The book that made me drop out from college. Sure, it wasn’t a smart decision, but I can’t blame Michael. I highly recommend it for anyone that is below 30 years old. It’s teaches you all the key concepts to start your professional life with the right foot.
Author: Michael Ellsberg
Finished on: 14/08/2012
Here’s a link to the Amazon page.
Risk
Very few of us, when we dream about the kind of impact we want to make on the world, dream about things we could achieve with little risk. Very few of us dream of staying anonymous middle managers, or paper pushers lost in sprawling bureaucracies for the rest of our lives. That doesn’t feel like much of a purpose at all.
No, our dreams and purposes are the stuff of romance, adventure, and excitement. We dream of becoming famous, wealthy, of making a big mark on the world. We dream of becoming rock stars.
Yet, such dreams of making a difference always involve risk. The more you want to be a star in your respective field—whether it’s being a teacher, a doctor, a lawyer, or an artist, musician, or entrepreneur—the more risk you will have to take in your career choices. Few people become stars in their industry, make a difference to the lives of lots of people, or find a sense of purpose in their career simply by sticking to the script and hewing close to welltrodden paths.
The secret of success
I’ve asked many superstars their secret for success. While they all mention talent, persistence, drive, determination, believing in yourself, never giving up—the standard chestnuts of the self-help literature—the most honest and self-aware of the superstars, such as David Gilmour, add an additional factor to the list. They also pay respect to the role of serendipity, synchronicity, and random chance. The stars shone on them. The gods smiled upon them. The right place at the right time. Simple, blind luck. They don’t call it a “lucky break” for nothing.
Having an impact
Why does this conflict between safety and heroism, impact and predictability exist? For a very simple reason. Almost by definition, “having an impact” or “making a difference” or “living a purpose” involves going beyond what already exists in any given workplace, organization, field, marketplace, or society. It involves innovating, or exercising leadership. Bryan Franklin, whom we met in the Introduction, defines leadership as “creating a future for others which wouldn’t have happened otherwise.” If what you’re trying to achieve would have happened just the same without you, it’s hard to say that you’re having that much of an impact or that your purpose is very significant.
Making an impact and leadership
Why does this conflict between safety and heroism, impact and predictability exist? For a very simple reason. Almost by definition, “having an impact” or “making a difference” or “living a purpose” involves going beyond what already exists in any given workplace, organization, field, marketplace, or society. It involves innovating, or exercising leadership. Bryan Franklin, whom we met in the Introduction, defines leadership as “creating a future for others which wouldn’t have happened otherwise.” If what you’re trying to achieve would have happened just the same without you, it’s hard to say that you’re having that much of an impact or that your purpose is very significant.
Risks
There are also a lot of unacknowledged risks to not following your passions, of sticking too close to the beaten path in the name of safety and predictability. These include: “The risk of working with people you don’t respect; the risk of working for a company whose values are inconsistent with your own; the risk of compromising what’s important; the risk of doing something that fails to express—or even contradicts—who you are. And then there is the most dangerous risk of all—the risk of spending your life not doing what you want on the bet you can buy yourself the freedom to do it later.”
Decisions
Randy pointed out to me that the words “decision” and “decide” stem from the roots “cise” and “cide,” to cut off and to kill, also the roots of many other words related to cutting and killing, such as “incise,” “concise” (cutting out nonessentials), and “homicide.” Thus, a decision is to cut off, or kill, other possibilities.
“People feel like, unless they’re affirmatively making a decision, they’re not making a decision. They think, ‘How can you fail if you’re not making any decision, not cutting off any possibilities?’ The reality is, you’re making a decision all the time. You’re making a decision not to follow a path that might lead you to fulfillment.”
“Even though the choice to do something you don’t love, to ‘keep the options open,’ may seem like a passive decision and therefore less risky, you can’t pretend you’re not making decisions. So the real question is ‘What risks are you taking by those decisions you’re not making?’ Not making a decision to create a fulfilling life now is in fact a decision—it cuts off certain paths in the future. The biggest risk is what we classically refer to as the middleaged crisis. You become forty-five years old and realize that you’re not the person you wanted to be. You haven’t accomplished what you thought you were going to. The reality is that the vast majority of people today, even when they are on their deathbed, find that their regrets largely center around things they didn’t do, not things they did do.”
