The Hustler's MBA
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The Hustler's MBA
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Re: The Hustler's MBA
#2While correct (in a sense), this suffers from pretty much the same naïveté that a lot of similar essays contain.
Simply put, the chief benefit of formalised higher education is that it forces you to learn stuff you didn't even know you didn't know, deeper than you ever thought you had to.
It's many years since I left university (studying electronics and software), and I while I still work in tech (who doesn't around here?!), I only used a fraction of what I learned there once I got to the real world. That's the chief argument of essayists like this one, and it's one I agree with.
However, I have many times been in situations where I've had to solve a problem that I would not have had the mental tools for, were it not for a deep distant memory of some obscure piece of maths I did (painfully, perhaps even reluctantly) in second year, or some recollection of a weird hack with CPU registers I learned in third year. True, these moments in my career have been fleeting, but they helped me in a way that OP could not have been helped.
I've since worked a lot as a technical trainer. For me, the difference between technical training (or vocational, or OP's self-inflicted syllabus) and education (college, university) is that the former gives you a great hands-on real-world grasp of the available tools and techniques and how to use them to solve problems. The latter gets you further into the "why", and makes you better suited to making your own tools and techniques. Those of you who have written your own operating systems and compilers - would you ever have done that had you _not_ been in university? And how much did you learn from it?
Re: The Hustler's MBA
#3Meanwhile back on earth...
Re: The Hustler's MBA
#4He lost me at the part where the secret to life is becoming a professional poker player. Because in a highly competitive game of chance you're pretty much guaranteed to come out on top to the tune of $50-60 an hour...
Does this post strike anyone as completely f'ing delusional? Perhaps applicable to the author, one of the greatest card sharks alive today, but seems silly to the vast majority.
Re: The Hustler's MBA
#5It's definitely an interesting concept, but does assume a certain 'buffer' level of class and income level to go down this road.
Having a home to be in while you 'get up to speed in poker', having parents that understand and provide some sort of boundaries at 18 years old, assuming poker winnings will be the base 'bank' for all other ventures, and assuming that the networks you make at school are not very important are big red flags for me.
For some, going to college, despite the hand-wringing, is also a way to break cycles of poverty within a lineage, a sense of family pride, and an escape from their home circumstance.
It's a little disconcerting that the author is a little lost in their own privilege and that his Hustler's MBA curriculum is probably a product of previous generations who went to college.
I think the better message is: Don't expect college, however many years you spend, to GIVE you everything or ANSWER everything. You still have to live life, take chances, and exist outside of your comfort zone. College is a concrete foundation to that mission.
Re: The Hustler's MBA
#6I lost focus after he talked about how easy poker was to make $85k a year.
Re: The Hustler's MBA
#7He also lost me at poker. A lot of us entrepreneur types love poker because we just love risk, IMO. To say that you can comfortable make 85k a year playing poker is the most outlandish statement I've ever heard.
I also hate how people try and tell me poker is a skill. Yes to a degree it is, but it's more luck than anything once you understand the game, let's be real.
Seemed like a good blog post until he became delusional about poker.
Re: The Hustler's MBA
#8He lost me at the part where the secret to life is becoming a professional poker player. Because in a highly competitive game of chance you're pretty much guaranteed to come out on top to the tune of $50-60 an hour... Does this post strike anyone as completely f'ing delusional? Perhaps applicable to the author, one of the greatest card sharks alive today, but seems silly to the vast majority.
Yes it does. Perhaps college would have helped him with his delusion.
Re: The Hustler's MBA
#9He lost me at the part where the secret to life is becoming a professional poker player. Because in a highly competitive game of chance you're pretty much guaranteed to come out on top to the tune of $50-60 an hour... Does this post strike anyone as completely f'ing delusional? Perhaps applicable to the author, one of the greatest card sharks alive today, but seems silly to the vast majority.
It's actually not terribly hard to get good enough to make money playing poker, but sustaining $60/hr for 8 hours a day takes an enormous amount of dedication and concentration, plus it takes time to get to that level. You're far better off learning to program.
Re: The Hustler's MBA
#10In 2006, you actually could fairly easily make $85K in a year playing poker.
Not anymore, though, and not for the past few years.