What if you're born poor?

Hi, Steve Barnes here with Life Writing Live once again. And it's got today, Thursday already. Oh, my God. The week's almost over. Listen, I just. These are gonna be really, really short. I think that what I'm gonna end up doing is either answering questions or finding things that people are saying on social media and finding ways to address them. And I saw a really good one today. Basically, somebody said. What was it? It was a post about a famous person, maybe a Cardassian, talking about how you have to work hard to get anything done. Somebody said, I never understood why people who are born rich are given so much credit for being rich. It's easy to get richer when you start rich. It's hard to get rich when you are born middle class. It's almost impossible to get rich if you are born poor, unless you have some freakishly amazing talent or. Or at least one adult to see it and help you. All right. And then she said something obscene. So I wanted to. I wanted to take a look at this because there's a lot of truth to that. I mean, I wasn't born poor by my standards. I mean, I guess we were in terms of some measures. Money was always a problem, but my mom never let us feel like we were poor. So it's kind of hard to say that. I don't want to dishonor her in that sense. You know, lower middle class. The black lower middle class is probably pretty close to white poverty in that. In that sense. But we were. We were okay. But my mom, for instance, sold encyclopedias so that we would have a fresh set of world books. She just did not let us. You know, she made sure we had library cards and she made sure that we had cultural experiences. I think that that is. Oh, gracia La Casillas. It's great seeing you, too, Graciela. I hope that your life is wonderful and that you and your family are well, and I hope to see you. Actually, my. My wife is starting to enjoy practicing martial arts. She's using a body action system, and it would be fun to get her a private lesson with you. So if you want to PM me, how much do you charge? It would be fun. But at. I hope that you are just great. And to Tom Barkley. Hello. So the question was, what happens if you. If you start with. With virtually nothing. So when. When she says. When she said. What was the. What was the line? Unless you have some freakishly amazing talent or at least one adult to see it and help you, you know something, there's a lot of truth to that, you're going to need to be very unusual. Most people stay in whatever social class they were born into. It takes unusual incompetence to fall, and it takes unusual competence to rise. And if you have a lot of issues, if you have a lot of things that are mitigating against you, there are gender things and sexual orientation things and racial things and cultural things that can make it harder, then I don't want to underestimate the impact of any of those things. But she says two things that are really important. Freakishly amazing talent. Well, maybe that's true. What if that's true? Let's interrogate that. See, first of all, I don't believe that talent is innate. I believe that talent is a matter of focusing on something over a long period of time until you. You've got it. That, you know, talent in that sense and skill that. That every single extraordinary person I've ever met, when I got close to them, what I saw was a lifetime of hard, focused work. Work that was so intense and so prolonged that most people can't even imagine it. I remember reading a book called the Mind of a Magician. I think it is maybe the magician's mind. It's about the mindset of professional magicians. And it made it very clear that these people, that the real secret to most of these people is that they spend more time developing their skill than anyone would imagine. There was one guy who has this, you know, mastered this impossible card trick. I mean, just hand him a deck of cards, he can do things with it. It just seemed like literally, you know, mentalism. And his comment was that the secret is he spent as much time developing that trick as he might have taken to become a brain surgeon. That's probably an exaggeration, but it says something there. And the guy who wrote the book made the comment that some of the best magicians he knows live in their mom's basement. You know, so it's like, yeah, you. If you say that you have to have a freakishly amazing talent, then the first thing you say is, okay, well, at least what I would say, you know, if I was starting my life over again, born into poverty, I would say I'm going to develop a freakishly amazing talent. And I'm going to be sure that it is in some arena where there is enough of a capacity to either prove my talent objectively or demonstrate it to enough people that I can find a mentor, you know, somebody to help me. But. But that would be my focus. What is that talent going to be? It's probably going to be something that I love doing because it's the stuff that you love doing that you'll spend the most time doing. You know, for me, that's writing and teaching martial arts and being with my family, man, I just, I love that. I love those things that just, you know, just. I'm crazy about those things. So I will spend time every day doing those things. And if I continue to model the behaviors and actions of people who are experts in those fields, then I will slowly start getting better. People sometimes get better more rapidly. I think that if there is a talent, that talent is an amazing persistence, the capacity to keep getting up once you've fallen down, that you get knocked down. You get up. You get knocked down. You get up because most people look at you and say, what is wrong with you? Why don't you quit? Most people do not have that. And that's what I've seen. Most of the people who, you know, who said they wanted to be writers, you know, there were writers clubs and this, that, that I belong to, and they didn't. They didn't continue. I kept getting kicked in the teeth, kept getting rejections, kept getting disappointments. My heart was broken so many times in so many ways, but for whatever reason, I just kept coming back, you know, it's. It. So that's the first thing. Decide to develop a freakishly amazing skill. You know, was it Steve Martin made the comment get so good that no one can deny that you're that good, that that's what your goal has to be? What are you going to do it? What, in what arena are you going to be freakishly good? Find