The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg [58]
Frank worked as a desk clerk at a hotel during high school. It was an eight-hour job, from three in the afternoon until eleven at night. “I was like, ‘If this is what the real world is like, I don’t want to live in this world. I’d rather just die. I’d rather just blow it out—wreck a motorcycle or something, or get shot, or OD. I just didn’t care.”
In college, at the University of Georgia, Frank lasted the minimum amount of time you can last, prior to academic dismissal. Three academic quarters. Partying too hard, living the wannabe rock star life, kind of like my wannabe literary star phase in my twenties, though apparently with a lot more alcohol. I asked him if he thought of himself as some kind of romantic rebel at this time. “No, that would glamorize it. I was really just a kid who was lost, who didn’t have any hope. I’m going to party as hard as I can, and maybe I’ll end up some old biker dude or something. I did not want to live, if I had to live in what I called ‘the cage,’ which was a nine-to-five bullshit job.”
After dropping out and moving out, he got a job as a Pizza Hut delivery guy, then various food prep and dishwashing jobs, then a job installing electric underground dog fences, all the while playing in his band. (It’s interesting how people who opt out of “bullshit” corporate jobs usually instead end up in even more “bullshit” service jobs, if they don’t possess the type of entrepreneurial skills and mind-sets we’re learning in this book. They see nine-to-five corporate office jobs and low-pay service jobs as the only two options for making one’s way in the world.)
Over the next several years, he bounced in and out of college. Whenever he’d get tired of whatever minimum-wage job he was working, he’d reenroll in college, with the idea that he’d get his degree and get a better job. Yet, his natural skepticism toward formal schooling continued. “I was studying in the School of Business at Macon College, and looking at the guys who taught there, and realizing none of them were rich. We all parked in the same parking lot, and the professors were driving old used Honda Accords. And I was like, ‘Wait a minute!’”
Sometime during this ping-pong back and forth between enrolling for college and dropping out for minimum-wage jobs, he hit rock bottom. And vowed he was going to create something better for himself, outside of both corporate office jobs and minimum-wage service jobs. Which is when he began hanging out with his grandfather intensively, studying his life, and soaking up every bit of knowledge he had.
“In the end, I learned more from him than in all of my schooling. He was a salesman, to the bone. He taught me the importance of sales. What I learned from my grandfather was, the key to making money was to cause something to get sold. Whether you sell it yourself, or you employ someone to sell it and you get some of the money. He would always say, ‘The only way to make money is to buy something at one cost and sell it at a higher cost. If you do that, and you hustle, you make as much money as you want.’
“I asked him to take me under his wing, and he taught me not so much a skill set, but a mind-set. The mind-set that was: ‘You can do anything you want. The people who are professing to be experts, telling you what you can and can’t do in life and how to do it, are just a bunch of fucking jackasses. The model that society teaches you to become successful is highly flawed.’ And he used his personal story as the example of that, because he had no education past eighth grade.
“When I was still taking some college classes, I would come visit him in the evening, and he would say, ‘Well, how much did you get paid for going to class today?’ He had very strong opinions about all kinds