How Being Poor Could Just Be The Best Thing That’s Ever Happened To You
When I was younger I considered myself lucky. My dad is a surgeon and we never lacked anything. I got top-of-the-range computers and equivalently priced gifts for my birthday most years.
I felt sorry for people who had nothing and had such an enormous mountain to climb if they ever wanted to achieve any success in life.
My perspective has since changed. What people don’t realize is that being born into wealth can be more debilitating than being born without any resources at your disposal.
Being born with a silver spoon in your mouth is just as crippling, if not in some ways more crippling than being born with nothing and being forced to work for every inch.
When I was young, I got expelled from school and fell into a trap of sleeping until the afternoon, watching TV all day, and driving around in my dad’s Mercedes. What I had been told all my life is that you have to work hard for a living, it’s competitive out there; but my subconscious internalised, not what I had been told my whole life, but what I had experienced my whole life, and that was that life was easy, there are such things as free rides, and you don’t need to work hard in life to make it.
I’ve seen that happen with other young people, where they start to believe that life owes them, and when they don’t get what they want they get furious! They think they’re better than other people because they have no frame of reference of what it’s like to have nothing. Youngsters like that are called brats, but people who are living in this condition are not so young anymore.
This attitude about life can cause very serious calamity, including landing you in prison and even killed, but that topic is for another time.
The theme of this post is that, if you are poor, don’t let that be in any way a deterrent to your success. Here’s why I envy people who have come from zero to hero – people who started with nothing and ended up with an amazing life and lots of money – people like Chris Gardner.
Pro’s and Con’s of being born with nothing…
Obviously, the disadvantage of being born without the resources you need to reach your dreams is that you need to first get the resources, whether that means money, knowledge, experience, influence or influential contacts or whatever.
The advantage is that having to fight for every inch on your way to success builds huge character, massive strength, persistence, wisdom and teaches you lessons that will enable you to go much further once you do eventually build up momentum. These are things which you might laugh at now, but once you have them, you realise they’re priceless.
People who go from financial poverty to wealth attain a perspective on life that makes them into more balanced people than people who were born into wealth can ever hope to be. They have the money, but also the balance to realise that life isn’t all about money, and that allows them to spend more time with friends and family, travelling etc, truly living life, and they have the financial wealth as well.
Those born into riches, even if they keep their riches, often live a life full of financial wealth, but utterly poor in these other areas.
The key for you if you’re high on dreams but low on resources, is to identify and take the first few steps. Once you get momentum you will be unstoppable!
Pro’s and Con’s of being born with everything…
We sometimes think that we’re in complete control of how we think about things and the perspective we have on life, but actually, your brain will accept truth based on your experience, not based on what people are saying, even respected influential people.
So if you’re born with parents that cater to your every whim, your brain will associate that you don’t need to work for a living. It doesn’t matter if your parents, your friends, or a respected hero of yours tells you that you need to earn your own living, it will only be when life’s experience starts causing your perspective to change that you’ll make a change. Until then, it’s as if you’re paralyzed.
You know in your head that you need to make things happen if you ever want to achieve your dreams but finding the fuel to get off your ass and do it, that’s a totally different ball game; and THAT is the crippling disadvantage that those born with everything have.
It’s not about resources. It’s about the attitude, character, and experience you gain from the process of building your own wealth (as opposed to living off of someone else’s wealth). The process required to build wealth has an incredible way of teaching you the things you need to know in order to manage and keep that wealth when it comes. Being born into wealth leads to mental and psychological laziness, paralysis.
That is something many people don’t ever get out of. And guess where the end of that road is: Poverty, financial, mental, and emotional – total and utter poverty. You can’t be proud of who you are. Even if someone buys you a Ferrari, you still feel like a loser inside. It’s like walking in town with your best friend’s beautiful girlfriend. You’re smiling cause people think she’s with you, but actually, you know the truth, and it sucks big time.
It’s something vitally important for parents to keep in mind. Many parents have said, “My kids will never have to go through what I went through to make it in this world.” Remember: If you take away your children’s struggle, you take away your children’s victory and all the character-building that goes along with attaining that victory.
The advantage of being born into wealth is usually irrelevant, because if I give you a spoon and food (resources), but you are not strong enough to eat (character), then you, my friend, are worse-off than the poorest of poor.