The 4 Big Lies You Need to Stop Believing If You Grew Up Lower or Middle Class and Want to Succeed — #1 People Owe You
Growing Up Low Income
Many entrepreneurs I meet have similar backgrounds to me. When I was growing up, we lived in a tiny apartment and my dad worked three jobs just to put food on the table. We didn’t have extra money for anything, just paying the bills.
Eventually, by the time I got into middle school, we’d moved up to a middle class income level and were able to move to the suburbia many of us now know and love.
The Mindset Difference That Keeps People Poor
As an adult, I’ve lived in huge cities like Chicago, Istanbul, and Shanghai, as well as smaller towns like Oshkosh, WI or Avon, IN. Whether you come from a huge metropolis or a smaller town, I’ve noticed a tremendous difference in culture and mindset between upper class and middle or lower class individuals.
I noticed it when I was running schools in high income areas versus the schools I ran in middle class or low income areas. I especially noticed it when I became an entrepreneur and started meeting with many people that had built or ran million dollar businesses.
This difference in mindset is, in my mind, the key factor that stops people from achieving anything other than a mediocre job and a shitty retirement dependent on scraping together pennies.
Looking back, I see how I believed 4 big lies that are just part and parcel of that mindset. They’re what stop us from having the life we really want.
Instead, we spend more time complaining about how the government should be fixing this, or rich people should be paying more taxes so we get that, or how our job should pay us more and on and on and on.
Who Owes You, Again?
And that’s it. That’s big lie number one. The idea that others owe you something.
It’s a ridiculous sense of entitlement. The fact is that nobody owes you anything. You don’t deserve a better life just because. Working hard at some crap job for 10 years doesn’t mean they should pay you more. Having extra challenges in life compared to others doesn’t mean anyone needs to give an extra fuck.
It’d be nice, but they don’t need to.
Maybe that’s not fair. Maybe it really sucks. But it’s reality. If you want something, you have to work for it. If you have challenges others don’t, that means you’re going to have to work that much harder.
Did my dad have to work 3 jobs for 10 years to get us beyond eeking out an existence? Yeah, he did. Do I know a quadriplegic that started his own business and is doing incredibly well? Yeah, I do.
There Are No Excuses
I’ve met multimillionaires that grew up poorer than you can imagine and still built incredibly successful businesses or careers. I’ve met immigrants that didn’t speak English when they came over and had to completely rebuild their lives, yet now own empires.
So there are no excuses. Let me repeat that. There are no excuses.
Take Control of the Only Thing You Can
Hard work is the only thing you can control. You can’t change where you were born, the color of your skin, how much money your parents had, the fluctuations of the market. But you can change how hard you try.
Or, you could be like so many people I know who just sit around and spend more energy bitching about how others should be giving them more rather than going out and actually trying to change things.
The Wrong Way to Look at a Job
You know how you look at a job as a middle or lower class individual? You see it as an adversarial relationship, an unfortunate necessity. Your goal is to make as much money as possible while doing as little as possible.
Frankly, you’d rather be at the bar or out fishing, but you need this job to give you the money to do so, so you stay. That’s really it and it will take you nowhere.
A Lesson Learned at Disney
I remember this really hit home for me when I first started working at Disney. I was sitting at a Director’s Meeting in my 3rd week on the job and the Regional Director had a bunch of extra projects he needed help with. So he asked if anybody was willing to do some extra work and help out.
I’m sitting there thinking, “Why the hell would anybody want to do that? You’re gonna get paid the same, but now have to do more work. How dumb can this guy be?”
But, to my surprise, about half the room raised their hand to volunteer. I was like, “What the hell is going on?”
The Revelation That Put Me on the Path to Success
So I started asking people. But, more than that, over time, I got into the culture of Disney. They were really out to help people and give families amazing memories and experiences.
I wanted to be a part of that. I also started to realize how much I could learn by taking on other projects.
And that started to lead to other opportunities with the company. I went from managing one center, to two, I became a certified Disney Trainer, I worked with National Operations on procurement, recruitment, and curriculum projects. I got to do some really amazing work.
It was a revelation for me. The purpose of my job was not just to collect a paycheck. It was to be part of an organization that did great things for people, that made magic. It was also to further my own skills, to stretch myself, so I could always achieve more.
Nobody owed me anything. Even after all that hard work, I didn’t get made CEO, unfortunately :). I didn’t even get the Regional Director job I’d wanted, although I came very close.
But I did learn a hell of a lot about myself and about how to achieve business success. The skills, knowledge, and leadership I learned there just by taking on a wide array of different projects has helped me tremendously in being able to run my own business today.
The Choice Is Yours
You’ve got a choice to make. You can choose to continue to work your crappy job and hope they someday pay you more. You can be one of those people spending more time complaining and protesting about how they should raise the minimum wage, rather than going out and working to get to the level of pay you want.
The income inequality gap between senior executives and front-line employees is ridiculous in America. But, it’s your choice to stay on the front-lines or start building a business and an empire right now, so you can be that senior executive with the ridiculously high pay.
Then, when you’ve got the money, if you decide to give it back to your employees or use it to advance a cause, more power to you. But you’ll never be in that position if you don’t take risks and constantly push yourself harder to achieve your dreams.
You’ll definitely never get there if you sit around waiting for someone else to hand it to you because you think they owe you.
Nobody owes you anything. You don’t deserve shit. Get over it. Influence what you can control, yourself, and do whatever it takes to get where you want to be. That’s how it works.
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