Education Archives - Boundless by Paul Millerd

Malcolm Ocean on Rationality, Goals, Self-Awareness & Motivation as a Self-Employed Entrepreneur

Paul Millerd — Tue, 12 Jul 2022 13:03:12 +0000

Malcolm ocean is a fellow wanderer of the pathless path and as is such – is hard to describe. He runs a software company, Complice which helps people turn big goals into day-to-day actions. More broadly from my vantage point, Malcolm appears to be one of the most deeply curious humans alive about how we make things happen at the individual and group levels.

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41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

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Hannah Frankman On Why Homeschooling Matters & Why It Helped Her Skip College

Paul Millerd — Fri, 01 Jul 2022 20:56:13 +0000

Hannah is awesome and you should listen to this podcast. She grew up homeschooled, is an endlessly curious person, has a deep sense of agency, and is a pro at carving her own path. She’s done a ton of things including writing, coaching, and working at startups and has created jobs for herself, negotiated working remotely (before it was cool), and has done a ton of other things. She recently founded Rebel Educator which is a media brand that aims to share more about homeschooling and alternative education with a broader audience online.

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Alastair Humphreys on microadventures, long-term travel and busking his way through Europe

Paul Millerd — Wed, 22 May 2019 10:00:56 +0000

I talked to Alastair Humphreys after he had returned the previous night from a micro-adventure. It wasn’t a four year biking trip or a challenging long walk across the desert (he’s done that though!), but instead a short overnight camping trip with himself to re-connect with nature and his adventurous spirit. He helps others think about how they can design similar micro-adventures to find joy in the “5 to 9” rather than doing everything in service of the 9 to 5.

Alastair Humphreys is a British Adventurer and Author. He has been on expeditions all around the world, travelling through over 80 countries by bicycle, boat and on foot. He was named as one of National Geographic’s Adventurers of the year for 2012.

More recently Alastair has walked across southern India, rowed across the Atlantic Ocean, run six marathons through the Sahara desert, completed a crossing of Iceland, busked through Spain and participated in an expedition in the Arctic, close to the magnetic North Pole. He has trekked 1000 miles across the Empty Quarter desert and 120 miles round the M25 – one of his pioneering microadventures. He was named as one of National Geographic’s Adventurers of the year for 2012.

We talked about:

His path after University
Redefining success two years into a four year bike ride
Walking across the desert
Finding joy in “miro-adventures”
His creative process
His aspirations for his kids adventures

Links Mentioned:

Alastair Humphries
Subscribe to his newsletter “living adventurously”
His new book: My Midsummer Morning: Rediscovering How to Live Adventurously Hardcover – May 30, 2019

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Ben Keene on dreaming, starting a tribe & living on an island with three kids

Paul Millerd — Wed, 15 May 2019 10:00:37 +0000

After attending a few corporate recruiting sessions, he didn’t take for granted that his path was to enter the corporate world. Twenty years later, he is still carving his own path and has recently returned from Koh Lanta, where he lived with his three children in Thailand for the last six months.

In the early 2000’s inspired by social networks like Myspace and the potential to bring people together online, he started Tribe Wanted, which was a “tourism experiment” to bring people together somewhere in the world. He and his business partner found an island for sale in Fiji and signed a three year lease. This experience taught him a lot about living in new ways, running a business and bringing people together. He described it as “doing a ten year MBA in six months.”

Ben has continued to bring people together throughout his career, combining eco-travel, community, career transition and learning. He has worked at the Escape school in London, which helps people “escape” the corporate world and shift to new careers. He has also started the Rebel Book Club which is a virtual and in-person book club group in England.

Last year, Ben and his wife decided to go on an adventure with their children and landed on Koh Lanta after some serendipitous discoveries of a co-working space and small school for international families on google maps. Here is what Ben wrote about the experience and whether he would do it again:

Despite the hard bits, the answer is definitely a ‘hell yeah’. It was a remarkable experience to have with our children when they were so young, and one we feel has made us closer as a family. Like all good travel journeys, doing something a little different helps your perspective. You get out of your bubble, you see how the world works somewhere else, you learn. As for Brexit, it seemed less important whilst we were away compared to more global social and environmental challenges. The evident impacts of mass tourism (plastic pollution), climate change (bleached reefs) and smartphone consumerism (every Thai child seems glued to their phone), has galvanised us to try and live and work with more awareness of the world than before.

