The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg [118]
“I was able to characterize myself, in the process, by saying, ‘This isn’t who I am. I’m this other person meant for much greater success than this—but I know that all greater success has as its seeds these types of activities. I must embrace these fundamental, simplistic activities, which maybe the average person scoffs at, because they are foundational, necessary, in building within me experience and character sufficient for me to be this greater person that I envision myself to be one day.’
“So I saw in all of those experiences, as tough as they were—and don’t get me wrong, I didn’t like a lot of them—opportunity for learning, growth, and greater leadership. I rejoiced in the challenges I faced, knowing that all the books I’d read, all the autobiographies I’d read by great men, all had this necessary journey of starting at the bottom rung.
“I read about the man who started the Ritz-Carlton hotels, César Ritz. He started at the lowest rung of the ladder, a high school dropout working as a waiter in a hotel. With time, he was managing hotels, and with more time, he owned them and began a world-class chain.
“What distinguishes the guy who’s the waiter, who then goes on to own the hotel, and then a chain of hotels, versus the guy who just remains a waiter and stays bitter and angry about being a waiter for the rest of his life?
“Well, the guy who ends up owning the hotel never sees himself as a waiter, first of all. He only sees himself in the role of the waiter, as a necessary transitional point, to get from being a waiter, to being the manager of a hotel one day, which would give him the necessary knowledge to maybe own a hotel.
“I never saw myself as a salesman, whatever I happened to be selling on the telephone or door-to-door. I always saw myself as the guy who was going to run this place one day, or run some sort of organization like it. As soon as I was running the organization for someone else, I then switched to seeing myself as the guy who owned it. So I just accepted where I was, as a necessary place I had to be, in order to learn what I had to learn, and do what I had to do, to get to the next greater level.
“I was always looking for opportunities for leadership, for opportunities to contribute, for ways to develop relationships with higher-ups, who could help me and whom I could help. My peers typically weren’t my coworkers. I wasn’t the guy who hung around the coffeepot with everyone else. I was the guy who came in an hour earlier than everyone else. I was friendly, but I wasn’t going to work for camaraderie with my coworkers.
“My coworkers were coming twenty minutes late, then they would go to the coffeepot and waste another fifteen or twenty minutes. So I’m working for a full hour and a half before the guys I’m working with are even starting to work. You can imagine the effect of having 20 percent more time in your day has on your work. It wasn’t that I was a genius, it’s that I worked more effectively than a lot of these other guys.
“I cared. They saw it just as a lousy job that got them to Friday. I saw it as a necessary step to get me from being the guy doing the ‘lousy job’ to the guy that’s running the operation that provides all of these jobs, and then to the guy that owns the business that provides all the jobs. I never thought of them as lousy at any step of the way. I always thought of them as very worthy, and very much a part of the process.
“When I became the manager and then owner of these types of businesses, I tried to encourage my employees to view things this way, so they could rise through the ranks of the company. But very few ears were ready to hear that. Most people saw their jobs from a short-term perspective. They weren’t thinking the long game. When you’re thinking just in terms of this month or the next six months, it makes sense to see your job as just a lousy source of a paycheck. But not when you’re thinking about