Why Great Entrepreneurs Get Bad Grades

After five years of teaching entrepreneurship classes at Duke University, I’ve begun to notice a pattern worth discussing. Every semester, some of my most obviously entrepreneurial students — the ones actively building companies — are also the students who get the worst grades. What’s going on here? Why are the entrepreneurs doing poorly in entrepreneurship classes?

Before I explore the reason for that, let me offer some necessary caveats. I’m not suggesting all students who get bad grades are great entrepreneurs. Nor am I arguing that students who get great grades will be bad entrepreneurs. I’ve got multiple former students running successful startups who got excellent grades.

I also want to be careful not to correlate “good grades” with being a “good student.” As lots of people will tell you, grades can be a problematic indicator of student quality.

Instead, the pattern I’m noticing is related to what I’ve come to believe is a core entrepreneurial skill: learning to make tradeoffs.

Every decision we make in life has a cost. For example, at a minimum, my decision to write this post is costing me opportunities to do other things, as is your decision to read it. Our decisions usually also have significantly greater consequences impacting everything from who we spend time with, to what career path we…