The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg [47]
Here is one single, very wise blog post that will probably go further in helping you achieve your purpose in life—if you put it into practice—than entire courses in college. And it’s available for free on the Web, along with an infinite number of equally powerful free resources, some of which I’ll be pointing you toward in this book. (See why more and more people are beginning to scratch their heads about the value of $100K college tuition bills and decades-long loan payments?)
Your self-study and learning in one of these areas of advice giving is highly liquid; it can often be traded for learning in another area. Because few people are truly well-rounded, if you become well-rounded in these areas of marketing and sales, health and nutrition, spirituality and personal philosophy, and interesting hobbies and passions, you will almost always have something to help people with. It’s like a Swiss army knife of service, ready in your back pocket for any occasion.
And, as you give more, and serve more, you’ll eventually attract the right teachers in all these areas, who will help you learn more ... which will allow you to give more and serve more ... and on and on. Forget all that quantum X-ray stuff in the movie The Secret. This is how the law of attraction works in the real world. “The happier you are in giving,” self-made multi-entrepreneur Russell Simmons told me, “the more people are excited to be around you. You become ‘sticky.’”
■ HOW TO BECOME A WORLD-CLASS CAPITALIST OF GIVING
Often, when a young person is starting out in the real world beyond school, wanting to connect with a powerful mentor, teacher, or contact, she recognizes this fundamental point of connecting via giving. But she doesn’t have a lot to give, so she volunteers to give the only two things she has on ready tap at this stage in her development, her time and her elbow grease, in hopes that these will buy her some access to the influencer.
This is fine, for a time. History is replete with stories of young up-and-comers who gave themselves over to a more powerful mentor in time-intensive service, and worked around the clock in apprenticeship, in exchange for valuable teachings and connections, later becoming successful themselves because of it. Benjamin Franklin, an elementary school dropout, started out his illustrious publishing and writing career (author, among other things, of one of the most widely read autobiographies in history) as a legally indentured servant in his brother’s printing shop at age twelve. (Though they don’t often involve legal indenture anymore, in modern times this is called an internship.)
However, if you start out making this trade of time and elbow grease in the hope of gaining teachings, make sure you’re able to convert those teachings quickly into connection capital (i.e., into a network of connections and the experience that allows you to give valuable, high-impact advice, thereby providing more value to your network, drawing in more connections).
For a simple reason. Relying on time and elbow grease and service as your main form of giving—potentially valuable as these gifts may be—severely limits your scope of giving. There are only so many hours in the day, and so many hours of elbow grease you can give before you conk out. In twenty-first-century business parlance, this form of giving is “not scalable,” or “not highly leverageable.” They reach their upper limit of scope quickly.
In turn, connection capital is a highly scalable, highly leverageable form of giving.