Why Privileged White Males Need to Own Up
Let me start by saying I’m a 28-year-old, 6' tall, white male.
By CHRIS DANILO — This first appeared on my personal blog.
I grew up in a wealthy suburb of Philadephia.
I went to good schools, (got kicked out of one, but that’s another story) and graduated from Penn State University with a degree in Psychology and Neuroscience.
I grew up with all the resources (social, financial, and intellectual) to give me an unfair advantage and had some amazing opportunities thrown my way — even after I messed a lot of them up.
Malcolm Gladwell has a great description of how factors like race, height, and gender correlate with success in business — which means my results arent’ purely based on my brain and CV.
If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.
Here’s where things get interesting.
I have a good friend who lives in west Philadelphia. He’s African American.
I was talking to him about how I quit my job managing a software company so I could work on my own projects. He’s considering doing the same and wanted to learn more about my experience.
I told him that I had enough cash saved up for a while and that I figured I’d have a profit-generating business in a few months, so I pulled the trigger and quit my cushy 8–6 job.
I’m a hard worker, and I’m smart. But fast forward and I put in 80-hr work weeks for over a year and I still failed at getting my projects off the ground.
Luckily, I had friends and family to help me out when I decided to shift gears in December 2015. I realized that I needed to focus on getting some consulting contracts to stay alive and pay my credit card minimums.
This meant falling back on my network of relationships I’d made.
Reality set in. Only after I’d built a sustainable income stream could I buy my time back and work on my own projects. My cash runway was gone. Oh well.
I was couch surfing for almost two months and pulling in just enough money to survive. It was pretty stressful, honestly. I was just trying to make sure I had enough money for food.
When I told my friend about this, he immediately called me out.
“Yeah, you don’t have the same risk as I do with that safety net.”
Of course, I was like, “what do you mean?”
He explained.
He has a well-paying job, but he’s also helping his mom out by paying a good portion of the mortgage on their house. If he quits his job and fails like I did, they could lose the house, putting his mom and sister out on the street.
Definitely NOT the same consequences I had. And I thought I was stressed out.
There’s a whole conversation in here about generational wealth and how policies like redlining have made it much harder for black people to get a loan on a house and built wealth — but that’s another blog post.
My point here is that my parents were still providing resources to me. My failures only impacted me and the consequences weren’t even life-shattering.
This is not a wake-up call, it’s a call to action.
There are so many of us, in positions of abundance but in mindsets of starvation, who are sitting on our dreams and ideas because we are afraid of what might happen. We are hesitant to start our projects and help others because we’re afraid we might be at risk.
It’s not as risky as you think.
Really. Think about what the worst-case scenario is.
Do you move in with your parents? Do you ask your spouse to cover rent and food for a few months? Do you have to live on a futon until you find income?
My point is; for most of us privileged white males, it’s not that bad.
You owe it to the human race to take that risk.
You owe it to those who have much more risk, to take your idea or your restlessness and build something that improves us as a species and enables everyone to work toward their dreams.
You owe it to everyone to look realistically at your life and say: when I get to the end of it all, will I regret playing it safe?
I don’t think anyone has ever laid on their deathbed and grinned: “Boy, I’m sure glad I played it safe!”
Will you take action on your idea?
What can you do today to get started?
There are communities online, on Facebook, and on Twitter, that are full of people with the goal of quitting their 9–5 gig and working on amazing projects.
Find them. Learn from them. Execute your life the way you want to.
Use the Google machine! That new-fangled internet box! You have all the world’s resources and information in your pocket right now!
We all have excuses.
- I don’t have the time.
2. I don’t have the money.
3. I don’t have a team.
Well, guess what? You’ll never have the time or money, so don’t let that stop you. And no one is going to follow you if you’re not already hustling your ass off.
Make it simpler. Make it smaller. Make it actually reachable.
“People are fast to stop you before you get started, but hesitate to get in the way once you’re moving.”
—Tim Ferriss
For most of us, excuses are produced by the mirage of “that perfect dream project” that will never actually be what we dream in our minds. Excuses come from the fear of being penniless, but that’s not as likely for us privileged white males.
The sooner we look at our vision for helping others and simplify it to something small enough to take action on today, the sooner we will accumulate the momentum required to chug up the “life-changing project” hill.
Audit yourself, your mission, and your life.
To whom do you owe your idea? A specific niche? A demographic? Yourself? Who is suffering because of your fear?
Here’s a somewhat disturbing message from Bronnie Ware, a nurse who wrote “The Top 5 Regrets of the Dying.”
The number one regret of the dying:
“I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”
“When people realize that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled. Most people had not honored even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made. Health brings a freedom very few realize until they no longer have it.”
You are capable. You have everything you need to build something bigger than yourself. It’s not as risky as you think.
You have the power to decide.
Will you play it safe, or go for it?
If you liked this, you might also like: 7 Surprisingly Simple Rules to Change Your Life.
Your feedback means everything to me. 🙌 Let me know what you think in the comments or reach out to me on twitter. I’d love to hear your thoughts so I can improve my message.
Thanks for reading!
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