The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg [84]
One of the most powerful things about learning sales well, as Marijo did when she finally decided to take full responsibility for her young children, is that it knocks down nearly all traditional barriers around formal credentials, stereotypes, hiring protocols, and prejudices. Learn how to sell by creating trusting relationships, and everything else falls into place. The tools are readily available to you. All you need is the will.
SUCCESS SKILL #5
HOW TO INVEST FOR SUCCESS
(The Art of Bootstrapping)
■ FROM HOMELESS TO BILLIONAIRE
At age twenty-three, John Paul DeJoria fit whatever stereotypes you might have about people who only have a high school diploma, with no college. He was earning very little money, his wife had just left him and his two-and-a-half-year-old son, he had been evicted from his apartment for lack of payments, and he moved with his son into a borrowed car. He drove around at night, homeless, collecting soda pop bottles for the recycling reward of $.05 for large and $.02 for small bottles, just to get by another day.
But John Paul was determined not to let his son starve. “We were down and out,” he told one interviewer. “I had a child to feed.... There wasn’t any time for poor me.”1
Fortunately, John Paul had two things going for him: a strong work ethic and a street-smart education in how to get on his feet after being knocked down—often literally. He had received this education thanks to his hardscrabble upbringing on the streets. His immigrant parents divorced when he was two, and he was raised by his single mother in the barrios of Echo Park and East LA. He briefly flirted with gang life in the barrio, but soon he decided to stay on the right side of the law. He was certainly not a favorite with his teachers, however. When a teacher caught him passing notes with a friend, she castigated them in front of the class: “These two people will never, ever succeed at anything in life.”2 (His note-passing friend, Michelle Gilliam, later Michelle Phillips, went on to become a founding member of the Mamas and the Papas, which has sold over 100 million copies of its albums, and she starred in the TV show Knots Landing.)
But, in this rough-and-tumble life, one thing John Paul learned from a young age was how to hustle and generate cash for himself. “My brother and I started selling Christmas cards and newspapers when I was nine years old. I’d get up at four-thirty in the morning with my brother, to fold and deliver papers every morning just so we could live a little better,” he told an interviewer.3
Now a single, homeless father, John Paul drew on this reserve of ingenuity, resourcefulness, and enterprise—gained on the streets as a kid—to pull himself up by his bootstraps and provide for his son.
“I had probably ten different jobs during that period,” John Paul told me. “Everything from selling insurance—I worked for Connecticut General and John Hancock both. I drove a linen truck around. My God, I worked for Dictaphone! I worked for A. B. Dick, which is a photocopy company. I ended up working for Time as a circulation manager, at twenty-six.”
Things had stabilized to a certain degree for John Paul and his son, but life wasn’t rosy yet. They were living in a biker friend’s house, eating a very lean diet. “We lived on a very simple diet of rice, potatoes, lettuce, cereal, canned soup, and macaroni and cheese, but we managed.”4
However, John Paul told me, at a certain point he began to hunger for a better future for himself and his son. “I asked my boss what it takes to be a vice president, and he said, ‘Well, you