Rework jason fried

Forget about formal educationI have never let my schooling 
interfere with my education. --MARK TWAIN 
 
There are plenty of companies out there who have educational requirements. 
They'll only hire people with a college degree (sometimes in a specific field) or an 
advanced degree or a certain GPA or certification of some sort or some other 
requirement. 
 
Come on. There are plenty of intelligent people who don't excel in the classroom. 
Don't fall into the trap of thinking you need someone from one of the "best" schools in 
order to get results. Ninety percent of CEOs currently heading the top five hundred 
American companies did not receive undergraduate degrees from Ivy League colleges. In 

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fact, more received their undergraduate degrees from the University of Wisconsin than 
from Harvard (the most heavily represented Ivy school, with nine CEOs).* 
 
Too much time in academia can actually do you harm. Take writing, for example. 
When you get out of school, you have to unlearn so much of the way they teach you to 
write there. Some of the misguided lessons you learn in academia: 
 
The longer a document is, the more it matters. 
 
Stiff, formal tone is better than being conversational. 
 
Using big words is impressive. 
 
You need to write a certain number of words or pages to make a point. 
 
The format matters as much (or more) than the content of what you write. 
 
It's no wonder so much business writing winds up dry, wordy, and dripping with 
nonsense. People are just continuing the bad habits they picked up in school. It's not just 
academic writing, either. There are a lot of skills that are useful in academia that aren't 
worth much outside of it. 
 
Bottom line: The pool of great candidates is far bigger than just people who 
completed college with a stellar GPA. Consider dropouts, people who had low GPAs, 
community-college students, and even those who just went to high school. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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Everybody works 
 
With a small team, you need people who are going to do work, not delegate work. 
Everyone's got to be producing. No one can be above the work.  
 
That means you need to avoid hiring delegators, those people who love telling 
others what to do. Delegators are dead weight for a small team. They clog the pipes for 
others by coming up with busywork. And when they run out of work to assign, they make 
up more--regardless of whether it needs to be done. 
 
Delegators love to pull people into meetings, too. In fact, meetings are a 
delegator's best friend. That's where he gets to seem important. Meanwhile, everyone else 
who attends is pulled away from getting real work done.