I know that it sounds like one of those things that everyone knows, but the truth is: know it or not, everyone doesn’t do it! In mid 2007, who was selling their entire stock portfolio? If you know someone who was, honestly, selling out anywhere from the spring of 2006 all the way through the summer of 2007, those people are the ones whose stock advice you need to be listening to.
Now that housing is dropping like the temperature at night, who is looking to BUY houses? Those are the people whose real estate advice you should be listening to.
With the commodities in a serious bust right now, who do you know that is buying commodities? Those are the people whose commodities investing advice you should be taking.
Which businesses are flourishing now? The ones that were hurting 10 years ago.
Which businesses are in pain right now? The ones that have been flying so high they couldn’t imagine a crash for the past 10 years.

So, enough about the economy rant, and back to the word Contrarian.
I am a firm believer that the Entrepreneur’s most valuable and sustainable competitive advantage is the willingness to do things that no other business person is doing right now. In the instances outlined above, there are some clear and simple markets right now that “the masses” are running from as fast as they can. If you, the Entrepreneur, study those markets, there are some VERY good investments to be made in them, because enough people are panicked that the valuation of some of those investments is far below the actual value of the company. Note the use of the word “some” in that statement. I am not telling you to invest in the US Equities Market like Warren Buffet did. I am saying that you should use your intelligence, and your investing system that you have found working for you in the past, and apply that system to some of the markets that you are comfortable with. As always, diversify your portfolio. That does NOT mean that you should buy mutual funds or hedge funds (again, US Equities Markets may not be the best place for money right now). That means that you should find more than one, but not more than you can keep track of, investments that you are both interested in and willing to keep a keen eye on ALL THE TIME. These should be highly specialized investments, which are in an industry or field that you are particularly familiar with and are able to sort out the actual value of the investment in relation to the asking price. I will give you a few examples here, but by all means, follow your personal expertise!

Gold is extremely undervalued right now. When gold was at an asking price of $900+ per Troy ounce, the bullion manufacturers, treasuries, and coins distributors, were unanimously back ordered. The demand exceeds the supply a tremendous amount. Despite that, the price of gold has dropped below $800 per Troy ounce, and the demand is still extraordinarily high. That means that sooner or later the price will catch up to the demand. It is inevitable.
There are cities in the US where the rent for a property is more than double the mortgage payment for the market value purchase price (not even accounting for the down payment). I know of a few of these cities, and I am investing in those real estate markets. When that is the case, find particular properties which allow you a 100% return on investment (ROI) in less than 5 year (assuming 100% occupancy). Those are the houses that are worth your investment. Don’t forget all of the fixed and variable costs that a landlord has to deal with, and include those in your ROI calculations (Insurance, Mortgage, Taxes, Property Management, Replacement Reserves, Repair Reserves, etc.).
Real Estate should ALWAYS be a cash flow investment, you should never buy a real estate investment looking to break even and build equity.

So, above are 2 distinct investment types. Both can be built into a business if you want to go that route. Now, go find your own investment ideas. What other things are undervalued right now? What can you invest in now, hold on to, and sell in a few years for a large return on investment (ROI)? Find them, invest in them, save them, and re-sell them sometime in the future, when their value has gone up. Remember: Money is not made when you sell your investment, money is made when you buy it!

Your loyal and very busy editor…

So, now that you have heard all about my college story, I guess it is time for me to talk to you about the real education in life. I know, “School is the real education, right?” Well, no. For an entrepreneur, there is very little of value to be garnered in school in support of your career. No school teacher can teach you how to be an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs are not interested in working for a school system! I know that some of you will have a problem with this, so allow me to substantiate this now.
The following are the skills/behavioral patterns taught in a school:
1) First and foremost, learn to follow orders.
- Teachers tell you to do classwork, homework, and to prove your learning over a given period of time based on testing.
- Teachers are absolutely unwilling to even consider the possibility that this is not a productive activity, or that their method is not the most sound or valuable; AND they will not consider that their methods or activities are not the most valuable for you.
2) Learn to fear mistakes.
- You are punished for your mistakes, and rewarded for your successes. Now, no one actually likes to be wrong. But students in school are actively taught that being wrong is a bad thing.
- We are not ranked in our classes by how much we improved, but by how much we were right.
3) Learn to follow the pack.
- Not only is the educational environment enlisted against the entrepreneur, but the social environment is as well! School social environments actively discourage students from trying their own path.

