The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg [112]
Self-educated serial entrepreneur Scott Banister, who sold his IronPort Web security appliance company to Cisco in 2007 for $830 million, is a living example of focusing on outcome instead of output. Scott was studying at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the late nineties, with the intention of becoming a professor of computer science. On the side of his studies, he began teaching himself HTML (hypertext markup language). He soon applied for and got a job as a webmaster, and then started various Web companies, including a banner ad company with college buddy Max Levchin (who later went on to cofound PayPal).
“We tell kids school is important, and most kids, including myself, believe that, and keep going further and further into formal education, with the attitude that ‘this is what’s important in the world.’
“Well, the problem with that is that that’s just a cliff that just ends at some point. It’s like ‘Do well in school! Do well in school! Do well in school!’ And then, once you’re out, you realize: oops, actually, this is not how the world works, you don’t earn any money directly from doing well in school, and you can’t even support yourself! It’s a road that might go somewhere, but it might not. For a lot of people, that’s a really disappointing thing. They dutifully go through the process, and they finish high school, and they go to college, and they finish college, and they’re like, ‘Great, where’s my red carpet to financial security!’
“That’s just not how the world works. I found quickly that, by day, I was going to class, learning a bunch of abstract, theoretical stuff, whereas by night, I was working on a business. I could see that business is how things actually get done in the world, and how people make money in the world: you build stuff, things that consumers want.” See how Scott is focusing on contribution and outcome here, rather than on entitlement and output? This is pure entrepreneurial mind-set at work.
“I realized that was how I would achieve my goals—through business. For a while, I kept those goals going simultaneously—I was like, ‘Oh, I have this set of goals around going to school, which I was ingrained with as a child, and then I have these goals related to creating new products and businesses.’ But very quickly it became clear, business is where I’m learning all the real skills that are going to help me for the rest of my life. And this stuff in class, I didn’t even know when it is going to help me or anyone else, ever. I realized, getting involved with business sooner rather than later, as opposed to being off in this education bubble, which is very different from the way the work world works, was incredibly important for me.
“There’s this really weird notion out there. All the way up through college, we assume we’re learning a vocation, separate from business, such as being a doctor, or a lawyer, or an engineer, or a nurse, or a computer programmer. And then, alongside all these vocations, there’s this other vocation over here called ‘business.’ And that’s for some small number of people, who go learn about ‘business.’ And the rest of us will become doctors, lawyers, engineers, nurses, computer programmers. 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. No matter what you’re doing, your vocation is business. The more you can understand the machinery that you’re working in, the better off you’re going to be.”
Scott Banister, and other self-educated success stories featured in this book, relentlessly look at the outcome they want to produce in the world and in their lives, and relentlessly focus on how to achieve that, cutting out all extraneous