THE EDUCATION OF MILLIONAIRES by Michael Ellsberg

• You’ve been fed a lie. The lie is that if you study hard in school, get good grades, get into a good college, and get a degree, then your success in life is guaranteed.
• If you want to succeed now, then you must also educate yourself in the real-world skills, capabilities, and mind-sets that will get you ahead outside of the classroom. This is true whether you’ve been to college or not.
• More and more people—including people who haven’t even graduated college yet—are waking up to the reality that the old career and success advice is no longer adequate. We need to start taking some new advice.
• I can confirm: there is literally no job too shitty or low-paying for which you won’t get a river of BAs desperately asking you for the work.
• Developing your practical intelligence will have far more impact on the quality and success of your life.
• beyond a middling level of academic achievement, there is little evidence that grades (the center point of our waking lives for almost the entire sixteen years of our educational track) bear any causal relationship at all to real-world results, success, achievement, or satisfaction in life.
• You can define a “success” any way you want—wealth; career; family; spirituality; sense of meaning and purpose; vibrant health; service and contribution to community, nation, and humanity—or any combination thereof.
• Lifelong learning and professional development are necessities in the current career environment;
• job security is dead, as anyone who has had a job recently knows.
• More and more Americans of all ages are waking up to the reality that you don’t need a nine-to-five job to be a valuable, contributing member of society and to create wealth for yourself and others.
• For knowledge workers in the developed world, the tools of their trade have become so ridiculously cheap that the “means of production” have once again become affordable to individual workers.
• In this new reality, no one gives a damn where you went to college or what your formal credentials are, so long as you do great work.
• Education is still necessary to learn how to do the great work that gets you paid. But these days, almost all of the education that ends up actually earning you money ends up being self-education in practical intelligence and skills, acquired outside of the bounds of traditional educational institutions.
• SUCCESS SKILL #1: How to Make Your Work Meaningful and Your Meaning Work (or, How to Make a Difference in the World Without Going Broke)
• SUCCESS SKILL #2: How to Find Great Mentors and Teachers, Connect with Powerful and Influential People, and Build a World-Class Network
• SUCCESS SKILL #3: What Every Successful Person Needs to Know About Marketing, and How to Teach Yourself
• SUCCESS SKILL #4: What Every Successful Person Needs to Know About Sales, and How to Teach Yourself
• SUCCESS SKILL #5: How to Invest for Success (The Art of Bootstrapping)
• SUCCESS SKILL #6: Build the Brand of You (or, To Hell with Resumes!)
• SUCCESS SKILL #7: The Entrepreneurial Mind-set versus the Employee Mind-set: Become the Author of Your Own Life
• The world doesn’t always care whether we want to make a difference or have an impact on it. In fact, it can be downright hostile to us when we try. The world doesn’t automatically open its arms to us just because we have good intentions. It may laugh at our great sense of “purpose” or, more commonly, simply yawn and turn its head to something else.
• The more you want to be a star in your respective field—whether it’s being a teacher, a doctor, a lawyer, or an artist, musician, or entrepreneur—the more risk you will have to take in your career choices.
• Few people become stars in their industry, make a difference to the lives of lots of people, or find a sense of purpose in their career simply by sticking to the script and hewing close to well-trodden paths.
• there wasn’t risk involved, and the fear that accompanies that risk, we wouldn’t be dreaming about it, we’d have already done it.
• The bigger the impact you want to make on the world or in your chosen field—the bolder your purpose is—the greater the risks you’re going to have to take. Which means, the greater the chance that you’ll end up making no impact at all.
• Safety and heroism are almost always opposed.
• Almost by definition, “having an impact” or “making a difference” or “living a purpose” involves going beyond what already exists in any given workplace, organization, field, marketplace, or society. It involves innovating, or exercising leadership.
• If what you’re trying to achieve would have happened just the same without you, it’s hard to say that you’re having that much of an impact or that your purpose is very significant.
• People tend to feel safer and more comfortable with the known over the unknown.
• The more of a change of course your innovation or leadership represents, the more you are asking people to abandon safety and comfort, which is not usually something they’re willing to do without overcoming a great deal of resistance.
• Making an impact on large groups of people involves leading them in some way.
• The more people you want to lead, the stiffer the competition. And the stiffer the competition, the less you can be sure you’ll win.