Links Mentioned:

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Heather McGowan on learning, adapting & identity in the future of work

Paul Millerd — Wed, 08 May 2019 10:00:01 +0000

Heather McGowan is the most thoughtful writer and speaker I follow on the future of work. She is able to connect the dots between work, culture, society and identity in a way that has captured the attention of many individuals, companies and universities around the world.

She credits much of her interdisciplinary mindset with her own University experience, saying that “every road points back to the Rhode Island School of Design.” Contrary to how many students are now pressured to choose a professional identity, she reflected that during her educational experience she was “not trained to be anything” and instead taught to embrace a beginners mind, focusing whether or not she was asking the right questions.

She defines learning as “figuring out something you didn’t know before.” While organizations claim to care about learning, many are not willing to embrace failure, letting people admit when wrong and be vulnerable. She has worked with Universities to re-imagine their curriculums toa adapt to many of these changes, leading the strategic design of the Kanbar College of Design, Engineering, and Commerce at Jefferson, and working with Becker College to craft the “Agile Mindset” curriculum. Even though much of her focus is on helping people think about work, she believes that because the Universities massified so much, we have lost touch with a liberal arts tradition in our academies and it’s an imperative to reimagine our liberal arts tradition to make it work for our modern world.

In the working world, she focuses on how we can think about learning and work in a more holistic way and often traces a lot of the challenges back to education. She cites research from Gallup showing that: “while 74% of surveyed fifth-graders are engaged with school, just 32% of surveyed 11th-graders are engaged.” Perhaps some of that disengagement is because people aren’t too excited about their job prospects. She worries that organizations in the short-term are still too focused on productivity, which depersonalizes the experience of work. As work increasingly becomes specialized – she calls it “atomization” – she fears that we will increasingly only focused on “explicit knowledge” instead of the deeper tacit knowledge that makes us special.

Her advice for companies:

“If your lens on attracting talent is to create a box called the job, which is an artificial box and then figure out who best fits that box, that is defined as the rear-view mirror. If you look out to your future, where are you going to get the best human potential, how are you going to attract it, how are you going to nurture it, how are you going to develop it?”

Heather’s career is a perfect example of the type of path and work that was not possible in the past. Reflecting on her path she admits “this field just sort of emerged.” As her career has shifted more towards speaking, she has been able to design her life around learning. Through her talks, she is able to get feedback and combined with her own curiosity, it helps her focus on what to learn next.

Ultimately, on the future of work, Heather remains an optimist:

I think if we focus on what humans do best…connecting to humans, and lighting the fire in a human by connecting to their motivational purpose…we’re going to see a huge boom in the future of work.

Some of my favorite articles of hers and links to learn more:

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The Nine Future Of Work Mindsets You Need For The Weird New World of Work

Paul Millerd — Thu, 26 Apr 2018 17:26:42 +0000

The question “what do you do?” increasingly does not make sense. Five years ago, I would have said “I’m a consultant.” People really just want to know “how do you make money?”

Increasingly, that question is coming to mean “what do you work on?” For me the answer is complicated — I create a podcast, I interview people, I write, I read extensively, I coach people in their careers, I volunteer. Some of those things help me make money and some don’t.

In organizations and in the emerging freelance economy, I have seen a steady, but dramatic shift. The people that are able to thrive are the people that are able to create. The people that are energized and excited are the ones that are doing what matters to them.

Yet, we pretend that the old markers of success — climbing the ladder, getting a promotion, having a “good” job — are what matter.

They don’t.

The Nature Of Work Has Fundamentally Changed, Yet We Operate As If It Is Still 1995

Consider the following:

The decline of full-time work: There was no net increase in full-time employment from 2005 to 2015 — all employment growth was in “alternative work arrangements” such as on-call and temporary as well as contractors and freelancers.

Work continues to increase in complexity: BCG has measured “complicatedness” of work showing that it has steadily increased 6.7% a year for 50 years. This has dramatically outpaced productivity improvements.

