Straight-A Students and Self-Made Millionaires

1. When you need someone to faithfully implement your time-tested policies and procedures, hire a straight-A student.

This is what we know about them:

A. They bought into the educational system, believed its promises, and played by its rules.

B. They have demonstrated obedience, compliance, and conformity.

C. They have obvious respect for authority.

And these are not bad things.

2. When you need to innovate, improvise or reinvent, hire a rascal.1

This is what we know about them:

A. They mistrust the system, laugh at its promises, and make up their own rules.

B. They have demonstrated disobedience, defiance, and abnormity.

C. They have obvious respect for alternative thinking.

Steve Jobs was a rascal with an unimpressive résumé. When Steve applied for a job at Hewlett-Packard in 1977, they rejected him because he had dropped out of Reed College in 1972.

“Quitters never win.” That’s the traditional wisdom. Ask any high school football coach. And Steve Jobs was definitely a quitter.

Jan Koum was a bonafide rascal. When he was 20, his ex-girlfriend got a restraining order against him. He later said, “I am ashamed of the way I acted, and ashamed that my behavior forced her to take legal action”.

Jan Koum was also a quitter. Facebook refused to hire him in 2008 because he had dropped out of San Jose State. Here’s what was on Jan’s resume for the previous year: “I traveled around South America playing ultimate frisbee.”

I can almost see that HR director rolling her eyes, can’t you?

In 2009, Jan Koum founded WhatsApp, an innovation he sold to Facebook in 2014 for $9.1 billion.

Steve Jobs and Jan Koum are mentioned in the opening paragraph of a 59-page study2 published by two academicians in 2017. That paper is titled Asymmetric Information and Entrepreneurship. Its scholarly authors reached their conclusions only after analyzing 12,686 individuals over a period of more than 30 years.

I’ll do my best to summarize those 59 pages:

“A person is motivated to start their own business when they have more confidence in their ability than they have in their résumé.” – Roy H. Williams

There. I’ve put 59 pages into a single sentence.

Perhaps I should become an ad writer.

Roy H. Williams

1 If no rascals are available, you can substitute a rebel, a rogue, or a renegade.

2 Hegde, Deepak and Tumlinson, Justin, Asymmetric Information and Entrepreneurship (May 15, 2017). Available for download at SSRN.