The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg [115]
Seth Godin said to me: “Most people don’t see that they have options beyond what society tells them to do. That’s the biggest problem. They honestly believe that compliance is the shortcut to success. If you go to any newspaper in America—the newspapers are all dying. What better business landscape is there to do groundbreaking, innovative work? And yet, there are all these people who work in newspapers who think that they can comply their way to success. It’s insane.”
One of my main motivations for writing this book is encouraging you, my readers, to see the world as less fixed—a little more open to creative molding and shaping—than you thought it was when you first started reading the book.
There’s more wiggle room, more flexibility at the joints of society, than you might have imagined. You just have to look for it. This is the essence of the entrepreneurial mind-set, which all the people I’ve featured in this book share in one fashion or another.
“A reasonable man adapts himself to his environment,” George Bernard Shaw tells us. “An unreasonable man persists in attempting to adapt his environment to suit himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
Hal Elrod did not “make up” the fact that his body was crushed in a near-fatal car accident. That was a hard, brutal, inescapable reality, over which he had no choice. But nearly everything after his accident he created himself. He literally made up the story as he went along. Whereas most people would view his accident as a defeat that would radically lower the quality of their experience for the rest of their lives, Hal chose to view it as an opportunity to grow, to develop a deeper relationship with life, to become a stronger man, and to reach even higher for his dreams. After the accident, he got right back into the driver’s seat of his own reality.
This is a skill at which nearly everyone interviewed in this book excels—writing their own script in life.
What script would you write if you were the author of your experience—the active ingredient of your life—rather than the passive receptacle of society’s program?
■ THE MILLIONAIRE JUNK MAN AND THE MYTH OF THE DEAD-END JOB
Once, in the middle of a three a.m. bull session at my high school, Deerfield Academy boarding school, I took a break from another all-night paper-writing marathon and asked one of my dorm buddies why we were all working so damn hard. The answer was forthcoming: “to get into a top college.” (For the tone of this answer, think “Duh?”)
We were obsessed with college—which college we would get into, how high on the pecking order it would be. Of course, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Brown, Stanford, MIT, Penn, and Duke were at the top, or Williams, Dartmouth, Middlebury, or Amherst for those who wanted a smaller school. Other namebrand schools such as Georgetown, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Tufts, and NYU would also do. The terrible fear was not getting into any brand-name school, and being relegated to some middling noname college.
That night, I decided to push the line of questioning a little further. I wouldn’t normally have asked these questions, as the answers were so taken-for-granted at Deerfield. Perhaps I was just overly sleep-deprived and not thinking straight.
“And why, exactly, is it so important to get into a good college?”
“To get a good job.”
“And why, again, is it so important to have a good job?”
“To make tons of money.”
“And why do we want to make so much money?”
“Dude, shut up—to buy shit with. To have a nice car, nice clothes, a nice house, to eat in nice restaurants, to go on ski vacations. To have a hot wife. Dude, you don’t want to end up as a garbageman, do you?”
“Oh yeah,” I muttered, and went back to my paper-writing.
Thus, these were