Opinion
Kaufman: Everything taught in business school can be self-taught
“There is nothing that's taught in business school classrooms that you are not capable of learning and understanding and applying on your own.”
Insight
Kaufman: Trend-focused books are poor investments compared to foundational frameworks
“I just, I remember a book from a couple of years ago of like the rising trend of Twitter. It's like, that's not a good investment in terms of this kind of research. I want to read something like influence, which is how to think about cognitive biases in this, …”
Opinion
Kaufman: Charlie Munger's mental models targeted investors, not business operators
“The things that he's done, and it was fascinating and illuminating, and it was focused on investors, so people who are making capital allocation decisions. And at this point, I think I was a year out of college, and frankly, I didn't have a whole lot of capita…”
Insight
Kaufman: Gauging daily progress by unfinished to-do lists destroys personal satisfaction
“If you're gauging your mental and emotional conception of progress on, is my to-do list done yet? The answer to that day after day, week after week, year after year is no, it's not done yet. Therefore, it's hard to feel good about what it is that you've done i…”
Insight
Josh Kaufman: Frequency analysis across diverse reading reveals key core concepts
“The wider you look, the wider the variety of sources that you have coming into your brain, the more access to interesting insights and connections you would have. So, so yes, reading broadly, experimenting broadly, having experiences in different domains and t…”
Insight
Josh Kaufman: Direct experimentation beats online research or asking for recommendations
“I think just even a relatively small amount of experimentation can get you further down to The line of what is the best X for Y problem, then you can find reading in a book or searching the internet or asking a friend about it.”
Insight
Kaufman: Reviews provide signal only when detailing specific problems and concrete solutions
“Reviews can be good signal if they include the information that this is what I was trying to do, and this is the problem I was trying to solve, and this is how this particular resource solved this problem or helped me with this, provide a solution in, in a ver…”
Insight
Kaufman: Money lost on failed experiments serves as domain knowledge tuition
“But I think in a lot of domains where you're doing synthesis or you're doing optimizy sort of research, that malinvestment is a form of tuition. It's the price that you're paying to gather information about this domain that you care about. And so if the proble…”
Insight
Kaufman: In-the-Moment Experimentation Separates Good Performers From Great Ones
“What separates people who are good at something in a skill context versus people who are great at something? Is that they are much better at doing that very fine experimentation in the moment, paying attention, learning the variations, learning the exceptions,…”
Insight
Kaufman: Daily logging is among the best tools for self-improvement
“Keeping a daily log of what you're doing and how your internal understanding of how you did, what went well, what didn't go well, what you would try the next time. Just having that reflection loop is one of the best things that you can do for yourself to both …”
Assertion Supported
Kaufman: The total cost of nine top MBA programs exceeds $400,000
“When you calculate the whole thing, there are, if I'm remembering correctly, Nine schools that have just passed the 400,000 dollar mark in terms of total cost of a program.”
Insight
Kaufman: Lower-status options often produce faster and cheaper results
“You can often get much better results if you're willing to examine, look at, and take seriously the lower status option And evaluate that in terms of, does this help me get what I want in a faster, more direct, less expensive less risky, less uncertain way?”
Opinion
Kaufman: Borrowing for an MBA is illogical if you hold the role
“It didn't make sense for me to quit my job and borrow a bunch of money, go back to school, you know, to come back to the kind of job I already had. I just wanted to learn what I needed to know to succeed. And so the personal MBA became a project where instead …”
Insight
Kaufman: First-time business plans only require five core operational sections
“When somebody is trying to write a business plan for the first time, my advice to them is very simple. Take out a sheet of paper. You have five subheads, value creation, marketing, sales, value delivery, and finance. And if you can sketch out in detail what ea…”
Insight
Kaufman: Side projects generate real-world validation data to de-risk career pivots
“The nice thing about all these side projects, because you're doing experimentation and because you're doing iteration is All of those experiments give you data from the world about, is this working for me? Is this working for other people? And the more informa…”