The art of earning a living
The Art of Earning a Living is the art of finding creative ways of bringing the spheres of money and meaning together and making them overlap significantly. The Art of Earning a Living requires a great deal of self-inquiry into what, exactly, the difference you want to make is, and also a lot of creative, entrepreneurial problem solving to figure out how you could make decent money while making that difference.
You’re going to have to create a solution unique to you and your circumstances. No similar solution will have ever existed before, for a very simple reason: in the whole of human history, no one has yet made the difference you want to make. If they had, the impact you want to make wouldn’t be a “difference” anymore, it would be a sameness! Making a difference, not a “sameness,” means doing things no one has done before, at least, not for the people whose lives you want to impact.
And doing things that no one has done before—that is, leadership—involves uncertainty, risk, and danger. Which means, as Anthony suggests, losing sight of the shore. The greater the impact you want to make in your field, market, career, industry, or profession, or in the world, the farther you have to travel from shore.
Getting on your feet financially (Step 1)
Get on your feet financially, however you can. That’s what most of the people in this book did. They got financially stable, from a young age, often their mid-teens. Get a square job, a corporate job, a temp job, a boring nine-to-five. Don’t feel anything is “beneath you” so long as it pays. Wait tables if you have to. Give up your “art”, “purpose”, or “meaning” for a little while and know what it means to be financially stable. Get a kinesthetic feeling in your body of how it feels to have enough money to pay rent, to pay your bills on time, to take your sweetie out to a nice restaurant. The best way to get financially stable, once you have some kind of job—any job—is to exhibit the entrepreneurial leadership values on the job.
Creating more room for expermientation (Step 2)
Finding a comfortable meeting ground for your money and your meaning is going to require a lot of experimentation. Experimentation takes time. It takes money. And it takes room to fall and to fail. Having the financial stability gained in Step 1 makes it a lot easier to start taking some measured risks in your life.
It’s just so different—and better—figuring out how to make a difference in the world and find meaning in your life when your bills are covered and you have a secure roof over your head. It’s way less stressful than trying to do it when you’re broke. And, once the hurdle of supporting yourself is already passed, you’ll be much less likely to take a path that leads you to being broke again. Paying your bills on time is a seductive feeling, and once you get in the habit of it, you won’t want to go back.
You need to free up time and space for some experiments in leadership, innovation, making a difference, and finding meaning.
Begining experimenting (Step 3)
With the newly flexible hours in your day and week (from Step 2), you can also begin experimenting more intensively with potential sources of meaning, passion, and purpose outside of work, from artistic endeavors to charity and causes.
Becoming self-employed (Step 4)
With the flexible hours in your day and week gained in Steps 2 and 3, begin experimenting with things that might one day become both a source of meaning and a source of serious income for you outside of your current job. Whatever it may be, if you want to make a living from it and leave your current job, you’re going to have to do a deep dive into the success skills in this book, particularly marketing, sales, and networking. You’re going to have to wrap your own passions, talents, and purpose—the things you care most about and are best at—in the package of these fundamental success skills. If you know how to do that, you get paid a lot, and you’re living your passion and purpose.
Failure
Most people, when they think of the idea of starting a business, see it as an incredibly risky proposition, one that entails not just egg-in-the-face, but total ruin. They are nearly hysterical about the risks they could incur if they left their safe, boring jobs. Images of would-be entrepreneurs living homeless on the street after their ventures failed keep many people who dream of starting their own businesses stuck in comfortable, boring corporate jobs for the rest of their lives.
I believe this is a distorted view of entrepreneurialism. Most of the self-educated people featured in this book took pains to make sure that their “downside was not so exposed,” to use the parlance of investing: they made sure that a failed business would not mean total ruin; it would just mean a few scrapes, a few good lessons learned, and up they are again at a new one. No biggie. They are calm, relaxed, and cool about failure, not hysterical and terrified, because they view failure as necessary for learning.
