Why a Liberal Arts Degree is Perfect for Retail Entrepreneurs

Thought you needed an MBA to be a good entrepreneur? Think again. In fact, many of the world’s most successful business people didn’t study anything to do with business at all. Case in point: Peter Theil. He created PayPal, gave Mark Zuckerburg a business loan, and came up with a business idea that pays students thousands to drop out of college.

You’d expect that he studied business, right? Or finance, or maybe marketing - but no. He majored in philosophy at Stanford University.

Theil isn’t the only successful entrepreneur who chose to study a ‘soft’ major. Stewart Butterfield, co-founder of Flickr, Carly Fiorina, former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, and Ted Turner, founder of CNN all majored in liberal arts subjects.

True, the liberal arts get a lot of criticism from those who push STEM subjects - and those who don’t know any better - but if you want to succeed in business, it’s the way forward. Here are some reasons why:

You’ll Be Great at Telling Stories

Liberal arts majors just get how to explain often complex things to a mass audience, thanks to all the studying and critiquing of things related to the arts that you’ll need to do when you study for an associates of arts degree.

When you study a subject like drama, for example, you’ve got a better chance of really being able to put across the value of a service or product to a customer. Good storytelling is becoming more and more vital to business success - with so much choice available, nobody really cares anymore if a business is saying their product is good. Everybody’s saying that about their products. It’s good storytelling that really conveys the value of why a consumer should choose one product over another.

You’re a Creative Thinker

Those who opt for studying a degree in the liberal arts tend to be more creative thinkers than most. Take Steve Jobs, for example - the man we now all know and love as the creator of Apple, couldn’t make sense of his college education at all.

But after Jobs dropped out of his formal education, he began to drop into classes simply because they intrigued him. According to him, the one that had the most impact was the Calligraphy class, which he used when designing the first Macintosh computer - the first computer that was capable of beautiful fonts.

You Can Think Critically

Learning to think critically is all part and parcel of studying for a liberal arts degree. After all, how can you argue a point when most of the time, there’s no right or wrong answer?

Unlike STEM majors, where everything is clear-cut and there’s a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer to most questions, those studying the liberal arts need to be able to think critically and clearly, understanding what people mean rather than what they say.

You Can Connect with Others:

Discussion is a big part of studying any degree in the liberal arts. And when it comes to entrepreneurship, it doesn’t matter if you’re the smartest or sharpest businessperson; if you don’t have strong emotional intelligence and lack the ability to lead and connect with others, you barely stand a chance.

As a liberal arts student, you’re used to thinking with others - and with so many theories to dive into, learning about others’ ideas and discussing them, coming up with theories and finding the best answer to questions or solutions to problems is an everyday part of your studying. In business, this skill is one that’s essential for success.

You Can Identify Trends

The ability to see possibilities before everybody else does is a hugely valuable skill to have as an entrepreneur. And when you’re studying for a degree where you literally scrutinize trends throughout history for four years of your life, scrutinizing trends when you’re in business is going to be like riding a bike - you probably won’t even realize you’re doing it at this point.

Studying history, for example, means that you will spend time identifying trends that led to significant occurrences and big changes throughout the centuries. You’ll learn how to analyze the steps that led up to specific events, rather than just about the events themselves. As a result, you’ll be in a better place than everybody else - or at least everybody who studied something else - to notice when similar steps are happening in the present, allowing you to get a head start on others when it comes to spotting future trends.

Since most startups fail, entrepreneurs need to have all five of these skills and abilities to improve their chances of success. As a liberal arts student, you’ll gain them all.