The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg [73]
This is the myth. Why does the higher education machine want us to believe this myth? Well, what are they selling in all of their graduate and professional programs? They’re selling, “Be better at your craft. Just take our master’s program!”
Yet, if you take the pool of the world’s best at a particular craft—medicine, law, writing, music, corporate management, acting, anything—their success is all over the map. Some of them are wildly successful, some of them don’t have two nickels to rub together. You take the world’s best actors, from a craft point of view, and some of them are superstars. Some of them are asking you if you’d like to see a dessert menu.
Furthermore, if you take any craft and you look at the most successful people in that craft as a group, their skill level is all over the map. Some are fantastic, and some are laughably bad—in fact, for some of them, you can’t understand how they got to where they are, given how bad they are. This isn’t true only in acting, it’s true in every field.
That’s because success is its own skill. There’s the skill of the craft. Then there’s the skill of success. It’s an independent education. My experience is, it takes about the same amount of effort to learn the skill of success as it does to learn the skill of the craft itself. So, it might take years to really learn what you need to learn to become a great engineer, or an attorney, or a musician, or a manager.
Well, guess what? It’s going to take years to fully own the skill of being successful at your craft as well. Fortunately, you can learn this skill of success while you also learn your craft. But don’t get fooled into thinking you only need to get good at your craft and you’ll be set financially. That’s the lie of higher education.
Of course, I’m not suggesting that you should be bad at your craft or neglect it. While it is true that you don’t actually need to be very good at what you do to be successful at it (because success is its own skill), it’s just not very classy, or fun, to be successful at your craft when you’re not that good at the craft itself. I recommend that you become awesome at the skill of your craft, but also become awesome at the skill of success. And don’t ever get caught up in the delusion that they’re the same thing, because they just aren’t.
So, the skill of success. What is it?
In my experience, the skill of success breaks down into three things. The skill of marketing. The skill of sales. And the skill of leadership.
First, marketing. Throw away everything you think marketing is because most of the marketing you’ve been exposed to, which makes you sick to your stomach, is crappy marketing that doesn’t work anyway. Fortunately, you don’t have to learn that.
You just have to learn effective marketing, and effective marketing is really simple. It’s the ability to get people who don’t know about you to know about you. That’s it. If you can get people who don’t know about you, or your service or your company, to become aware of you, then you’re successful in marketing. They didn’t know about you, something happened, and now they know about you—that’s successful marketing. [Michael’s note to reader: direct-response marketing, which I talked about in the last chapter, combines marketing as Bryan has defined it here, plus sales as he defines it below, in one fell swoop.]
The second skill of success is sales. For some people sales is worse than marketing, and for others marketing is worse than sales. Either way, we have this belief in our culture that these two things are icky. That sense of ickiness is one of the things that perpetuates the lie that if you just get better at your craft, you’ll be fine—you can just do what you do, without focusing on marketing or selling what you do, because marketing and sales are icky and low-integrity.
It’s just not true. You have to be good at these things in order to be successful.