The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg [6]
Beyond career, for the first time in my life, I was also having the feeling of being successful in my personal life. I had just gotten engaged to Jena and was enjoying a loving, stable, fulfilling relationship with her. This was after about a decade (my entire twenties) of being a total mess in relationships. It didn’t just happen by accident that I was now enjoying a great relationship; I learned how to be a better partner, by investing in a zillion workshops and reading a zillion books on the topic, until something started to shift.
I was also enjoying vibrant day-to-day health for the first time since college. Years of partying (starting in college), combined with poor eating habits, began to take their toll in my twenties, as I began seeing a gauntlet of doctors and specialists for symptoms of depression, constant low energy, and mood swings. I didn’t get better until I started paying a lot more attention to my diet and lifestyle. After doing that, I began to feel energized and vibrant on a consistent basis for the first time since I was a kid.
In other words, for the first time as an adult, I was absolutely loving my life. My professional and personal life were exactly where I wanted them to be. Yet, as I took stock of my life in this moment, I realized: the fact that I had done well in college—even the fact that I had gone to college in the first place—had absolutely nothing to do with my adult happiness, fulfillment, success, or contribution to others. Zero. Zip.
I had learned a lot about how to live as a successful, happy adult. Yet nearly all that learning had been self-education in practical matters, out in the real world in my twenties, outside the bounds of a classroom.
This got me thinking: What would education for a successful life look like? You can define a “success” any way you want—wealth; career; family; spirituality; sense of meaning and purpose; vibrant health; service and contribution to community, nation, and humanity—or any combination thereof. What would an education look like that was laser-targeted only toward achieving these real-world results, and zealously cut out all bullshit not directly related to living a happy, successful life and making a powerful contribution to the lives of the people around you?
Certainly, this education would look nothing like anything taught on current college campuses, or anywhere inside our nation’s entire educational system. If you wanted to take this course of study, you’d have to do so on your own, outside of college, as your own teacher, because this course doesn’t exist anywhere within the halls of academia.
So I decided to write this book, in which I pose these simple questions: What do you actually need to learn in order to live a successful life? How and where can you learn it?
While there are many ways I could have gone about answering these questions, I decided to answer them by interviewing and learning from successful people, like Bryan Franklin, who did not finish college.
I first got the idea to take this tack after entering into a serious relationship with Jena, who is now my wife. Jena, a year younger than I, did not complete college. Yet during her twenties, she amassed far more wealth than I did, despite the differential in our educational credentials pointing solidly in my favor. What did Jena learn during her self-education about making her way in the world that I did not learn during my college education?
Around 90 percent of the people I interviewed and feature in this book are literal millionaires, and several are even billionaires. Some are famous, many are not. I’ve also chosen to include, for around 10 percent of my interviewees, people like Jena, who are not millionaires (yet!), but who are clearly on their way, who exemplify