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Michael Ellsberg

Author, The Education of Millionaires and The Power of Eye Contact

Michael Ellsberg is the author of The Education of Millionaires: It’s Not What You Think, and It’s Not Too Late, out Sep. 29th, 2011 from Penguin/Portfolio, and The Power of Eye Contact: Your Secret For Success in Business, Love and Life, from HarperCollins. He also writes a blog on entrepreneurialism, career development, and education at Forbes.com.


The Education of Millionaires is a bootstrapper’s guide to investing in your own human capital. Ellsberg interviewed some of the most successful people on the planet who didn’t complete college and who educated themselves in the real world, to deconstruct their secrets and create a “Syllabus for a Successful Life” based on what he learned from them.

The book features interviews with self-educated billionaires Phillip Ruffin and John Paul DeJoria, Facebook co-founders Dustin Moskovitz and Sean Parker, WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg, fashion designer Marc Ecko, Pink Floyd lead guitarist David Gilmour, and marketing experts Eben Pagan, Frank Kern and Joe Polish. It also features the insights of experts including Seth Godin, “Rich Dad” Robert Kiyosaki, and PayPal co-founder and Facebook angel investor, billionaire Peter Thiel.

The Education of Millionaires has been sold into Korea pre-release, and The Power of Eye Contact has been sold into China, Russia, France, Korea, Vietnam, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Brazil. The latter was featured in the Washington Post, and on Tim Ferriss’s Four-Hour Workweek blog.

Ellsberg is the creator of Eye Gazing Parties, a series of social events based on eye contact which attracted feature press coverage from the New York Times, Associated Press TV, CBS News, CNN, Good Morning America, MSNBC, Regis & Kelly, Current TV, Yoga Journal, the San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco magazine, the BBC, the Times of London, Match.com, Nerve.com, Agence Press France, German and Canadian national television, and in Tim Ferriss’s #1 New York Times andWall Street Journal bestseller The Four-Hour Workweek. Elle magazine called Eye Gazing Parties “New York’s hottest dating trend.”

Ellsberg collaborated with Dr. Marc Gerstein on Flirting With Disaster: Why Accidents Are Rarely Accidental, which was reviewed in the Wall Street Journal. Ellsberg’s work has also been featured in theHarvard Business Review online and on Digital Book World.

Ellsberg was born in San Francisco i