The way all the entrepreneurs I interviewed in this book relate to risk is completely different from the way most of us do. To be sure, they aren’t banking their entire life future on one single dream or bust (say, becoming a rock star, à la David Gilmour). But rather than never try their hand at any dream at all, and sticking to a safe-but-boring course instead, they keep trying one dream after the next, maximizing their inner and outer resilience for the inevitable failures. They fail early and often, and turn courses on a dime, until something begins to gain traction.
Resiliance
For Mike, his failure wasn’t condemnation to perpetual ruin. He started out with the assumption that life has risk. Rather than see failure as something to be avoided at all costs (as most of us see it), he instead designed his life and mind-set around the inevitability of failure and how to cope with it. Instead of viewing his first big failure as ruin, he simply decided to view it as an opportunity for an interesting change in life plans.
Learning valuable skills
The point is, if you’re learning valuable business skills while you also pursue your dreams, you win either way. You win (obviously) if the venture works out, but less obviously, you also win if it fails—few things provide better real-world education in business skills than a good hard failure.
But this win-win only applies if you’re actually immersing yourself in the business side of what you’re doing as you go for your dreams. Seth continues, “Does spending your teenage years (and your twenties) in a room practicing the violin teach you anything about being a violin teacher or a concert promoter or some other job associated with music? If your happiness depends on your draft pick or a single audition, that’s giving way too much power to someone else.” Learn the business side of your craft, and you’ll come away with applicable, marketable skills no matter what.
Networking
There it is. From one of the world’s most successful twentysomething leaders: if you want to be successful, and make a huge impact in your life, find exceptional people to learn from, and surround yourself with them.
So how do you find these powerful guides and teachers in real life, outside of the classroom? “Great networking is not about quid pro quo. It’s not a back-and-forth. It’s about give-give-give as much as you can, and if I see you succeed, I’m really happy. And, if I’m your friend, you’re going to pull me up with you. If you have everyone in your network asking each other, ‘How can I help you? How can I help you? How can I help you?’ you’re going to go far in your life. If you’re genuine, and you want to help people—give, give, give—it comes back around
Helping leaders
“How can I connect personally with powerful mentors who will guide me in my life and business?”. Eben said, “Leadership is like a fountain. Imagine the leaders are the water near the top, ready to burst out of the fountain. The water about to burst out is being pushed up by water below it. If you want to succeed, find leaders who are doing amazing things in the world, and push them up. Find powerful people and help them reach their goals. If you’re of service to them, they will be of service back.”
Giving
So, if you want to recruit powerful mentors and teachers to your team, the secret is giving. Giving. Giving. Support them. Figure out how you can help them, and do it. Be the water beneath them, pushing them up the fountain. Be enterprising about it—figure out ways to give and to support them that will blow their mind.
And, while you may hope to get something in return, you must always do it with absolutely zero expectation of getting anything in return. The vibe has to be one of giving, not taking. Simply be grateful for the opportunity to help someone who’s doing amazing things in the world. Very likely, it will come back to you (it always does, in my experience). But you can’t focus your attention on that, or it doesn’t work. Focus your attention on how you can be of service.
Connection capital
Connection capital is anything that can help you expand your network of connections (your “tribe,” as Seth Godin calls it), and is not significantly used up in expanding this network. The two biggest forms of connection capital are (a) your already-existing connections and (b) your ability to give good advice.
Your Already-Existing Connections
This is the snowball effect in action; once you get a good network going, the growth can be fast and dramatic. In fact, no other asset I know of can grow so quickly. Because it’s comprised of people and of caring. And people, unlike dollars or bonds or stock shares or globs of gold or factory machines or plots of land, talk to each other and connect each other over the things they care about.
Being able to connect people to each other is a massive asset, which in turn helps grow the amount of people you know, which in turn grows your ability to connect people. Get the snowball rolling, and it may surprise you how fast it grows.
Giving good advice
In my experience, almost every person I’ve met who is, by societal standards, much more successful than I, is also struggling with at least one area or issue about which I know quite a bit more than they do. They’re human, just like you and me, and humans have problems.
