OK, drumroll please. Here they are, the seven courses in The Education of Millionaires.
- Success Skill #1: How to Make Your Work Meaningful and Your Meaning Work (Or, How to Make a Difference in the World, Without Going Broke)
- Success Skill #2: How to Find Great Mentors and Teachers, Connect with Powerful and Influential People, and Build a World-Class Network
- Success Skill #3: What Every Successful Person Needs to Know About Marketing, and How to Teach Yourself
- Success Skill #4: What Every Successful Person Needs to Know About Sales, and How to Teach Yourself
- Success Skill #5: How to Invest for Success (The Art of Bootstrapping)
- Success Skill #6: Build the Brand of You (or, To Hell with Résumés!)
- Success Skill #7: The Entrepreneurial Mind-set—Take Your Success into Your Own Hands
These seven courses, which correspond to the seven core chapters of the book, focus primarily on skills related to success in career, money, work, and business. Of course, for a truly integrated sense of success, in the fullest sense of the word, we all need to learn many practical personal skills as well. These include skills such as how to find and maintain a wonderful, loving relationship, how to sustain vibrant health, and how to navigate our spiritual beliefs in a world that seems to get more chaotic every day. It is possible to be a financial millionaire, and an emotional and spiritual pauper. All the money in the world provides little comfort if we are lonely, sick, or forlorn of love.
But I will leave those personal success skills (crucial as they are) for another book. Since this is a business book, I am focusing here on skills related to success in the realms of career, money, work, and business. The seven success skills I explore here are of course not exhaustive, even in the realm of career and financial success. But they go a long way.
My format in the single chapter devoted to each of these skills is quite simple. First, I provide some stories of successful self-educated people who learned and applied these skills, to great effect, in their own lives. Then, I give some examples of how I applied the same skills in my own life and the results I got. (I would never recommend to you something I hadn’t battle-tested in my own life.) Then, based on the experience of my interviewees, as well as my own experience, I give some practical tips about how to go about learning and applying that chapter’s skill in your own life.
Welcome to your own journey of self-education.
We’re about to dive headlong into the success skills. But before we take the plunge, I want to offer two minor disclaimers, in the interest of full disclosure and transparency.
Disclaimer #1: My Views Are My Own! (And Probably Not Shared by All of My Interviewees)
I should make something absolutely, beyond-a-shadow-of-a-doubt clear: my opinions, controversial as some of them may be, are mine and mine alone; they are not necessarily shared by the people I interview or feature.
My interviewees all chose to share their amazing stories of self-made success for this book, for the benefit of us all. They chose to share these stories because they all believe that no matter where you are in your life, no matter what your age or your life circumstances, you can strive to achieve more in life, to make a greater impact, to aim for higher dreams.
This book would not exist without the generous participation of the many, many experts and self-educated people I interviewed. My interviewees are a diverse, brilliant, and cantankerous bunch, with a wide range of opinions on many topics, as well as a wide range of backgrounds. I am profoundly grateful for their participation, and am proud that I am able to share their cutting-edge insights and their moving stories.
I’m certain, however, that some of my interviewees will outright disagree with some of my own views, as well as some of the views expressed by other interviewees featured in this book. Thus, I want to emphasize that there is a gulf of difference between my interviewees having agreed to share their personal stories here, and their agreeing with everything or anything anyone else (including me) says in this book.
The interviewees I feature in this book are responsible only for their own views, clearly delineated by quotation marks, and for my general paraphrases of their views, both of which I have submitted to them to check for accuracy. (I edited all interviews for flow, readability, and space.) I repeat: interviewees’ participation in this book should not be taken as endorsement for any other aspect of this book other than their own views in quotation marks.
I give a hearty thank-you to all my interviewees for their participation in this book.
Disclaimer #2: I Interview Several Close Friends and Business Connections
The vast majority of the people I interviewed in this book were strangers to me before I interviewed them. However, several of my key interviews come from people who are very close to me. For example, I interview my wife, Jena. Another major source, Eben Pagan, is engaged to my close friend Annie Lalla, and I played a large part in introducing them.
Bryan Franklin, whom you met in the Introduction and about whom I write more in the coming pages, is one of my best friends. He officiated at my wedding ceremony. And I’ve done business with him in the past, both as a client and a vendor, and probably will again in the future. (Another company I mention in one of the stories, the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, was a copywriting client of mine in the past, though is not at present.) Whenever I have a personal or business relationship with anyone else mentioned in this book, I will disclose that.
In no case did I receive any financial or other specified benefit for featuring anyone in this book. No pay for play, ever.
Except for a few massages and extra-special romantic nights from Jena.
(OK, enough caveats. Let the fun begin . . .)
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Thanks for reading this Introduction. If you’re ready for more, then I humbly ask you to please pre-order your copy now. It’s available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and IndieBound. Pre-orders make a HUGE difference to my success as an author, so if you found anything valuable or intriguing in the above Introduction, I’d greatly appreciate your support with a preorder. I spent two years putting in grueling hours on this book to make it as valuable as possible. You won’t be disappointed, I promise. Thank you!
