The Plan
- This MBA self-study plan involves studying a specific business topic every week. The order of the topics roughly follows the order established in the Personal MBA book. Some important topics are missing in that book so they’re added as additional topics to study either at the end or in-between where it makes sense.
- The goal is not to be an expert in any one of them but to have a general understanding of the concepts and ideas so we can dig deeper when needed.
- The plan is structured to accumulate knowledge in four ways to make the most effective use of your time
- Read high-level overview of the topic in Personal MBA book (~2 hrs) - do this at the start of the week
- Read a book that goes into slightly more depth but still at a high-enough level that it can be read easily within a week (takes about 1 to 1.5 hr of reading everyday)
- Read an article or two from HBR everyday from the 10 Must Reads books (~1hr everyday)
- (Optional) Listen to an audiobook on the topic while you do other things like exercising or walking or household chores (~45 mins everyday) - this is done only for the topics where such a book exists
- (Optional) Use blinkist or other such summarization service to review the book and audiobook (~30 mins)
- It is expected that we take extensive notes of what we learn that can be further summarized into a 1 to 3 page summary (~2 hours)
- Overall the plan requires about ~20 hours of focused time to read (where you can’t do anything else) and ~10 hours of optional effort listening to audio book. This assumes that you read at a pace of ~30 pages every hour and listen at 1x so you can follow along.
- Weekly presentation of the summary to review each other’s understanding. We just go over the summary notes that we prepared and try to explain to others our understanding of the subject. This step is to keep ourselves accountable.
Study Plan
Topics
References