The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg [117]
With all this learning and growth, Brian had four trucks under operation within a year, then five the next year. Within five years of leaving college, through good hard bootstrapping (see Success Skill #5) his rubbish-hauling business was doing $1 million in revenue. He bought his first home at age twenty-four.
The business has since exploded. (There’s a lot of junk out there that needs to be hauled! Leave it to a self-educated entrepreneur to see that as an opportunity rather than a fate to be avoided at all costs.) The company now has over two hundred locations across Canada, the U.S., and Australia, with U.K. operations opening soon. It does well over $100 million in junk-hauling business per year.
Looking back on all the fear and frenzy my Deerfield classmates and I experienced at the prospect of not getting our proper credentials to become a middle manager in a “good” job, I’m now tempted to ask, “And what if I did become a garbageman?” This might sound naively romantic for someone who has never done any real manual labor (except in volunteer programs). But in light of the work histories of the people profiled in this book, I believe it’s a fair question
The fear my Deerfield classmates and I felt of becoming garbagemen—and the specter of “dead-end jobs” used by general culture to terrify kids into college—assumes that such jobs are static, like a low caste in ancient India: once a garbageman, always a garbageman.
Yet, even a cursory read of the lives of the people we’ve met in this book shows that, for all of them, “dead-end jobs” in their youth were anything but. Rather, such jobs provided valuable exposure to the values of work and industry, opportunities for meeting mentors and others who could advance their career prospects, and a stream of income and savings that helped them live independently, which often became initial capital for ventures that eventually made them affluent. Nearly every person I feature in this book started out their working lives in low-status “dead-end” jobs, from fast food to waiting tables to door-to-door sales and telemarketing to manual labor. But they sure didn’t stay there. Why not?
In a wonderful book called 50 Rules Kids Won’t Learn in School: Real-World Antidotes to Feel-Good Education by Charles Sykes, Rule 15 is: “Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping. They called it opportunity.” Sykes writes: “You live in a country with extraordinary opportunity and income mobility: if you start at the bottom, that doesn’t mean you will stay there. The important thing is to actually start.”3
If you have the entrepreneurial mind-set, it doesn’t matter what job you start out with, even hamburger flipper. You will find a way to become the most valuable damn hamburger flipper in the joint, and then find a way to manage and lead the other hamburger flippers, and then find a way to assume even more responsibility and leadership in some other workplace, and on and on, up and up. Of course, most garbagemen are not going to start multimillion-dollar junk-hauling empires. But it is simply false—almost to the point of propaganda—to assert that starting out in a so-called dead-end job is a condemnation to stay that way for the rest of your life. It is, if you never educate yourself. But the people in this book chose to view such jobs, instead, as expenses-paid laboratories for learning about business, leadership, and the entrepreneurial mind-set.
David Ash, the real estate investor, told me: “I looked at everything I did as an apprenticeship—even low-level sales jobs. I looked at it as something that was going to prepare me