The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg [52]
But we’re talking about money in this particular discussion. And in a capitalist economy, in general (and with some significant exceptions) money flows to the people who make the most impact on the most people who have the most money. That’s just the way the game works. You can rail against it, you can call for a socialist revolution. But as long as you’re still opting to play the game, you might as well learn the rules of the game.
Brian Tracy, one of the most successful motivational authors, speakers, and sales and leadership trainers of all time, and a high school dropout (before later enrolling directly into an MBA program with no high school or college), writes: “The amount of money you earn is the measure of the value that others place on your contribution.... To increase the value of the money you are getting out, you must increase the value of the work that you are putting in. To earn more money, you must add more value.”6
Personal development author and blogger (and graduate of Cal State, Northridge) Steve Pavlina expresses a similar theme in his book Personal Development for Smart People: The Conscious Pursuit of Personal Growth. He talks about the “contributor” mind-set versus the “moocher” mind-set, which is the essence of what we’ve been discussing in this entire chapter—the giver mentality versus the taker mentality. He writes: “Under the contributor mind-set, you receive money as payment for your social service. The money you earn is society’s way of saying: ‘In exchange for your valued contribution, you are hereby granted the right to extract equivalent value from society at a time of your choosing.’ . . . The only real limit on your income is how much societal value you can create. If you want to earn more money, develop your skills and talents to facilitate the creation of lots of social value. Focus on giving, and the getting will largely take care of itself.”7
From a certain perspective, these viewpoints are quite problematic. Can these authors really say that the Wall Street executives who received multimillion-dollar bonuses, while evaporating trillions of dollars of shareholder value and nearly causing a worldwide financial meltdown, were providing “social value” worth millions of dollars? Is the guy who gets rich building yachts for multibillionaires really providing that much social value in the grand scheme of things?
These perspectives ignore vast failures in market efficiency, which stem from conglomerations of power and concentrations of wealth, which lobby for favorable policies and distort market forces, making a mockery of the neat charts of the “efficient markets” from Economics 101. The world rewards people a lot more financially for polluting rivers than it does for planting trees, even though society benefits more from fresh air than from polluted rivers.8
On a day-to-day level, however, within your normal career in an industrialized economy, there is much to what Tracy and Pavlina are saying. Both authors rail against adopting the idea that you will earn the money you want to earn in life simply by showing up for work and doing what you do, without regard for how much tangible value you are actually creating in real people’s lives.
Zig Ziglar, another legendary motivational speaker, author, sales trainer, and self-made multimillionaire (who dropped out of the University of South Carolina to pursue a career in sales), has said, “You can have anything you want in life, if you will just help other people get what they want.”
The problem is, the concept and skills of “helping other people get what they want”—which is the main method by which we can connect with powerful mentors and teachers in life, as well as by which we will earn the money we want to earn in life and achieve what we want to achieve—is nowhere to be found in our formal educational curriculum,