School is not inherently bad —but an exclusive focus on formal schooling as your only education, in the absence of real-world street-smarts, almost always is.

Listen to me in a teleconference with Dale Stephens, founder of Uncollege.org and “Chief Educational Deviant” of the Uncollege movement. This movement is liberating young people from constrictive views—foisted upon them by parents and  teachers—about how they should educate  themselves.

How to Deschool Your Mind: A Dialogue With Dale Stephens & Michael Ellsberg
You can listen to the audio of the call here. (Right-click to download; CTRL-click on a Mac)Read More

I wrote my book The Education of Millionaires: It’s Not What You Think and It’s Not Too Late because I want to promote freedom.

I believe our current notions of education, and degrees people believe they need in order to succeed, are instead keeping people in chains: keeping them tied down to insane student debt loads, taking time off from work to continue full-time studies for ever-more degrees, and feeling inadequate with their own ability to succeed without the right societal punch-cards.

So, I wanted to take the opportunity to have a free-ranging, raucous, controversial, open dialogue about how to rebel against this insane system, and take your education into your own hands, with my friend Alexis Neely.

Because Alexis, more than most other successful people I know, embodies a full-on commitment to achieve her success while also living a life of freedom, on her own terms, without chains or societal pigeonholes.

We be talked together in dialogue on for 90min live on a teleconference.
You can listen to the audio of the call here. (Right-click to download, CTRL-click on a Mac)Read More

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.Read More

(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.Read More

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

[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.Read More

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6

Two of my closest friends and mentors—the uber-badass power couple Bryan Franklin and Jennifer Russell—invited me to be interviewed by them live for 90 minutes, on a free call now archived for you here:

“The Entrepreneurial Mindset vs. the Employee Mindset”:
A Live 90-Minute Interview With Michael Ellsberg
You can listen to the audio of the call here. (Right-click to download, CTRL-click on a Mac)

This call focused on the central theme of The Education of Millionaires: It’s Not What You Think, and It’s Not Too Late. Much of what I initially learned about topic of this call, I learned directly from Bryan and Jennifer (and I credit them in the book.) So it’s an honor to be interviewed by them on this.

So what is “the Entrepreneurial Mindset,” and what is the “Employee Mindset”?

And why should you mercilessly kick out any last remnants of the latter from your mind?

Well, the top question I’m getting about the book is, “What’s the one thing all these self-made, self-educated millionaires and billionaires you’ve been interviewing for the past two years have in common?”

In this call with Bryan and Jennifer, I spilled the beans and shared the answer.Read More

For some time, I’ve been trying to come up with a few words that describes my “brand promise” I make to you. . . what you can expect when you hang out with me in person or read my stuff.

The challenge of coming up with brand promise, for both companies and individuals, is finding the sweet spot between overpromising and underpromising.

If I were to say something like, my brand promise to you is that “I spread peace and love wherever I go,” that would be overpromising. I may be able to deliver on such a promise a few minutes in a given day, but if I had to go to a 7AM breakfast meeting, and you had to meet me there, I guarantee you would not experience me as delivering on such a promise! (My brain doesn’t usually come on line until about 11 AM, and you really really don’t want to meet me before that hour.)

Yet, if I were to say something like, my brand promise is that “I’ll usually be friendly and helpful,” that would probably be true, but it would also be underpromising and underwhelming. No one is going to get excited about meeting a person with such a weak brand promise.

Well, folks, I feel I’ve finally nailed it, a brand promise for me that gets it exactly right . . . what you can reasonably expect when you come into contact with me.Read More

Last night I saw Simon Posford play one set as part of his project Shpongle, and one set under his stage name Hallucinogen, at his show in New York City.

All I can say is: wow. Wow. Wow. Wowwowwow.Read More

A Manifesto by Michael Ellsberg

You can download the manifesto for free, in PDF form, here. (No email opt-in required.)

Dear Friends,

A year and a half out from my diagnosis of testicular cancer, I’ve been processing what it all means.

I’ve finally come to a place where I am grateful for having had this experience.

Not that I would choose it again—but given that it did happen, I’m grateful for it.

As soon as I came to this awareness, I began reflecting: how is it possible to be grateful for something you would not wish upon yourself or anyone else?

This paradox is at the heart of a new manifesto I’ve written, called “What Does It Mean That Your Life Is Perfect?”

The short reflections in this manifesto—which takes about 8 minutes to read in its entirely—were forged through a year and a half of conscious and unconscious processing, after my diagnosis and surgery for testicular cancer last year.

I found that I didn’t really try to write these words. . . the words just came to me, from some deeper place within me, the source of which I do not know.

Many people who read them told me they were moved by them, and encouraged me to put them together so other people could have the benefit of them. I have done so here.

You can download the manifesto for free, in PDF form, here. (No email opt-in required.)Read More