So you want to startup? Are you thinking to go for degree so that you can reach top of corporate food chain or forego college in favor of entrepreneurship?
Most owners learn from practical experience, so what’s the value of a degree if you want to set up your own business?
College is inherently useless when it comes to adding value to your career. MBAs come with a bag of business tools.
They have pivot tables, sensitivity analyses, and maybe even Myers Briggs profiles. They’re theoretically ready to solve any business problem but does not add value in term of starting up own business.
Degree can prepare you for job but does not teach you skills required to become entrepreneur. No degree teaches how to take risk to start, how to hustle or how to work under pressure.
Degree can rather sometimes be hindrance because degree generally defines people goal. After graduation people feel pressure that now they have gained knowledge in one area, they have to do something about it. This stop people from looking at other exciting opportunities existing in marketplace for starting business.
Business is simply a solution to problem faced by people in society. Problem can be simple or complex. Generally solving simpler problems become great business. For example, serving hot tea of standard quality is a solution provided by startup “Chai Point”.
After completion of degree, let’s say engineering people generally face problem that if they start business of tea, they might be ridiculed by society. This creates immense pressure forcing them to do job, which they even don’t like.
Also, education system has approach that you have to give right answer to every question but in real life this is not the best practice. In business sometimes it is important to fail. Business involves lot of experimentation or testing. An entrepreneur cannot give right answers but it is the market or target audience who will tell whether product or service is useful or not. Building a business is marathon, not a sprint.
School or college have built in roadmap and set path. But entrepreneurship journey is all about adaptability. Just like war, strategy which you have made might not work in field and you have to recourse again. Running and scaling business involves adapting to what customer needs are, how your competition is growing, how industry in which you are doing business is responding etc.
So this is the good question to ponder – whether you should invest in degree or invest same time plunging into entrepreneurship.