From Guilt to Growth: What My Life Has Taught Me About Wealth (So Far) By Wade G. Morgan

Before I graduated high school, I signed a summer internship offer that made me the richest person in my household on a per-hour basis. J.P. Morgan had just piloted an immersion program for high schoolers interested in finance, and agreed to pay them $20 per hour to get their feet wet and learn for a month. While I was ecstatic about the opportunity and wanted to make the most of it, something about the situation seemed….off, to say the least.

As a 17 year old without a high school diploma officially under my belt, I already had more earning potential than my parents.

Coming to that realization changed my life forever. While my parents were very proud of me as I grew into my own person, there was some part of me that just felt guilty.
I felt guilty because I had some idea of the trajectory my life would hit once I went to college. I felt guilty because I envisioned a life full of experiences I would not be able to share with the people and community that got me there. I felt guilty because in all likelihood, my financial struggles had an end-date.

In a sense, I felt guilty because my parents did their job.

As a young adult, I long struggled with the tension between aspiring for financial success, and feeling guilty about potentially attaining it. While on one hand I had successful black people to model myself after, on the other hand I saw the stigma in my community associated with people known as “Uncle Toms” or “sell-outs”.
Growing up, my friends and I always wondered how successful black people attained their success, especially whether or not they had to trade in parts of their identity, culture, or more (sell-out) for their piece of the American Dream. I worried that the more successful I became, the more distance there would be between my community and me, and the more likely I could be seen as one of those sell-outs.
It seemed like the only way to avoid those labels would be to work in a field that directly contributed to the community: nonprofits, law, politics, activism, or education. I knew that there were wonderful opportunities in all of those fields, and the people who pursue them do great work. After all, I would not be here without the work of civil rights lawyers and activists, teachers and professors, and nonprofits like NJ SEEDS and MLT. However, in spite of my desire to do impactful work, I did not want to pursue those opportunities and felt lost as a result.
Learning
Fast forward to college. In my sophomore year, I had a conversation with a former teacher that completely re-framed the way I thought about wealth. Although I had exposure to wealthy people in high school, my conversation with him was the first time I could discuss the topic in a culturally relevant way.
He decoupled many ideas I thought moved in lockstep together. First, he explained that there is nothing inherently wrong with being wealthy. It does not mean you are selfish, or don’t care about other people. Being wealthy does not mean you are self-indulgent or too caught up in material possessions. There are wealthy people like that, but those attributes are not inherent to wealth itself.
Second, he explained that prioritizing your personal growth in the interim does not equate to turning your back on your community. On the contrary, the higher you grow, the wider the impact you can potentially have. To explain this idea, he described the idea of scale. It went something like this:
Him: “Wade, you can work for the nonprofit, run the nonprofit, or be on the board of 3 nonprofits, and donate $1 million annually so they can run for years to come.”
Me: “Ooooooohhhhhh”
My light bulb moment was not because I had some new-found moral justification for wanting to be wealthy; rather, it was because I finally felt like I had some options.
He made the point that none of those options was “better” than the next, and each role was necessary and important. But, I had the choice and ability to pursue any and all of them. He also pointed out that donating money to a cause is not sufficient for solving it, but it is necessary. For example, nonprofits rely on donations from people and organizations to fund marketing campaigns, hire people, increase the services they offer, and keep the lights on.
Around the same time as this conversation, I also spoke with Sumorwuo Zaza, a mentor & role model from high school. He exposed me to the idea of verticals. He explained that everyone who wants to impact their community does not have to work in the same areas. Some people will pound the pavement, some will be the voice of the people, others will work on policy, and some will do good through business. Again, all of those verticals were necessary and important, and you just had to figure out which role(s) you aimed to occupy.
Black American Dreaming
In the first 19 years of my life, it never crossed my mind that you could do good through business. Keep in mind that at this point in my life, 2012-2013, business was probably the last place you would expect anything "good" to come out of. Everywhere on campus, people debated about how “1% of the population has more wealth than the 99% combined,” and other similar topics (I use this example solely to make a point about the climate, and not to invalidate these discussions. I believe that conversations about wage disparities and similar topics are healthy for our culture). So before my conversations about scale & verticals, business had a negative connotation in my mind.
But after these conversations, that perspective changed. I started to think about the problems I faced growing up, and how I could create products and services to solve them. I started to see that wealth was neither a means nor an end, exclusively; rather, it could be a platform. Your success could benefit you and your family, while being a platform to benefit others as well. People like Bill Gates, whose scholarship helped fund my college education, and Oprah may come to mind.
Now, a sense of eagerness has replaced my guilt, and a sense of purpose has replaced any questions surrounding my motivations. I have seen how every experience I have had up until this point has been absolutely necessary for me to dream of a brighter future for myself, my family, and my community.
I have no idea what will come of my experiences, and I’m fine with that. Every milestone on my 2 year plan has an asterisk next to it that says “unless another dope opportunity arises”. While I cannot predict what will happen, I live every day knowing that the following things will remain constant no matter where my journey takes me:
I always aim to grow. I always aim to be genuine. I always aim to help others.
With those principles as my true north, I look forward to seeing what the future holds.
KINGSMITH

