The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg [34]
The point is, if you’re learning valuable business skills while you also pursue your dreams, you win either way. You win (obviously) if the venture works out, but less obviously, you also win if it fails—few things provide better real-world education in business skills than a good hard failure.
But this win-win only applies if you’re actually immersing yourself in the business side of what you’re doing as you go for your dreams. Seth continues, “Does spending your teenage years (and your twenties) in a room practicing the violin teach you anything about being a violin teacher or a concert promoter or some other job associated with music? If your happiness depends on your draft pick or a single audition, that’s giving way too much power to someone else.” Learn the business side of your craft, and you’ll come away with applicable, marketable skills no matter what.
For Dustin, of course, going for his dreams paid off. For several years, Mark Zuckerberg was the world’s youngest-ever self-made billionaire. But Dustin is eight days younger than Zuckerberg. When Facebook’s valuation soared in 2010, Dustin’s chunk surged to over two billion, and he took Zuckerberg’s place as the world’s youngest. Dustin has already started his next venture, Asana (http://asana.com), which aims to revolutionize workplace collaboration as thoroughly as Facebook has revolutionized the way we socialize.
I don’t normally outdress billionaires, but in this case I did. I was wearing a black Hugo Boss suit (no tie) to my interview with Dustin at a Mission-neighborhood café near Asana’s offices in San Francisco—and he was wearing jeans and plaid. “I don’t really tend to buy expensive things and haven’t changed my lifestyle a great deal since starting Facebook. As such, I don’t have much interest in making my net worth accrue any further. I believe in the ability of capital markets to create positive impact on the world, but I’m also going to give quite a bit of it away.”
Dustin and Zuckerberg have since signed Bill Gates and Warren Buffett’s Giving Pledge—in which they have all vowed to give away at least half of their wealth. In a letter announcing his pledge, Dustin writes, “As a result of Facebook’s success, I’ve earned financial capital beyond my wildest expectations. Today, I view that reward not as personal wealth, but as a tool with which I hope to bring even more benefit to the world.... Over the next few years, [my partner Cari and I] will begin to identify the causes to which we can make the most leveraged contributions. We will donate and invest with both urgency and mindfulness, aiming to foster a safer, healthier and more economically empowered global community.”7
SUCCESS SKILL #2
HOW TO FIND GREAT MENTORS AND TEACHERS, CONNECT WITH POWERFUL AND INFLUENTIAL PEOPLE, AND BUILD A WORLD-CLASS NETWORK
People thought twenty-year-old Elliot Bisnow was either crazy or stupid when he started calling up complete strangers, inviting them to join him on an all-expenses-paid ski trip to Utah, and then charging the cost of their flights, hotels, skiing, and meals on his personal credit card.
But Elliott Bisnow is neither crazy nor stupid.
In 2005, Elliott was entering his junior year at the University of Wisconsin–Madison when he spotted a great way to make a difference for someone he cared about. His father had started a real estate investment newsletter, Bisnow.com, which had amassed a loyal following, but which had no revenue yet. Elliott saw an opportunity to help the family business. He came up with the idea of selling advertising in the newsletter and—to use a technical term—started selling the shit out of that advertising space.
“I’d wake up at five A.M. in my dorm, every day, sometimes four thirty. I would do follow-up e-mails on the business from five to six. I had a tennis scholarship to college, so I would go to tennis practice from six to seven. It’s late fall in Madison, and I