The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg [8]
This is a book about practical education. Street smarts. It’s about what you have to learn in order to be successful in life and how you can go about learning it on your own, outside of traditional schooling. It is about the skills, habits, and mind-sets you need to make an impact on the world and find happiness and success doing so.
If you’ve already gone to college, you still probably want to make a bigger mark on the world than the one you’re currently making. Even if you’re a doctor or a lawyer—and you literally could not practice your profession without having graduated from college and graduate school—these real-world success skills are every bit as relevant to you for accelerating your career. And they definitely weren’t on the curriculum at law school or medical school.
If you haven’t started college yet—or if you’re in college and wondering what you should do there and whether you should stay—then this book will also be an important read. If you do choose to go to college, or to stay there if you’re already there, this book can help you get the most out of your college experience by helping you to avoid a lot of the BS you’re likely going to encounter and to pay more attention to learning things that will actually be valuable to your achieving your dreams later in life.
This is the book I wish I had when I was sixteen, seventeen, or eighteen. If I’d had it then, I would have saved a lot of misery, stress, and drudgery in the rest of my education. I would have been more focused and clear on my path.
It also would have been useful to me as soon as I graduated college. If I’d read this book when I was twenty-two, I may not have spent a good part of my twenties wandering aimlessly.
In fact, this is the book I want now, at age thirty-four, well into my career. It didn’t yet exist, so I wrote it. I’m definitely still learning, with more appetite than I’ve ever had before.
If I can give just one person the value from the book I wish I’d received at the age of seventeen, eighteen, twenty-two, or later, the whole endeavor of writing it will have been worthwhile.
■ OUR CURRENT EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM IS A TYPEWRITER (WOULD YOU LIKE A WI-FI-CONNECTED LAPTOP INSTEAD?)
The already-questionable connection between academic excellence and preparation for success in life and career became all the more questionable during the time I was writing this book, as the Great Recession of 2008–10 unfolded. As I was writing, a rash of articles came out in a number of major publications in which Americans expressed rage about their inability to earn sufficient money, given their expensive academic education. The bargain used to be: give up four years of your life (or more for graduate school), incur hundreds of thousands of dollars in tuition, debt, and forgone earnings during the years you study, and when you graduate you’ll be set for life earnings-wise.
People who entered into this bargain four or five years ago are beginning to realize that only half the bargain has held up: the half in which they spend four years, incur up to $100,000 in debt, and forgo earnings they would have gained in the workforce during their years of study. The other half of the bargain, in which they were virtually guaranteed a job with a great salary upon graduation, has vanished.
An article in the New York Times, called “No Longer Their Golden Ticket,” covered the tidal wave of recent law school graduates, often carrying hundreds of thousands of dollars in student debt, who can’t find jobs. For those who were lucky enough to find or retain employment during the recent colossal shakeout in the legal profession, “it is harder to maintain that sense