After I graduated from college quite a few years ago, I realized that I didn’t know all that much about living in The Real World (TRW). In fact, everything I know about TRW I’ve learned via experience, some hard and frustrating, since college. I had a particularly sheltered life growing up on a farm in the country, but I know from talking to some of my younger friends nowadays that lots of people still graduate from college, especially liberal arts graduates, without knowing some key stuff about living in TRW. Like how to get a job. What that company they are applying to is actually thinking about them. Why a company would want to hire someone in the first place. What a company even exists for. And then, what you have to know in order to get a job in a particular field if you want to work in it.
I always thought there should be a guide, a handbook to “Making It In The Real World,” that there was probably a set of key, basic information that, if they had it, would help liberal arts grads be better prepared for entering TRW, and enable them provide more value to their eventual employers, move faster up the ranks, make better decisions about where and how to work, and generally be more successful overall.
So I’ve had this idea floating around in the back of my head – we’re liberal arts graduates, we’re smart, we’re fast learners, but no one has told us some key stuff that we could probably learn pretty fast. So why not put together a short course, or a short set of blog posts, as I’m doing here, that provides “The Theory of The Real World 101” – or as I often call it, “The Five Hour MBA.”
Originally conceived as a course that might get taught to liberal arts undergraduates as a series of five to ten evening lectures that just orient kids who are new to TRW into what’s going on out there, it’s seeing its first embodiment as this set of blog posts.
So that’s the genesis of the 5-hour MBA set of posts, which I will be publishing over the next few months. The first one is right below, and you’ll see more once or twice a week as I continue to produce them.
I’d love to hear your feedback on this idea, and on the content I’m putting in here as it gets created.