The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg [48]
When I was hanging out with Elliott, he dashed off three introductions to potential interviewees for my book, including one to self-educated fashion designer Marc Ecko. Within twenty-four hours, I already had an appointment set up to interview Marc, one of the most influential people in the world of fashion; there’s not a chance I would have gotten that interview so quickly (if at all) without the amazing introduction from Elliott.
This introduction took Elliott minutes to compose, and yet it helped me and my project immensely. Those few minutes he spent earned him a lifelong fan in me.
Would there be any chance he’d be able to win a similar amount of appreciation, goodwill, fandom, and desire to serve him back on my part by spending hours and hours of his day, say, fetching me coffee, scheduling my appointments, and making photocopies for me? The image of Elliott Bisnow, one of the world’s most connected twenty-five-year-olds, spending time fetching coffee or writing reports for anyone is absurdly laughable.
Yet, that is precisely how many twentysomethings, including many twentysomething college graduates, spend their days, in their entry-level corporate shit jobs. The difference between the lowly impact most twentysomethings experience day in and day out in their shit jobs (with all the attendant existential angst, feelings of resentment, and bitterness) and the massive impact Elliott Bisnow can have on someone’s day with just two minutes of his time shows the power of connection capital.
By developing connection capital—that is, your “emotional bank account” of trust and goodwill among your already-existing contacts, and your bank of experience and knowledge from which you can give valuable advice—you can decouple the impact you make on others’ lives from the time you spend making it. You still need to spend some time to have an impact—Elliott still needed to spend a few minutes composing those e-mails. But those few minutes were so profoundly helpful to me, as opposed to, say, two minutes of coffee fetching from a similarly aged college grad in a corporate shit job, because those two minutes were mixed with a very powerful form of capital—specifically, Elliott’s network of trust and goodwill.
It’s just like anything else in business. You mix labor with more capital (technology, skills, support services, etc.) and you get more productivity out of each minute of labor. Now, economists tell us that education is one of the most important forms of capital investment—it’s human capital. And I agree with them entirely on that point.
Where I disagree, obviously, is what form your investments in education should take. Economists, when they talk about human capital investment, are almost always talking about formal education. As I’ve been arguing, and I’ll continue to argue throughout this book: unless you want to go into a profession for which formal credentials are strictly required—such as medicine, law, academia, and so forth, or in which they are strongly preferred, such as rising up through the ranks of a corporate or government bureaucracy along with the rest of the herd—then in my opinion, formal schooling past the basics is an extremely weak form of investment in your own human capital.
What kind of human capital do you truly develop in today’s formal higher education? The ability to write mediocre, turgid academic papers. The ability to cram all night for tests on things you will forget the next week and never use again in your life. The ability to study Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday nights, and party Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights. The ability to navigate a social landscape full of binge drinking and Adderall popping. The ability to follow orders and do as you’re told. The ability to manage long-term loan payments on $20,000 to $100,000 of debt.
These, and a starter business wardrobe, will buy you a mediocre entry-level