The Education of Millionaires

Michael Ellsberg ★★★★★

A good book explaining why your degree is just a tiny portion of what you should have for a successful career.

As more and more people have a diploma, the value of higher education is inflating. But having a degree may be just a checkbox that you can either tick or skip entirely, focusing on something more relevant to you career. I admit the latter must be quite hard, exactly because so many people have it that it’s become a minimal requirement for a huge portion of jobs.

The second half of the book is questionable, especially its somewhat too self-assured tone, but it is a nice collection of stories about failures, struggles, successes, and the skills that can be acquired during these processes.

Quotes

there is literally no job too shitty or low-paying for which you won’t get a river of BAs desperately asking you for the work.

I think you’d have to conclude the whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors.

We should look at the kind of work that goes into acquiring a liberal education at the college level in the same way that we look at the grueling apprenticeship that goes into becoming a master chef: something that understandably attracts only a limited number of people.

Malcolm Gladwell argues meticulously that, above a certain IQ (around 120, which is considered “above average/bright,” but not even “moderately gifted”3), additional IQ points have little correlation to real-world success. […] once a person has demonstrated passable logical, analytic, and academic skills, other factors have much more influence on real-world results—specifically, creativity, innovative thinking, and practical and social intelligence.

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