Right around the time that I was finishing my undergraduate degree I had a friend who was finishing his MBA, as part of a joint degree program. The program allowed him to opt for an extra year of school in exchange for an extra degree.

I was curious to know what is taught in an MBA program, I burning desire to know if it was really the kind of life altering experience that people claimed it could be. So I asked my friend, degree fresh in hand, what he had learned.
                                                                                                                                                                           He told me that he had learned a lot of small lessons that he was thankful for, but that he only learned two things of great importance.

He said that the first important lesson that he learned was that “if you can take in more money then you spend, then you have what it takes to be in business.” He explained that people often make business more complicated than it needs to be. That a lot of people second guess themselves thinking, oh I don’t have the proper degree, the right education, I am not experienced enough.

His belief was that the most important “acid test” to determine if someone had what it takes to be in business, is if they had the ability to generate more income into their business then they spent. In his mind there was no need to mystify business further.

The second important lesson of his degree was that “perfect is the worst enemy of good enough”. I am not sure who the first person to say this quote was but it’s probably an evolution of the Voltaire quote that, “The perfect is the enemy of the good.” When I first heard this idea, it hit me like a ton of bricks. The idea that if you wait until a project is perfect before you release it, that you will be waiting forever.

I struggled with the temptation to, perfect before release, with my ebook, “The eBay Myth”.  According to the My Documents folder on my computer, I went through 59 drafts before I finally released the “First Edition”. I believe however, that in the end, the temptation was defeated. I offer in proof of this claim, that fact that anyone who reads the first or second edition, will likely notice multiple typos on the second page.

Obviously an MBA has value, and all the little lesson that you might learn in such a program will add up to an education of significant value. Even without education as a factor, an MBA, especially from a prestigious program, can have enormous value from networking purposes alone.

The important thing to remember is that business has no required prerequisites aside from an ability to take in more than you spend and please keep mind that “perfect is the worst enemy of good enough”.