The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg [29]
My own Art of Earning a Living, so far, culminates in this book. It is both the most financially lucrative and the most personally meaningful project I’ve ever had the privilege to be involved with. Through a lot of trial and error and going through the Four Steps to Aligning Your Money and Your Meaning I describe here, I seem to have found the sweet spot of overlapping money and meaning in my life.
How will you meld together money and meaning in your life?
This is one of the most important skills you’ll ever develop. By definition, it can only be studied in the real world, outside of class, because the method of instruction is trial and error, with real-world feedback. I hope the stories I provide in the book—and the steps I’ve given you here—offer inspiration for getting started.
■ WITHOUT FAILURE, THERE IS NO LEARNING (OR, WHY ENTREPRENEURIALISM IS LIKE DATING)
One of the capacities that will be invaluable to you as you begin to work through the Four Steps to Aligning Your Money and Your Meaning is developing a different—and I believe more realistic—relationship to risk. Indeed, if there’s one single trait that sets all the self-educated millionaires I interviewed for this book apart from other people, it’s their relationship to risk.
Critics of my book will likely say that what sets them apart is they simply took bigger risks than others: the people I interviewed were simply the winners at the roulette wheel, and I failed to talk about all the people who played at the wheel and got wiped out. (This line of critique would charge me with a fallacy of statistical reasoning known as “survivorship bias”: making assertions about some process based on conclusions drawn only via looking at the “winners” of that process, without taking into account the experience of the—usually much larger—sample of losers.5 )
And yet, I don’t believe the people I feature in this book simply took a bigger bet than everyone else and happened to get lucky and win. Rather, I’ve seen that they have systematically and intentionally developed a style of working that allows them to take lots of small bets—bet after bet after bet after bet—all the while making sure that they don’t get wiped out of the game if one or many of them go south. In other words, I believe that for most of the people featured in this book a trait even more important than luck was resilience.
Most people, when they think of the idea of starting a business, see it as an incredibly risky proposition, one that entails not just egg-in-the-face, but total ruin. They are nearly hysterical about the risks they could incur if they left their safe, boring jobs. Images of would-be entrepreneurs living homeless on the street after their ventures failed keep many people who dream of starting their own businesses stuck in comfortable, boring corporate jobs for the rest of their lives.
I believe this is a distorted view of entrepreneurialism. Most of the self-educated people featured in this book took pains to make sure that their “downside was not so exposed,” to use the parlance of investing: they made sure that a failed business would not mean total ruin; it would just mean a few scrapes, a few good lessons learned, and up they are again at a new one. No biggie. They are calm, relaxed, and cool about failure, not hysterical and terrified, because they view failure as necessary for learning.
Take the story of Mike Faith, owner of Headsets.com, which does millions in sales each year of headsets for hands-free phoning. Mike was mildly dyslexic, and started falling behind in the United Kingdom’s equivalent of high school. He never felt he fit into an academic environment