The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg [114]
■ Work Yourself Out of a Job—Don’t Work to Protect Your Job
What’s the best way to ensure you never climb to the next rung on the ladder in your workplace or business? By clinging desperately to the lower rung as if it were your salvation in life.
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.
Celebrated business author Guy Kawasaki—who holds an undergraduate degree from Stanford and an MBA from UCLA—expresses this sentiment cogently in the New York Times: the “ideal goal would be to make yourself dispensable—what greater accomplishment is there than the organization running well without you? It means you picked great people, prepared them and inspired them. And if executives did this, the world would be a better place.”2
This notion of making your job obsolete, of making yourself “dispensable” in this way, would seem to fly in the face of Seth Godin’s notion of a “Linchpin,” or an indispensible employee, which I cite widely in this book. Actually, someone who continuously makes themselves “dispensable” and “redundant” at their lower-leverage roles in the organization—through good hiring, outsourcing, delegation, automation, systematization, whatever—and at the same time continuously seeks roles of greater and greater leverage and leadership, is indispensible to the organization. That’s a linchpin in action.
■ Go Toward Big Decisions, Even Without Authority
The people in this book are successful because they didn’t wait around for someone to tell them to be successful. They didn’t wait around for someone to tell them they could make big decisions in their lives, and have a big impact.
Could there be anything more audacious than deigning to have a big impact on society, without jumping through all the hoops and checking off all the checkmarks society tells you that you need to check off before you can do so?
Bryan explains: “If I work in a retail store, and I don’t have any training, tools, power, or budget, and I believe I can make a positive impact on sales, I’m going to start just making those decisions. I don’t need the authority. I’m trying to make a contribution and have the outcome be good for the store. I might make a mistake, and I’ll accept the consequences, but any smart boss will see that my intentions are to make him more money and will soon start to see me as an indispensable employee, ready for promotion.
“People with an employee mind-set don’t want to be the one responsible for making a bad decision, so they move away from responsibility for all decisions. It’s part of protecting their job. But they didn’t get the message that, in this economy, such behavior is the opposite of ensuring your future employment. Because they’re not making any real decisions, which means they’re not having any real impact. They’ll be the first to go when leaders start looking to trim fat.”
■ See Your Circumstances as Illusory and Temporary, Not Real and Permanent
This last point might risk getting too philosophical for some readers. But I think it’s important.
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.
The people we’ve met in this book, with the entrepreneurial mind-set, look out at the world and see malleability, elasticity, plasticity, flexibility. They see how they can bend currently accepted “reality” toward the reality they would prefer.
Those with the employee mind-set, in turn, look out and see a world