The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg [113]
Those in the employee mind-set, in turn, feel satisfied if they just work harder and harder and harder—in school, at a workplace, in a business—without paying much attention to whether all that effort is directly producing the specific outcomes they want.
In many ways, our modern school-to-workplace system was specifically designed to be populated with people exhibiting the employee mind-set of cranking out more and more output without focusing on real-world outcomes.
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 can always make a fast buck peddling bullshit—that is, peddling output unrelated to outcome. But if you want real financial security—comfort in the knowledge that you will always be able to generate resources for yourself and your family—then develop a keen nose for any situation in which you are expected to drone away at lots and lots of hard-work output, without any regard for the value of the real-world outcome all this work produces. Run away from these situations as soon as you get the first whiff.
Instead, run always toward creating real-world results for people who are willing to pay for these results, and you’ll never have to worry about money; it will always be there for you in sufficient supply. Exchanging your cash for bullshit (which is mostly what happens in higher education these days), or exchanging your bullshit for other people’s cash (which is mostly what happens these days in the bloated corporate, government, and nonprofit bureaucracies for which college serves as a job credential and training ground), is never a recipe for long-term financial security. The entrepreneurial mind-set, which involves focusing on outcome rather than output and contribution rather than entitlement, applied in your own ongoing self-education, your own business, or in your place of work, is the recipe.
■ Sorting for What’s Needed versus Sorting for What’s Requested
If you look for and take care of what’s needed in a situation, rather than what’s requested by your boss, your teammates, or your clients, you’ll always be the first one up for promotions, the first one to win new business, and the last one laid off.
Multi-entrepreneur Russell Simmons told me, “Find out what people in your organization need, and give them that service. That is the way entrepreneurs think—‘I’m going to fix the problem.’ You get paid by how many problems you solve, and people will gravitate toward you. If you know your boss’s job better than your boss, your boss is going to count on you for more things. You can begin to learn different parts of the job more than the boss knows them—you can’t start anywhere, it doesn’t make a difference. The person who can start solving problems and exercising initiative and leadership at the bottom certainly won’t be able to at the top, either—and in fact, that person won’t even get to the top.”
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.
The late Wharton management professor Russell Ackoff writes, “Every child learns at a very early stage that when they’re asked a question in school they must first ask themselves a question: What answer does the asker expect? That’s the way you get through school, by providing people with the answers they expect. Now, one thing about an answer that somebody else expects is it can’t be creative because it’s already known. What we ought to be trying to do with children is get them to give us answers that we don’t expect—to stimulate creativity. We kill it in school.”1
To be successful in the twenty-first century, when all the factory-style jobs