Business 101

Business school gets more popular every year. As the price of college rises, students want to make a safer investment so they choose a degree based on expected salary at the end. That means picking engineering, business, or something that will lead to law school. Business school sounds practical. You’re keeping your options open. It’s business, that where all the jobs are! So hundreds of thousands of high school seniors around the country know they want to work so they sign up for business school because they think they need to go to college.

In the college paradigm choosing to study business is a logical choice, but it is not the best way to learn about business.

The best way to learn about business is to work. Get a job, learn the skills required, see how an organization functions, and figure out how you can add value. Learn from experience what you like doing, and what you never want to do again; that is an education in business.

The business school experience at college is more about turning yourself into a personality type and learning business jargon than it is about learning the skills you need to add value to  a business.

At any college, the typical business degree covers a range of topics. You take courses in statistics, accounting, marketing, finance, human resources, operations management, and more. You touch on the surface of a broad array of topics but don’t dive deep into any of them. You pick a major and do four of five courses in it, but this isn’t a deep dive into one topic, it is a surveying of the options available within that field.

Business school teaches broad, abstract knowledge. It does not teach the hard specialized skill that you need to succeed at a business. Businesses are built on specialized skills. To run a business, you need to provide a service or a product to someone at a higher quality or better price than your competition, or than you customer could do themselves. At the core of every single business is entrepreneurship. Someone, or a group of people who had the skill to get people things they wanted. Entrepreneurs that create value for their customers and themselves. So, entrepreneurship skill is foundational business skill. And lots of the skills for entrepreneurship can be learned and enhanced traveling.

Identifying Unmet Needs

As you travel, you see new places, new markets, and new cultures. You see businesses that exist in one country but not in others. You are introduced to a service in one city that you miss when you leave. You notice that some businesses you wish existed, don’t. Maybe it is a supermarket, or a cool restaurant set up for travelers to hang out at. Many successful businesses begin with someone who wants something that they can’t get where they are. Whether that is starting an Asian fusion taco food truck in your city, or starting a business to import Inka Corn and Plantain chips from Peru. Traveling with your eyes open will lead to to think of all sorts of possibilities to start a business.

Practicing Negotiation

On almost any trip you take, you will end up in a country where negotiation is common for small transactions. Whether it is at a market in Asia, or a bus station in South America, you have many opportunities to barter. Developing negotiation skill helps you save money while you travel, but it is one of the most important skills to develop for business success. Maintaining a calm demeanor, knowing what you want and how much you are willing to pay for it, learning how to estimate what someone may take for an item, and ultimately learning how to get a deal done quickly that makes both sides happy. Practicing barter will help you negotiate a salary, get a better deal on rent, save on large items and make sales of your product or service.

Through bartering, you learn a lot about sales.  You see how children try to pressure you to buy based off of emotions, or how adults will try to make you feel like you have committed to something you haven’t committed to. And you experience how businesses with shifty ethics will use sunk costs and hidden fees to get more money out of you.

Learning by Experiencing

When you travel country to country, you experience a broad range of business practices. You learn from your bad experiences with tour companies, hostels, and other businesses about what makes good service and what makes bad service. You see how useful gimmicks and free offers can be in generating traffic and driving sales. While your friends are sitting in classrooms learning abstract theories about human resources, synergies, or corporate governance, you are out in the streets practicing persuasion with street vendors, experiencing novel businesses, seeing the difference in markets between countries and actively learning skills that will help you as an entrepreneur.

Beyond any one skill though, you will be developing trust in yourself by facing challenges and obstacles on your travels. Every time you push yourself outside of your comfort zone you become more self-reliant and independent, you start to appreciate how much better it is to be in control of your own time, living a self-directed life. Instead of having a professor or a boss telling you when you have to be somewhere and what you have to be doing, you will be deciding for yourself.

You return home and crave the feeling of living a self-directed life. You have more trust in yourself, better skills, and an improved perception of the unmet needs in your city, country, or somewhere abroad. You’ve learned that being passive gets you know where. You are more ready to actively pursue a job that interests you, to assertively create value there, and to continue learning about business from reality, not abstract textbooks.