3 Ways A Liberal Arts Major Can Start A Badass Business

The following article was sponsored by BADNET

Ok. You got screwed by a bad degree. And you’ve heard it from everywhere by now.

  • “Your degree sucks!”
  • “Go back and get a real degree!”
  • “You’ll never make as much as a doctor!”

You know you’re destined for more than flipping burgers or rotating tires. You’ve got success written all over you. You’ve got to turn those classroom skills into some real dollars. But how?

The answer, my friend is easy. It’s as simple as finding a need, and filling it.

Case 1: The Music Major

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Let’s take a professionally trained singer. Rather than spend all your life waiting tables, how about taking the skill you’ve honed over the years and turn it into some cash?

“Oh,” you say, “Nobody wants to learn how to sing opera.”

That’s fine though. Not many people want to sing opera. But opera is not all you can do. In fact, you have a very useful talent that’s not only in demand, but well-paid. That is vocal enhancement.

Instead of selling, “learn how to sing opera,” which nobody wants, you could instead offer a very targeted service that improves a specific domain. Something that gives a result within one session and creates a tangible change in the buyer. How about something like, “Make your voice low, growly, and manly within minutes.”

Plenty of guys out there I know are insecure about their voices and would like to have a more classically manly voice. Or how about something like, “Got an upcoming speech to deliver? Vocal confidence for public speaking within one session.” You’ve just turned your “useless” skill into a business with a functional benefit to thousands of people.

Case 2: The Biology Major

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Biology may seem like a pretty strange field to profit from. You’ve got to have a lab and grant money to do anything real with that knowledge, don’t you?

No, you do not.

Better still, biological knowledge meets a fundamental human need (that’s often left out of Maslow’s hierarchy).

The need to connect with nature.

So who is it that most needs to connect with nature? Maybe city dwellers who work round the clock? So here’s an idea: custom-designed plant and flower arrangements for city highrises.

You get contracts with the movers and shakers (who are rarely in their condos,) and design plant arrangements that not only fit their space and personality, but that have functional benefits as well. Ever been in a polluted metropolitan area, and then escaped to the countryside? You know what a difference it makes to your lungs.

So you can not only sell the personalized to your space angle, but also the improve your health angle.

For instance, you might include a few Sansevieria trifasciata, or “mother-in-law’s tongue” plants – one of the best plants for small spaces because it rejuvenates the air and cleans it of toxins. You get one of these contracts, and they’ll start to talk to their friends about that smart young lad who made their air cleaner, and their apartment look like a real urban jungle.

What’s more, you could even sell ongoing contracts and hire out labor to your favorite immigrants to take care of the watering and maintenance while you go sell more.

Case 3: The History Major

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By now you’re beginning to see that your degree doesn’t necessarily give you the direct skills required to build a business, but it can give you an interesting angle. Now we’ll go to the last example, a history major.

If this is you, you may think you have no useful skills. But that’s far from the truth. In fact you have one very useful skill.

You have the ability to take lots of information (often from conflicting sources) and turn it into something clear and concise.

That’s all writing an essay is.  So what’s a field that’s rife with conflicting (and confusing) advice? Well how about nutrition?

Sure, you could start an everyday nutrition blog. That would use your writing skills, but let’s say you wanted to put a historical slant on it. You could explore topics like “Recipes Your Great-Grandmother Made (That Were Healthier Than Anything Today)”

Could do very well with certain audiences, (such as most of the women cooking in the world).

They want to respect their heritage. You want to make some dough.

So you start digging up ancient recipe books. There are a ton of these old cookbooks available if you peek around for them, but they often need to be translated for modern times. They might call for huge quantities (designed for feeding an army, or a large family). They might require ingredients that are hard to find nowadays (elk liver). Or they might use cooking methods that would seem crude compared to modern methods (such as fermentation in urine… really).

So you write them up for modern times, explaining the nutritional benefits of using ancient methods and ingredients, while offering them in easy-to-use recipes.

That’s easily a 5-figure business right there. Combine the “heritage” angle with your powerful writing skills, and this could be a very profitable business.

Best of all, these are all untapped.

No one has really cornered the market on these niches. In fact, people are just beginning to dig in to some of these more profitable angles. That could be you.

