While some of the things you’ve learned in business school may have some external applications, most of it, was at best, busy work — at the worst, complete bullshit. You learned how to give presentations, and pretend you knew what your were talking about. You learned how to take tests, cram information, and spew it out verbatim. Ultimately, you learned how the machine worked, and how to maximize your returns on the smallest amount of inputs— a valuable business lesson. You also learned that the machine is broken.
You became a master of managing your time, and hitting submit with minutes to spare.
You became a scholar of multiple-choice exams as you broke down the wording and gauged the chances of your professor trying to trick you with obvious answers. You realized that for every mishap, there was a perfectly worded email that would outline your complete acceptance of responsibility, in the context of the victimized circumstances which led to your demise. If you were lucky, you had professors with real world experience, who spoke English, and told it to you straight. I was not lucky. Most of us just bought textbooks, read three chapters out of it, and Googled the rest. We cannot forget that as a whole, the College of Business, is a business. Like any business, they operate to make money. They are building generic pieces of a workforce.
Business school reminds me of dogmatic grooming.
Let's create an analogy, because we all love comparisons, right? Let's call business school a maker of puzzle pieces, with jobs being an empty space. Graduates are the pieces, and we need to fill in the ranks of organizations and businesses. Unfortunately, all the fun parts of the puzzle are already complete. The edge pieces, which we'll call the gatekeepers, are already in order, and you are just one among many hoping to be mashed in somewhere among thousands of pieces that look just like.
Some pieces will perfectly fit into place, complacent and frozen in time. Some pieces will be lost, some never found—most will be desperately mashed around the edges into a place they never belonged. If you're lucky you fall of the board and get sucked up by the vacuums cleaner (sales), but chances are most will just sit in the box, desperately awaiting an opportunity to be meaningful. Why—because who ever actually ever finished a puzzle? There's only one way to win in the game of life, and that means saying "Puzzles are bullshit, I want to play checkers." While many of you have the utmost expectations for our seemingly bright future, the realty is that most of us will never come close to achieving even a fraction of dreams.
This is just the way our economic hierarchy, but not necessarily the way it has to be. Somebody has to be the garbage man, somebody has to be the desk jockey, and somebody has to call the shots. Not every one, can be #1. The economic stability of a capitalistic labor-based society depends on it. Fortunately, you do have the opportunities in front of you to create the success that you desire; safe, simple, and easy are not a part of that reality.
The American dream was never broken, we just never understood how it worked.
America is the land of opportunity, not the land of success. That’s how the ‘American Dream’ really works. As a once thriving middle class continues to evaporate, the reality is that glass ceiling is more unbreakable than ever. College tells you that you need to know how to manage: time, money, investments, people, risk, and information. College teaches you how to play it safe, how to minimize risk, and how not to fail. If you truly want to win business, that's the worst advice you'll ever get.
College isn’t learning how to succeed; it’s learning to never fail—never. This type of thinking is a disease, and setting up future graduates for real failure. A type of failure not defined by poor marks in thought, but failure defined by a cradle of debt, poverty, and economic decay.
And because we’ve learned to fear failure we’ve never learned to create, and we’ll never know what we’re truly capable of…because we won’t even try. To our generation, fear means risking everything on a pipe dream, and the possibility of working unskilled labor the rest of our lives. Many would rather take the security of mindless job with decent pay and benefits so we can buy that jet ski and timeshare, than risk becoming a 'failure'.
Most will just spend lives worth of hours, days, and years frivolously at work dreaming about how alive they’ll feel upon returning home for a beer and their latest Netflix binge. There are two parties at the reigns of the future; those who manage opportunity, and those who create opportunity. Now is the time to decide which side you want to be on.
Fail big, fail fast: the greatest piece of advice the College of Business will never teach you.
