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April 26, 2013

Learning Like Millionaires

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I read a rather interesting book recently, The Education of Millionaires: Everything You Won’t Learn in College About How to Be Successful, by Michael Ellsberg. This book adds to the small but growing collective of books urging us to look at education from a different perspective. That perspective is from one of self-empowerment when it comes to our education versus feeling that we must comply with a singular vision for how one becomes educated. Self-education versus formal schooling.

Ellsberg, college educated himself, is a convert to the path of self-education as often being more practical and useful than the traditional higher education path. He interviewed an array of the wealthy and successful who don’t have college degrees. From those interviews and his own experience he fashioned a set of life’s vital success skills and how one would go about self-educating and developing those skills.

The author makes the case that practical intelligence almost always trumps academic intelligence. From that platform, he crafts what he sees as the core seven success skills that we all need to succeed professionally, and indeed in life. Each chapter is a deeper dive into a skill and how one best goes about acquiring that skill outside of formal schooling.

Ellsberg believes that you will likely learn outside of school most of what you need to know and do in both business and in life. While ostensibly about self-education, the book is as much a practical, real world success skill guide, especially when it comes to the business and professional aspects of our lives. While this is most certainly a book that celebrates self-education, the success skills it addresses are vital to college-educated people as well.

As a strong advocate for encouraging more respect for self-education as a viable path for educating ourselves, I highly recommend this book.

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