The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg [116]
Indeed, when I interviewed the self-educated subjects of this book, I started all the interviews in the same way: “Most people, including parents, teachers, and politicians, will tell you that if you don’t get your college degree, you’re going to end up as a garbageman. How did you avoid buying into that viewpoint and having faith in yourself that you could go out and succeed by educating yourself instead?”
Yet, when I began interviewing Brian Scudamore, I had to stop myself as soon as I was about to utter the word “garbageman” in my little opening spiel. Because Brian is a junk man, of sorts. A very, very wealthy junk man.
He’s not literally a garbageman, in the traditional sense. But as founder and CEO of 1-800-GOT-JUNK? (http://www.1800gotjunk.com), he probably created more wealth via hauling junk than just about anyone on the planet.
One day in 1989, as a freshman in college, Brian found himself wondering how the heck he was going to pay for his college education. He was standing in a McDonald’s parking lot in Vancouver, and he saw a truck go by, which said “Mark’s Hauling.”
“When I saw that pickup truck,” Brian told me, “I thought, ‘Uh-huh, there’s the idea. I’m going to go buy a beat-up pickup truck and I’m going to start hauling junk.’”
He went ahead and bought an old truck for $700 and started the business. Soon, through a lot of hustle, he had money coming in. Yet as quickly as he started the business, he began to feel a tension between what he was learning in class and what he was learning on the streets (literally!). “I was learning hands-on how to do things. I was solving my own problems rather than saying, ‘Coca-Cola had this problem with marketing and distribution and this is how they solved it.’ That is a completely different scale, and it’s one that most people won’t be able to relate to. My self-made education was practical, and I felt that I was learning by making mistakes rather than reading about someone else’s mistakes. I got to make mistakes firsthand and say, ‘Okay. Congratulations! Another screw-up!’”
Brian finally decided he was learning more about life through his real-world business than in his classes. He decided to leave school and focus entirely on his business, which was already profitable. “My father is a liver transplant surgeon. He had expectations that I was going to follow in his footsteps, or at least do something academic, something respectable. When I told him I was dropping out of school to become a full-time junkman, he was pretty freaked out. But in the end, he said, ‘Okay, you know what, I’ve got to trust you. You’re an adult. You’re responsible for making your own decisions.’”
That is really the message of this entire chapter. People with the entrepreneurial mind-set take responsibility for making sure that every experience they have, no matter how challenging, is an opportunity for expanding their learning and their capacity for leadership. They don’t shield themselves from responsibility; they take responsibility for seeking out roles of greater responsibility.
Brian kept making mistakes in his business and learning from them, kept growing as a businessperson and a leader, growing step-by-step. “I was dealing with the responsibility of having a business to run and customers to serve. I was learning