The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg [51]
Nonetheless, from time to time, Eben informed me, he did do consulting work, particularly if it came in through a friend. He wouldn’t keep the money; he’d give it to a charity, the Safe Conflict Project (http://www.safeconflict.org), run by his best friends, Amber Lupton (who did not complete college) and Nathan Otto. It would be his form of volunteerism.
His fee?
Fifty thousand dollars per day.
That is, around $6,000 per hour.
It sounds preposterous on its face. Earning more in one day than many recent college graduates will earn in an entire year of labor (if they’re lucky enough to have a job), and more than many people around the globe will earn in their entire lifetime.
Before we take up arms and call for the socialist revolution to redistribute Eben’s wealth to the poor twentysomething collegegrad cubicle farmers in corporatelandia, however, let’s pause and reflect for a moment.
Why is an hour of his help so highly valued on the marketplace, when an hour of a recent college grad’s help is typically valued at 1 percent or less of his rate?
It’s because Eben has focused his education on accumulating real-world skill sets and knowledge—human capital—which have allowed him to give very, very good advice. Specifically, this advice allows him to have a massive impact on individuals’ and organizations bottom lines in a short period of time, such that those individuals and organizations are willing to pay top dollar for an hour of his attention and advice.
What does this have to do with our focus here on connecting with powerful people? Giving good advice—as we can see in the case of Eben—is one of the most highly valuable gifts you can give someone, and one of the most highly leveraged ways to connect with people. This means that an hour of attention from someone who has really good advice to give is valued in the marketplace a lot more than an hour of someone who has elbow grease and “hard work” to give.
Imagine if your advice was valued at $6,000 per hour and you could just dole out these $6,000 hours to anyone you pleased. Think you’d have more people wanting to connect with you? This is an incredible asset to be able to draw on for giving, giving, and giving more. As we’ve been discussing, it’s a phenomenal form of connection capital.
In turn, most of us have focused our education, in the classroom and beyond, on much lower-leverage knowledge: How to follow orders and be obedient little schoolboys or cubicle jockeys. How to do as we’re told. How to follow workplace manuals, protocols, procedures, classroom assignments.
We get paid less and are valued less by other businesspeople with whom we might want to connect because these skill sets have a lower impact on business results. We’ve basically just trained ourselves to be cogs in a machine. Now, with highly educated Chinese and Indians happy to do this kind of by-the-book work for us, many of us are finding that these skills we’ve been training sixteen years to develop have no impact in the workplace at all; we’re out of work. Software programs might even take our job.
Eben, Elliott, and the other people I interview in this book get paid more than you and I do, and have more people wanting to connect with them in their business network, because they have a higher impact on the world and on other people’s businesses than you or I do. Specifically, they learned how to have a higher impact, through the skill sets and knowledge we’ll be talking about in this chapter, and in this book.
This sounds slightly offensive. Higher impact? Don’t all human beings have an impact? Don’t we all matter?
Of course we all matter. And of course