I’m going to teach you two questions that, if you put them into use at parties, events, and conferences, will change your life forever and will grow your network faster than you ever thought possible:
- What’s most exciting for you right now in your life/ business?
- What’s challenging for you in your life/business right now.
If it’s a personal context (cocktail party, dinner party, etc.), ask about their life; if it’s a business context (conference, networking event, etc.), ask about their business. Note: These shouldn’t be the first words out of your mouth when you initially meet someone. Of course not. You’ve got to have some trust and rapport going in the conversation first. But if you start peppering these questions in your conversations with new people you meet, and then honestly try to help them with whatever goals, aspirations, or challenges they mention in response, you’ll be amazed at the networking magic that occurs.
Sometimes, just an ear to listen, an empathetic understanding, or a dose of commonsense guidance is a massive gift you can give. You think rich, powerful, and well-connected people don’t struggle with anything in their lives? You have to do all of this advice giving with clean intentions, with humility, and in a total spirit of service. Usually, you can’t do it right away. You must already have built up some rapport and trust together. And you must do it extremely tactfully, with a great deal of social intelligence.
With all these caveats in place, if you can give someone a loving wake-up call in an area of their life where they’ve got a major blind spot, or just some well-placed advice that helps them overcome a problem or get one step closer to an important goal, they will be forever grateful.
Here are several areas where you can often give valuable advice to—and therefore greatly serve—people who are more powerful and successful than you are:
- Marketing and sales
- Food, weight and nutrition
- Spirituality, purpose and meaning
- Hobbies, passions and causes
- Relationships
Giving connections and advice
Then, there’s giving connections. Once you’ve got a great network in place, that’s a highly time-leveraged form of giving. Meaning, once you’ve built up a great network, it doesn’t take much time—just a phone call or an e-mail—to connect two people within your network, or to connect someone you just met with someone you already know. These connections can be life-changing for people. And, assuming the connections are always well thought-out, and they provide value for both people being introduced, it’s pretty much an infinite, inexhaustible form of giving.
And finally, there’s giving great advice. Granted, it may take you years or decades to build up the appropriate knowledge base, but once it’s there, giving advice from it can take just minutes, and it can be incredibly powerful and life-changing. If someone is having trouble with their business, or their relationship, or their health, and you give them a juicy suggestion that sets them on the right course and changes their life for years to come, you’ve just provided massive value in the space of a brief suggestion.
Adding value
“The amount of money you earn is the measure of the value that others place on your contribution…. To increase the value of the money you are getting out, you must increase the value of the work that you are putting in. To earn more money, you must add more value.”
The giving mindset
For some reason, the more you adopt the giving mind-set in your personal relationships and your network, with no quid pro quo, the more people want to be around you and connect to your network. (That much is obvious.) But also, the more they want to hire you as well. I don’t know exactly why that is, but that’s been my experience and the experience of others I’ve seen.
It may be because people trust givers, and therefore want to hire givers. They know they’ll be taken care of. They know they’ll get great value. They know that if anything goes wrong, it will be cleaned up and fixed. They know that you’re not just doing it for the money; you’re doing it because you care.
The reverse also holds true. The more you get your money and material needs met, the easier it is to take your mind off these material needs and focus on helping others.
Implementing other people’s advice
The right way to go about it is to be generous with the person you want to connect with. And in this case, the generosity is: you tell a story. Tell a story about how you drew inspiration from their teachings and their example, how it impacted your life, and all the ways you’re passing that gift on to others now. If you move me enough with what you’ve accomplished with my teachings and how you’re serving others, then yes, of course I want to help you. I’ve helped all kinds of young people who have reached out to me with their stories of the amazing things they’ve done applying the concepts in my books. When I invest my time and effort in helping a young person, the dividend I receive in return is their gratitude, and their success.
