The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg [119]
Oh how rare is the entrepreneurial mind-set; develop it, and you will go far.
Am I saying that every person born in some god-awful slum in Rio or Nairobi has the opportunity, through the entrepreneurial mind-set, to become a millionaire, and that the people remain poor simply because they’ve adopted the employee mind-set? Of course not; that’s pure propaganda for the status quo of vastly uneven resource distribution in life. People are born with different chances in life, which vastly influence their chances for affluence. The simple fact that I was born learning English in America, versus Swahili in Kenya, gave me a massive leg up in the pursuit of wealth and success in the world, from birth. To suppose otherwise is sheer self-delusion—it’s being “born on third base and thinking you hit a triple,” as they say.
However, there’s not a doubt in my mind that, whatever station you’re born into in life, whatever era and whatever country, rich or poor, adopting the entrepreneurial mind-set gives you the best chance of raising your station, and the only chance at making your biggest dreams come true. Thinking otherwise—for example, thinking that Big Brother government is going to save the poor—is as delusional as thinking that we’re all born with equal opportunity.
The entrepreneurial mind-set may not be a guaranteed bet, but it’s certainly your best bet.
People with the employee mind-set (whether they are actually employees, or whether they are entrepreneurs) may work hard. Very, very hard. But they haul ass along a path others have created for them; they don’t create their own path. They are the passive recipients of instructions, orders, and guidance, not the active creators of their own world. They do not have the answers; someone else does. They do what others around them tell them and expect them to do. They hope—indeed, expect and demand—that, if they please the people above them, a steady stream of benefits will flow their way. (“I did what you told me. Now give me my reward!”) If the reward is not forthcoming, they complain and get bogged down in bitterness and resentment, like a child who didn’t get a candy from Mommy.
To people with the employee mind-set, power resides elsewhere, not within themselves. There may be some safety and security in clinging to the employee mind-set (or at least the comforting illusion of safety) because those with employee mind-set rely on someone more powerful and resourceful than themselves to save them and shield them from risk. But whatever safety there may be—and it diminishes each year forward into the age of outsourcing, offshoring, and downsizing—there’s certainly no freedom, no self-determination.
If you always asked yourself how you could make a greater and higher-leveraged contribution to the people you work with and the situations you find yourself in; if you focused like a laser on actual outcome of the projects you’re involved with, rather than the output of your time and effort; if you were relentless about taking care of what’s actually needed in your workplace or team, rather than just doing what was requested of you; if you started running toward the big decisions in your organization, rather than away from them, whether or not your job description called for it; if you became a diligent student of the ways in which social reality is more flexible and malleable, and less predetermined, than you think it is—if you did all these things, is there any chance you would come out behind?
Of course, there’s always a chance of failure no matter what. But that chance is dramatically lower if you adopt an entrepreneurial mind-set in whatever you do (even if it’s nine to five), rather than the millions of people who go through life with the passive employee mind-set, consciously choosing (out of fear, lack of imagination, or sheer laziness) to run as fast as they can toward becoming replaceable commodity cogs, with the same generic resume as everyone else, the same paper credentials.
Seth Godin told me: “Safe is the new risky; risky is the new safe. The