Lisa Keester's Wealth Class

A story about how a Duke professor named Lisa Keester became an early believer in Shaan when he was a pre-med student considering entrepreneurship.

"I took a class my last year at Duke. I was a pre-med student, had taken the MCATs, was ready to go to med school. In my last semester, I decided to take a class with my two best friends. We wanted the easiest class we could find, and on RateMyProfessor.com, the easiest class was called 'Getting Rich.'

The professor, Lisa Keester, had a crazy story. She graduated from Duke with a degree in Mandarin because that's what she was interested in. She told us she felt completely clueless about what to do with her life because all her friends were going to law school or banking. People would say 'What are you going to do with this Mandarin degree?' But she bet she could figure something out in China.

She moved to China on a one-way ticket, ended up building a great business connecting Chinese companies with American companies, got super rich in the process, retired by 30, and came back to teach.

When my friends and I had this terrible idea to start a sushi restaurant chain, everyone told us it would fail. Every adult I looked up to was saying I should just go to med school since I got accepted. But Lisa was the only one who said 'This sounds awesome, you could totally do this.'

At the time, I thought she believed in our idea, but looking back, she didn't even know us that well. She was actually just a big believer that if you do the most interesting, exciting, and ambitious thing in your life at the moment, things work out. But at the time, I interpreted it as her thinking we were going to win, and that belief fueled me."