The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg [80]
But David, fifty-one, was not always so successful, nor so philanthropically oriented. In fact, for many years in his childhood and teens, it looked like his life was heading in the wrong direction.
David grew up in working-class West End of Montreal, part of the English-speaking section of town. “I hung out with the wrong guys, I didn’t do well in school, I was high-strung, probably ADHD. Both my parents left school after seventh grade, so education wasn’t a major emphasis in my life.
“My mother grew up a ward of the court—at age two, in the midst of the Great Depression, she was taken from her single mother, who was a teenage orphan. She moved from foster home to foster home, where she sometimes suffered physical and sexual abuse. When I was about twelve, she collapsed under the burden of these painful experiences. She had a major nervous breakdown and was hospitalized. For the rest of my childhood, she was in and out of psychiatric wards, coming home heavily medicated, attempting suicide, then starting the whole cycle again. Unfortunately, she eventually left our home and went on her own. She refused hospitalization and other attempts at help, and ended up on the streets.
“School was a gong show for me. My educational career started off with a bang. I failed grade one. It went downhill from there. In grade seven, I had skipped 264 periods, they told me when I came back for grade eight. I was having fun with my friends on the streets, with virtually no supervision at home. I finally dropped out in grade eleven.”
David moved to Ottawa to live with his brother, and took on a job as a pot scrubber at a YMCA. For most people who hear this kind of story, that’s the end: kid drops out of high school, gets a dead-end job, doesn’t go anywhere in life, becomes another high school dropout statistic.
Yet, here’s where those stories go wrong. If you have the will and the drive to better yourself, you usually can, no matter how much (or little) formal education you have. There’s no doubt that, on average, dropouts do worse in life than people who complete their formal education. This is probably because people who drop out—on average—have either a lower will to succeed or have faced exceptional personal challenges at a very young age.
But averages always belie a great deal of variation within. If you happen to have or develop the will to succeed—or are lucky enough to find a person who inspires it within you—you can learn everything you need, with or without formal education.
“If there’s one thing I had a lot of, it was street smarts,” David continues. “At one point, I met a real estate salesman in Ottawa who saw something in me, and he said, ‘You should become a real estate salesman.’ Keep in mind, my parents had never owned a home. I didn’t even know what the word ‘mortgage’ meant. But something about me respected this man, and I decided to take a six-week, full-time real estate license course he told me about.
“I decided I had to do something with my life, and sales seemed like a natural fit, since you don’t need much formal training, and the upside was significant. I’d gotten messages my whole life that I wasn’t going to amount to anything, but I had a strong sense of self, and I knew I wanted this. I never connected the stuff they were trying to get me to study in high school to any kind of career benefit,