Limited connection between traditional education and our work: Less than three out of ten people work in fields tied to their major.

Dream jobs don’t exist: In 1997, Amy Wrzesniewski found that work that is a “calling” is a result of a mindset, not our underlying skills.

People prefer autonomy over control: Researchers found that when power is framed as autonomy versus power over people, people were much more inclined to seek power positions. Autonomy is also highly linked to job satisfaction and performance.

Money is not a motivator: In 1949, Professor Harry Harlow introduced incentives to reward monkeys and ended up destroying their intrinsic motivation. We then found the same result in humans. Yet, almost 70 years later, in organizations, we still use the language of “carrots” and and “sticks”

People are meaner at work: McKinsey found that people experiencing rudeness at work increased from 49% to 62%from 1998 to 2015. YIKES!

Failure to understand these shifts means one thing:

People are stressed, miserable and fed up, playing a game with rules that no longer exist.

In my own career journey, I made multiple career changes and eventually carved my own path as a freelancer. At every step of the road, I encountered endless amounts of bad advice, pseudo-science and buckets of hogwash about the choices I was making. Despite this, I was quite happy and engaged.

That made me wonder, why do ignore science and reality when talking about careers? In the last year as I’ve been carving my own path as a freelancer and in my work as a career coach, I’ve become obsessed with one question:

How should someone think about navigating their life and career in a way that enables them to have freedom to do the things that matter to them?

The deeper I looked, the more good ideas I found. From Pryor and Bright’s “Chaos Theory of Careers” to Adam Grant’s work on original thinking to Ryan and Deci’s self-determination theory to the fascinating research on curiosity, creativity, and solitude.

Our Deep Attachment To Work

How did we get here?

We place so much emphasis on work, yet the labor force participation rate is still less than 65%. We live in a time where we have a belief that much of meaning, dignity and identity can be unlocked through work. This cultural meme runs so deep that we tend to value any work for work’s sake and leave unquestioned the deeper questions of what it means to live a good life. It also results in bizarre phrases like “working poor” being a commonly understood and accepted phenomenon.

We need a radical mindset shift in terms of how we think about work and how we are meant to do things that matter

At the core, we need to stop praising someone for merely being employed or dutifully going into an office every day and we need to embrace the ambiguity and reality of the world.

Let’s ask people instead:

Does your work bring you alive?
Are you creating value for other people?
Are you doing things that matter to you?
What can I do to support your life?

The Framework

Foundation: Perspective, Motivation & Compass

Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier. — Colin Powell

Perspective:

We are operating under the assumption that the default path is the only path. The reality is that the default path is mostly an illusion. Most people that end up doing something that energizes them end up there through serendipity. We need to shift our thinking to embrace optimism and think about work as a life-long journey that will be reinforced by continuous learning and a flexible and open mind to new experiences, ideas and opportunities. Too often, organizations stifle motivation they tell people what not to do — numbing them into a state of learned helplessness. The reality is, for organizations to thrive and for people to thrive, we will need to push people to think on their own, question the status quo and become “original thinkers.”

We are operating under the assumption that career paths still exist and that successful people are the ones with the most money or highest rank. There are jobs and industries with great paths, but these are increasingly reserved for people who know how to acquire the right degrees and credentials. The truth is, we need to destroy the idea that a “job hopper” is somehow a lesser qualified person. We need to encourage people to try more types of work and embrace planned happenstance theory putting emphasis on optimism, open-mindedness and flexibility rather than specialization or the illusion of career paths.

Motivation:

We are operating under the assumption that having a job is enough. Unfortunately, most jobs are not set up to enable you to thrive and at worst, they may also destroy you. You are also more at the whim of the success of your industry, the pace of change in your job, and the “strategic” moves of large companies than you realize. The truth is you will need to continually self-reflect on the work that motivates you intrinsically, prioritizing mastery, autonomy, and relatedness, and continually re-assess your values, definition of success, and a connection to doing work that matters to you.

