Getting Paid to Learn

My favorite entrepreneur is Mark Cuban. His focus, passion, drive, determination, and love for what he does translates into business success and success in life. He is not only one of the most successful businessmen in the world, he is also one of the most charitable.

And thanks to his blog, Blog Maverick, I am able learn directly from the source. His post this week about Getting Paid to Learn couldn't be more true.

Cuban talks about when he was in his early twenties, bouncing around from job-to-job and living on the floor in his friends apartment. But all along, he was getting paid to learn. At each and every job, he was getting paid to learn computer skills, management skills, and communication skills. That education, Cuban says, is much more valuable than an MBA would be.

I couldn't agree more with him. I knew I wanted to run SportsLizard.com full time back in 2004 when I started it. However, when I graduated school I took an engineering job against my better judgment. Now, a few months after leaving the job, I am able to reflect back and say that I did it the right way. I needed the exposure to industry, to all of those things that Mark mentioned. I really did get paid to learn.

It's really interesting to look at Cuban's statement as part of a larger question - how much value is their in an MBA (or any post-graduate degree for that matter) in the success of an entrepreneur? I don't have any data to support this, but my guess is that there is no correlation between a successful business an MBA. An MBA probably doesn't increase your chance of success, and if you are trading the MBA for valuable on-the-job experience it may decrease your chance of success.

There's no doubt that every entrepreneur needs to value education. The question really becomes where does that education come from? With the increasing prices of tuition, it is becoming more and more practical to get it informally. Personally, a mix of formal education, informal education on the job, reading stacks of books on my own time, and learning from others by reading message boards and articles on the web has given me what I consider a very thorough knowledge base to build my business. But I guess everyone needs to figure out what will work best for them in their situation.