GEMS FROM: THE EDUCATION OF MILLIONAIRES
BY: MICHAEL ELLSBERG
Reviews, notes and lessons learned
THE ROAD TAKEN
If you goal is to maximize the chances of your professional success under any economic circumstances, then what would you need to start learning?
Cultivate your “Practical Intelligence” the art of getting things done effectively in the real world over instead of accumulating theoretical knowledge.
“Your chances of success have less to do with your degree and CV and more to do with your drive, your initiative, your persistence, your ability to make a contribution to other people’s lives your ability to come up with good ideas and pitch them to others effectively, your charisma and a total, unwavering belief n your own eventual triumph throughout all the ups and downs, no matter what the naysayers tell you”.
Building a portfolio of the real-worlds results and impacts you’ve created is a far better selling tool than any CV.
THE PERCEPTION OF SAFETY
Choosing a seemingly safe, predictable life, down a socially respected path VS choosing to make an impact on your own terms:
“Err to far in either direction, and it is very unlikely you will end up happy in your life. Err to far on the side of reaching for lofty dreams within your career, without any attention to existing market risks and constraints and you may end up (hitting a brick wall) “Err to far in the other direction, giving in to fear and sticking to the safe path, without even a nod to the larger impact you want to make, the greater purpose you want to achieve, and you might end up feeling like you missed out”
Whatever path you take never defer any meaning, purpose, adventure or excitement from your life. Always move toward meaning, purpose and adventure.
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 figuring out how to make decent money while making that difference.
RISK AND FAILURE
Always view “failures” as an opportunity for an interesting change in life plans.
Be flexible and adapt. Don’t bank your entire life future on one single dream or bust. Keep trying one dream after the next, maximize your inner and outer resilience for the inevitable failures. Fail early and often if necessary and turn courses on a dime until something begins to gain traction.
Seth Godin on Risk:
“The ardent or insane pursuit of a particularly risky goal is a good idea if the steps you take along the way also prep you for other outcomes, each almost as good or better. If… bending the market to your will and shipping on time and doing important and scary work are all things you need to develop along the way, then it doesn’t really matter so much if you don’t make the goal you set out to reach”
In other words, learning valuable business skills while you also pursue your dreams, you win either way.
BEING OF SERVICE
If you want to be successful and make a huge impact on your life, find exceptional people to learn from, and surround yourself with them.
Leadership is like a fountain. Imagine the leader are the water at the top, ready to burst out of the fountain. The water about to burst out is being pushed up by the water below it. if you want to succeed, find leaders wha are doing amazing things in the world and push them up. find powerful people and help them reach their goals. if you are of service to them they will be of service back.
Any service you provide in this respect, do it with zero expectation of getting anything in return. The vibe has to be one giving, not taking. Simply be grateful for the opportunity to help someone who is doing amazing things in the world.
The happier you are in giving, the more people are excited to be around you. You become sticky.
Two of the most useful questions to ask when trying to be of service:
What’s most exciting for you right now in your life / business?
what’s challenging for you in your life / business right now?
How can you become a Trusted Advisor to people you want to connect with?
FOOD, WIEGHT AND NUTRITION + SPIRITUALITY, PURPOSE AND MEANING + RELATIONSHIPS + SALES / MARKETING… These are the areas where people tend to “want things”
If you become well-rounded in these areas of marketing and sales, health and nutrition, spirituality and personal philosophy, interesting hobbies and passions, you will almost always have something to help people with.
Always inquire within yourself and within your deepest creativity, how can you be of greater service. Without keeping track and without the concern for a specific quid pro quo.
WHAT TO KNOW ABOUT MARKETING
The ability to get people who don’t know about you to know about you.
There are always people and niches with unfulfilled needs. Choose a niche and find a need and then see what could help those people do their job better. 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 than unsolved problem or unmet need, would will be happy to hear about that product or service.
The people who are most successful had a problem that was gnawing at them, and they could not be comfortable unless they did something to solve that problem.
Good marketing starts with a problem you can solve for a customer, it’s not an after thought to the products development. Might sound simple but it is rarely the case and its is in part why the public has such a low impression of sales and marketing, because they are usually engaged by shitty marketers and sales people pushing products and services you do not really need.
Marketing is a mentality. It is a world view that puts customers emotional reality first and inquires deeply about their needs, desires and wants. If you are not talking to your prospects about their strongest and deepest wants, needs and desires you are doing them a disservice.