Compass:

We are operating under the assumption that companies will take care of us. Deep down, many know this is not true — just google the word “layoff” and see who was axed today. Here, I’ll do it for you…and this is only in the last 24 hours:

The truth is, we need to shift instead to approaches like Stanford Professors Bill Burnett and Dave Evans “Designing Your Life” that starts with a focus on living a good life and then helps you find work to do that fits into that. This does not mean living paycheck to paycheck— it means being thoughtful about mitigating risk through lowering expenses and eliminating debt such that you can have the freedom and flexibility to spend time how you want across all aspects of your life.

#2 How You Create: Environment, Connection & Action

It’s the way I study — to understand something by trying to work it out or, in other words, to understand something by creating it. Not creating it one hundred percent, of course; but taking a hint as to which direction to go but not remembering the details. These you work out for yourself.
Professor Richard Feynman

Environment:

We are operating under the assumption that work means going to an office 260 days a year, 5 days a week, working from 9–5 (at least). The reality is, more and more people are not working this fixed schedule and that it is often impossible to do 40+ hours of the types of creative work we will need to do in the future. We need people who are more comfortable in diverse global, virtual and remote teams and understand how to optimize their environments to maximize flow and creativity.

Connection:

We are operating under the assumption that investing more in corporate culture will make us happier. The confusing reality of this is that many of these efforts backfire since they are not built on a foundation of meaningful work. We need to instead align our work and lives around communities that share our passions and values (which can be done in companies sometimes!). We also need to shift beyond the “transaction mindset” which pervades our world and look for ways to be generous and support each other in their work so more people do the work that matters to them.

Action:

We are operating under the assumption that work is easily understood and can be documented in a process. Not to mention that it should be done full-time! The reality is, work is increasingly happening in projects and the companies that thrive are the ones that think in this context instead of keeping employees from quitting. Workers and companies will need to think about experiments — especially ones that will fail. As Adam Grant showed, original thinkers often run enormous numbers of experiments (for example Edison has 1093 patents, but most of them likely had little impact).

#3 How You Adapt: Knowledge, Progress & Vitality

Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning. — Benjamin Franklin

Knowledge:

We are operating under the assumption that our employers and universities will train us and give us the skills we need. The data shows that most of the $150 billion spent on learning & development every year is wasted. Universities are failing to give people the skills to compete in the economy. The truth is, we need to embrace the mindset of learning through doing, thinking about learning as a lifelong project instead of something that happens from ages 5 to 22, and creating opportunities for apprenticing or projects as a way to continuously develop skills. Finally, we need to more quickly shift to and give more credibility and support to alternatives to on-campus learning.

Progress:

We are operating under the assumption that employers and managers should tell us what to do and that the hierarchy determines our value. The truth is, permission is increasingly an illusion and those who seek it are going to be left behind. Hierarchies are outdated and more concerned with power than helping us develop the skills and experience that will help us build a career and a life. This leads to unnecessary suffering, the lack of growth and people in the wrong jobs. We need to shift from external markers of success to internal ones — are we energized?, are we learning? — and think about our careers as a portfolio of different projects, connections and skills. As Marc Andreessen offers: “The first rule of career planning: Do not plan your career.”

“ Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Vitality:

We are operating under the assumption that two weeks of vacation a year is adequate and that “work-life balance” is a worthy goal. This mindset starts with the assumption that work is the most important thing and you need to be some sort of productivity ninja that carves out meaningful time for health, love, relationships and fun. We instead need to start with our work and time and think about how we can invest in other people and communities to get the best out of each other. Finally, we operate under the assumption that workplaces are the source of all dignity, meaning and energy. However, with this mindset, we avoid the solitude and reflection that will unleash our naturally creative spirits. We need to flip our thinking to ask ourselves what the conditions are for us to thrive!

