DD Support Board and Research Team

[shajandr]

"I assume you had parents who valued education"

Nott my dad. My mom always encouraged me to read and write. Neither had college degrees. My dad, while a really supernice guy, could nott even figure percentages (e.g., what is 10 percent of 200 - he wouldn't know) and was born a 'blue baby' and probably had some brain damage at birth (he said he was told that by his aunt and his mother confirmed it). He was a Marine in the Pacific from spring 1942 until the winter of '45 into '46 - he was in many of the well-known battles across the Pacific - from the Aleutians, Kwajalein, Peleliu,the Gilberts, Makin, Okinawa, and the Battle of the Surigao Strait at sea. He was on the battleship Mississippi when it was hit by a kamikaze and he jumped into the 5" gun turret to throw live shells overboard so they would nott be detonated by the fire. When he was discharged, in 1946 in New Orleans, he had hearing loss, scars from flash burns, and a metal sliver in his eye that he had for over a year because there was no opthalmologic surgeon in the western Pacific or at sea who was qualified to do the surgery - so they disembarked him at New Orleans to have the eye surgery done before he was discharged. He was a great man, butt just nott very smart nor into the value of education.

My mom was a voracious reader and writer. Butt enough on that or this will be a very long post. She was more of an example to me than one who ever said or implied "you must do well in school".

And this goes to my point; at no time did I or do I feel disadvantaged because of our economic limitations - if anything, I feel the opposite - and maybe this is why I am so frugal and like ghetto tourism - I feel that being on the poorer side actually drove me to success. I feel that I was advantaged, if anything, by being from a low economic household.

My uncle (my mom's bro) also became very educated (in math and in computers in the early 1960s) on his own volition at public schools and public university/college. He was trained in computer science before they had computer science departments or degrees. After his masters degree, he took a job at Boeing in computing, then he went to LA and worked for McDonnell-Douglas in computing, then another company (I can't recall the name). He took all his available money and bought a janitorial service, then he had workers and pickup trucks so he had them learn to install fire and burglar alarm systems in his commercial clients as well and he bought a PDP-11 computer to have the alarms tie into to monitor all the alarms with one user at a monitor. He then had all kinds of spare computing power, so he sold one of his clients at Chino airport who sold airplane parts located all over the world a monthly subscription and he converted all those 3x5 cards they had to a searchable database (to use all the free time of the user sitting at the monitor he was paying to monitor alarms) - he saved them so much money that the client was paying him $14,000 a month in the early '80s just for that database service - more than his entire business expenses. Then he still had this person at the display with time on their hands (the alarms had to be monitored 24/7 so it was multiple individuals doing the same job at different shifts) and he realized that if his trucks had mobile radios the monitor person could dispatch them more efficiently when a janitorial emergency, an alarm, or whatever occurred. So he bought from a company that was divesting themselves of all their radio assets. He only wanted mobile radio, butt they wanted to sell the whole package - mobile radios, pagers, and this new thing called cellphones! So he bought it all, just for the mobile radios. Well, sure enough pagers became more popular and then the cellphone wave came along and he was king of cellphones in the Inland Empire - and sold his entire business to a larger cellphone carrier that was then bought by McCaw cellular and then became MCI. Bottom line - he made a ton of money after years and years of hard work and saving and investing in his business.

I suppose some people would call that just "good fortune". Nonetheless, he came from dirt, and even though he was and is what I think would be considered rich my everyones' measure except maybe Trump, when he visited he would go to the local low-end dive bars. I asked him why he goes to the dumpiest places with sawdust on the floors. He said to me "I'm a blue collar guy. That's all I've ever been or ever will be." He drove one of the old, dented, faded paint Ford Courier mini-trucks he kept from his business (until it finally blew a head gasket and cracked the block) even though he had tens of millions of dollars. I asked him why he left his aeropace computing career and bought the janitorial business in the first place. He said (I'll paraphase from memory): "I'm really nott that smart, butt I'm smart enough to know that I'm nott that smart. If I stayed with a big company, I'd eventually be pushed aside by younger kids from better schools. I know I'm a blue collar guy, so I knew I could do janitorial work even if business got bad, I could still sweep and clean toilets my myself. I've been so poor I don't fear failure, so I take risks and play in areas I know I can compete. That's all I've ever done. I was driven to make it work, no matter what it took or how much crap I had to deal with. The rich kids that were in my cohort at Boeing and McDonnell were stuck there because of their fear of losing their comfortable job and status. They don't think like us blue collar guys. They fear manual labor. They fear losing their new-car-every-two years or their house. They fear becoming poor - a fear that traps them. I've never had that fear. I've failed at things. I lived poor for a long time. Because of that, I succeeded at my business. Being a blue collar guy is what made me. Why would I nott go to bars where I belong - the blue collar bars - where guys who build stuff, get dirty, and rely on their ability to work - to survive and feed their families go to relax for a few beers after work or on the weekend. All I am is a blue collar guy who decided to work for himself and wanted to do a good job and be efficient."

I took that to mean that if he hadn't been poor, he would have wound up like the rich kids who wound up trapped in the bureaucracy and politics of Boeing and McDonnell.

So, tell me how 'advantaged' those rich kids were and how 'disadvantaged' my uncle was.

He's nott the exception either. One of my good friends is a very successful attorney - who came from a poor farm town in CA - his dad was a Japanese internee - the family lost everything in WW2. So he grew up with his dad running a salvage yard and farming a small plot of land. My friend used to work the vegetable field and also man the roadside fruit stand. His dad worked to find a way to grow the gobo root - a Japanese vegetable that people seemed unable to cultivate in the USA (the root didn't grow right and was misshapen and tasted wrong). His dad found a way to grow the gobo root in plastic tubes inserted into the ground, so the root filled the tube and formed an almost perfect cylinder - and it tasted right. My friend went off to a UC while his dad worked to expand his gobo root plot and find Japanese markets and restaurants that would buy it from him. My friend graduated and went to work for a major semiconductor company. Like my uncle, he decided he was a blue collar guy/farm kid in a bureaucracy that he didn't want to stay in, even though the money was very good. So, he saved and wound up buying three rental homes while he lived in a garage that was converted into an illegal apartment, and he went to law school - living off the rental income and his savings. He joined our firm a couple of years after I did - and us two farmboys/blue collar dudes hit it off. We'd play poker with these blue-blooded kids from Ivy League backgrounds who were slumming by inviting me and my friend into their game. While these schmucks would lecture us hicks on why we were misplaying our hands base don mathematical probabilities, we buddy and I were cleaning them ~OUTT. The mouthiest guy (after a few drinks) was a Ph.D. scientist/lawyer - he'd have to run ~OUTT to the ATM almost every game to replenish his chip stack. Everytime he'd explain why my friend and I were fucking upp by nott playing according to the mathematical probabilities. That chump prolly dumped $25k to us over the course of a couple of years - lecturing us all the way - never understanding that poker is nott a game where the mathematician wins.

I offer these as examples of how being from poor and/or rural backgrounds is often a real world advantage - and being a rich kid is a disadvantage. You should read this book - and this is why the top universities are accepting and inducing to matriculate applicants who were orphaned - they succeed at much higher rates than those with comfy childhoods with no experience dealing with obstacles or failing:

http://www.amazon.com/Outliers-Story-Success-Malcolm-Gladwell/dp/0316017930

I'll end this overlong screed with a quote from Gordon Gekko:

"Gimme guys who are poor, smart and hungry."

There is pure truth in that statement. Those are the kids with the 'advantages' who are much more likely to succeed.