Teaching myself how to business

I’ve taught myself how to design, how to code, and now, I’m teaching myself how to business.

I finished reading ‘The Personal MBA’ last week. It was eye-opening. It exposed so many mistakes I made as a business owner. And it gave me the vocabulary to better discuss business.

If I had to boil the book down into two concepts, it would be: Systems and Psychology.

A business is a repeatable process (System) that makes money. And to make money, you need to marry this cold, calculating system with soft, squishy people with feelings (Psychology).

I was surprised at how much psychology was in the book compared to stuff I would’ve expected: like finance and statistics. The book (thankfully) doesn't dive deep into these topics. But the appendix has great resources on these topics, which I’d like to tackle next.

I hear the biggest value of a proper MBA from a proper school are the connections and conversations with fellow students and professors. But I think applying self-learning to my work is just as valuable. I’ve made mistakes in my businesses that have costed way more than an MBA. In that sense, self-learning takes longer and is more expensive. But a classroom doesn’t work for me. I need applied knowledge.

I distilled the business concepts from this book into my second brain in Notion. These concepts form a latticework onto which I can hang my experiences as a designer, consultant, and a business owner.

The goal is to make better decisions faster. And I believe journaling my experiences on top of solid business fundamentals will increase my chances of success.

Part of being self-taught is that you never stop learning. As a knowledge worker in the tech field, staying still means getting outdated. For me, the journey itself is the reward.

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P.S. I thought about putting my “MBA” on my resume. But online forum people said that was a dumb idea: “You can’t just read a book and say you’re qualified in something”. I kind of see the point, but I also think this is why resumes are broken. How are you supposed to stand out when you're also expected to follow a format everyone else uses?