Getting advice
Eliott Bisnow told me: “Everybody loves to give advice. If you ask someone in a genuine way to sit down with you, talk to you, give you advice, most people are happy to do it. It’s shocking how few people go and ask for advice. If you call someone and say, ‘Hey, I love what you’re doing, I think it’s incredible. I’d love your advice on something,’ most people will sit down and give you advice and talk with you and mentor you. But most people just never do that.”
“There’s so many things that people just never do, which are available to them. It’s all about not going through the motions. Going to high school, going to college, playing sports. This is just doin’ what you’re supposed to do, in an archaic system that doesn’t really teach you. The notion that college is learning, and if you don’t go to college you’re not learning, is very silly. It’s all about learning, all the time. And I felt in order to maximize my learning, I needed to learn different things than science and math and ancient history. In college, I realized, I was a people person. Just as, if you want to be a lawyer, you need a law degree—I realized I was a people person, and I needed to get educated in the game of life.”
Marketing
Whenever Cameron Johnson has started one of his dozen-plus profitable businesses, many of which he’s sold for nice payoffs, he asks a few simple questions: “What do people in this industry need? What’s bothering them, hassling them, costing them money, keeping them from getting what they want? . . . [C]ustomers with needs come along every single day. There are always people and niches with unfulfilled needs. With this approach to business, you don’t need to rely on luck, timing, or the fickleness of fads and crazes—just on your own ability to observe and create. Choose a niche, find a need, and then see what could help those people do their job better.”
This is the essence of quality marketing. If the product or service is designed to solve a specific unsolved problem or meet a specific unmet need, and if the message is targeted well, so that you happen to be someone with that unsolved problem or unmet need, you will be happy to hear about the product or service. Think of how excited you were when you heard that there was finally an effective solution to that problem—that is how good marketing is supposed to feel.
So the first part of marketing has nothing to do with communications or ads or messages. It has to do with the concept of the product or service itself, and how well it is designed to meet needs/ solve the problems of a specific target market. Good marketing, Seth Godin writes in Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable, “start[s] with a problem you can solve for a customer (who realizes he has a problem!).” Good marketing, in other words, is not something you do after you create the product; the fact that most marketing is done this way is why we hate the word “marketing” so much. If you start with marketing—that is, with thinking about, anticipating, and meeting the needs of a market in an original, effective, compelling way—then that market will be glad to hear about what you’re offering.
Once you’ve designed a product that actually solves someone’s real problem (rather than just solving your own problem of needing more cash!), you’ll still need to let those people know about it.
Learning about marketing
There are several important reasons you should learn marketing, even if you work for a large corporation and aren’t planning a career in marketing.
1. Marketing is a mentality. It’s a worldview that puts customers’ emotional reality first, and inquires deeply about their needs, wants, and desires. Do you think adopting that mentality might be good for other parts of the business, besides the marketing department?
2. There’s no better way to rise up the ranks of your organization than bringing in new business, or coming up with ideas that bring in new business. Not in your job description? If you’re seriously that attached to your job description, one day someone is going to come along in your department who’s willing to go the extra mile and go way beyond your job description. Whom is the boss going to think of first when it’s time for considering promotions? And, if you’re using your job description as an excuse for avoiding proactive leadership and initiative, whom do you think your boss is going to think of first when it’s time to hand out pink slips? Few employees are more popular with the higher-ups than those who come up with workable ideas about how to bring in more revenue.
3. If you’ve noticed, your job may not seem so secure these days as it used to. Now is a good time to start thinking about what skills you’re bringing to the table if you find yourself looking for work in the future. Not only will these marketing and copywriting skills help you promote yourself to future employers when you need to (see Success Skill #6 on personal branding, for Marian Schembari’s story), but there is no skill, and I mean no skill at all, more highly prized by potential employers than a demonstrated ability to bring in new business. Employers love rainmakers. They hire rainmakers first, and will never, ever fire them, so long as they continue making rain. Learn to be a rainmaker
Success
Success is its own skill. There’s the skill of the craft. Then there’s the skill of success. It’s an independent education. My experience is, it takes about the same amount of effort to learn the skill of success as it does to learn the skill of the craft itself. So, it might take years to really learn what you need to learn to become a great engineer, or an attorney, or a musician, or a manager.