Thus the best marketing is all about human connection, on a genuine level. If you can truly help your prospect achieve their deepest wants and desires in the area your product or service addresses then you are doing your prospects a great service by communicating with them about their problems or issues, because few people ever meet us on that level, even in our personal lives.
“Understand that no matter what you are doing, even if you want to be a ball player, a rapper, a movie star, nothing happens until something gets sold. Ever … The key to making money and therefore a living a life of less stress and more options, is to cause someone to joyfully give you money in exchange for something that they perceive to be of greater value than the money they gave you. The key here is joyfully.”
WHAT TO KNOW ABOUT SALES
The skill of success (which in itself is a skill) breaks down into three things. The skill of marketing, the skill of sales and the skill of leadership.
If you can get people who you don’t know about you to know about you (marketing) and you can convert them into customers (sales) and once they are customers, you can lead them from point A to Point B then you can accomplish anything.
What are the right questions to ask? Any question that gets the prospect deeply connected with their frustrations, fears and desires around the problem that your product or service addresses.
RESUME 2.0
Google is the new resume in the 21st century. How does your resume look?Every industry has the top 20 blogs and people who are the online influencers. You need to get online and make friends with them, and read everyhting you can and comment on those blogs. Regardless of the industry, there is a community of these people online. Become known in those circles.
THE GOLDEN MINDSET
You are not entitled to anything until you create value for another human being first. Second, you are 100 percent responsible for producing results, no one else.
Focus on contribution, not entitlement. Focus on outcome, not output. Sort for what’s needed, not requested. Work yourself out of job, rather than work to keep your job. See your circumstances as illusory and temporary not as fixed and permanent.
Focusing you 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 entitlement from your mind.
Anything you can believe you can count on to be there, without regard for what you yourself are doing to ensure it is there — is entitlement.
Even if you lose a client or a job, you should not have the sense that you lost something that belonged to you. You should instead stop and realize you needed to contribute more there, and in turn recognize how you can contribute more in the future.
From a perspective of attaining success, whatever that may mean to you, perpetually engage in deep inquiry about what outcomes you specifically want to create in your life and the relentlessly engage in only the activities directly related to producing those outcomes in your life.
Every experience you have, no matter how challenging, is an opportunity for expanding their learning and their capacity for leadership.
Look at every job you have as an apprenticeship. All experiences provide a lesson, and each lesson learned contributes to who you are and will be. No experience defines you.
To recap, always ask yourself how you could make a greater contribution to the people you work with and the situations you find yourself in. Focus like a laser on actual outcome of the projects your are involved in, rather than the output of your time and effort. Work relentlessly to do what is needed rather than simply what is requested. Run towards big decisions, not away from them
THE EDUCATION BUBBLE IS ABOUT TO BURST
Most graduate programs in American universities provide a product for which there is no market or at best, a shrinking market. Buyers think what they are buying will appreciate in value, making them rich in the future. The product grows more elaborate, and more and more expensive, but the expense is offset by cheap credit provided by sellers eager to encourage buyers to buy.
The only tracks where one can make a plausible case that graduate school is an investible decision are Med and Engineering, as long as you commit to these paths for the rest of your life.
For the last few decades, most of the Western world has ben a very stable place, where the right thing to do has been to follow this super tracked, predictable path. It’s worked very well. But that is no longer the case. The kinds of skills you want to have are the ones that are better adapted to a more chaotic world.
If we only know one thing for certain about the future of work, business and careers, it is this: the future is not going to be anything like we predict. The only thing we can be certain of is uncertainty.
The more complex any system gets (physical or biological system, a social network, an organization or an entire economy) the more unpredictable its behavior gets. The more elements of a system there are (people, businesses) and the more interconnections between those elements (cheap global transportation, global media, internet and the internet of things, big data) the less useful predictions about the future behavior of that system become.
That’s the globalized, interconnected world we live in now. Changes in one part of the system impact the entire system. Prepare for many more interruptions, shocks, surprises, global reorganizations, totally unforeseen developments, “black swans” (both positive and negative)
Under these circumstances, the wisest choice for thriving and flourishing is to focus your efforts on cultivating skills, habits, and ways of being that will work for you under a wide range of market circumstances and economic realities, and which will allow you to bounce back and adapt to changes, shifts, shocks, crashes and new opportunities as they arise. This is called cultivating resilience.