Is The End Near for Public Education...? By Don Peppers

“It’s time to admit that public education operates like a planned economy, a bureaucratic system in which everybody’s role is spelled out in advance and there are few incentives for innovation and productivity. It’s no surprise that our school system doesn’t improve: It more resembles the communist economy than our own market economy.”

- Albert Shanker

For more than 30 years prior to his death in 1997, Albert Shanker was a pivotal force in the teachers’ unions, serving as President of both the United Federation of Teachers and the American Federation of Teachers. But as hard as he fought for teachers’ rights, he also felt the public education system in the U.S. was sadly inadequate.
And with good reason. State-sponsored public education in almost every country in the world is unsatisfactory and inept, a scandal we’ve tolerated far too long.
The origin of comprehensive, state-sponsored schooling in the industrial era can be traced to 19th Century Prussia. In the early 1800’s Prussian military rulers implemented a national schooling program to ensure a supply of disciplined young soldiers capable of resisting any future Napoleonic-style invasion of their country. Under the guise of teaching young boys how to read and do numbers, Prussian schools grouped students by age, rather than by knowledge or ability, sat them at rows of desks facing a teacher, rather than arranging them in discussion circles, and rang a bell regularly, so as to discipline their day while they studied a variety of subjects.
The British adapted the Prussian model when they needed to create their own cadre of professionals to administer their far-flung empire. And Horace Mann, one of the early proponents of public schooling in America, returned from an 1843 visit to Prussia full of ideas for implementing the same kind of system in the U.S.
Teaching “reading, writing and ’rithmatic” was not the main purpose for these early school systems, however, because the vast majority of adults in Prussia, Britain, and the young United States were already literate, even before public schooling was instituted. The printing press had unleashed a tidal wave of demand for literacy, and most people either learned on their own, or were taught by a combination of parents and non-public, for-profit schools. Instead, one of the primary objectives of the public school system in most countries was to raise a disciplined work force and maintain the social order.
In Matt Ridley’s ambitious book The Evolution of Everything, he dedicates a full chapter to a sweeping story of how people educate themselves, when left to their own devices. If you look at how schools develop “in the wild” today, outside of government programs, you'll be amazed at the kind of systems that evolve on their own – simply because parents want to educate their children, and they’re willing to spend money to do so, especially when they see that a state-sponsored system is dysfunctional.
And why not? After all, no one thinks a government monopoly is necessary to ensure an adequate supply of fitness centers, or hotels, or grocery stores, right? But just like hotels and groceries, non-government schools maintain their quality because they compete with each other; state schools do not.
Ridley cites the work of James Tooley, Professor of Education at Newcastle University, who documented the evolution of low-cost private schools in city slums and remote villages around the world. In the cramped and sewage-infested slums of the old city of Hyderabad, India, for instance, there is an association of five hundred private schools catering to the poor. A school might have unglazed windows and stained walls, but for the equivalent of $2 a day or less, the children of rickshaw-pullers and day laborers get what amounts to a first-rate education. In Ghana, one highly popular teacher has built a school with four branches teaching some 3,400 children a year. Scholarships are provided for those who can’t afford even the modest tuition fee of about $50 per term. In Somaliland, Tooley found that in a city with no water supply, paved roads or street lights there were twice as many private schools as state schools.
In virtually every region, all over the world, low-cost private schools out-deliver state schools. They have consistently lower costs and they generate consistently better results than public schools, Tooley found, simply because parents vote with their feet.
Now add technology to the equation and you have a formula for rapidly evolving, non-state-controlled education, not just in the developed world but in the developing world as well.
You may have already seen Sugata Mitra’s prize-winning 2013 TED talk about how poor kids in an Indian slum were able to teach themselves English, along with advanced concepts in biology, chemistry and mathematics, simply by following their own curiosity and helping each other with the use of a single personal computer and access to the internet. But if you haven't yet watched this, you are missing out on what may be one of the most important insights in the last couple of centuries into how the most effective kind of education actually happens.
Mitra's research suggests that the schooling system itself may soon become obsolete, replaced by what he calls the self-organized learning environment, or “SOLE.” His plan is to have three to five children share a computer with internet access, then propel their learning simply by giving them questions to answer on their own, like figuring out puzzles. Can trees think? Why do we dream? How does an iPad know where it is? Why do humans breathe, and what happens to the air we breathe?
The galloping pace of technology requires us to upgrade our capability to learn. But unfortunately the public schools, saddled with bureaucracy and undisciplined by any real feedback from customers (i.e. students) will simply not be up to this task. No top-down, take-it-or-leave-it process ever could be.
When the end finally does come for public education it's unlikely to be by government action. Instead, at some point in the next two or three decades public schools will simply find themselves completely outdated by technology, to the point that they will stand alone and unused, rendered as obsolete as public phone booths, or secretarial pools.
Whatever replaces the current system will be an emergent, evolutionary phenomenon, demanded by individual consumers (i.e., students and their parents), and augmented by technology. We can only hope it emerges sooner rather than later.
KINGSMITH.

