Four years ago, I was invited to sit in on a small, private, high-level mastermind led by Victor Cheng, a business growth expert who helps businesses grow from $1 million to $10 million, and from $10M to $100M, who is often quoted by reporters from Fox News, MSNBC, Inc. magazine, Entrepreneur, Forbes, Time, and the Wall Street Journal.

The second Victor opened his mouth and started talking, my jaw hit the floor. It stayed there pretty much for the next several hours (I did eventually shut my jaw, after he stopped talking.) I had never heard such a nonstop blitzkrieg torrent of brilliant, counter-intuitive, specific, street-smart “Why didn’t I think of that??!!” business advice, delivered with such precision, confidence, authority and clarity.

Well, on Thursday, 9/22/11, I had the privilege of sharing his insight for 90 minutes live on a teleconference, on the topic of my own upcoming book The Education of Millionaires (which he’s featured in).

We  had e a free-wheeling, shocking, highly-caffeinated, no-holds-barred, controversial, angry-making dialogue together, packed with counter-intuitive, real-world, street-smart career development, education and and business growth strategies that they DON’T teach at Harvard Business School. It will get you riled up to take your career success to the next level.

Listen below!

–Michael

Here’s some additional info Victor sent to his own list before the event – “straight from the master himself”:

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(How to Make a Difference in the World Without Going Broke)

[Note: For the full Introduction to the book, click here.]

A twenty-one-year-old singer, songwriter, and guitarist named David found himself in a hospital in Paris one night, being treated for malnutrition, in 1967. The reason he was malnourished was that he was not making a lot of money and couldn’t afford proper foods, as he played gigs at bars, nightclubs, and dances across France and Spain.

No gig tonight, no eat tomorrow.

Two years before, he was in his sixth form in Cambridge, England (equivalent to the last two years of high school in the United States). David simply stopped going to his A-levels, the series of exams that determine university entrance in the UK. All he really cared about was rock music, and he dove fully into it, playing in local bands and eventually living by his wits, gig to gig, in France and Spain. Had you seen him in that moment in Paris, sickly in the hospital at age twenty-one, lacking funds to feed himself properly, you might not have thought he had made a good choice leaving his A-levels, or that he had any decent prospects in life.

And while that judgment may be correct for most starving artists, in the case of this particular artist—who was starving not just figuratively but literally—such a judgment would be as off the mark as you could get.
David returned to the UK, and later that year, a drummer he knew named Nick Mason asked him to join a little band they were putting together called Pink Floyd. The band went on to sell over 200 million copies of its albums over the next forty-plus years. The Dark Side of the Moon, the band’s most famous album, has sold upward of 45 million copies worldwide and ranks among the greatest-selling, most critically acclaimed, and most influential albums of all time. As lead guitarist, co-lead vocalist, and songwriter for the band that produced so many hits for over forty years, David Gilmour is easily one of the most important musicians in the history of rock.

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[Here is the full Introduction to my forthcoming book The Education of Millionaires. Since this piece is being made available here a month before the book is being released, Penguin has asked me to include the following proviso: “These are unrevised and unpublished proofs. Please do not quote for publication until verified with the finished book.” Thank you. Enjoy! –Michael]

You’ve been fed a lie. The lie is that if you study hard in school, get good grades, get into a good college, and get a degree, then your success in life is guaranteed.

This might have been true fifty years ago. But it is no longer true today.

If you want to succeed now, then you must also educate yourself in the real-world skills, capabilities, and mindsets that will get you ahead outside of the classroom. This is true whether you’ve been to college or not.

This book shows you the way.

Why Practical Intelligence Almost Always Beats Academic Intelligence

A thirty-seven-year-old Harvard MBA and a twentysomething college dropout, the latter a few credits shy of a film and theater degree from USC, are sitting across each other in a job interview. The MBA is wearing a crisply pressed three-piece suit with a yellow tie. The twentysomething is wearing jeans and a pullover sweatshirt, with no shirt underneath. The twentysomething is unshaven, and the state of his hair suggests that not much grooming had occurred between his departure from bed that morning and this interview.

The interview is going very, very poorly. The interviewer is entirely unimpressed with the academic background the interviewee brings to the table, and feels the interviewee doesn’t have enough experience to provide tangible value in the chaotic environment of a real-world start-up.

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