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

We’ve all heard this lie, and it’s certainly a convincing one. After all, it used to be true. But many people didn’t notice it gradually becoming less true as the world changed, with tuition skyrocketing and job prospects dimming.

In The Education of Millionaires, Michael Ellsberg explores alternative paths followed by millionaire and billionaire college dropouts. His point isn’t that education is unimportant, but that it doesn’t have to come from a lecture hall. He makes a strong case that what it really takes to get ahead today is self education over formal education, practical intelligence over academic intelligence.

Although I’ve read several books on this theme, I found this one to be perhaps the best of them. In fact, the only thing I didn’t love about this book was the title (just because it’s a little bland). Everything else was great.

Specifically, I liked:

• The plethora of interviews and case studies of the rich and famous, including Russell Simmons (fashion), Dustin Moskovitz and Sean Parker (Facebook), Matt Mullenwag (WordPress), David Gilmour (Pink Floyd), Phillip Ruffin (casinos), and John Paul DeJoria (hair care products)
• The interviews of the not-quite-yet rich and famous (such as he and his wife), whose situations may be easier for most of us to relate to
• The practical information about key success skills such as networking, marketing, sales, branding, and bootstrapping, and his style of “teaching you how to teach yourself how to fish”
• How he anticipates and overcomes objections that most authors ignore, like “well, that might work if you have endless amounts of money to burn, but what if…”

Are we in an education bubble that will burst in the coming years? It’s hard to be sure. In the meantime, consider this book mandatory reading for any student of success, dropout or not.

“How much math do you really need in everyday life? Ask yourself that — and also the next 10 people you meet, say, your plumber, your lawyer, your grocer, your mechanic, your physician or even a math teacher. Unlike literature, history, politics and music, math has little relevance to everyday life.”

This quote is from G.V. Ramanathan’s article How much math do we really need? While I somewhat agreed with most of the article, that last sentence instantly struck me as perhaps the dumbest thing I had read in the month of October.

True, the average person doesn’t need much math in everyday life. Everyone needs some, and people in certain jobs need a lot, but most people need so little that they don’t even realize they’re using math.

But notice what happens when you take his question — “How much _____ do you really need in everyday life?” — and fill in any of the other subjects he mentioned. The answer in every case is still “almost none.” Really, how often have you turned to Shakespeare or Beethoven to get yourself out of a jam?

Of course, that doesn’t mean that these subjects are worthless. Despite the limitations on their practical value, they’re still part of being a civilized human being, and worth studying for their own sake.

But math, in addition to being a worthy subject from a purely academic perspective, is a basic life skill (at least lower level math). Not being able to balance your checking account is about as stupid as not being able to find Florida on a map. Yet someone would be ridiculed for the latter while getting a pass on the former, simply by using the excuse “I’m terrible at math.”

In all fairness, math majors, teachers, etc. probably tend to overstate its importance. I have to admit that it’s entirely possible to get by just fine without having ever learned the multiplication tables. But I can’t think of another school subject where ignorance has more potential to hurt you.

Show me someone who thinks they can win at blackjack without counting cards, who thinks they can afford a mortgage ten times their annual income, and who doesn’t know the difference between itemizing their deductions and taking the standard deduction. I think it’s a pretty safe bet that they can’t pass a 7th grade math test.

You don’t actually need the quadratic formula or the Pythagorean theorem to figure out how much retirement income you’ll need, or whether paying off your mortgage is a good idea, or whether paying 24% credit card interest is a wise investment. But someone who learns how to solve problems in the classroom grows up better able to solve problems in the real world.

I’m not saying that mathematical illiteracy is our biggest problem, or that America’s educational system will be its downfall, or that everyone needs to take math after high school. But can we agree that any self-respecting adult should have better math skills than a dog?

“Dave the Math Dog” was once a guest on the Late Show with David Letterman. Dave the dog was asked to figure out the square root of 36, and answered with 6 taps of his paw. Dave the human was unable to verify the answer until he was given a calculator. (The dog is probably explained by the Clever Hans effect, but still…)

Photo by Mykl Roventine

Everyone is talking about Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers: The Story of Success. Many people say it’s great, and it is.

It’s filled with amazing insights into success. It took me a long time to read it because I found that reading just a few pages sometimes gave me enough to hold me over all week.

You can read the prologue here and some excerpts here. (See “The 10,000 Hour Rule,” “Harlan Kentucky,” and “Rice Paddies and Math Tests” in the sidebar. The last one was enough to make me start learning to count in Cantonese.)

Just be aware that it’s not a how-to guide with a list of steps to take. In fact, his idea that successful people are merely a product of their environment might make you go all fatalistic like the Merovingian. It’s meant to be more intriguing than practical.

My only disappointment is that I was hoping for a lot more detail about the 10,000 hour rule that he’s so well known for. It says that pretty much anyone can become successful in pretty much anything if and only if they put in 10,000 hours of practice.

But what level of granularity does that apply to? Does 10,000 hours of being creative make you successful at being creative, or is that too broad? Does it really take 10,000 hours of practice to be successful at reciting the alphabet, or is that too narrow?

In Success Is For Suckers, I wrote about whether success is worth it, in response to Glen Allsopp’s post What Malcolm Gladwell Should Have Told You In ‘Outliers’. Now having finished the book, I can better see what Glen was talking about.

Compare these two examples from the book of people who sacrificed their childhood in the name of success. One was Bill Gates. He sacrificed his childhood to become the richest man in the world doing what he loved. That’s way more than a fair tradeoff.

Another was a poor girl named Marita. She sacrificed her childhood for an 84% chance of catching up to her grade level in mathematics. It’s not mentioned whether she got there, and if she did, we’re only talking about mediocre math ability by the standards of a country that’s notoriously bad at it. The link between that and success is far from clear.

Of course, Bill Gates didn’t know things were going to work out so well for him. But he would have gladly made the sacrifice regardless, just because it was more appealing to him than anything else he could be doing. Maybe Marita feels the same way. I hope she does.

But not knowing the outcome in advance can make the decision very difficult. In eighth grade, I had to decide what high school I wanted to go to. I could have gone to my local high school, which was a perfectly good one. Or I could have applied to the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, which has been ranked the #1 public high school in the country by U.S. News and World Report.

Although TJ would have been an incredible experience, there was a price to be paid. If I remember correctly, I would not only be leaving for school earlier in the morning, but I’d be getting home at 7 or 8 every night instead of 3 in the afternoon like a normal kid. And that’s to say nothing of homework, or how stressful it would be during the day.

My dad made it very clear to me what the tradeoff was. He said, “If you want to learn everything you possibly can about math and science, then this would be the best thing in the world for you. But if you don’t, you would absolutely hate it.”

I went to the regular school, and to this day I’m still pretty sure I made the right choice. I think I learned plenty, and I probably would have gone to the same college anyway (the University of Virginia). And remember that there are some advantages to, you know, not sacrificing your childhood.

On the other hand, say my future self had come to me in eighth grade and said, “If you go to TJ, you’ll become interested in robotics. Because of that, you’ll go to MIT. There, you’ll meet a professor who will steer you towards nanotechnology. You’ll go on to invent a race of nanobots that can be injected into the blood stream and safely kill cancer cells. You’ll be an outlier. But if you don’t go to TJ, then none of this will happen.”

In that case, then yes, of course I’ll make the sacrifice, knowing that the payoff is coming. But no one wants to make a sacrifice when your best prediction is that it’s not worth it. And not knowing the future is what makes it so hard to make the right decision.