The real truth about the people you work with By Penelope Trunk.

Penelope Trunk

The real truth about the people you work with

Empathy is one of the key signifiers of workplace success. Exhaustive research shows that when businesses fail, it is often because leaders have stopped focusing on understanding different types of environments and instead remain insulated in their own domain. And the Harvard Business Review shows that empathy is key to successful product design.
To leverage empathy as a competitive advantage, The Fortune 500 obsesses over personality type. Young, promising executives take a test to discover their own personality type and they receive training to understand personalities of those around them.
But there's also a slew of other kinds of behavioral research that helps you understand what your co-workers are doing and why. Here are some of my favorite examples:
Givers are at top and bottom of the ladder.
I have said many times that in order to be successful you need to help other people. Adam Grant, professor at Wharton, adds an interesting twist to the idea of being kind at work: givers are not only the most successful people, they are also the least successful ones. They are found on the very top and the very bottom of the career ladder. "Takers" and "matchers" are in the middle.
Men are rewarded for faking an 80-hour work week.
There are a lot of ways to get out of doing work. Delegate. Cut corners. Overestimate the time a project will take. The list is endless but the results are the same: you get credit for carrying a huge load while doing a lot less work. And those people who are adept at faking long hours get the same promotions as their workaholic counterparts. If those people are men. Women are much less likely to fake long hours and instead, women ask for accommodations, such as shorter hours and less travel. And women are penalized for asking. Of course.
The child prodigies are suffering.
A major downside of being a prodigy is that everyone expects you will grow up to become a genius. But the skill of being a child prodigy is qualitatively different from the “skill” of being a creative genius. Child prodigies master an adult domain that has already been invented and defined, whether it is perspective drawing, mathematics, chess, tennis, or music. On the other hand, the adults we classify as creative geniuses are individuals who have invented or discovered something new, something that changes their domain. (So for those of you feeling the need to wallow in schadenfreude, your time has come: those little upstarts suffer once they realize how shallow their talent really is.)
Your peers are in intimate relationships with each other.
Men are likely to mentor women they want to sleep with, and this is probably good for women, as long as they don't capitulate. (Women have more power when men want sex from them. Duh. But here's the research.) The people most likely to find a lover at work are those with unusual work schedules. Wondering who it is? When laughter breaks out in a group of people, each one will instinctively glance at whichever other individual they feel closest to in that group. This is a good way of spotting who is secretly sleeping together at work.
People in their 40s are a wreck.
All of them. For one thing, our salaries top out around age 40, but that's just the time when our financial needs ramp up, often to pay for college. On top of that, most creative breakthroughs happen in our 30s, and our lowest point in the happiness scale is at age 46. This is true for apes, also, which makes researchers think we are biologically set to have a slump in middle age. However our 50s are---for people in a wide range of cultures---a time of re-calibration, when they begin to evaluate their lives less in terms of social competition and more in terms of social connectedness. So all those people who are getting kicked out of the company for being too old are about to start feeling a lot happier.
Senior executives have open networks.
The number-one predictor of success is how open your network is. If you spend time with people who all know each other, you are not exposed nearly to the level of ideas as someone who spends time with a wide range of people from different walks of life. It's a spectrum: the further to the right you go toward a closed network, the more you repeatedly hear the same ideas, which reaffirm what you already believe. The further left you go toward an open network, the more you’re exposed to new ideas. (Good news is you can get this type of power network even if you hate networking.)
People who wear the same thing every day have good focus.
Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg are both known for a repetitive wardrobe, and their laser focus on their company's product. These men, and others, have said they don't want to use their brain power to choose what they will wear each day. And that's an explanation people are increasingly open to when their co-worker seems to never change clothes. However there's a difference between having ten of the same outfits for ten days and having one outfit for ten days. The biggest difference, of course, is smell. Gross, yes, but also a good way to understand your co-workers because you can smell their mood. Really.
People reveal their thinking patterns with their eyebrows.
Mac Fulfer, an expert in jury selection, says your eyebrows match with certain personality traits. For instance, he shows how people with straight eyebrows appreciate facts, ones with curved arches learn best from real-world applications, and those with angled brows like to be in charge.
This type of emotional intelligence is a key factor for being able to construct a career that works for your life. The more you are able to understand people around you, the more you are able to get what you want from them. And, done right, striving to succeed at work makes you a better person: Because if you assume your co-workers are thinking good thoughts, it's likely that they will think good thoughts about you.
KINGSMITH.