But one thing’s for sure, if you don’t go ahead and get yourself set up with a domain name and a website soon, it might be too late to make these (or other businesses).

To get started with a free domain name and a website on the world’s most powerful open-source software, head over to BADNET.

It’s a free service where we set you up with a ready-to-use website within 48 hours. You just pay hosting.

That’s less than $5/month to run a real business.

Or do you prefer working for your boss?

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61 thoughts on “3 Ways A Liberal Arts Major Can Start A Badass Business”

    1. The idea that the article is trying to convey is to be creative in making money from whatever knowledge you have. If you don’t know anything, go learn something.

      1. I have a degree in History & have worked as a HighSchool teacher for the past 15 years. I left my European country to escape the
        P.C. nature of schools/society there and have spent the past 12 years teaching in Russia and the Middle East. Now, almost 40 yrs old, with no skills but a bit of cash behind me, I’ve decided to leave
        teaching and try to get a ‘real’ job for the second half of my career. I’m considering painting/decorating, Taxi driver, buy a pub, plastering..anything real to be
        honest.
        With painting I hope I could learn the skills in a 1 month
        workshop class, then slowly try to start building my own company. I could drive a cab on weekends to keep myself afloat during the first few years. Why am I writing all this? To see if I could get any feedback. Is my plan any good?

  1. These suggestions are fine, and imaginative, but if you find yourself having graduated with no idea what your skills are useful for in the real world, this is more of a sad commentary on what you aren’t being taught in college these days than it is a referendum on the major-specific knowledge you receive in school. Any well rounded education should not only teach you the raw skills for your discipline, but how those raw skills are applicable outside of your narrow discipline. That’s what a liberal arts education is supposed to be. If this is no longer happening, add this information to your “do I need to go to college” decision tree. Technically, none of the suggestions in this article require a college degree at all – they require business sense, imagination, ambition, and the ability to hire a graduate to do the dirty work.

    1. I agree with you. More important than education is being able to take whatever knowledge you have in one domain and apply it to a different one. This is critical in my opinion as it opens a lot of new and unexpected paths to ones life..
      As an example (of course this doesn’t apply to everybody), a lot of the guys developing the financial models for trading firms have degrees in Physics..
      Also, people that can bridge two completely different domains are in high demand. For example someone that understands technology (to a fairly deep level, but not expert) and also understands the health insurance business in detail can talk both. Geeks don’t speak insurance, and business people don’t understand technology…Someone that understands both is invaluable..

    2. A lot of the problem is government certifications and licensing. For example, my background is in Classical Languages, and I have a certification in the Great Books. I work as a tutor in three languages, but business is slow as schools are opting out of Latin (my main stay.) Looking to teach in my field would require a teaching degree and licensing, but I know the whole grad school dance: the debt, and even less promise of job in my state.
      Basic fact: Western civilization has been killed in its culture and in the numbers of descendants. Not enough children, less demand for teachers.
      Over the years I have cultivated a number of useful interests/skills, 20 years in the martial arts, old time strongman lifting.
      I also write transgressive fiction.
      So yeah, I could teach your son to read Caesar, beat the fuck out of bullies, and do a one handed clean and press with a 100 pound dumbbell. But that won’t help him get a job.
      Being well rounded is dead, being a polymath is dead. The West is on life support, oh well let’s follow the Chinese Mandarin Model while the Chinese study Latin.
      Go figure.

    3. If you think about it, university education today is essentially a con. You pay these people thousands of dollars and walk away with less than you started with (four years during which you could have been working and getting real skills). There is a massive sales job being worked here by the government. Worse, they want to tie you in debt that keeps you right where they want you for years.
      It is a terrible deal.

  2. Lets be honest here. The chances that you’re going to make “real dollars” with your useless liberal arts degree by writing blog posts about obscure niche topics are pretty slim.
    You’ll probably make a whole lot more money by signing up with a temp agency and taking data entry jobs.

    1. The odds are very slim. Those of us who were duped into attaining lib arts degrees need to come to grips with the fact that we were ripped off and sold snake oil. Move on. Start a viable business. I do landscaping. It’s backbreaking and the pay sucks. That’s life. I graduated from UCLA. HAHAHA! The joke’s on me!

      1. Landscaping, the art of growing useless pretty scenery that no one can eat, use, or truly benefit from.
        Grow some potatoes.