Are You Ready For The Future Of Work? Take The Assessment Here

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Boundless Podcast: Amma Marfo on Combining Humor, Creativity & Writing (Episode 8)

Paul Millerd — Wed, 28 Feb 2018 14:21:43 +0000

Download & Subscribe : Itunes • Stitcher • Google Play • Overcast

Amma Marfo is a thoughtful yet incurably silly independent higher education professional, writer, and editor based in Boston, MA. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Communication Studies from the University of Rhode Island, and a Master of Education from the University of South Florida. Amma is a dynamic and sought-after speaker on topics such as leadership, group dynamics, learning and optimizing the temperament of your organization, cultivating environments that encourage creativity, and incorporating your values into your work and larger goals- and has written three books on those topics since 2014. She speaks on college and university campuses across the country, at regional and national conferences, and has partnered with organizations like HubSpot, Wayfair, Startup Institute Boston, and General Assembly. She is an outspoken advocate for creativity, believes strongly in the power of humor, and looks forward to helping you find the way you live and work best. Her other interests include live comedy, surfing, trivia, and gluten-free cooking/baking. You can follow her on Twitter @ammamarfo.

How she defines success:

“Success is the ability to do stuff that I really like with people that I have a lot of fun with and know a lot of cool things — ideally things I don’t know — and also being able to have fun. So having enough money to have a roof over my head, have insurance and have a little fun — that’s all I really need.”
Amma

Links:

Amma’s 2017 Reading List and The 2018 Reading List
Netflix – The Standups
Podcast: The Imposters
Book Recommendation: Hamilton The Revolution
Book Recommendation: When They Call You A Terrorist
Twitter: @ammamarfo

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Should you try get an MBA from a top-tier school? Its complicated.

Paul Millerd — Tue, 20 Feb 2018 21:26:43 +0000

Every year I look at the rising tuition for a top-tier MBA and get more and more shocked. I am a first-generation college student and did not grow up knowing about things like a “top-tier MBA” or having the expectation that this is a path I was supposed to take.

However, I am incredibly lucky in that I was able to attend one of the top schools in the world – MIT Sloan. Given this, people ask me about business school all the time. Should I go? Do I need an MBA? My answer is nuanced, complicated and is more focused on getting you to think more deeply about what you are trying to achieve, but I’ll attempt to walk you through my thinking…

Let’s first look at some of the trends from my school, MIT (MIT Tuition). Here is the approximate two-year tuition cost of an MBA over the past 20 years:

2000: $47k
2005: $77k
2010: $98k
2015: $128k
2018: $142k
2020: $154k

What the hell is happening!?

When I look up the tuition every year, I have a harder time recommending that people go get their MBA. Part of this is my guilt for suggesting someone take on hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt and part of this stems from thinking there may be better options.

The money equation (ROI) still works

A typical way to assess the “value” of an MBA is to focus on salaries.

Let’s say you have a job making $65k and you earn modest salary increases that raise your salary to $70k. This would mean by going to a full-time MBA you would be forgoing $135,000 in salary over two years. This type of analysis is fraught with flaws but stick with me.

Given that few people pay full sticker price, let us assume even a 50% tuition cost of $71,000 and living costs of $25,000 a year. Also, let us assume you are able to land an internship over the summer that pays you $25,000. This puts the opportunity costs at $135,000 and the real costs at $96,000. The traditional ROI analysis says that your investment is $231,000.

Next, analyze what you can make after graduation. Top-tier MBAs can usually find jobs paying them impressive salaries that can quickly offset this investment within five years. Let’s say that you make about $150k for 3 years after graduation. The incremental $240k (3 years x $80k more than the $70k you would have been making) covers your total investment. Then you are also looking at the intangible cost of the two-year educational process. There is obvious value in this, and I’ve always thought there was a lot of value in stepping outside of the working world – not to mention being exposed to new people, new ideas, new industries and new cultures.

ROI Analysis: Worth it ✔️

However, this logic can be flawed

Looking solely at salary is short-sighted. It makes a bold assumption that your sole goal for the rest of your career is to maximize every salary increase and promotion. This does not align with reality and increasingly, is harder to do as our business world becomes more fragmented and less dependent on full-time labor.

I am almost six years out from graduating from an MBA and I talk with my classmates often. Many are a bit lost – they have had had one or two promotions but have quickly realized they have no desire to be the CEO or even a senior executive. What was the rush? Priorities have changed – other things like health, family or kids have taken over importance. So the ROI analysis that many people do is deeply flawed.

