I had a fear of poverty most of my life. It originated from my childhood experience living with my family as underclass citizens in a low-income neighborhood. My mom did her best as a single mother with three kids and no job. My father was never involved in my life, and he did not provide any economic support. We depended on the government’s welfare program to sustain us. From that experience, I developed a ferocious work ethic and intense hatred of poverty.
It was summer time. I was 12 years old and desperately in need of a haircut. My grandfather often took me to the barbershop to relieve my mother of the expense. But the day came when he could no longer afford to pay for my haircuts. This presented a major dilemma for my 12-year-old self because my hair grew out of control. That could not continue. So, I searched around and found some clippers. I fired those bad boys up and hacked every strand of hair off my head like a butcher. It was a mess! It was so bad, in fact, that I put on a wool Kangol cap, even though it was 90-plus degrees outside. My mom asked, “Why are you wearing a winter cap in the summer?” Slowly, I removed the cap and she exclaimed, in her concerned motherly voice, “Boy, what did you do to your hair?!” Sure, I confessed my misstep, but I did not concede to the thought of never doing it again. I loved myself too much to let poverty stop me from looking and feeling good. My very own mother taught me that. In that moment of scarcity, I gave birth to my hustle. Eventually, I perfected my hair-cutting skills so well that I was dubbed the neighborhood fade master. The money started flowing like water. And that hustle helped me cover some of my expenses while in college. My unsolicited encounter with scarcity was smashed by my creativity. The experience taught me that a limit in my resources is a trigger to become innovative.
Never let your lack of anything stop you from living your best life. Confront scarcity with creativity. To this very day, I use the deficits in my life as stimulus to do something great.
“An imperfect plan implemented immediately and violently will always succeed better than a perfect plan.”
— George S. Patton
Snake Plissken, the hero from the movie Escape from New York, was commissioned to rescue the president of the United States from his crashed plane in post-apocalyptic New York. He had 24 hours to retrieve the president. The only way he succeeded was by confronting the hostility with violent persistence and creativity. My situation was no different. To break the grip of poverty, I had to do more than vacate the low-income environment. I had to be violent and persistent. Admittedly, the initial process of escaping my poverty, I made a very big mistake. I thought by simply leaving the hood and getting a job that poverty would cease to exist in my life. I was wrong. I mistakenly viewed being poor as solely an external consequence of limited funds. What I did not take into account were some of the habits I had adopted as a result of being poor.
This is not a slight to a program that has helped countless people in need, including me. However, my family deified the welfare check and treated the first of the month like a sacred day. And without even realizing it, when I started working for a corporate paycheck, I had the same dependency mentality that I had for that welfare check. After I cashed my corporate paycheck, I spent it and could not wait until the next payday. To “supplement” my income, I added credit cards. On top of that, I had a car note, rent, and a student loan. Even though I said farewell to welfare, I was still living like I was on it. What should have been economic liberation was more like self-inflicted financial incarceration. There I was, making more money than I ever had, yet living like I was poor. It was my behavior that got me into my predicament. Experts say that money management is 80% behavior and 20% knowledge. I had to do something violent to break my poor behavior. Here is what I did:
I am still on my journey. However, this shift in my behavior is helping me to create wealth and disrupt the cycle of poverty.