        1. They also love pronography, drugs, gladiatorial games, and slavery too. I guess those are a good too.

        2. Landscaping is just another American pretension. Be a mini-lord, grow useless green grass on your over leverage mini-estate.
          A.k.a. King Shit syndrome.

      2. Learn to sketch. start a livestream, put a ton of your work on deviantart. take commissions, profit (It’s earning me 200 bucks a night)

  3. Obviously there are many cases of success without college, but even some of the most successful people have at least started and may have dropped out, however it has been shown over and over that a college degree does help, but more importantly you need to have a game plan of what you want to do and how to accomplish it, a degree doesn’t just magically get you jobs, but it can help https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDfKHXrnLGs

    1. A degree may be needed for certain specialties, e.g. medicine, but determining the cost to benefit ratio of a degree for your chosen field should be part of your game plan. I opted to skip college and the exorbitant payments on the student loans for a degree in my field because a degree simply isn’t required. It took a little longer than a four year degree would, but I now make a six figure salary and I am not chained to 20 years of debt repayment on tens of thousands of dollars in student loans for what amounts to a piece of paper on the wall. Determining if you really need to get a degree in the first place should be the first part of your game plan. Don’t buy into the sales pitch that you need one because it might help you a little.

      1. Oh I agree 100%, but it takes the willingness to do a certain amount of hard work and sacrifice, which some people do not want to do. If you know what you want and don’t need a degree you are for sure better off to just start working on it immediately, or an apprenticeship or whatever it’ll take to obtain your dreams.

      2. Does it require math.. no skip that.. basic arithmetic. Because if you are making a six figure salary then paying off $20-50k of debt would require less than a decade, probably less than 5 years.

  4. “The Music Major”
    Better plan: Buy a string instrument you can play (violin, cello, bass), and move to a wedding hotspot. Lake Tahoe. Aspen. Etc.
    You’d be amazed how much demand there is for 3-4 piece groups for weddings (despite the plummeting marriage rate). The music is easy, the setting congenial, and the pay in hourly terms is great.

  5. Better yet, go back to school! And this time around, don’t be a dumb fuck and get a STEM degree! Or go to a trade school and learn how to make some serious money.

      1. A very true point, a two year college would work just as well and you wouldn’t have time to join a frat and get accused of rape either- if you went to any major universities that support the feminist agenda, which they all do.

        1. Go to a city school or land grant school. Large, anonymous, with plenty of room to do your own thing.
          At my alma mater that shit was on the back burner because we had.. ya’ know.. real crime like burglary, muggings, shootings, car theft, vandalism, and street side sexual assault going on.

      2. And if everyone got a STEM degree, then the STEM labor pool would be flooded leading to lower wages and just as much unemployment.
        Wasn’t it in the early 2000’s new pharmacy schools went online and commercials ran non-stop making kids think there was a shortage of pharmacist? Thus a ton of kids were getting pharmacy degrees only to walk out and unemployed as there never was a shortage — just new schools seeking kids to dish out cash.

        1. You are correct. However, in the case of pharmacy the jobs were in Canada and some developing countries where people go to the pharmacist before going to the doctor. A US trained pharmacist could go to the developing world and make a lucrative living.

      3. Yeah exactly, I’ve know a fuck ton of engineering drop outs who went into accounting.
        I’ve also have two friends who have advanced degrees in engineering who are not working their fields.

    1. Skilled trades, over paid as a result of massive government regulation.
      I keep hearing about them, all except one thing: what are the projected numbers of welders, pipe fitters, steam fitters, electricians need in the near future?

  6. A degree only gives you two things: rigor, and the ability to deal with large amounts of information. If you already have that, or you can master it on your own then there are so many free top notch classes you can take online, even from MIT for god’s sake.

    1. There might be an advantage by being around people smarter than yourself, in which case you could probably just go the classes..its not like anyone will actually kick you out of a class.

  7. Pretty good suggestions. Unfortunately people who are generally interested in a Liberal Arts degree aren’t interested in forming their own business.

    1. only because some ‘liberal arts’ do not truly belong in the category.
      History, for example. History is as scientific and as concerned with accuracy as any science. The problem is, because you cannot experiment with history (yet) it is relegated to liberal arts.
      Some ‘sciences’ like psychology, though, do not belong in the sciences at all.

