The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg [16]
The first arose during his high school years, when he told them he wasn’t going to go to college, as he was too busy building his already-successful businesses.
“Michael Dell doesn’t have a college degree,” I told them. “Bill Gates doesn’t have a college degree.”
They pointed out that I was not Michael Dell or Bill Gates. I was their son, and they wanted me to get a good education!1
Cameron succumbed in that argument and started as a freshman at Virginia Tech. However, soon after starting college, a similar argument arose, when he informed his parents he was leaving college to build his business.
They said, “No, you’re not.”
I said, “Mom, Dad, look at all the basketball stars and football stars who go right from high school to the NBA, or the actors and musicians who don’t bother with college because their careers are already in motion. There have to be business stars, too, who don’t need to go to a four-year program to learn their field. If I go through four years of college, I’ll just be on a level playing field after four years—whereas now I have an advantage. Spending four years in school means I’ll be four years out of the business world. Everything changes like lightning in the Internet world, and they’ll have caught up to me.”
My dad said, “A college education doesn’t hurt anyone.”
I said, “I agree, but it’ll still be there ten years later if I still want it.”
He said, “Cameron, you can lose your house, you can lose your company, you can lose your money, you can lose your wife—but you can’t lose your education. It’s the one thing you’ll always have.”
I said, “That’s true, I don’t disagree, but I am getting an education—a real-world education. Even though I’m not in the classroom every day, I’m still learning, and at a faster pace than my friends in college, because they’re trying to learn about these things in the classroom, whereas I’m learning these things by actually doing them.”2
These types of family dramas and arguments, in my opinion, boil down to arguments about our sense of safety versus heroism in life. Safety and heroism are almost always opposed. Imagine a movie in which the hero exposed himself to no risks or dangers, took no chances, and in fact wrapped himself in bubble wrap to protect himself from everyday slips and bruises. The movie consists of him walking on the sidewalk, on a nice sunny day, in this protective bubble wrap, to go to the store to purchase a few ingredients for dinner. Finito.
Sound like a very exciting movie?
Kids, in their idealism, want to make a big impact on their world. They want to change the world, to feel like their existence makes a difference. They want a big sense of purpose and excitement. They want to be heroes. No kid dreams of being an anonymous paper pusher or a faceless office drone.
Parents want their kids’ lives to feel meaningful and satisfying as well, but they see that the kinds of careers that young people tend to dream about (arts and entertainment, literature, blogging, social media, sports, activism, entrepreneurialism, etc.) are also very risky.
And on that point, the parents are absolutely correct: these endeavors are more risky. In other words, there’s a greater chance you’ll end up flat-out broke if you follow them than if you become, say, a dentist or an accountant. So naturally, in their inviolable, nonnegotiable role as parents to protect and look out for their children, they tend to advocate safer, less risky, more predictable, more conformist paths as their children contemplate a career. They tend to talk about “backup plans” and “fallbacks,” and to think about their children’s creative passions and quests for meaning as “hobbies.”
Why does this conflict between safety and heroism, impact and predictability exist?