Well, guess what? It’s going to take years to fully own the skill of being successful at your craft as well. Fortunately, you can learn this skill of success while you also learn your craft. But don’t get fooled into thinking you only need to get good at your craft and you’ll be set financially. That’s the lie of higher education.
The three parts of success
In my experience, the skill of success breaks down into three things. The skill of marketing. The skill of sales. And the skill of leadership.
First, marketing. You just have to learn effective marketing, and effective marketing is really simple. It’s the ability to get people who don’t know about you to know about you. That’s it. If you can get people who don’t know about you, or your service or your company, to become aware of you, then you’re successful in marketing. They didn’t know about you, something happened, and now they know about you—that’s successful marketing.
The second skill of success is sales. Sales is the ability to take someone who knows about you, but who has never given you money, and turn them into someone who knows about you and who is also giving you money, if what you’re offering is a good match for them. That’s it.
The third skill of success is leadership. Leadership boils down to the ability to change the hearts and minds of people. Not controlling people; it’s a myth that the leader has control. Your leadership consists precisely in your ability to define a future you don’t have control over. The leader doesn’t have control over what the employees do; she has to influence the employees to do what she thinks is best. The more you understand that you have no control at all, and you’re dealing with a bunch of people with free will who are going to do what they want anyway, the more you realize that the skill of leadership really boils down to the skill of influence. If you’re taking on a role of leading others, people don’t do what you say just because you say it; they only do what you say if they’re inspired. Which means, you have to study “What influences people?”.
If you can get people who don’t know about you to know about you (marketing), and you can convert them into customers (sales), and once they’re customers, you can lead them from point A to point B, you can accomplish anything on the planet.
Effective sales
While we normally think of salespeople as fast-talking slicksters, it turns out that the more the prospect talks—about their problems, their fears, their frustrations related to the needs your product or service addresses—the more likely they will want to do business with you. Which means, effective sales isn’t about spewing off a slick pitch. It’s about asking a lot of questions. The right questions. And then listening.
What are the right questions? Any question that gets the prospect deeply connected with their frustrations, fears, and desires around the problem that your product or service addresses.
Making sales
People’s underlying motivations are very different. Two people could walk into your business wanting to lose twenty pounds, but for very different reasons, at either the conscious level or the unconscious level. If you say, ‘I can help you lose twenty pounds,’ without going into why they want it, then you’re no different from anybody else. But if you can get into the unerlying motivations—they’re not buying the twenty-pound weight-loss coaching. They’re buying a new career. Or a shot at having a great relationship. Or a shot at being a mother, with kids.
And if you can talk with them about that, and help them solve that problem—the underlying motivation—then they’ll want to do business with you. Because they can tell you actually get what’s going on inside of them, you care about what they care about, and you’re helping them with something that is actually very deep to them, not a superficial problem. If you try to sell a solution before you’ve mutually agreed on the problem you’re trying to solve—which is what most salespeople do—people mostly aren’t interested.
Once you’ve inquired thoroughly with your prospect about what’s going on at that core emotional level, if it turns out that what you’re offering honestly and effectively addresses that, then great—you’re a match, and it’s likely you’ll do business together. And if not, then you refer them to someone who can help them with that. At no point would you ever try to manipulate or pressure someone into buying something that is not a great match for their deepest desires and needs.
Advice to young people
The advice I would give to young people? Quit your job. Don’t work for anybody. You really can’t make any money working for someone else. Maybe it’s a hamburger stand. Maybe it’s a coffee shop. You can do that. It’s very risky to quit your job and start on your own. You have to be committed to it and you have to be willing to work the hours, because you can’t have a lot of labor. You can start almost any kind of business yourself. It doesn’t take a lot of capital. It’s very doable. You have to work your ass off. Be willing to work yourself.
If you can’t rely on your employer for security, what can you rely on? 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.
Self-education
Andragogy: Its literal meaning, I found out, is “man-leading,” and is contrasted with “pedagogy,” which means “child-leading.” I Googled it, and in the Wikipedia entry for the concept I found a pitch-perfect description of the way all the self-educated millionaires I’d been interviewing educated themselves.