As I am certain that these are not the only traits that stand in the way of success as an entrepreneur, allow me to move on and worry about whether or not this list is complete when you all write me updates and suggestions!
The following are a list of the contrary (in order) skills/behavioral patters of a successful entrepreneur:
1) Entrepreneurs are very contrarian. They do not like to follow orders.
- So, when a teacher tells you to do something, and will not give you a reason why; it seems like a complete waste to you! The reward of grades is almost entirely valueless.
2) Entrepreneurs have come to understand that the path to financial health and wealth comes through making the mistakes that others don’t make.
- Entrepreneurs, like everyone else, do not actively enjoy messing things up. However, it is increasingly clear to entrepreneurs, as their lives and careers move forward, that making mistakes is a profitable endeavor. Again, we are contrarian. We WANT to go where no one else will! We WANT to do what other people won’t!
3) We live our careers doing the opposite of everyone else!
- For the last time: We are contrarian! And it works for us! If you find yourself wondering why everyone else is doing one thing, when it seems perfectly natural to you to do exactly the opposite, go with your gut! Do the opposite! You will find that it can earn you a lot of money. More importantly, it is a lot of fun!

Now that we have spent some time bashing public education, let me make something very clear. There are some very valuable things to be taken away from public education, BUT THOSE THINGS DO NOT INCLUDE A TRADE SKILL! Pardon my caps, if I surprised you, but I find that statement to be slightly important. Trade skills are for employees. They are for people who are intending to do what everyone else does. You are following a well beaten path, down a road that has been tried and proven many times over. This is not a bad thing, but it is not the place for entrepreneurs. It is safe, boring, and not very profitable. The path to excitement, and profit, is down a road that the other people are not taking!

Ok, I am going to try to keep things shorter, and sharper, in the future. So this is where I will draw this to a close. Enjoy, and look out for my next post!

I was far from the perfect student. The honest truth is: I was a lousy student, right up until it was time for college. I graduated high school with a 2.36 GPA. Think about that for a moment. If you are thinking that those grades aren’t nearly good enough to get me into any decent school at all, you are almost correct. As a stand-alone, those grades virtually guarantee me that I will be rejected from my own state school, and likely would have to beg a Community College to allow me entrance. There is a reason for that, which I am going to discuss below. But first, allow me to allay some of your fears that your child will fall into the pattern that I fell into and be doomed to my fate. My fate is not a bad fate at all.
In fact, my college experience was a phenomenally valuable experience for me. This is true all the way from the applications process, through graduation, and into getting jobs and using my degree. Please enjoy my story, and perhaps we can post again about the hows and whys of what failures and successes manifested in my life, and what can be done to ensure that you will experience my successes, and avoid my failures.

In my high school each student was assigned to a group of 8-10 students of the same age group (yes, random assignments) to meet with and discuss school, success, and life for about 10-15 minutes each morning. That group was assigned to one of the teachers in school, who was referred to as a TA (yes, Teacher Advisor, not the same TA as in college). I have discovered that this is a similar situation, with slightly different names and time-frames, to what happened to my generation in public schools all over the country. There were some great advantages to this system, and some significant disadvantages as well. I am much more acquainted with the disadvantages, as I ran into each of them head on! We will circle back to this a bit later, first let me get you into the story.
In 8th grade (and you may even remember taking these), every student in my school was forced to take a 3-day long set of exams, designed to give your TA and the school Guidance Department some direction on where you should be expected to end up. There were plenty of students who were told that they would end up as teachers, scientists, bankers, lawyers, and nearly every other kind of career that you can expect. My test told me that I had a 94% chance of becoming a plumber. I have come to appreciate that in a very different way, now, than I did then. At the time, I believed that that was definitive proof that that test was a worthless waste of time which was designed to administer road blocks in my life path. And, in practice, that is precisely what happened. My Guidance Counselor (yes, every student is assigned a Guidance Counselor as well) had a conference with my TA at some point during that semester, and the two of them decided that since I am destined to be a plumber, I am not worth the emotional and academic support that I needed in order to be a successful high school student. My TA stopped badgering me about my grades, and my Guidance Counselor was so willing to believe the test results that he actually told me not to apply to colleges, as the application fees were going to be an unnecessary expense (I did go to college, and my application fees ended up being waived for each of the schools I applied to). Further, my Guidance Counselor, who is supposed to be the guy who helps you finish and apply for colleges, told me to my face that since a college education is not in my future, he is not interested in working with me to get me into college.
Don’t give up, and stop reading because of this. I didn’t give up and stop trying, and my success, while hard fought and hard won, is decisive and exciting. We will see the happy ending, but not until the end!
On high school graduation, my grades were absolutely the product of the system. I know that you have heard that many, many times in the past, but you will come to see, as I have, that in this case (and many others similar to me) it is actually true. That is not to say that my high school grades were a determinant in my choices for college. This is absolutely not true. I pursued college, my first opportunity to study something that I want to study, with a fervor otherwise unknown to my academic acquaintances. I applied, coming out of public high school, to 17 different colleges, and was accepted to 16 of them. Among these were some of the best known Ivy League schools on the lists. The 17th school, to which I was not accepted, I was wait-listed, and withdrew my application before I was given an answer either way. I still, to this day, have not received a single rejection letter from a college. I have been rejected from academic institutions, as I am about to discuss; but never from a college or university.
What was it, you should be asking just about now, that allowed a man who graduated with a 2.36 GPA, and no help or recommendations from his school Guidance Counselor, to gain acceptance to some of the most prestigious universities this country has to offer? Well, since we are now at that part of the story, I can think of no better time to discuss.