• Those who do end up leading often achieve leadership, amass wealth, fame, or support, or make an impact on the world, largely through the effects of word of mouth.
• In your career, whenever you are faced with two paths, you will almost always be facing a choice between one path that is more predictable (in which you’re more or less a cog in a predetermined script) and one that offers the chance to make a bigger impact (e.g., a leadership position) but has more risks associated with it.
• It’s hard to be a hero if there’s no risk involved.
• If you’re not making a difference in anyone’s life, it’s unlikely you’ll feel that your own life has been meaningful.
• Not making a decision to create a fulfilling life now is in fact a decision—it cuts off certain paths in the future.
• The reality is that the vast majority of people today, even when they are on their deathbed, find that their regrets largely center around things they didn’t do, not things they did do.”
• Money and financial security are completely separate from living with a sense of purpose and creating a meaningful life.
• The Art of Earning a Living is the art of finding creative ways of bringing the spheres of money and meaning together and making them overlap significantly.
• Don’t feel anything is “beneath you” so long as it pays.
• The best way to get financially stable, once you have some kind of job—any job—is to exhibit the entrepreneurial leadership values on the job, described in detail in Success Skill #7, “The Entrepreneurial Mind-set versus the Employee Mind-set.”
• You need to free up time and space for some experiments in leadership, innovation, making a difference, and finding meaning.
• There’s really no excuse for not creating some flexibility in your workday now if you want it. The only excuse is your own fear and lack of imagination—and those aren’t good enough.
• Solve problems that you weren’t “hired” to solve. Contribute in high-leverage ways you weren’t hired to contribute.
• Leading always feels more meaningful, impactful, and creative than following.
• Become a Linchpin in your organization.
• Keep seeking out opportunities to exercise more leadership in your workplace (read Success Skill #7 and apply the entrepreneurial mind-set at your workplace).
• Keep looking for ways to stick your neck out, to take risks, to innovate, to make a difference, in the name of taking your organization to the next level.
• “People who have been successful are still as likely to get it wrong as right going forward. They just try more things,”
• Try some little businesses. Get some failure under your belt. Find out what works and doesn’t work, and don’t worry about the failures, worry about learning.”
• “The very best things you can do when starting a new business,” Josh told me, “are, number one, keep your overhead as low as possible, and number two, make sure you’re getting recurring revenue as quickly as possible. If your revenue is semi-predictable, you can just grow and grow based on the cash that the business is throwing off, instead of having to get investments, loans, and so forth.”
• Doing something entrepreneurial is, much like dating, a numbers game.
• The point is, if you’re learning valuable business skills while you also pursue your dreams, you win either way.
• few things provide better real-world education in business skills than a good hard failure.
• ‘You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.’
• Everything is about people. It all starts with you surrounding yourself with great people who you can learn from.
• if you want to be successful, and make a huge impact in your life, find exceptional people to learn from, and surround yourself with them.
• it. If you want to succeed, find leaders who are doing amazing things in the world, and push them up. Find powerful people and help them reach their goals. If you’re of service to them, they will be of service back.”
• So, if you want to recruit powerful mentors and teachers to your team, the secret is giving. Giving. Giving. Support them. Figure out how you can help them, and do it.
• Simply be grateful for the opportunity to help someone who’s doing amazing things in the world.
• The two biggest forms of connection capital are (a) your already-existing connections and (b) your ability to give good advice.
• This is the snowball effect in action; once you get a good network going, the growth can be fast and dramatic.
• Being able to connect people to each other is a massive asset, which in turn helps grow the amount of people you know, which in turn grows your ability to connect people.
• The second major component of connection capital is your ability to give relevant and valuable advice.
• That is one of the most powerful things you can give someone, ever: a wake-up call.
• if you can give someone a loving wake-up call in an area of their life where they’ve got a major blind spot, or just some well-placed advice that helps them overcome a problem or get one step closer to an important goal, they will be forever grateful.
• I have found that most people who have built their businesses around marketing don’t know jack about sales. And most people who have built their businesses around sales don’t know jack about marketing. If you learn about both, as you should if you want to be successful in life (see Success Skills #3 and #4), you can often provide business advice to a surprising variety of people,
• you should learn about direct-response marketing and copywriting,
• If you can help people generate sales and revenue now, you’ll never be a wallflower; you will always find people wanting to talk with you and wanting your advice.
