The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg [57]
Welcome to your education in the game of life.
SUCCESS SKILL #3
WHAT EVERY SUCCESSFUL PERSON NEEDS TO KNOW ABOUT MARKETING, AND HOW TO TEACH YOURSELF
Twentysomething college dropout Frank Kern was taking orders at a fast-food Greek restaurant in Macon, Georgia, when a college buddy of his he hadn’t seen since dropping out walked in to order some fries.
The old college friends were excited to see each other, but also a bit surprised to find themselves on opposing sides of a fries transaction. Frank exclaimed, “Dude! Great to see you, man! I heard you were in med school. How’s it going, man?”
And the friend replied, “Oh, it’s going great, man! Hey, what are you up to these days?”
“Um, well . . . I’m here, um . . . working at this fast-food restaurant.”
Around the same time, Frank suffered another disheartening experience. It was Christmastime, and he wanted to drive to see his parents for the holiday. “I realized I didn’t have enough gas in the tank to go see them and then make it home. And it was like ten miles away. And I didn’t have the cash to buy the gas.”
Working for minimum wage in a fast-food restaurant. Not enough money to buy gas for a twenty-mile round-trip. These are the typical scenarios we imagine when we think of someone dropping out of school. When Frank dropped out, his parents kicked him out of the house, saying, “Enjoy life as a fry cook.” So far, he was not proving them wrong.
But what these cultural expectations for dropouts miss is that people can turn around. Whether you’re a fast-food server or a cubicle jockey in a mindless corporate shit job fresh out of college, you’re not going to create anything better for yourself unless you make a fundamental shift: from viewing yourself as a passive follower of paths other people set for you, to actively taking responsibility for creating your own path toward success, however you define it. Thus, how much education you have doesn’t really matter ; what matters is whether you make this fundamental shift in mentality.
For Frank, the shift happened after these two humiliating experiences. He realized he wanted something better for himself. He decided he didn’t want to live broke and powerless any longer.
Frank’s grandfather was a self-made multimillionaire who had dropped out of school after eighth grade. He started out his working life as a young boy in sales, worked his way up through the car-dealing profession, and eventually came to own a chain of car dealerships in Macon. He had then parlayed those earnings into very successful real estate development. (Except for one flop: he partnered with a fellow Macon resident, who had a sixth-grade education, named James Brown—yes, the one whose music you dance to at parties to this day. Unfortunately, the restaurant, James Brown’s Gold Platter, didn’t sizzle like the music did.)
Frank was aware of his grandfather’s success, but hadn’t paid a lot of attention to it. Now he began to think, “If he could achieve all that without a degree, maybe I could be that successful too.”
In his youth, Frank hadn’t taken himself, or his future, very seriously. He remembers feeling profoundly alienated from school. “From third grade forward it all went to shit. I started losing interest in school when I was getting bad grades for ‘penmanship’—and my mother would hassle me for getting bad grades for my handwriting. I remember thinking, ‘Who gives a shit? This is stupid.’”
Frank’s idols in high school, in the late eighties, were Duane Allman, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison. (Note: What do all of these musicians