The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg [20]
Yes, I believe there is.
I’m about to share with you a very specific plan for living the meaningful life of your dreams, making a difference and escaping the rat-race/herd/cage of the predetermined societal/parental script, while also making it less likely that you’ll end up poor than if you followed the aforementioned societal script. I call it the “Art of Earning a Living.”
To explain this art, let me tell you the story of someone who has navigated these dynamics of dreams and dangers with great elegance in the real world. And no, he’s not a gazillionaire, and he’s not famous. But he’s managed to create an amazing life for himself.
■ ANTHONY SANDBERG AND THE ART OF EARNING A LIVING
For some reason, when many people reach a certain level of material affluence in life, and find that the things they had to do to get there are starting to feel meaningless, many such people begin to develop a keen interest in . . . sailing.
And when they do, Anthony Sandberg is right there, ready to take them out onto the water. “That’s when they come to sail with me! They realize that maybe they were missing out on something. My world is about opening adventure up to people who have deferred that their entire lives in favor of checking all the right boxes and following the script.” Anthony runs one of the largest and most successful sailing schools in the world, the OCSC Sailing School on the Berkeley Marina (http://www.ocscsailing.com). His story is directly relevant to this chapter.
Now sixty-two, Anthony dropped out of Dartmouth his senior year in 1971. Tensions were boiling in the United States around the Vietnam War, and during those final years Anthony was at college, the campus protests against the war were reaching a frenzied height.
Anthony spent most of his time organizing busloads of people to go down to Boston, New York, and Washington, D.C., to participate in the protests. When the invasion of Cambodia started in 1970, “schooling didn’t mean anything to me anymore. I wanted to be where what’s really happening in America. I took off that last term, and started organizing students full-time in D.C. So I never got a degree. I suppose I could go finish and get one now [chuckling], but I’m not sure it would do me any good.”
Sandberg was the first person in his family to attend college. His father was a cook and his mother was a waitress. He grew up in lower-middle-class Hawaii, and then California, in what he describes as a troubled family life.
Wanting to escape, he left home and high school at sixteen, got a job on a ship, and sailed around the world. He returned to high school later that year, though he moved out of his home and was supporting himself fully on his own from that point on.
Dartmouth was impressed with his self-determination and the writings he showed them about his self-funded sailing adventure. They offered him a full scholarship.
While he did well his first two years there, toward the end of his time at Dartmouth—in addition to the little matter of barely attending class due to his organizing—he began to feel a profound cultural alienation from his peers as they readied for life beyond graduation. “At the same time, my senior year, all my friends—who had long hair throughout college—started cutting their hair and buying suits. It was like watching lemmings getting ready to jump. The biological clock kicked in, and they had to please their parents or please whatever they thought the process was. They didn’t seem to me to be in touch with what they wanted in life. In fact, there were no rewards for doing what you were passionate about. There were rewards for behaving.”
After leaving college, and after the protests died down, Sandberg drew on the same enterprising spirit that got him into college in the first place, and he supported himself from a number of entrepreneurial