The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg [72]
No single skill you could possibly learn correlates more directly with your real-world success than learning sales. And yet—surprise, surprise—it’s nowhere to be found on the curriculum of formal education, from elementary school through graduate school. No wonder there are so many broke and unemployed people with undergraduate and graduate degrees.
(And don’t tell me that there are more broke people without the degrees. True, but beside the point. If they learned to sell, like nearly all the dropouts I feature in this book did, they wouldn’t be broke for long.)
Robert Kiyosaki (http://www.richdad.com) is famous for having two dads, his biological father, whom he describes in his books as “poor dad,” and a mentor who took him under his wing early, whom he describes as “rich dad.” His poor dad had a PhD, worked at high levels within the state education bureaucracy of Hawaii, and—Kiyosaki says in his books—never accumulated much money. His rich dad mentor, Kiyosaki says, had an eighth-grade education, was a successful entrepreneur, and made millions by the time of the mentor’s death.
Robert, who listened to his poor dad’s advice and graduated college, but listened to his rich dad’s advice on almost all other matters related to money, told me: “I learned nothing about sales in school. I love education—but education that makes me rich. In my first job after leaving the Marines, I went to work for Xerox. I was formally trained by Xerox to sell. Every day, five or six hours a day, I’m being trained to sell. How to overcome the fear of rejection. The biggest lesson I had to learn was how to fail faster. That was the biggest one because every day, I’d take three sales calls, take three rejections. So all my rich dad said to me was, ‘You’ve got to increase your rejections. The faster you fail, the more you are going to learn.’ That’s why when I left Xerox at five o’clock, I would go up the street to this nonprofit charity, helping homeless kids, and I would dial for donations at night. I had a goal every night of getting rejected thirty times. The more I increased my failure rate, the more success I had at Xerox.”
You can’t truly learn anything about sales until the “I’m Above Learning How to Sell” mentality is fully expunged from your system. So, just in case your nose is still turned up even one or two degrees at the idea that you should learn to sell, I’m sharing with you a little talk I transcribed, by Bryan, who mastered the skill of selling in his twenties (it’s part of why he’s so successful) and who has taught me a great deal of what I know about sales. I think the relevance of this talk to what we’ve been discussing so far in this book will be screamingly obvious.
■ THE MYTH OF HIGHER EDUCATION BY BRYAN FRANKLIN
There is a myth in our system about careers and money that most of us have totally bought into. And the reason the myth is in our system is because it was put there by the marketing machine of higher education.
The myth is that if you get better at your craft, if you get better at what you do, you will be more likely to be successful. So, if you’re a doctor and you become a better doctor than others (by going to the right schools, studying harder, etc.), then you’ll be a more successful doctor. If you’re a mechanic and you become