She shouldn’t reject him for getting C in macroeconomics. She should reject him for putting his macroeconomics grade on his resume.

Google requires transcripts for new grads. (And even not-so-new engineers.

I’m printing and framing this one.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-alex-benzer/why-the-smartest-people-h_b_169939.html

Apparently academic success doesn’t lead to “sales success” in the dating world. So “good students aren’t good at all things.” Maybe they’re just good at all things that are easily measured.

Do the C students get the girl and get to own the company?

If one looks at the total pool of college vs non-college people, and what each group’s career trajectories look like in the aggregate, I think Google’s position is more justifiable.

The two options are like the Jets and the Sharks from Westside story. Sure, you might fall for your enemy’s girl (or at least snap at her), but you don’t choose to be one or the other. In most cases, at that point you just *are.*

Agree 100%. Blogged the exact quote when it was published in Feb. Google’s attitude is ensuring that they will become the next Microsoft, the good news is that will open up a lot of opportunity for entrepreneurs like me.

Jamie

A hidden corollary to this, I think, is that enjoying work doesn’t necessarily mean doing work that you enjoy. What I mean is that following “your passion” often leads down a blind alley, whereas picking a really big goal and then doing whatever it takes to achieve that goal (including many things that you are decidely not passionate about) ends up being enjoyable. I like what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi says about work in this regard.

Actually, this statement is troubling to me. Its tone, diction, thought process, and vapidity reek of an unexceptional individual who excels at getting good grades, but is mediocre at all other things.

Of course, I wouldn’t want to make a comprehensive assessment of character or ability based on a single data point.

I’m sure Bill Gates would have been a great employee at Google, his 20% time would create some amazing products. If he wasn’t presented with the opportunity to create Microsoft, this might have been a great option for him.

The great entrepreneurs are not necessarily ‘A’ students, nor are they serial entrepreneurs – they are people passionate about a subject matter and an idea – so passionate that they want to spend their whole life working on it (it’s the spending their whole life working on it that prevents them from getting the ‘A’ in every other subject, it also prevents them from being serial entrepreneurs).

Serial entrepreneurs are another story – they live their lives interupted by a smattering of ideas – starting/exiting companies, starting/quiting jobs, starting/stopping studying hard enough to get good grades, etc

The ‘A’ students on the other hand, are the students who have a desire to work within the bounds of the system (or know how to work around the system) – either way, they value the system for some reason and are working towards ordering their lives around it. This usually means that these people (the ‘A’ students) are good for any company who needs someone to interact with the system of society (any system that human culture has created), this is obviously valuable to and can bleed into the entrepreneureal side of things… for example businesses that are built around government contracts (like blackwater)… they have spent their lives working the system and can build a business to take advantage of it.