The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg [30]
His career after that, for many years, began to look like a ping-pong match of entrepreneurial ventures, one after the other after the other in rapid succession. He started in door-to-door sales at fifteen, selling window insulation, all the while living at home with his parents (living at home with parents is a powerful way to limit one’s financial downside, as many twentysomethings are now being forced to discover).
He was so good at sales, he bought his first car at seventeen with money he earned, and bought his first home at twenty-one, enabling him to finally move out. Soon, he got into the business of buying up assets of bankrupt companies and selling them at auction for a tidy profit. He then got involved in the rising UK property market of the late eighties. When that crashed, he lost everything. “By my mid-twenties, I had made my first million, and lost my first million.”
For many people skeptical of starting a business, this is the end of the story in their minds: welcome to life as a desperate pauper, they imagine, the penance for taking too much risk.
But for Mike, this was only the beginning. (Indeed, a great many of the people I interviewed for this book have at least one bankruptcy under their belt.) Here’s where the differing mind-set around risk comes in. Ruin? Eh, says Mike. “It’s good for you to go through that experience. I think for someone to be successful in business, you’ve got to have that edge where you’re prepared to take chances and fail, and—here’s the key—pick yourself back up.”
Here’s where the resilience comes in. For Mike, his failure wasn’t condemnation to perpetual ruin. He started out with the assumption that life has risk. Rather than see failure as something to be avoided at all costs (as most of us see it), he instead designed his life and mind-set around the inevitability of failure and how to cope with it. Instead of viewing his first big failure as ruin, he simply decided to view it as an opportunity for an interesting change in life plans.
Mike and his wife sold all their remaining possessions in 1990. With $1,000 in their pockets, they followed generations of enterprising spirits before them and moved to America.
He took a day job at a software company, but soon he was back at his entrepreneurial ventures on the side. He started a company selling the labor law posters that human resources departments were legally required to display at workplaces. Soon he had a hundred thousand customers. Then he got into selling posters with area code and ZIP Code maps and turned that into a $2 million business within years.
“We were using phone headsets in the poster business. The headsets were pretty crappy. It was hard to get any service on them. And I couldn’t buy what I wanted anywhere. I tried and I couldn’t get it. To me, that’s enough of a data point to say there’s a business there. Because if I can’t find it I know I’m not the only one. Other people can’t find it. There’s an unserved niche in the market, something people can’t find but they want. It’s just a question of how big the niche is. And I thought, ‘Everyone uses the phone, this is a big market.’ I decided to be in the headset business. Six weeks later I was in the headset business.” The company now does $30 million a year in phone headset sales.
Hearing Mike talk, you could be forgiven if you thought you were listening to a different breed of human. The way he—and nearly all the entrepreneurs I interviewed in this book—relate to risk is completely different from the way most of us do. To be sure, they aren’t banking their entire life future on one single dream or bust (say, becoming a rock star, à la David Gilmour). But rather than never try their hand at any dream at all, and sticking to a safe-but-boring course instead, they keep trying one dream after the next, maximizing their inner and outer resilience for the inevitable failures. They fail early and often, and turn courses on a dime, until something