The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg [120]
Those with the employee mind-set have willfully participated in their own corporate dehumanization, by choosing safety in numbers (it’s always safer in the middle of a herd) rather than taking risks and adopting an entrepreneurial mind-set in their work. You’ve heard warnings before about how “the nail that sticks out gets hammered” and how “if you stick your neck out it will get chopped off.” Well these days, the guillotines of offshoring and outsourcing, the hammers of downsizing and automation, are waiting to chop off and hammer down all those who don’t stick their necks out, stand up, and exercise leadership.
If you take on the entrepreneurial mind-set, you see yourself as responsible for the impact you have in your business or workplace, and for your own success and advancement in life. You have become the active ingredient in your own life, and in your workplace.
You see a problem in your life or in your surroundings and fix it. You don’t count on some higher authority to make things better; you make it better yourself, whether or not you have the authority.
You believe in your own power to blaze your way forward; if someone else was going to blaze the trail, it would have already been blazed.
If you encounter a problem or a roadblock along the way, you figure out how to fix it or bypass it.
You seek help when needed, but you take responsibility for finding the best help, the best answers; you don’t just passively accept whatever help or answers are immediately available.
You don’t wait around for someone to save you or solve your problems.
You are an active creator of your success, not a passive recipient of instructions, tasks, and rewards.
To a large degree, you create the social and financial reality you live in.
Are you ready to be free?
■ CODA: FROM ERRAND BOY TO EISENHOWER’S BUDDY
At the beginning of the 1900s, a young boy named Louis Marx, born in Brooklyn to Jewish immigrants from Berlin, stays up late on school nights, reading books on “how to become a $5,000-a-year man.” At that time, $5,000 was about $113,000 in today’s dollars and it was the “magic number,” which meant you had made it in your career, much as earning six figures symbolizes a certain arrival today.
Louis graduated high school at age fifteen. Ma and Pa ran, well, a ma-and-pa store, a dry goods retailer that kept closing in one neighborhood of Brooklyn, for lack of business, and reopening in another, with higher hopes. College was out of the question—and the option was scarcely relevant to Louis’s life.
Though growing up in relative privation, and bearing the same last name as the most famous revolutionary of all time, Louis didn’t harbor any resentment for his lot in life. “The class struggle? Someone sold that idea. We never felt it.”4
After high school he went to work as an errand boy for Mr. Ferdinand Strauss in New York, a German man who ran a large toy manufacturing and retailing outfit under that name. “Within a few months, the boy was running the factory,” Strauss later told Fortune.5
Louis came up with a toy idea that the old man decided to take a chance on—a paper horn that made sound effects, and could also be worn as a lapel flower. It sold well, and Strauss promoted the teenage Louis to director. He was earning his $5,000 by age twenty.
Louis had strong views about management issues and didn’t let his young age deter him from advocating passionately what he thought was best for the company. In an ongoing discussion over whether the company should remain a retailer as well as a manufacturer, Louis stuck his neck out and argued that the company should divest its retail business and become a pure manufacturer. A later Fortune profile on him said, “Marx felt that these stores deflected