The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg [90]
There, you will find the world’s first Web 2.0 adult photography social network devoted to appreciating the nude female form in a respectful way. Don’t worry, it’s all very tasteful; it was started by a classy woman named Cyan Banister, whom we’ll meet in a moment, and it’s designed to be friendly to women, both as models and as users of the site. Dubbed as “Playboy meets MySpace meets American Idol,” Zivity allows paid subscribers to vote on their favorite models, who get a large share of proceeds. The emphasis is on artistic values, respectful interaction between fans and models, and elegant self-expression rather than sleazy exploitation.
How does one start a world-famous social network for adultthemed art? Not by following the traditional educational and career paths prescribed by society, to be sure.
Cyan Banister, who happens to be five days older than I, dropped out of high school in Flagstaff, Arizona, at age sixteen. “My grandfather told me I’d be a huge failure if I didn’t go to college. My mother was very concerned that I’d live in a Dumpster in Flagstaff.”
But Cyan never lived in a Dumpster. She had already moved out of her home at fifteen, and has supported herself fully and comfortably since that time. “I figured that most of what I wanted to accomplish in life started with a job. I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do, but I knew that it all started with getting in there and working. My first job, I started in retail and food service. I figured out pretty quickly, in a period of three years, that my future wasn’t in retail or food service. [Laughing.] Then I started doing construction work, and figured out that that’s also not what I wanted to do.
“A friend of mine that I met at a coffee shop got a laptop, and showed it to me one day over a cup of coffee. I knew instantly that that was what I wanted to do. It was like a bit flip. It was over. That was my calling; that was what I had to do. Nothing else mattered to me at that point.
“I started reading books, going out to coffee shops and hanging out with people who were into computers. I got a job at an ISP [Internet service provider] doing dial-up tech support, and slowly worked my way up to a sysadmin [systems administrator], worked my way up to a manager, and just continued on that path for at least ten years.” (For tips on how to work your way up a career ladder within a company, read Success Skill #7.)
While Cyan was not gaining a formal education during all of this time, it’s a huge mistake to say she wasn’t gaining any education. She was obviously learning a lot during this whole period—and a lot of it was more useful and ultimately more lucrative than anything she would have learned in a formal environment. She was defining and learning about what her passions and interests were, trying out different career paths to see what suited her (a lot easier to do when you don’t have student debt yet), learning about computers, about how to do job interviews, about how to work her way up a corporate hierarchy and play office politics, about how to lead and manage others.
One of the key things she was also learning—and this is crucial to our discussion—was how to support herself, to manage her finances, and the simple details of living in society as a selfsupporting, independent adult.
“When I first began living on my own and supporting myself at age fifteen, I spent a lot of my time figuring out things like, ‘Who takes your trash away?’ ‘How do you get electricity?’ I had my electricity shut off, my trash was piling up outside. I couldn’t figure out how these things worked. I had to go ask my neighbor: ‘OK, so I’ve noticed your trash disappears, but mine stays. What’s the deal with that?’ And she said, ‘Well, you kind of have to pay the city ...’ And I was like, ‘Really? You have to pay people to take away trash!?’ The whole learning process of how to live life as an adult, they don’t teach you that in school. There was nothing in school that taught me how to pay bills, how to be a