The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg [103]
Still doubtful? . . . [L]et’s try an exercise. On a piece of paper, write down 15 to 20 luxury brand names.... If you’re like me, you have a list that looks something like this:Ferragamo
Versace
Mercedes-Benz
Dom Pérignon
Rolex
Rolls-Royce
Prada
Riedel
Kohler
Lauren
Bang & Olufsen
BMW
Bentley
Yves Saint Laurent
L’Oréal
Cartier
Armani
Take a look at your list. How many of the luxury brands you listed are someone’s name? On my list, the only ones that aren’t are Rolex and BMW. Every other one began as a person who started a company, built it over time, developed a reputation for excellence, and along the way crafted a stellar Personal Brand .2
Maria Andros’s name opens doors on the Internet, and in business and career opportunities for herself. She is no longer anonymous, or a cog. She is a brand. And she did it by doing amazing things in her field, and then creating a highly visible Google trail of all these accomplishments, across multiple social media communities. All instead of building up a formal resume.
Google is the new resume for the twenty-first century. How does your resume look?
■ ROBERT SCOBLE AND THE WORLD’S GREATEST JOB
Robert Scoble has one Shakespeare paper left to write—seventeen years tardy—if he wants to complete his college degree in journalism.
Robert graduated from high school in the early eighties and began working retail in a camera and consumer electronic store. “I was taking one class a semester at West Valley College in Saratoga [Silicon Valley], trying to figure out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life,” he told me. Like most of the people in this book, he started supporting himself very early, earning $27,000, which was livable middle-class money back then.
After kicking around like this for many years, in 1991 Robert started a photojournalism degree at San José State. He started writing a column called the “Spartan Nerd” in the school paper, which got noticed by a Valley computer programming magazine. In his senior year, in 1994, the magazine offered him a job. Like Matt Mullenweg, due to his own initiative, Robert had essentially been offered the job he wanted upon graduation, before graduation. He left college for the job. “Within a year, I was sitting in the front row of Bill Gates’s keynotes, meeting all kinds of interesting people, organizing conferences.”
Flash-forward to December 2000. “I was trying to find new things for the conference to do—new sessions. I was talking to fifty or sixty speakers. ‘What should we do this year that we didn’t do last year? What’s new?’ Two of the speakers said, ‘Blogging.’ I didn’t think it was important to do a session on it. I used this new thing called Google, and it said there are only two hundred blogs in the world. But I got curious myself, and started one! What I didn’t realize was, this was a disruptive technology that was riding on the back of another disruptive technology, Google—and as Google got bigger, blogging got bigger. I got more into it, started getting more and more traffic to my blog and my boss was pissed that I was doing this blogging thing—he almost fired me. I finally quit my job in 2001, because I got sick of my boss giving me so much trouble for my blogging.”
It was a lot easier for Robert to quit and find another job easily because he already had an online reputation by this point at his blog, http://scobleizer.com (now powered by—you guessed it—WordPress). “NEC hired me for the sales department, mostly because of my blog. When I went into the interview, they had a stack of my blog posts printed out right there.”
From his job at NEC, Robert got invited to a “Most Valuable Professional” meeting at Microsoft of the top corporate customers. At that meeting, someone confronted CEO Steve Ballmer publicly, saying, “You need to create a better image for Microsoft.”
Ballmer responded, “OK, I’ll give a dollar to anyone in this room who comes up with a good idea