Seth's Blog: If you could change your life | Hacker News Reader

Seth's Blog: If you could change your life

sethgodin.typepad.com

23 pointstwampss17 comments

Do you see the way this guy is selling you an unpaid internship and honestly making you consider going for it?

He's a genius marketer. And he also fooled me for a second. But... you cannot turn an unpaid internship into an MBA through the sheer force of your own awesomeness.

http://xkcd.com/125/

You can turn it into one hell of a learning opportunity though, and given the clone warriors that business school tends to produce, I'd imagine this is much more valuable to the right people.

No, I'm sure it's much more valuable to the people he knows and who he'll likely refer you too if he thinks you're good enough.

People who come to Seth will be more than happy to hire someone who has been taught to see things like he does. They're going to him because he's an unconventional thinker and they'll go to his apprentices because they hope they'll be unconventional too.

He is appropriately askew to convention, he is not radically unconventional. The difference is paramount.

That's true; it's like walking a marathon instead of running so you guarantee that you'll make it to the finish line without passing out, however being unconventional would be running the entire thing facing backwards.

exactly. as lbrandy rightly said, he's a genius marketer. how many of those are there in MBA schools?

It seems to me the type of person he is looking for wouldn't be applying for his apprenticeship but already starting their own business.

Perhaps, but I am starting to realize that creating a business isn't the most sure way to get into changing the world. Seth says that it isn't so much about connections, which is true, but at some point it seems like you have to be lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time to get noticed by the right people. This seems like an excellent opportunity to increase the likelihood of those situations.

This is on the front page at the same time as the WSJ article "Any College Will Do" - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=381582 - which highlights how it doesn't really matter where you go or who you study with, it's all down to your personal drive and attitude.

That's a pretty interesting (and probably very effective) way to do your hiring! Most likely will be very demanding on Seth, but he'll get some second-to-none colleagues out of it at the very least.

Joel Spolsky was doing something similar:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FogCreekMBA.html

I wonder how this went.

From todays HN front page:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=382039 (On page 2 of the article)

"Not everybody gets it. Not long ago, we had a management trainee who sat around waiting for us to give him a formal title and promotion so he could "get stuff done." Problem was, he had never managed to win enough respect or influence from the development team to actually do things. He didn't work out so well; despite being smart and competent, he didn't earn the leadership position he thought he deserved. He would have been better off thinking about new features we should develop, writing specs to outline the benefits of these features, and winning the developers' trust through action instead of waiting for the title.

Another management trainee didn't care what his title was: He came up with a new idea for a program and persuaded the team that it was a good idea. I think he'll go far."

It would be particularly sweet if there were some way to more or less objectively compare the results of a rock star apprenticeship of this sort to a traditional graduate education. That would be hard to fashion, given some response bias and Seth's influence over who gets in (if anyone does).

I would bet, though, that studying under a ninja by doing some ninja-tasks with guidance from the master in a small group setting would at least nurture a certain type of brilliance more effectively.

I thought this was a whole time travel question.

care to explain? thanks :)

bush is the most famous hbs mba lol

i hope putting pic of bush won't scare the applicants

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