      1. Psychology and sociology are the butts of many jokes among chemists, or at least the people I am around.

        1. It is, but psychology is so leftist it’s impossible to get anything done.

        2. I actually have to take back a little of that… there have been amazing strides made in commercial psychology.

      2. Eh, I would say it is half and half. Depends on the school, it used to be standard for History majors to have a reading comprehension in one or two foreign languages.
        I know for a lot of Classics graduate program reading comprehension in German (in addition to Latin and/or Greek) was a must.
        Speaking of which, yeah Sociology, Psychology yeah we would laugh at them too. Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind discussed how those pseudo-sciences rose up to displace philosophy. If you ever want to see sparks fly get a traditional (i.e. not post-modern) philosopher on the topic of psychology.

        1. wait, have you ever seen a traditional philosopher in the flesh? I thought the last one died like… two centuries ago.
          If you have, I hope he gets on the protected species list.

        2. Mainly in the HIstory and Philosophy of Science. But I guess they would be more anti-post-modern-ists.
          Who the fuck knows? Grab a tub and start barking at people.

        1. As far as I am concerned, history is only dwarfed by mathematics in it’s applicability to real-world problem solving.

        2. And mathematics is one of the liberal arts, which, since Descarte, has swept up the liberal arts of geometry and logic.
          Liberal means “spread widely” and Art means “a skill, or area of expertise.”
          Liberal Arts means “broadly educated,” not “Leftist Finger Painting.” At some undergraduate colleges even maths and physics majors are awarded arts degrees.

        3. The trouble is, with humans, they think that “this time it will be different…”

        4. Of course. Insanity is attempting the same idea over and over in the assumption that they will obtain a different result.

  8. Getting rich is easy. Ready for the formula? Be on the lookout for the latest new Internet technology. When it hits, figure out how to get LOLcats and WorldStarHipHop videos on it.

  9. People, check out my site: http://www.envynothingbuild.com. I am creating a sustainable catalog of human history, that is verifiable, visual, and fun to learn from and share. It’s a book built for the web, constantly updated, like software. You can enjoy a free sample, but the cost for access is only $1! The first work in the series covers the 1700’s, from Newton to Washington’s death and everything in between. You could also help by going to the Facebook page, liking it, and sharing it with friends. http://www.facebook.com/Pro.paganda.us. I’m currently in the process of acquiring investment capital to build a team and make the site a fully gamified experience. Any feedback and traffic to the sites would be awesome! Thank you.

  10. It is true that a very talented person who completed a degree in liberal arts may achieve something with it, but first that person needs a real talent and motivation. It is definitely not the case of all students in those fields.

  11. Good suggestions and the overall point of looking for creative ways to turn your bullshit degree into some actual money is even better. Notice the conspicuous absence of Philosophy/Comp Lit/Sociology/Anthropology. You fuckers are still doombed 🙂 I don’t mention women’s studies because a) that isn’t education and b) they will wind up making a fortune once HR departments start being honest and requiring a WS degree

  12. The idea that Liberal Arts are jokes is based mainly in the people who study them. 90% of my course were completely clueless. I studied history at a second rate university and started a business that between two people that turned over in excess of £60,000 in its first year of operation. I’ve provisionally handed the business over to someone else in exchange for a constant income over the next two years. What major you have is no obstacle to starting a business.
    There are some really obvious ways to turn history related stuff into a money maker. At the moment, there is a massive interest in family research and people will pay good money for you to find stuff Ancestry.com etc can’t find. I’m looking on doing that freelance as a side income soon.
    On a side note a lot of people slate going to college and advise against it in The Red Pill community. I see where they are coming from, but studying at an academic level provides a discipline that few things at that age can provide, if you approach it in the right way.

    1. Up until recently I would consider boot camp to be a more than acceptable substitute.

      1. I don’t want to be too specific for the sake of anonymity (Several people I’ve worked with browse this site, TRP and other similar sites), but I found a supplier for a product that was in high demand and extremely limited supply, through networking and sheer good luck. Timing was a huge part of success and that’s my main worry for any other business ventures I start in the future.

  13. I have begun writing a philosophical novel. Hopefully that will make me some money.

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