Last year, PayPal cofounder and first outside Facebook investor Peter Thiel made waves when he announced the Thiel Fellowship, a program to pay twenty people under the age of twenty $100,000 each to leave formal schooling and learn in the real world, not in the classroom.
In May of this year, the Thiel Foundation announced 24 brilliant young inaugural recipients of the Fellowship. In June, they held they held their first retreat together, at the Headlands Institute in Sausalito, CA. I had the privilege of delivering the presentation below to the Fellows.
My talk was aimed at helping the Fellows see that---like all people, young and old, in college and out of college---they will get their education by finding great mentors and teachers. The difference between them, and their peers in college, is that they are getting a head start in learning how to find mentors and teachers outside of the classroom, out in the real world.
This is an absolutely critical skill for all of us to learn, whether we've been to college or not. I share my best secrets for learning that skill here, in 3 parts, in video (50 min) and edited transcription.
(For fun, you'll see me on-the-spot with two live demonstrations of how I do this at networking events.)
Part 1, below, contains an overview. You can also watch the full 50 min video of the presentation below.
Part 2 of the transcript teaches you how to attract great mentors and teachers by giving them quality advice. (Huh? Giving advice to people you want to get advice from? That's the great secret. Keep reading/watching and it will all become clear.) Includes one live demonstration.
Part 3 of the transcript teaches you how to attract great mentors by connecting them to other people in your already-existing network. Includes the second live demonstration.
[Disclosures: the Thiel Foundation paid my roundtrip airfare, NYC to SF, so I could deliver this presentation. I did not accept any speaker fee or honorarium for this talk. Earlier, I interviewed Peter Thiel for my upcoming book, and he subsequently endorsed it. I edited the transcription of my talk substantially for better readability and flow, and I also corrected a few minor factual errors in my talk.]
Enjoy!
We’re here tonight to explode a myth. This is a complete BS lie of a myth that most of the culture believes. And all of you here tonight are at the forefront of challenging this myth.
And the myth is this: because you are not getting a college education, supposedly that means you are not getting any education at all.
There are people out there who hate Peter Thiel’s guts for even daring to suggest that smart young people such as yourselves not go to college. In Slate magazine, for example, the editor-in-chief, Jacob Weisberg, called the Thiel Fellowship “nasty” and "appalling." And people have written that you smart young people I've been getting to know this weekend are actually fools for taking Thiel up on his offer, and that you all are basically going to end up as garbage people because you don't have a college degree. [Laughter.]
If even one molecule, one cell of you believes that myth—that you're not getting an education because you happen to not go to college—you’re not going to accomplish what you want to accomplish.
The myth says, essentially, the only way to get an education is to go through a formalized schooling process that ends in college or graduate school. I want to reframe that for you tonight.
What I suggest instead is that the only way we can get an education—you, me, all of us in this room, anyone at all—is by finding people who are smarter, more accomplished, and wiser than ourselves, and hanging around them, soaking up their wisdom, and taking in their teachings.
That’s the essence of education.
Now one way to expose yourself to wiser, smarter, more experienced people is to go to college. That’s the way that most people do it, and that's the way society says you have to do it. And of course, professors are some of the smartest people on the planet—a lot of them have done amazing things. However, I think that for a lot of people, it’s a very inefficient way to get an education.
The reason is, most professors, as brilliant as they are—and there are exceptions to what I’m about to say—but a lot of them haven't actually accomplished much in the real world, outside of academia.
They went through schooling, they went through college, a lot of them went straight from college into graduate school. They went straight from graduate school into some kind of teaching. They've pretty much existed their whole life in this very comfortable, relatively cushy environment that is governed by bureaucratic rules and is highly insulated from the realities of making your way in a business or marketplace.
Now there are certain areas where that is a great place to learn. If you are going into the hard sciences, for example, you can meet people who have gone really far in their field. But if what you’re interested in starting a business—and that's what all of you here are interested in—most of the people in academia (again there are exceptions) don’t know business from their elbow.
They collect their checks. They have their tenure track. Once they get tenure, there's almost nothing they could do to get fired. They could run down their campus naked doing cartwheels and they could not get fired.
That’s just not the reality of business. The reality of business is that if you mess up, your customers fire you. So my argument tonight is that you are interested in starting a business—which is why you are all here—then academia is the wrong set of mentors for you to hang around, because they don't know anything about business, for the most part.
Even a lot of people in business school. One of the guys I interviewed for my book—he said he was getting an undergraduate degree in business and he decided to drop out, because he was parking in the same parking lot as these business professors. And he was driving the kind of beat-up used car that students tend to have. And he noticed that it was basically the same kind of car the professors were driving, these used Honda Accords. And he's like, “Wait a minute!” Not to say that you should judge your status by cars [laughter]. But it's kind of telling.
So the way you get an education is by finding people who are experienced in the areas that you want to be experienced. And you hang around them and you learn from them.
Now here's the tricky part: when you go to college, those older wiser mentors are basically fed to you on a silver platter. You go there and the first thing that happens is either you or your parents write a big fat check, and that goes into the college, and it pays their salary, and you get this nice fat course book that tells you the times when all of the professors' courses are held. You get to choose, like a menu, which ones you'll learn from.
And as long as you are in good standing, they have to provide some type of mentorship. They have to have some office hours or something—basically, it's handed to you. So one thing your peers who are going through the college system are not learning is how you actually go and find mentors in the real world. Because I guarantee you, the people you want to be learning from in your business, they don't have office hours. And they don't have the little course book that says where you can sign up to take their course.
So that's actually a real skill that your peers are not learning in school, and that you are going to have to learn if you want to be successful: how to go and find these mentors that are going to take you under their wing, and persuade them to mentor you.
That’s what we're going to be talking about tonight. I’m going to be giving you some real practical tips on how you can go about finding these mentors. We're going to do some exercises also.
So how do you find these mentors, these advisors, these people who are going to help you?
Next: The Secret of Finding Great Mentors and Teachers, Revealed
The basic lesson of how to find these people, how to get them into your team, how to get powerful, connected people in your corner, is to give to them.
And that sounds really strange, if you think about it. You’re looking for mentorship, so you’re hoping their going to give something to you. How is it that you are going to give to them?
(Probably you have all kinds of beliefs—which I'm going to try to explode in a minute—about you don’t have anything worthwhile to give because you are young.)
You’re looking for these people to give to you, but the way you bring these people into your corner is to give to them.
I'm going to describe some what I mean by that. When you go to college, you are giving to them. Either you or your parents are writing those big fat checks. But people who are doing things out in the real world and building businesses, they’re busy too and they don't necessarily want to take time out of their day to help some brand new person they don't know, without receiving anything in return.
They’re just like all of us, they're busy. And so you have to go show that you bring something to the table.
As they say, always come bearing wine. Don't show up empty-handed. You always want to show up with something. As an analogy, when you hold a party, who are you more psyched to see when you open the door? Your friend who says, “Hey, we've got the drinks, we’ve got the chips, we’ve got this, we’ve got that. Where can we put it all?” Or the person who shows up with 3 friends, all empty handed, and they ask, “Hey, where's the beer?” You always want to show up at the party with something to give.
So what can you give them?
Next, in Part 2: How to attract great mentors and teachers by giving quality advice.
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Michael Ellsberg is the author of The Education of Millionaires: It’s Not What You Think, and It’s Not Too Late, which is launching from Penguin/Portfolio in September. It’s a bootstrapper’s guide to investing in your own human capital at any age. Michael sends manifestos, recommendations, tips, and other exclusive content to his private email list, which you can join at www.ellsberg.com. Connect with him on Twitter @MichaelEllsberg and on Facebook.
