Authors@Google: Michael Ellsberg September 26, 2011

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"The Education of Millionaires: It's Not What You Think and It's Not Too Late "

Get Rich Investing in Your Own Human Capital

The richest billionaire executive on the planet and the lowest-status minimum-wage worker have at least one thing in common when it comes to work: they both have 24 hours in the day. So what distinguishes the high-earning executive from lower-paid workers? It's the amount of capital they are able to combine with that 24 hours each day. Not just capital in the form of money and business systems, but also the amount of intangible "human capital" they bring to their work: knowledge, wisdom gained from experience, mindset, the ability to sell their vision effectively to others, and the "social capital" of their business connections.

I've spent the past year interviewing some of the most successful investors in human capital on the planet, for my book "The Education of Millionaires: It's Not What You Think and It's Not Too Late ." These millionaires and billionaires all reached their success while sidestepping one of the most popular (and expensive and time consuming) forms of human capital: formal higher education. In so doing, they learned how to make fast, lean, low-cost-high-payoff investments in their own human capital, in the real world. In this talk, I explain how to make the most fast-acting, direct, high-impact investments in your own human capital and career success, based on what I learned from these masters of self-education and from my own experience.