The six assumptions related to motivation of adult learning:
- Adults need to know the reason for learning something.
- Experience (including error) provides the basis for learning activities.
- Adults need to be responsible for their decisions on education; involvement in the planning and evaluation of their instruction.
- Adults are most interested in learning subjects having immediate relevance to their work and/or personal lives.
- Adult learning is problem-centered rather than contentoriented.
- Adults respond better to internal versus external motivators. The term has been used by some to allow discussion of contrast between self-directed and ‘taught’ education.
Brand
Your brand is what people think about when they hear your name.
If people think “trustworthy, confident, intelligent, funny, hip, savvy, and up-and-coming” when they hear your name, then that is your brand. If people think “wannabe loser” when they hear your name, then that is your brand. And if people think absolutely nothing when they hear your name, then you have no brand.
Having a resume
The reason you shouldn’t have a resume is that any job you can get because you have a resume probably isn’t a job you want. You don’t develop those things (a sophisticated project, an important blog, reputation) in college or grad school, you develop them by doing stuff in the real world. And then making sure there’s a Google trail related to what you’ve been doing. That’s your brand. Create stuff. Sell stuff. Market stuff. Lead stuff. Make sure it’s good stuff, then make sure there’s a good Google trail about it, so when potential employers or clients Google you (as they all will), the brand impression they come away with (the thoughts that come to mind when they hear your name again) are, “This person gets shit done.” Or simply, “Wow.”
Wisdom about freedom and effectiveness
There are two decisions you need to come to in order to be free, and to be more effective. First is that you are not entitled to anything in the world, until you create value for another human being first. Second, you are 100 percent responsible for producing results. No one else. If you adopt those two views, you will go far.
The entrepreneurial mindset vs the employee mindset
What is the main difference between the self-educated people I’ve featured all throughout the book—who have enjoyed massive success in their lives—and the majority of other people, who are wondering how to bring more success, happiness, and achievement into their lives?
It all boils down to one thing. They’ve chosen to do whatever it takes to create the lives that they want, including exercising the effort and initiative to figure out what “whatever it takes” is. What they didn’t do is sit around, waiting for someone else to feed them the answer, give them the right opportunity, make things safe or easy for them, give them some “Fail-Safe, Guaranteed Plan of Action,” or give them permission or authorization or the right credentials to get started figuring what needs to get done, and getting it done.
Contribution vs entitlement
Focusing your life around contribution means paying great attention to what you can contribute to any given person or situation you care about, banishing all sense of being entitled or “deserving” of one outcome or another entitlement from your mind. It’s the “give, give, give” philosophy.
Anything you believe you can count on to be there, without regard for what you yourself are doing to ensure it’s there—that’s entitlement. When you lose a job, or a client, do you have the sense that you lost something that you had? (That’s entitlement.) Or, do you immediately think, ‘Wow, I needed to contribute more there. How can I contribute more in the future?
I can’t express enough how many people there are with an entitlement mind-set, up and down corporate hierarchies. It’s so rampant. For example, there’s a certain ‘How dare they!’ attitude many employees have after being laid off. That’s entitlement. The employee assumes that because the company hired them, they’re entitled to a job.
That attitude, that you’re entitled to a job, even a promotion, no matter what results you produce there, is a death sentence for doing the kinds of things that actually lead to your getting promoted and becoming indispensable in the organization; it is itself a leading risk factor in getting laid off.
Outcome vs output
The people in this book did not assume that, by going to class five days a week and dutifully doing homework and papers and studying for tests, some wonderful outcome was going to arise from all this diligent output of work, just like parents and teachers and society said it would. Rather, they engaged in deep inquiry about what outcomes they specifically wanted to create in their lives, and then relentlessly engaged in only the activities directly related to producing those outcomes in their lives.
The self-educated success stories featured in this book, relentlessly look at the outcome they want to produce in the world and in their lives, and relentlessly focus on how to achieve that, cutting out all extraneous crap not relevant to that outcome. It’s one of the key factors that distinguishes those with the entrepreneurial mind-set from those with the employee mind-set.