Second, looking solely at money avoids a hard look at the underlying learning transformation you are paying for. Most people expect that they will undergo some amount of improvement in their ability, skills, and expertise over the two years. It is easy to look at the success of MBA graduates and assume that the MBA had some role in the process. However, the research on this is pretty damning. Professors Jeffrey Pfeffer and Christina Fong (who both work in business schools!) published an extensive review of the evidence in 2002 and found:

What data there are suggest that business schools are not very effective: Neither possessing an MBA degree nor grades earned in courses correlate with career success, results that question the effectiveness of schools in preparing their students. And, there is little evidence that business school research is influential on management practice, calling into question the professional relevance of management scholarship

In many ways, the types of people that go to top business schools are already incredibly driven and would likely reach the same levels of success with or without the degree and dare I say, perhaps in a shorter time. I often run the thought experiment of wondering where people I know would end up with or without an MBA. My hypothesis would be that If I were to run a simulation of a driven person’s career over the next 35 years, I would guess 55 times out of 100 you might be more successful getting an MBA and 45 times out of 100 it would have had little or no impact on your level of success.

Deeper Reflection: ❓

So how do you get ahead? Is there a better way?

A question that is really bothering me lately given the massive sticker price of an MBA:

Is there a better way to transform yourself with that $150k you intend to spend over two years? Why are we so tied to a 300+-year-old way of learning in classrooms?

Design Your Own: Tim Ferriss had always wanted to go to Stanford Graduate School of Business but challenged himself to think about alternate options. He decided to not pursue an MBA and instead use the money he would be spending on tuition to build a “Real World MBA.” He decided to take the money he put aside for tuition and use it to invest in startups. On his podcast, he talked about how he lost $50,000 in his first investment, but at least he had “skin in the game” as Nassim Taleb would say.

Online Intensive Programs: Another option I have seen emerge is Seth Godin’s altMBA – when you get accepted in the program, you become part of a global online learning community of driven and passionate people and focus on “shipping” 12 projects over 30 days. Tuition for this program? $3,500. That’s less than the deposit for many of these full-time MBA programs. I spoke with Cody Royle on my podcast about his experience with the altMBA and he said the best benefit was “not a credential…but a real-world transformation” that has enabled him to write multiple books, become a freelancer and become an influential sports coach who helps people with talent management. 20 years ago he would have gotten an MBA but now he took 30 days, $3,000 and bet on himself.

One-Year MBAs: Business schools are not oblivious to the shifts happening in the market and many have added one-year MBA options in the last year. This includes schools like Cornell, Babson, Northwestern, Bryant and Miami. However, business schools are not completely ready to disrupt themselves and are charging much higher fees for the one year program – at Northwestern, the one-year program tuition is $103,316 versus $149,742 for each year in the two-year program.

Skill-Specific Programs: Georgia Tech has a one-year business analytics program that can be completed for less than $10,000 online through edX – not to mention the immediate usefulness of the skills, this seems like a steal for your effort.

Screw it, just travel: Finally, a lot of the value I found in the two-year MBA was putting myself in a different environment and pushing myself out of my comfort zone. Could you take one year off and travel through the world, potentially work in some different industries, learn languages, develop skills for less than you would spend on tuition? One of my close friends did that for a mere $24,000. He could have kept going for six years for the full sticker price of a top-tier MBA.

So challenge yourself – how could you design your own “top-tier” MBA experience?

Is the MBA still relevant?

Judging by the high placement rates of top-tier MBA graduates, I would judge that the MBA is still relevant. As long as people want to hire graduates of the school and as long as people keep attending, it will continue to remain relevant.

However, the top-tier MBA seems shakier than ever. It faces two risks, an increasingly homogeneous customer and a disconnect from the skills needed in our economy.

As tuition continues to skyrocket, it seems that demand is largely inelastic when it comes to two parts of the population:

people who are working for companies that will sponsor their attendance (consulting firms and investment banks) and
rich people and international elites

For these people one could argue that the current prices are way too low and that schools could double or triple the price and they would still attend.

This is the biggest risk of business school because one of the biggest secrets of these elite schools is that most non-sponsored student do not pay sticker price.

This is why I tell people to apply. On the off chance that you end up getting a full-ride? Then definitely go.