• If you have reached some peace, reflection, or wisdom about the spiritual or existential questions of your life, you can often offer a great service by sharing this peace and reflection with those whom you wish to become your teachers in the realms of business and money.
• Often, just having a real, honest, human-to-human conversation about life’s biggest questions can gain you a new friend for life.
• Many people who achieve great success in the worlds of business and money do so at the expense of their relationships, by focusing on their business entirely and ignoring their relationships.
• Being a trusted adviser to a successful person is, simply put, one of the most powerful ways to become successful yourself.
• There are only so many hours in the day, and so many hours of elbow grease you can give before you conk out.
• But the way to get really high-quality, pure-grade love in your life is to give high-quality, pure-grade love.
• Give widely and generously, to all those around you (particularly focusing on your own tribe), and somehow it comes back to you.
• Giving good advice—as we can see in the case of Eben—is one of the most highly valuable gifts you can give someone, and one of the most highly leveraged ways to connect with people.
• “The amount of money you earn is the measure of the value that others place on your contribution…. To increase the value of the money you are getting out, you must increase the value of the work that you are putting in. To earn more money, you must add more value.”
• If you want to earn more money, develop your skills and talents to facilitate the creation of lots of social value.
• “You can have anything you want in life, if you will just help other people get what they want.”
• For some reason, the more you adopt the giving mind-set in your personal relationships and your network, with no quid pro quo, the more people want to be around you and connect to your network.
• One thing I see in common among all the successful self-educated people I’ve met—which is different from the way most other people think—is that they tend not to see a contradiction between living a comfortable life for themselves and helping others.
• Always inquire within yourself, and within your deepest creativity, how you can be of greater service.
• you’re not going to create anything better for yourself unless you make a fundamental shift: from viewing yourself as a passive follower of paths other people set for you, to actively taking responsibility for creating your own path toward success, however you define it.
• What I learned from my grandfather was, the key to making money was to cause something to get sold.
• The model that society teaches you to become successful is highly flawed.’
• At some point, if you’re interested in money, and the making of it, you should immerse yourself in the work of Kennedy (http://www.dankennedy.com).
• “The breakthrough realization for you is that you are in the marketing business.
• If you are going to make something your life’s work and chief activity and responsibility, why not do it exceptionally well?”
• There are always people and niches with unfulfilled needs.
• Being that thoroughly consumed with solving a problem will carry you through a lot of business ups and downs.
• If you’re an entrepreneur, or self-employed, marketing is one of your most important jobs, period.
• Marketing is a mentality. It’s a worldview that puts customers’ emotional reality first, and inquires deeply about their needs, wants, and desires.
• There’s no better way to rise up the ranks of your organization than bringing in new business, or coming up with ideas that bring in new business.
• Few employees are more popular with the higher-ups than those who come up with workable ideas about how to bring in more revenue.
• Employers love rainmakers. They hire rainmakers first, and will never, ever fire them, so long as they continue making rain. Learn to be a rainmaker.
• “Understand that no matter what you’re doing, even if you want to be a ballplayer, a rapper, a movie star—nothing happens until something gets sold. Ever.
• The key to making money, and therefore living a life of less stress, is to cause someone to joyfully give you money in exchange for something that they perceive to be of greater value than the money they gave you. The key there is ‘joyfully.’
• “If you aren’t talking to your prospect about their strongest and deepest wants, needs, and desires, you are doing them a disservice,”
• Good marketing, in turn, speaks to the prospect about their deepest emotional realities, their innermost desires, and about helping them achieve what they want in those realms.
• This site (http://www.copyblogger.com), run by Brian Clark, is an absolute treasure trove of free information on high-integrity marketing.
• Don’t wait for the time to be right. (It never will be.) Don’t wait for everything to be perfect. (It won’t be.) Don’t wait until you “learn just a little more.” (There’s always more to learn!)
• There will be bumps, bruises, slips, trips, and falls along the way. But your failures will themselves be a crucial part of your learning process.
• Good marketing is not about pushing your stuff onto an unwilling audience. It’s about listening to your audience. Really, really well.
• You can’t learn how to be a good marketer from a textbook….
• Ultimately, marketing is all about listening. If you don’t listen and you don’t care, you’ll never be a good marketer.