Those in the employee mind-set, in turn, feel satisfied if they just work harder and harder and harder—in school, at a workplace, in a business—without paying much attention to whether all that effort is directly producing the specific outcomes they want.
Run always toward creating real-world results for people who are willing to pay for these results, and you’ll never have to worry about money; it will always be there for you in sufficient supply. Exchanging your cash for bullshit (which is mostly what happens in higher education these days), or exchanging your bullshit for other people’s cash (which is mostly what happens these days in the bloated corporate, government, and nonprofit bureaucracies for which college serves as a job credential and training ground), is never a recipe for long-term financial security. The entrepreneurial mind-set, which involves focusing on outcome rather than output and contribution rather than entitlement, applied in your own ongoing self-education, your own business, or in your place of work, is the recipe.
Needed vs requested
If you look for and take care of what’s needed in a situation, rather than what’s requested by your boss, your teammates, or your clients, you’ll always be the first one up for promotions, the first one to win new business, and the last one laid off.
Multi-entrepreneur Russell Simmons told me, “Find out what people in your organization need, and give them that service. That is the way entrepreneurs think—‘I’m going to fix the problem.’ You get paid by how many problems you solve, and people will gravitate toward you. If you know your boss’s job better than your boss, your boss is going to count on you for more things. You can begin to learn different parts of the job more than the boss knows them—you can’t start anywhere, it doesn’t make a difference. The person who can start solving problems and exercising initiative and leadership at the bottom certainly won’t be able to at the top, either—and in fact, that person won’t even get to the top.”
Circumstances
The people we’ve met in this book, with the entrepreneurial mind-set, look out at the world and see malleability, elasticity, plasticity, flexibility. They see how they can bend currently accepted “reality” toward the reality they would prefer.
Those with the employee mind-set, in turn, look out and see a world full of protocols, rules, regulations, fixed hierarchies, established orders. They bow their head down and “stick with the program,” hoping that if they just do what they’re told and what’s expected of them, it will turn out all right, just as Mom or Dad or Teacher or Professor or Boss said it would.
There’s more wiggle room, more flexibility at the joints of society, than you might have imagined. You just have to look for it. This is the essence of the entrepreneurial mind-set, which all the people I’ve featured in this book share in one fashion or another.
True education
Ford writes in his autobiography: “An educated man is not one who is trained to carry a few dates in history—he is one who can accomplish things…. A man’s real education begins after he has left school. True education is gained through the discipline of life…. A man may be very learned and useless…. Merely gathering knowledge may be the most useless work a man can do. What can you do to help and heal the world? That is the educational test. If a man could hold up his own end, he counts for one. If he could help ten or a hundred or a thousand other men hold up their ends, he counts for more. He may be quite rusty on many things that inhabit the realm of print, but he is a learned man just the same. When a man is a master of his own sphere, whatever it may be, he has won his degree—he has entered the realm of wisdom.”
Thiel on education
I asked Thiel why he wanted to pay promising young people to “stop out” of school. He said: “Some of my friends and I were thinking, ‘What can we do to encourage more innovation, more entrepreneurship?’ The basic fact is, when you come up with a great idea for something new, the correct thing is to just do it. Because there’s no training for it, there’s no way you can prepare for being an entrepreneur. By definition, you tend to be doing something new, that’s not been done, and so there’s no really good tracked training you can get. Even though I think the formal school isn’t necessarily incompatible with being an entrepreneur, I definitely don’t think it prepares people for that in any interesting way. Schooling is important if you want to become a lawyer, a doctor, or a professor. But it’s not as critical for being an entrepreneur.”
Sean Parker on education
When these incredible tools of knowledge and learning are available to the whole world, formal education becomes less and less important. We should expect to see the emergence of a new kind of autodidact/thinker/entrepreneur/businessperson/leader who has acquired most of their knowledge through self-exploration.
Because for the first time in human history, all of the world’s knowledge is available at their fingertips. Perhaps more than anything the Internet has given us, this is the most significant discontinuity event.
