The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg [94]
Your own human capital. This is your greatest investment, and if you are savvy about investing in it—as the people in this book have been—it will never let you down and will keep providing value and cash for the rest of your life. The value of bootstrapping, saving, and building up capital—whether it’s financial capital or human capital—is that it keeps on giving, year after year, without being depleted. Once you own it, it keeps on paying in one way or another.
I asked Ruffin, “Have you ever thought of writing a book yourself ? You have such a fascinating story. I think it would make a great book.”
He replied, “Why would I want to write a book?”
“Well, there are a lot of reasons to write a book.”
He said, with a smile and a chuckle, in his charming Southern drawl, “Michael, I’m going to make more from this casino today than you’ll make from your book.” He looked down at a neat sheet of figures on his clean, nearly empty desk. “I made $820,000 yesterday. Not a bad day of business.”
That, friends, is the power of building up capital. You may not become a billionaire casino magnate, but you can always invest in your own human capital. If you invest in building up the right kind of human capital—the success skills described in this book—it will keep paying you dividends for the rest of your life.
■ MARC ECKO, MATT MULLENWEG, AND LIFELONG LEARNING AS AN ADULT
In high school in New Jersey, Marc Ecko routinely carried around $600 or more in cash in his pocket and had weeks when he was clearing $1,000 in business. No, he was not a rich kid (he lived on the “wrong” side of the train tracks, where the lower-middle-class and working-class families lived). Nor was he a drug dealer, nor was he stealing the money.
Marc had learned how to airbrush graffiti-style illustrations onto people’s hats, jackets, shirts, and even their cars. His services were in high demand. “My neighborhood in Lakewood, New Jersey, was very diverse—lots of working-class Jews, blacks, and Latinos. Hip-hop was the emerging cultural trend, and the cultural narrative was driven by black popular culture. Here was a Jewish kid growing up among all this diversity, not religious, reconciling my own identity. I was a fat white kid—too fat to break-dance, and I definitely wasn’t going to rap.
“But I was into art. Because graffiti was the aesthetic that young people were talking to each other through if you were into hip-hop, I figured I’d connect with my art. I was a decent artist. Grandma got me a book called Subway Art [by Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant]. I got my airbrush in eighth grade. Once you got the compressor and the paints, it was like a hundred and fifty dollars, which was a lot of money for an eighth grader in the eighties. My parents were like, ‘You better make good on the investment.’ I was just an artist—but it was a gateway to business.
“My public school education is where I learned a lot of my marketing prowess. I started a business called Ecko Airbrushing. Either it was my stoner friends who wanted me to paint their car, or my hood friends that wanted me to paint pictures of their baby on their jacket. Not to be vulgar or anything, but I was doing better than most drug dealers in my school.
“That, for me, became my school. That was my business school. To be a fifteen-year-old kid standing in line at the Sears service center whenever the compressor would break down, not being taken seriously, having to negotiate my way to get my stuff fixed so I could fulfill my orders. Ordering paint. Hunting down the best how-to videos—there wasn’t the Internet then. I followed the thread of that airbrush, and that air compressor, to learning a tremendous amount about business—management of my time, commitment, communication, information, and