The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg [7]
For the record, I’m not a millionaire myself, and I did complete college (Brown, class of ’99). I’m not an example of the self-educated millionaires I write about in this book. But I’ve learned a tremendous amount from them. I write extensively about the changes I’ve experienced in my life applying the skills and lessons I’ve learned from them, so you can see how these skills apply to all people, not just those who are already millionaires, and not just those who didn’t complete their formal education.
All of the millionaires and successful people I interviewed for this book said “no thanks” to the current educational model. And with their self-education, they have built businesses, amassed fortunes, helped others live better lives, and even changed the world.
These are the people we’re going to be learning from in this book. They have much to teach us about how we can educate ourselves in the practical skills we need, in order to be successful in a rapidly evolving, shape-shifting, and self-reinventing economy. They are going to teach us how we can get, for ourselves, “The Education of Millionaires”: the real-world skills that these millionaires studied and learned in order to get where they are in life.
What they have to teach applies to you no matter what age you are and whether or not you’ve been to college already. Lifelong learning and professional development are necessities in the current career environment; this book is your guide to self-education for success in the twenty-first century.
The people in this book also have much to teach us about what kinds of practical life skills and career-oriented content your children should be learning if our educational system is to take the new realities of this twenty-first-century digitized, globalized, flatworld economy seriously—an economy in which every traditional assumption is being turned on its head, shaken up, and called into question, including traditional assumptions about education.
We Americans are obsessed with success, and we readily snap up books promising insight into the lives of successful people and how to emulate them. Yet, up until now, there have been few voices making this obvious point about success (normally only spoken about in hush-hush tones, as if it were a dirty secret): despite sixteen years or more of schooling, most of what you’ll need to learn to be successful you’ll have to learn on your own, outside of school, whether you go to college or not.
I am passionately pro-education. There are few things I care more about than reading and learning constantly.
Yet, the lives of the people profiled in this book show conclusively that education is most certainly not the same thing as academic excellence. We’ve conflated them, at great cost to ourselves, our children, our economy, and our culture. And, while education is always necessary for success, pursuing academic excellence is not in all cases. As Mark Twain said: “I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.”6 (Twain dropped out of elementary school at age eleven to become a printer’s apprentice.)
The driving theme of the stories in this book is that, even though you may learn many wonderful things in college, your success and happiness in life will have little to do with what you study there or the letters after your name once you graduate. It has to do with your drive, your initiative, your persistence, your ability to make a contribution to other people’s lives, your ability to come up with good ideas and pitch them to others effectively, your charisma, your ability to navigate gracefully through social and business networks (what some researchers call “practical intelligence”), and a total, unwavering belief in your own eventual triumph, throughout all the ups and downs, no matter what the naysayers tell you.
While you may learn many valuable things in college, you won’t learn these things there—yet they are crucial for your success