Stop Making Excuses And Be A Starter By Robert Herjavec.

Robert Herjavec

I’m not embarrassed to admit that I started my first business out of necessity – I was fired, and had a mortgage payment to make. Even though it was out of necessity – I still had to find the courage to be my own boss.
When you’re out today, think about how many small businesses you see and interact with. For each small business you see, someone made a courageous decision for it to exist. Whether it was to prove a point, to satisfy an itch, to beat the odds, to pursue a dream, or even to make ends meet, the courage to strike out on your own is worth celebrating.
I was like most people, afraid to fail and with very little guidance and NO experience as an entrepreneur. There are plenty of reasons why people make excuses not to start their own business — I’ve heard them all. When you fall into the trap of making excuses, you limit yourself from going after your dreams. “I can’t” is the lie you tell yourself so that you don’t have to try. In honor of Global Entrepreneurship Week (Nov. 16-22) and Small Business Saturday (Nov. 28), I wanted to share with you the top three excuses that I hear from would-be entrepreneurs, in the hopes that you might recognize your fear and find the courage to face it.

Now isn’t the right time.

Mark Zuckerberg didn’t create the concept of social media, but is now among the top 100 wealthiest and most influential people in the world. You don’t have to be first to the table. Sometimes when you put something off, “later” becomes “never.” It will never feel like the “right” time. Nothing is ever perfect, and you’ll always feel like you’re too busy and you don’t have the time. The bottom line? We all have 24 hours in a day; it’s up to you what you do with it.

You don’t feel prepared to run a business.

You don’t know the right people, you don’t have the money, and you don’t have the right skills. I know all too well that these are legitimate concerns for someone who wants to start a business, but to achieve the skills, connections and cash to start your business, you will have to earn them. Shadow a mentor, get a part-time job or volunteer, read books, search the web, reach out on social media, talk to friends and family, speak with a financial advisor and look into loans. Our connected world is at your fingertips.

You’re afraid to fail.

Everyone has advice, but no one knows what you have to go through to start, grow, and scale a business until they live it. I’ve lived it, and I know that the fear of failure is very real. Business, as in life, is a series of trial and errors — failure and success. If you suppress your fear of failure and are open to the lessons, you can learn each time you make a mistake you will be stronger for it. Failure can be embarrassing, but if you never try, all you will end up with is regret.
KINGSMITH.