The Great Discontent: Noah Stokes.
Before my small reaction, if you’re not subscribed to The Great Discontent I strongly encourage you to do so. Stellar interviews from our industry as well as those on the fringes. Great stuff.
Noah Stokes. Motherfuton himself. I can’t quite remember how I first started talking to Noah, but I remember my first exposure to him being this. I literally LOL’d and no one else in my office at the time got it. It was then I knew I liked this guy.
We’ve talked a bit from time to time since then, but I honestly can’t fathom how things got started. I have a big respect for him and his work and followed him around ever since. I finally met Noah in person when we unconf’d Brooklyn Beta and I truly feel he’s one of those dudes I could work alongside for years. Great guy, great story, do read.
Our stories are quite similar, starting with this bit:
Did you go to school?
I did. I have a B.S. in Industrial Engineering from Cal Poly—a bit of a technical background. I’ve never actually done anything with my degree, but going to school taught me how to learn. Everything I do now is all self-taught—it’s all from Google University, which I’ll proudly promote to anybody. If you know how to learn, you can do anything you want to do because information is so freely available online.
While I don’t have an engineering degree from a school in California, my degree is not completely correlated with what I do. However, I guess we did go to the same school after all, Google University. I really like how he described that college taught him to learn. That resonates with me completely.
You can learn literally anything from the Web, but not many people take advantage of that. If you don’t have a degree from a fancy school you could use your time to study a field and break yourself into any industry, but it’s not something you hear of every day until we’re talking about Web design, development, or something to do with the Internet. I think our field makes it easier, without a doubt, but his view on college was a great take home message for me.
All in all, I really enjoyed reading the interview with Noah, and wanted to make sure you knew about it and The Great Discontent itself.