Katherine Bell moved through 13 schools and learned to read in eighth grade, but earned straight A's and eventually built a multimillion-dollar company with her husband, selling it by 30. Adopted at 16, she later adopted twins from foster care, crediting her success to holding a vision while staying open to unexpected paths.
Chapters
My name is Katherine Bell, and I am here to tell you about why I am a sentinel of the American dream. My journey actually began in northern Canada. I was born to a teenage mother and I was in and out of more homes than you can possibly count and ended up going to 13 different schools and didn't actually learn to read until I was in the eighth grade. But I did get straight A's. And how did I do that? It's because I learned very quickly that they didn't want you to actually think. They just wanted you to get the right answer. So if you could figure out how to get the right answer, you got straight A's. And that's what I did. So through that entire journey, I had younger siblings. They ended up. Ended up getting adopted. I knew that I was headed down a really horrible trajectory and I. Something needed to happen. So by the time I was 16 years old, I actually did get myself adopted by a family that absolutely changed the course of my life forever. And that allowed me to go on and graduate and eventually go off to college. I ended up traveling the world and from there got to explore and discover that there were so many different ways that a person could actually live versus the childhood that I was born into. And went on to do a bunch of volunteering, which is where I ended up actually meeting my late husband. And we got married in 2001. He was an American and he actually had a dream. So it was choosing, you know, Canada, United States. We chose the United States because he's American. And so we took his dream and we turned it into a multi million dollar company and turned around later and sold it. And so what was extraordinary about that experience is I came to this country at 26 with nothing, and by the time I was 30, we were millionaires. Hence the American dream, which is extraordinary. And in that time of that journey, discovered that we couldn't actually have children. And one of the things that I like to really talk about is that when we hold onto a vision, but we let go of the picture, then magic shows up in all different ways. So we ended up adopting our twins out of the foster care system. We got them when they were four months old, a boy and a girl. That's what I wanted. That was my vision. And so we had our. We got our twins and ended up living truly. It was the American dream at the time, at least for our little family. And.
