The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg [133]
A revolution is happening. All of a sudden, I was meeting kids everywhere who were waking up and realizing something profoundly important: they have more power and choice to control their own destiny than most parents, teachers, pundits, and politicians tell them. They don’t need to follow the crowd running into a building that’s burning down, just because everyone else is running into it. They have choice. They have the tools at their disposal now to create their own path through life.
Peter Thiel continued on this theme: “I was talking with someone here in San Francisco, who was running a foundation to get minority students into college and then into various tracked careers. There’s a sense in which that sounds like a very respectable, worthwhile thing to do. But then the man said, very proudly, ‘And here’s how many of our kids got jobs at Lehman Brothers!’ He said that in all seriousness. Well, Lehman Brothers doesn’t exist anymore! It imploded along with much of the rest of the financial establishment.
“He said it in the spirit of, ‘We got these minority students to enter into this establishment that they normally wouldn’t have gotten into.’ Four years ago, this would have been a very liberal, progressive thing to do. But is helping minority students—indeed all young people—enter into establishments that are crashing all about them as we speak really the best way to help them anymore? Versus helping young people do something totally outside of the establishment?”
One of my favorite of all TED videos is a segment called “Let’s Raise Kids to Be Entrepreneurs” by Cameron Herold.10 Cameron, a serial entrepreneur, has started numerous highly profitable businesses. He went on to become an early COO of 1-800-GOT-JUNK?, helping it grow from $2 million to $105 million in six years “with no debt and no outside shareholders.” He is the author of Double Double: How to Double Your Revenue and Profit in 3 Years or Less, of which he has direct experience from his entrepreneurial work (http://www.backpocketcoo.com).
He says in his talk: “Right now we teach our kids to go after really good jobs ... like being a doctor and being a lawyer and being an accountant and a dentist and a teacher and a pilot. And the media says it’s really cool if we could go out and be a model or a singer or a sports hero.... [O]ur MBA programs don’t teach kids to be entrepreneurs. They teach them to go work in corporations. So who’s starting these companies [which employ everyone else]? It’s these few random people.”
Cameron graduated from university, but he never thought much of formal education. He got a 62 percent average in “the only university in Canada which would accept me” and almost flunked out because he was spending all his time managing and growing a highly profitable house-painting franchise, which he has said was his true education. He told me:I called home from the university in the second year. I was really frustrated with my accounting course.
My dad said, “What are you frustrated about?”
I said, “I don’t understand it. I have now hired a kid to do my assignments for me. I’m paying a guy in beer to do every one of my weekly assignments. First I am ashamed of doing it, and secondly, I am terrified because I have to write my midterm tomorrow, and I don’t understand it.”
He said, “What do you need to pass?”
I said, “Probably like 52 percent, because this guy is doing a good job with my assignments.”
My dad said two things. He said, “First, do you want to be an accountant when you grow up?”
“No, I want to be an entrepreneur.”
“Good,” my dad said. “So don’t worry about it because when you graduate from the