Don’t learn entrepreneurship from a PhD

“These things are nice on paper but really no one can use them in practice."

These were the thoughts I had after I started my first job after graduation. I thought university prepared me well but the reality was so messy. It was chaos. I felt I was lacking the most essential tools.

It was at that time that it slowly dawned on me: Why did I even trust people to teach me something that they had never done themselves?

It’s easy to talk. It’s way harder to do. Because there is a complexity that academia and theory abstracts away. But reality is inherently complex.

After I founded my first company that became even clearer. I took entrepreneurship classes at university but I realized painfully that you don’t learn entrepreneurship theoretically. You learn entrepreneurship by “doing" entrepreneurship. The frameworks are really easy to learn. Improvising, dealing with uncertainty and setbacks, that’s really the hard thing.

If you want to achieve something, don’t start with the easy part. Go straight to the hard part which is doing and then you can always pick up on the easy things later. This sharpens your focus on what theory actually matters.

Or in Nassim Taleb’s inimitable words: "If you want to learn how to become a Mafia lord, you learn from a Mafia lord. You don’t go learn from Francis Ford Coppola. You learn from the people who do it."

This even applies beyond entrepreneurship: If you want to switch careers or learn anything new go straight to practice. Fail and learn to build resilience. And if you need help ask people who know what they are talking about.

Don’t learn from people that have acquired their knowledge from books and the closest they got to practice was talking about it at a conference.