I talk a lot about entrepreneurship, and most of the millionaires I’ve interviewed so far made their money as entrepreneurs. There’s another perspective to be had. The vast majority of people with never pursue their own business (which I consider unfortunate), so I feel like we need to give some attention to how a person that spends her/his career in corporate America can achieve financial independence.
I spoke with John, a successful older gentlemen who spent over ten years with Hewlett Packard “when it was still a great company”. He told me the lessons he learned there have been integral to his success as an entrepreneur.
He first talked with me about the attitude he took into his corporate job.
John: I’ve never really set any financial goal to be at some certain level, and my whole approach to my career has been do the best I could wherever I was and then the opportunities and the doors would just open naturally. A lot of people will have very specific goals of where they want to be by a certain time. I had some very broad goals - I had a goal coming out of college to double my income in the first five years (which I did), and it doubled in the next five years, but it wasn’t anything that I set out in a plan. I approached it more like “I will do the very best I can with whatever I’m given and the rewards will follow.” And that’s what happened.
The attitude of doing the very best with what you’re given isn’t something he saw a lot of during his career:
John: I did a lot of hiring and recruiting of MBAs through my career from some of the top schools in the country, and they’d come in with a little bit of a primadonna attitude. [They acted] like the pick and shovel work was beneath them and they wouldn’t put out…and therefore they’d lose out on opportunities because they saw themselves one or two levels above where they were. They had the potential but it doesn’t matter how bright a person might be – they’ve got to perform where they are. In any organization you’ve gotta perform where you are [or] you’re not going to be given more responsibility.
That’s the whole approach I took with my career. Early on in my career I wanted to be in management, but in order to do that I took a position that didn’t seem very meaningful - it was managing a bunch of people in accounts payable, and it wasn’t by itself a real highly visible kind of position, but it got me into (management) at a company like HP that [had] all the management training. I got the experience, and established the credibility.
I believe an attitude of entitlement and ‘being above that kind of work’ is one of the biggest threats to success for people of my generation. John has gone on from his ‘lowly’ position as an accounts payable manager to being a successful entrepreneur in the health supplements industry. He works now, not because he has to, but because he enjoys it.
Ask yourself: are you more similar to John in your approach to your work? Or are you like one of his primadonna MBAs that saw themselves as above the menial tasks?
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