The Education of Millionaires
Everything You Won't Learn in College About How to Be Successful
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4.0 • 53 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
The myth: If you get into a good college, study hard, and graduate with excellent grades, you will be pretty much set for a successful career.
The reality: The biggest thing you won't learn in college is how to succeed professionally.
Some of the smartest, most successful people in the country didn't finish college. None of them learned their most critical skills at an institution of higher education. And like them, most of what you'll need to learn to be successful you'll have to learn on your own, outside of school.
Michael Ellsberg set out to fill in the gaps by interviewing a wide range of millionaires and billionaires who don't have college degrees, including fashion magnate Russell Simmons, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and founding president Sean Parker, WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg, and Pink Floyd songwriter and lead guitarist David Gilmour. Among the fascinating things he learned:
How fashion designer Marc Ecko started earning $1000 a week in high school with his own clothing business, and later grew it into an empire. How billionaire Phillip Ruffin went from lowly department store employee with no college degree, to owner of Treasure Island on the Vegas Strip. How John Paul DeJoria went from homelessness to billionaire as founder of John Paul Mitchell Systems Hair Care Products.
This book is your guide to developing practical success skills in the real world. Even if you've already gone through college, the most important skills weren't in the curriculum-how to find great mentors, build a world-class network, learn real-world marketing and sales, make your work meaningful (and your meaning work), build the brand of you, master the art of bootstrapping, and more.
Learning the skills in this book well is a necessary addition to any education. This book shows you the way, whether you're a high school dropout or a graduate of Harvard Law School.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
After a slow start, this book launches into a series of riveting interviews and life lessons featuring hugely successful business people, such as Russell Simmons and Sean Parker, who didn't finish college, and instead forged their own path. Ellsberg, who blogs about entrepreneurialism for Forbes.com, is zealous about following one's passion, and maintains that college courses are woefully insufficient for tackling real life. Instead, it's better to embrace risk within a framework of unstinting work and "street smarts." As he explains: "We've basically just trained ourselves to be cogs in a machine skills we've been training 16 years to develop have no impact in the workplace at all." He also argues that "no single skill you could possibly learn correlates more directly with your real-world success than learning sales." Ellsberg suggests valuing life-long learning and voracious reading.
Customer Reviews
Adel
This is a good book to read for anyone who is getting bored with their job and looking to do something more meaningful. It provides with real life examples of success, and makes one think what one man can do - another can do. Overall I felt positive and empowered after having read it.
Enlightening
This book was so fresh and new and i ended up highlighting and bookmarking every page. I recommend this book if you are bored in your job and you are looking for something new to invest your future in. Probably the best book i have read and i am looking to read all the books that are mentioned in this book. Probably worth every penny you invest in buying this book
Held my interest
A good gauge of whether I like a book or not is whether I finish it, and this book passed that test. Overall I liked it and am happy I invested the time to read it. It provides some food for thought.
The book needs another round of editing and is a little rough around the edges with various typos and grammatical errors. I got over it, but it's still a little annoying...especially from an author that claims to be a copywriter.
The book suggests a college degree is unnecessary in today's world for entrepreneship, which I agree. That said, he's coming from a liberal degree perspective. For technical start-ups, it is beneficial to have a technical background and the mental structure taught in engineering programs. Also, the university can be a good networking hub and provide catalysts beyond mere knowledge that foster collaboration and gaining the resources necessary to get anything started. There is another side to this coin and overall argument.