Why Everyone Should Grow Up Poor

The 2009 Labor Day Message of the Wizard of Ads

When I was a boy, I noticed that people often remember things as having been better – or worse – than they really were. I would listen to friends and family and think, “That’s not what happened at all. I was there.”Call me jaded, but I came to believe that the average American is mildly self-delusional, forever attempting to sculpt a reality that matches their view of the world.

“It is a wonder to see how, when a man greatly desires something and strongly attaches himself to it in his imagination, he has the impression at every moment that whatever he hears and sees argues in favor of that thing.”

– Bartolomé de Las Casas (1474-1566)

Most people believe, deep in their hearts, that wealthy people are happy and poor people are sad. Am I right? So one day when I was twelve, I looked at my circumstances – broken home, no father, no money, bad neighborhood – and realized that people in the future would assume I had an unhappy childhood. So I looked into a mirror and smiled as I said out loud, “Never let them convince you of it.”Growing up poor gives you marvelous advantages. The people who love you are unable to hand you the things your friends take for granted, so you develop quick resourcefulness and humble audacity. Picking up pop bottles for the return deposit. Auctions. Auto salvages. Garage sales. Odd jobs. Bartering, trading, learning from your mistakes.

Resourcefulness and audacity. Priceless.

The Anatomy of an Entrepreneur is a recently published study of the personality traits of the founders of 549 high-growth companies. Funded by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and conducted by researchers from Duke University, USC and the University of Akron, the study found that 94 percent of those high-growth entrepreneurs came from middle-class, lower-middle-class, or “upper-lower-class” backgrounds.

Hah. Told you so.

Money, stability, and family connections will help you get into the best fraternities at the best schools. Then, if you’re lucky, you can graduate and go to work for someone who had the advantage of growing up on the wrong side of the tracks.

“I felt I would live a long, lonely, useless life and die alone and unmissed…This is what happens to the overachieving but essentially useless children of parents who raised their children to do well on tests but failed to equip them with the poison-tipped spurs of true ambition.”

– Jon Fasman, The Geographer's Library, p.5

Would you like to give your children the poison-tipped spurs of true ambition? Would you like to use your own spurs to climb the slippery mountain of Success?

I’ve spent the past 30 years working exclusively with self-made men and women; rule-breakers, innovators, rocket riders. Several of these have built empires worth tens of millions of dollars. They look like everyone else. But they don't think like everyone else.

Want to learn how high-growth entrepreneurs think? Come to our 3-day Bootstrap Business Boot Camp, Sept. 22-24. We've priced it cheap because you're not rich yet. (We're counting on you remembering the difference we made when you ride your rocket to the sky.)

The campus of Wizard Academy has been built entirely through the gifts of grateful alumni. We've never sought or accepted government money or grants from big foundations. This is a family thing.

And you are family.

We're with you all the way.

Roy H. Williams