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Summary of The Education of Millionaires: It’s Not What You Think and It’s Not Too Late

The Formal Education Myth

There is almost no relationship between academic excellence and success in your life and career. Insofar as it was ever true that the roadmap to success was to work hard in school, get a good entry-level job, and work your way up through middle management, it isn’t anymore. You need credentials for a few professions (doctor, lawyer, etc.), but these days you don’t need formal credentials for most things you might want to do.

There are certain practical skills that will lead to success in life—they just aren’t taught in school. This book doesn’t teach them in depth, but it does point the way and teach you how to teach yourself the skills.

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Come This Sunday and Learn How to Beat Procrastination by Cultivating Positive Motivation

This Sunday, Skullcrusher Household is presenting a three-hour class on beating procrastination by cultivating positive motivation.

When: 2:00-5:00pm

Where:
850 Williams Way, Apt 4.
Mountain View, CA 94040

When you get here, you’ll see a blue garage door with a turtle on it. Go up the stairs to the left, pass the monkey-pony monster by the door, and come right in!

Last week at our IFS practice group we had a full-house of attendees, and there was one issue that was especially popular. Quite a few of the people who came independently picked it to address. It’s the same problem that has come up the most often with the clients I’ve worked with individually. Want to guess what it is?

Procrastination.

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Five Questions that Let You Watch What’s Going on in People’s Heads

A while back, when I was making Anki decks of the life concepts that I found most important, I wrote these two sentences:

“Communication is authentic when what we express externally corresponds to what’s going on internally.”

“Humans crave authentic communication.”

If you’re anything like me, you spend a big chunk of your waking hours talking to people. It’s important the time I spend communicating be fun, not unsatisfying. I don’t like it when I:

  • find myself planning what I’m going to say next instead of listening to the other person (Note: There is a level of listening beyond just being able to remember the words the other person said. That’s the type I’m referring to here.)
  • wonder whether the other person is really listening to me, or just being polite
  • discover that I’m completely off in my head somewhere else entirely, maybe thinking about what I’m going to eat for dinner
  • get the sense that the conversation is kind of dead, even if I couldn’t say why

Everything I listed above is a symptom of people not talking about what’s actually going on in their heads.

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IFS practice group this Saturday (Nov 5): Make friends with the voices in your head!

It’s been a while since I’ve hosted an official gathering, but I’ve been practicing hard, and I keep getting inquiries, so it must be about time.

The exact time is this Saturday, November 5th from 3:00pm-6:00pm.

And, even better, Shannon has been doing intensive (averaging multiple hours a day!) IFS training with me, so the facilitator to newbie ratio just went up. More individualized attention for you!

Our practice group will meet at our very own secret lair, Skullcrusher Household, complete with painted monkey-pony monster. (What’s with all the screaming???) We’re at Tortuga in Mountain View, CA. Email me for the exact address.

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When you get here, you’ll see a blue garage door with a turtle on it. Go up the stairs to the left, admire Shannon’s monkey-pony monster by the door, and come right in!

You should join us if:

  • You find yourself thinking, “Part of me wants X, but part of me wants Y”
  • You feel stuck because it seems as though you’re being pulled in multiple directions at the same time
  • You’re sure about what you should do, but you “just can’t” get yourself to act
  • You see yourself acting out the same destructive pattern over and over again (i.e. lying awake at night worrying intsead of going to sleep)
  • You want to overcome emotional blocks to becoming the sort of person you want to be (see item #4 from Alicorn’s polyhacking post)

Identifying With

Recently I’ve been using the phrase “identify with” a bunch. As in, “I’m learning not to identify with my past self”, or “I try not to identify with my beliefs”, or “the ego is what, when accurately perceived, we stop identifying with”. When a friend of mine asked me what I meant by “identifying with”, I wasn’t immediately sure how to unpack how I was using the words. I said, “Well, when I identify with something it feels like me. It feels like part of my, uh, identity”. He was unsatisfied with this explanation, as was I.

(Prioritizing explaining myself is a heuristic that has served me well. I want meaning.)

Here’s my best one sentence version: When I identify with something, doing an original seeing on it is aversive. I don’t want to take a fresh look at the evidence and see if it really exists in the way I’m thinking of it. In other words, things I identify with seem like part of the territory, not just part of my map. I’ll expand a bit on what this means in terms of identifying with beliefs, emotions, and parts of myself.

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NVC Question #12

Question:

Explain to me why “intimidated” is not a proper feeling-word.

Answer:

“Intimidated” isn’t an emotion—the word includes an interpretation of the situation. The emotion on its own would probably be fear, maybe anxiety, maybe some other mix. When you say “intimidated”, you’re also bringing up a story about the other person’s behavior, and I’d say there are also implications about intent. “I feel intimidated when you say that” seems much more likely to provoke defensiveness than “I feel scared when you say that”. Does that make sense?

Followup:

Cool, thanks! Someone I am trying to get to know told me he feels intimidated by me and that never sat well with me, thus why I wanted to figure this out.

(Thanks to Dave Jackson for this particular question.)

NVC Question #11

Question:

I’m still kind of confused about the NVC general sense of the term ‘need’.

I’d before been thinking that NVC talks about ‘needs’ rather than ‘values’ or ‘wants’ because by thinking of them as needs, people would respect the desire once noticing and taking account of it, in themselves and/or others. So this was kind of my own way of interpreting the NVC term in a way that didn’t state necessity, such as “I need understanding”.

I put together the facts that NVC talks about needs, you’re an experienced user of NVC, and you mentioned you don’t like “need” based thinking, and wondered what was your own way of treating the NVC terminology of needs. (Perhaps you oppose the use of ‘need’ to mean obligations specifically rather than necessity generally?)

Answer:

I think I understand your question better now.

I guess I was being somewhat imprecise when talking about “need-based thinking”. The needs that NVC lists are all very general. Respect, fun, connection, stuff like that. The most specific ones are stuff like air and water. So sure, you “need” respect, but you don’t “need” it from any one person. You “need” fun, but you don’t “need” to have fun playing this video game right now. Those are strategies.