Smart people can recognize smart people
When you read short online biographies of successful people, they mostly start or end with a level of education, usually a university degree. Big companies’ HR bureaucracy aside, I’d like to understand what message they’d like to deliver by including this information, and in fact, it’s hard for me to recognize whether it’s a negative or positive one. It goes something along the lines:
“John Smith graduated from Harvard University with an A. B. in Computer Science. John worked at Amazon as a VP of marketing and developed a known and very successful expansion strategy. John later founded project.com and sold it to Google for $900 million after 3 years of operation, with 20 millions registered users”.
Translated:
“At school, John Smith learned from old smart people how to build a sand tower by using a beach bucket. John is also known for studying architecture on his own and building an astonishing 200-acre golf course in the middle of San Francisco with his bare hands over a period of 3 years, working 16 hours a day. Tiger Woods called the course most enjoyable and challenging he’s ever played on. The planet’s most famous golf course has been later acquired by Nike for $900 million, making John one of the hardest working, most rich and successful startup entrepreneurs in the world”.
Now, I had to strongly overexpose for the difference to be more clear - much more people can use a beach bucket and fill it with sand than those who can successfully graduate from Harvard. But my point is simple. Study is important, in some fields critical, and can also be a part of business strategy - but with the level of some people’s accomplishments, I’m personally not very sure what their degree means in the bio. Smart people recognize smart people. You are not going to ask Larry Ellison where he graduated from before you decide whether you want to conduct business with him, are you?
An entrepreneur can care and consider his graduation to be a big notable accomplishment, but before including it, he should ask himself a very basic question first: “Does my target audience care?”. I think only the dumb one does. Your target audience better be smart.