However, this fact is not well known and increasingly the MBA is attracting a certain type of student that knows how to jump through hoops and perform in a certain way rather than attractive a diverse set people people and a diverse set of background and experiences.

I grew up fearing debt and no one in my life really cared what schools I went to. The program I attended at MIT had a generous fellowship at the time, but if I were to do the same program today, I would pay at least three to four times more out of my pocket. In only eight years, I would likely have to take another $75,000 of debt. Just writing that sentence terrifies me a bit.

The second risk MBA’s face is an increasing disconnect between the real skills and experiences that enable people to thrive in today’s world. Top-tier MBAs are highly dependent on a symbiotic relationship with powerful, high-paying employers. As Godin stated when he launched the altMBA in 2015:

This is a small-group process that works online, designed to help people move from here to there—to stand up and become the leaders and the game changers they want to be.

I originally wrote this in 2017 and now in 2020 it seems that this gap has continued to widen with more and more cohort-based online courses like the altMBA filling the gap as well as other emerging alternatives like On Deck and even just “creating in public” on twitter as a way to enter a new industry.

The MBA may unintentionally help people make a transformation in their life, but the “job to be done” of the MBA is to groom students to work at a select group of finance, consulting, Fortune 500 companies and now, tech companies.

This is a job it does exceptionally well, but as technology and digital platforms continue to shape our economy and as creativity, experiments, original thinking and building a diversity of skills become more important, we may see many more options like the altMBA emerge to “disrupt” the top-tier MBA.

Do I regret it? (and some exercises to do before you go)

Short answer – no. I’ve written about some of the benefits I’ve gotten from an MBA – but they may not be what you would expect (full article here: Should You Go To Business School? The Only Reason That Matters):

Lifelong friends
Global perspective
Taking a step out from the working world
Contagious optimism / Overcoming self-limiting beliefs
Thinking like a leader
No-risk learning lab

These are not the conventional benefits you think about – because a lot of them are specific to me and were unexpected. With anything, I think you need to expect similarly. These type of experiences also have the confirmation bias effect of making it really hard to regret going to business school.

Some exercises I usually have people do when I chat with them about going to business school:

Write down 25 ways you could get what you expect from business school now for $25,000 or less. If, after you write this list, you still want to go to business school, you should go.
Write down what you want to do for work after business school. Now brainstorm at least one alternative to make that career shift without going to business school.
Brainstorm five ways you could grapple with the insecurity of having an MBA-sized hole in your identity? Where does this insecurity come from? Is there a way to grapple with that insecurity directly?

I always give the rather worthless advice of “go to business school if you want to go to business school.” I’ve found that most people already have their mind made up – they are just looking for reassurance for what they have already decided!

[contact-form-7]

The post Should you try get an MBA from a top-tier school? Its complicated. appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

Should you go to business school?

Paul Millerd — Fri, 02 Oct 2015 18:29:23 +0000

Six reasons to go and one big caveat

common question I hear is, “Should I go to Business School?” My answer is always the same, half cynical and half serious:

“You should go to business school if you want to go to business school”

Simple, but I really do believe this. Advice from other people can be valuable, but most people tend to tell you to do what they did. If you’re confident that business school is the next step for you, you will always have that thought lingering in the back of your mind. Go do it!

There are two questions I ask everyone who solicits my advice:

1. “What do you want to do after business school?”

2. “Why don’t you do that now?”

Even if you know what you want to do, there are still a number of benefits of going to business school (which I will get to). I was always impressed by my classmates who knew exactly what they wanted to do — they were able to take advantage of every resource, connection, class, and project to help them build their skills.

For people that are less sure, like I was, business school can be a confusing place. Many prestigious jobs instantly become more attainable. For those that have been crushing it in their life, it is incredibly hard to not pursue those paths, whether it is working at Google, McKinsey, Goldman, or the hottest startup.

I’ve been having a lot of conversations with classmates three years after graduation who are all facing the same issue: they are in a great job, but something is missing. I have a friend at Google who loved his job, but when a few things changed — a new manager and position, he realized he didn’t care where he worked — he just wanted to work on a great team.