• To the extent you haven’t achieved the material results you want in the real world, it’s because you’ve bought into this “I’m Above Learning to Sell” mentality. Expunge it from your system. Now. Every last drop of it.
• No matter what you’re up to in life, you have to sell something,
• Sales is simply persuasive face-to-face communication.
• No single skill you could possibly learn correlates more directly with your real-world success than learning sales.
• The faster you fail, the more you are going to learn.’
• The myth is that if you get better at your craft, if you get better at what you do, you will be more likely to be successful.
• If you’re a software engineer, and you become a better software engineer, you’ll be a more successful software engineer. This is the myth.
• success is its own skill.
• My experience is, it takes about the same amount of effort to learn the skill of success as it does to learn the skill of the craft itself.
• I recommend that you become awesome at the skill of your craft, but also become awesome at the skill of success.
• In my experience, the skill of success breaks down into three things. The skill of marketing. The skill of sales. And the skill of leadership.
• Any time we’re exposed to people who are totally incompetent at their job, it feels like crap.
• Leadership boils down to the ability to change the hearts and minds of people.
• The leader doesn’t have control over what the employees do; she has to influence the employees to do what she thinks is best.
• If you invest in being better at marketing, sales, and leadership, then the sky’s the limit to your success.
• In fact, the bar is so low, for marketers, salespeople, and leaders—the bar is so laughably low—that you have to get like a D in these things to be extraordinary.
• While we normally think of salespeople as fast-talking slicksters, it turns out that the more the prospect talks—about their problems, their fears, their frustrations related to the needs your product or service addresses—the more likely they will want to do business with you.
• A lot of the skills you need to be successful—and I mean, you need them if you want to be successful—they’re just not taught in college. Even in most business schools.
• Formal schools teach skills, but they don’t teach how to sell or market those skills.
• All experience comes from mistakes.
• Mastery comes from doing.
• Sales is the magic skill that opens doors and fills bank accounts.
• The essence of bootstrapping is keeping expenses low, generating income right away (even if it’s just a little bit), and continually reinvesting as much of that income as effectively as possible into expanding your future income.
• Most investments in human capital (i.e., education) are made four, five, or even seven years before the “business” being invested in (you) will produce any additional revenue from the investment in capital.
• Make small, incremental investments in your human capital and earning power.
• “The advice I would give to young people? Quit your job. Don’t work for anybody. You really can’t make any money working for someone else.
• The value of bootstrapping, saving, and building up capital—whether it’s financial capital or human capital—is that it keeps on giving, year after year, without being depleted.
• If you invest in building up the right kind of human capital—the success skills described in this book—it will keep paying you dividends for the rest of your life.
• trying lots of ambitious stuff, making a ton of mistakes in the process, and learning from those mistakes is the essence of how you become good at something.
• “A common quality I see of people who are successful is that they are voracious readers.
• When you write a book, it consumes you. What you get when you read that book, then, is someone’s entire life for several years or more, distilled into one work. That’s really powerful.
• Perhaps no single word in the English language has more overblown puffery, smoke and mirrors, and verbal diarrhea written around it than the word “brand.”
• Your brand is what people think about when they hear your name.
• Your brand—a “reputation that precedes you”—will allow you to command big bucks for your time and insight,
• The reason you shouldn’t have a resume is that any job you can get because you have a resume probably isn’t a job you want.”
• even if you work for or own another company, you should always build up branding around your own name as well.
• Make sure you get YourName.com.
• Companies, niches, and keywords come and go. Your own personal brand stays with you for life.
• Of course, in order to express your originality, you have to be original—and it’s an oxymoron to teach someone to be original.
• You’re going to have days when you don’t reach your goals. And it’s OK to be negative sometimes. But not for more than five minutes. You’ve got to live by the five-minute rule. Bitch, moan, complain, vent, get it out of your system, whatever you’ve got to do. But just for five minutes. Beyond that, there’s no benefit to dwelling on it. Instead, focus 100 percent of your energy on what’s in your control.
• We don’t get to choose what happens to us. But we get to choose what it means. And in that choice is a tremendous power.
• “Well, if there are other people doing well in your industry, and you’re not, there’s nothing wrong with the business you’re in, there’s something wrong with you.”