College applications, job applications, and even building new friendships, despite what your guidance counselor would have you believe, is NOT based on only 1 piece of your application. My grades, as dismal as they are, actually provided me an opportunity to shine. I know this sound strange, but it is the absolute truth. In truth, I am a highly intelligent person, and was given the oportunity to shine in that my grades were well below what the recruiters were even used to seeing. They would stop at an application like mine simply because most people won’t even try to submit it with a GPA as low as mine. By stopping, they would examine, out of pure curiosity, the rest of my application; which in my case was exemplary. I had stellar SAT scores, and my application essay was both extraordinarily well written, it was also significantly touching. It was perhaps one of the best pieces of writing I have ever created.
These two points, in conjunction with my grades, made me actually more competitive than I would have been with a 3.5 GPA (plenty of my friends with prodigious high school academic achievements were rejected from the same schools that I was accepted to). Now, even those two together are no saving grace for someone who is socially inept. I went to each of the 17 schools that I applied to for personal interviews with admissions officers. In most cases, as you would expect, they scoffed at my grades when they first saw them. Usually, their look of disgust was replaced by a look of interest when they located the SAT scores shortly afterward. This was enough to get an interview, and I shine in interviews. Hence, waived application fees, and 16 acceptance letters.
I did not, however, go to a college or university the year after I graduated from high school. Did I, you may wonder, travel the world, or take some interesting or exotic job? Unfortunately, no, I did not. I still had not realized that the things pulling me away from traditional education were actually beneficial pieces of my personality. As the eduationsystem dictated, I believed that my personality, colorful and quirky as it is, was a detriment to my lifelong success. At least, some part of me believed it. If it was on the surface, I would have faced it and dealt with it, moving on with my life. I did, clearly, come around to that eventuality, but it took significant hardship beforehand.
Instead of going to college, I applied to private high schools for a post-graduate course of study. No, that is not a typo; I did this for “personal reasons”, or translated into a language that makes more sense: I did this to reconcile myself with my poor academic achievement in public school. More to the point, I had proven that grades are not the be-all-end-all; but I wanted to prove, at least to myself, that I am capable of getting any grade I want (which is what I had publicly maintained, and proven, on many occasion prior). I set my heart on a GPA of 3.3, being low enough that I shouldn’t have to give up my life to acquire it, and high enough to prove my point. Care to guess my success? Well, in case you are wondering, I had no problem at all earning a 3.3 GPA, and my second round of college applications was much shorter. I applied to only 1 college, early decision, and was accepting; raising my grand total of acceptance letters to 17.
In reference to my statement above of rejections to academic institutions… You may have guessed by now, but I was referring to Preparatory School, otherwise known as Private School applications following my graduation. I did, finally, locate an institution which was willing to turn away good students, and good people, on the basis of grades alone. I applied to 4 Private Schools, and was accepted to only 1 of them. This may come as a surprise, based on the statement above that I was able to garner, based on nearly the exact same application requirements, acceptances to several of the most prestigious institutions in the country. Private Schools, on the other hand, don’t care. All they want is a perfect set of grades, or a very famous family member.

In college, the going was a lot easier. I was able to study the things that I found to be interesting. I DID NOT study business, in case you are wondering. And, if I had to go back to do it all over again, I would again avoid business studies like the plague. There is a huge set of reasons that I can give you for this, but the most important one worthy of consideration is that learning about business from a textbook is similar to learning about baseball from a textbook. Without direct involvement in the processes of business, the textbook learning that you submit yourself to is, in fact, a direct detriment to your opportunity to success. You will fill your head with information that is not relevant, while reducing your opportunity for personal and creative growth.
I did, however, study something that I consider interesting. I studied Theoretical Physics as my primary degree. With my free time I managed to pick up some other degree and resume boosting material. All told, my parents, friends, relatives, and myself, were all quite proud of my accomplishment, and I have had no difficulty finding or keeping good jobs in the marketplace. But this post is about entreprenuriship, not jobs and grades!
Theoretical Physics was absolutely fascinating, and it was easy to earn a 3.5 GPA studying the courses that are interesting and intellectually stimulating. I was so engrossed in my Theoretical Physics studies, that I nearly committed myself to a further degree in Physics, which would have been a wonderful choice, and will likely resurface in the future.

This academic choice has served me very well, but was a long and hard road. Look for more on my follow up posts.

As always, thank you for your participation!