That same friend recognizes now that business school may have delayed him coming to this realization. All the things that made the two year experience exceptional (exposure to diverse perspective and time to reflect) also made career planning more confusing.

Business school is an option multiplying machine. Of course, this is one thing I found attractive — it expands your pool of opportunities. Since I didn’t have a clear understanding of what I wanted to do when entering business school, expanding my options seemed like the best idea.

But expanding my options did not solve the age old question of “What do I want to do?”

My one caveat about business school is always:

Business school will not help you decide what you want to be when you grow up

You may figure it out during the two years of conversations, classes, and projects but I don’t think business school is well suited to answer this question — and it shouldn’t be! The burden is on you.

Like me, a lot of people go to business school because they want to go to business school — and I think that is fine! So for these people, I offer what I consider the six best things about going to business school:

1. The life-long friends: A lot of people talk about “the network.” This is definitely real. My classmates are doing incredible things in their career and every one of them will pick up the phone to have a conversation or help me in my career. That support system is invaluable. However, the real power comes from the friends you make from spending 12 hours a day together, struggling through the same assignments or choreographing a dance for an upcoming cultural event. I will guarantee that you leave school with at least one or two life-long friends. These are people that will be in your wedding party, take vacations with you or offer a place to crash when you visit a new city. This paid off for me when I faced some health challenges after graduation. The unexpected love and support of my classmates was amazing. I had life-long friends, not a network

2. Shrinking the world: It is very easy to expose yourself to different industries and perspectives during the two years you spend at business school. Whether through clubs, classes, speakers or just conversations with classmates, you will likely learn about industries you never knew anything about and jobs you never heard of. At MIT Sloan, almost half of my class was international. Beyond the obvious benefits of travel recommendations for life and inside food knowledge, working with diverse groups broadened my perspective. One of my groups composed peolpe from the US, Mexico, Israel, and Korea — which made the world seem a lot smaller and the world’s challenges a lot more solvable

3. The ability to take a step out from the “hustle”: Business school is certainly fast paced, but it’s also a step out of the increasingly complex and competitive working world. I am a big fan of taking breaks or walks during the day to increase my productivity and creativity: the benefits of this are well known. I haven’t found any research on the impact of a two year break during your career, but my hypothesis is the benefits are profound. I like to think of business school as a two year walk, where I had time to reflect, think, learn, dream and wonder

4. Eliminating stories of why you can’t do something: Being surrounded by such successful people can be a double edged sword. If you start comparing yourself to your classmates, you will always find someone more accomplished or impressive. However, the fact that you share a beer or lunch with them makes you realize they don’t have superpowers, they just don’t spend any time creating excuses. It made me realize that the only thing that will hold me back from what I want to accomplish is my own beliefs. Everyone, including me, is capable of greatness

5. Thinking like a leader: Being accepted into an amazing business school gave me a lot of pride. It also gave me the self-imposed pressure that I need to embrace this opportunity and do something with it. Prior to business school, my definition of a “leader” was something defined by a title or number of direct reports. During a leadership class I took, this idea was destroyed, as I realized these people haven’t cornered the market on leadership. I was filled with the anxiety and excitement that anyone could be a leader. I embraced this mindset and try to ask myself “How should I act in this situation, as a leader?” For me this comes out by having integrity and being authentic to who I am. I’m passionate about building positive and meaningful work environments where people can flourish — so I try to embrace this spirit in every interaction I have in and out of work. I’m grateful that I literally had a class to think about leadership and what it means to me

6. An experimental lab: I looked at everything as a new learning opportunity. The improvisational leadership class that made me dance around in front of my classmates taught me how to be more fearless. The healthcare project I did made me realize I didn’t want to go work in healthcare. The choreographed dances I did with my classmates for the New England Cultural Function (yes, really) made me realize I love making a fool of myself for the sake of having a good time. Finally, the many hours I spent helping others with their job searches and interviews made me realize I love helping others achieve their dreams

Going to business school was not a rational decision for me. I didn’t calculate two years of lost salary and factor in the ROI of tuition payments and future salaries. It was just something I had always wanted to do, a dream that I had.

I went to business school because I wanted to go to business school

Why do you want to go?

[contact-form-7]

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