• But until you learn how to make a business work, it doesn’t matter what industry you go into, you’re still going to fail at it.”
• “There are two decisions you need to come to in order to be free, and to be more effective. First is that you are not entitled to anything in the world, until you create value for another human being first. Second, you are 100 percent responsible for producing results. No one else. If you adopt those two views, you will go far.”
• “I can’t express enough how many people there are with an entitlement mind-set, up and down corporate hierarchies. It’s so rampant.
• The reality is, no matter what vocation you’re in, you end up working for a business of one kind or another. Thus, everyone’s vocation is business.
• Many people spend four years soaking up bullshit in academia, then go to work for consulting firms, which peddle bullshit to bloated corporate bureaucracies already full of bullshit.
• You get paid by how many problems you solve, and people will gravitate toward you.
• Sadly, our education system, in its current form, is essentially one long series of contrived classroom situations in which the purpose is essentially to do what has been requested by an authority figure. This is the opposite of how success occurs in the real world.
• How do you become a leader in your workplace or your business? By making yourself obsolete in your current role and finding a higher-leverage role to play. And then making yourself obsolete in that and finding a higher-leverage role to play. And on and on.
• The people in this book are successful because they didn’t wait around for someone to tell them to be successful.
• A key aspect of the entrepreneurial mind-set is seeing the world around you as largely made up. Sure, there are societal rules, but those rules are often arbitrary and outdated, and can therefore frequently be broken, bent, bypassed, or just plain ignored, to good effect.
• People with the entrepreneurial mind-set take responsibility for making sure that every experience they have, no matter how challenging, is an opportunity for expanding their learning and their capacity for leadership.
• You see a problem in your life or in your surroundings and fix it. You don’t count on some higher authority to make things better; you make it better yourself, whether or not you have the authority.
• You are an active creator of your success, not a passive recipient of instructions, tasks, and rewards. To a large degree, you create the social and financial reality you live in.
• Merely gathering knowledge may be the most useless work a man can do. What can you do to help and heal the world? That is the educational test.
• Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans).”3
• “From Facebook to SpaceX to Halcyon Molecular, some of the world’s most transformational technologies were created by people who stopped out of school because they had ideas that couldn’t wait until graduation.
• Middle-class values are essentially the stuff of the employee mind-set, the precise values that have led so many young people to be completely fucked in our current economy: follow orders, get all the checkmarks that parents and teachers and society and politicians tell you to get, stick with the herd, don’t stick your neck out too much, don’t try anything too bold, just do as you’re told and there will be a nice cushy job with government- and company-sponsored benefits aplenty waiting for you to guide you through your safe life and your comfortable, secure retirement.
• The basic fact is, when you come up with a great idea for something new, the correct thing is to just do it. Because there’s no training for it, there’s no way you can prepare for being an entrepreneur. By definition, you tend to be doing something new, that’s not been done, and so there’s no really good tracked training you can get.
• Schooling is important if you want to become a lawyer, a doctor, or a professor. But it’s not as critical for being an entrepreneur.
• “One of the strange paradoxes about education is that it’s actually become a way to avoid thinking.
• Formal education has become a way to be on autopilot, and not to think about what you want to do with your life.
• If we only know one thing for certain about the future of work, business, and careers, it is this: the future is not going to be anything like we predict. The only thing we can be certain of is uncertainty.
• Vocational training prepares you for a specific job—even though many of the jobs people are now training for may not exist in five or ten years!
• Success, happiness, contribution, innovation, and leadership depend on a range of human skills, most of which are not taught in school.
• “A startup needs to learn about the problem, the solution, who the customers are, the market, and getting all these pieces to fit together.
• [O]ur MBA programs don’t teach kids to be entrepreneurs. They teach them to go work in corporations.
• The hidden job market (also called the “unpublicized job market” or the “unadvertised job market”) comprises all jobs that are not listed publicly or filled through means such as employment ads, job boards, or career fairs.
• How are those “hidden” jobs being filled? Primarily through networking and referrals.
• Most people who want a dynamic career outside of traditional professions can forget about resumes and formal credentials:
• The best way to prepare for adulthood is to take on progressively greater adult responsibilities as soon as possible.
• If you have less boundaries, you have less rules about what’s possible and what’s not. If you think that anything’s possible, you can solve some really difficult problems.