it. Because it's not that 10,000 hours makes you a master. It's that all masters spend at least 10,000 hours. You know that you look at these masters and they have, you know, on average, spent 10,000 hours doing it. So if you're not willing to spend 10,000 hours, you're not really serious about mastery. You're kind of, well, it would be nice to be good at something. But if the average person watches three hours of television a day or is on social media a couple hours a day, it's very clear we have the time. What you don't have is the focus, the self confidence, the belief in yourself you're using. Say, I was born poor, or I was born this, I was born that, you know something. It is true that those things are obstacles. They drop the curve. The average member of your group will perform less. However, that doesn't say anything about what the individuals within that group can do. The individuals, if they can change their minds and develop that mindset of, I'm gonna do it, you know, patience, my ass. I'm gonna kill something. You know, that attitude. If you can. If you can develop that, then all the people I know of who succeeded, starting with relatively nothing, had an attitude very much like that. All of them. All of them. Every one of them. And so, you know, I remember hanging around with Octavia Butler. You know, Octavia and I lived walking distance from each other for years, and she was born with nothing. And. And by the end of her life, she had been acknowledged as a genius. She won the MacArthur genius grant. And now, if she'd lived longer, she would have seen her stuff all over Hollywood, you know, people developing all these series. But her family is getting that money, so she was obsessively focused, too. And she put all of her energy into something that she loved, such that even if she didn't achieve it, she would have spent her life doing the thing that she loved. I mean, isn't that the real reward, to spend your life doing the thing that you love? Now, if you can figure out a way to get paid for it, too, that's even better. I love getting paid for it. But the real thing, the real present, the real gift to yourself is to spend your life doing what you want. Now, if you get paid for it, great, because then, you know, if you don't have to split your time between flipping burgers writing stories, you're going to get better writing stories. So, yeah, I have written some stories in some context where it was just for the money, but I found a way to grow in that process because my goal was mastery. I was going to master this. I wanted to be freaking amazing at this. Okay? Now, we talked about that, and we will talk about excellence more. But what is the. What about the other part of it? At least one adult to see you and help you. And that is the truth. You can't do it alone. You're going to need to find allies, people who are further along, if you can, and some of my allies. I started that relationship by paying for them. There's Steve Muhammad, who was. Is, you know, one of the great teachers of my life. I paid to be one of his students, okay, so that I could model him. He helped me. He saw me. He saw where I was scared, where I was weak, where I did not understand, and he provided me with a model of how to become strong. Larry Niven, on the other hand, I could not pay Larry. I Mean, Larry's a multimillionaire, you know, I was broke, but what I could give him was sincerity. I had done my homework. I was already a writer. I just wasn't a very published writer. I still needed a lot of help. And I was sincere. I was honest. I was interesting. I could hold a conversation with him. I knew his work and could discuss his work with him. And he decided to give me a chance. And when he gave me that chance, you had better believe that I did everything in my power to be sure that he would never regret having given me that chance. He handed me a story that he hadn't been able to write to his satisfaction. And I worked my heart out to get that right. But I'd also done my homework. Now, here's the whole thing. He could say, well, you were lucky you found Larry Niven. Yes, I was lucky, but I'd also prepared. And another thing. Larry wasn't the first person I asked. I asked Ted Sturgeon, I asked Harlan Ellison. I asked Gordy Dixon. I asked a bunch of different people, you know, can you help me? Would you help? And they were all nice to me. But no, they. They didn't help me. You know, Ray Bradbury. They could not help me in that way. So it was a matter of knowing exactly what I wanted, being willing to work my butt off for it. I didn't ask anybody else to do my work for me. And I kept asking, will you help me? Will you help me? Will you help me? And I was the nicest, sweetest person. Because I figured that, yeah, there are people who really succeed that are assholes. If they're geniuses, they can succeed and be an ass. I knew I was prepared to work my heart out, but I didn't know that I was a genius. So I figured, you know something? Let me be the nicest person I can be. Because nice people always have people that are willing to work. If you've got the power, if you can. If you can do it, if you've got the goods. And you're also easy to work with. Oh, my God. Everybody wants to work with you if they know that you're easy to work with and you're a sweetheart and you've got the goods. Oh, that's perfect. So if you're just kind of okay, but you're an absolute sweetheart, people will help you. If you're a genius but an idiot, people will put up with you. But if maybe I could develop that freakishly amazing skill, or as close to it as I could get, I mean, Seriously, I'm not trying to say that that's what I've got, but I'm also as ethical as I can be, as positive as I can be. And my attitude is always, when somebody walks away from me, I want them to feel better than they felt when they were walking toward me. I want to add to their life. I want to lift some of their burdens. I want to be the best gift to the world I can be. Sincerely. See, that was the thing I could give Larry. I could offer him sincerity. I genuinely love that man. I mean, right down to the bottom of my heart. I liked him and I respected him at first. But how can you not love someone who changes your life? And if you have that attitude and you realize that these people, no matter how much they have achieved, they're just human beings like you. And you keep asking, keep asking. You understand, there could be a thousand different reasons why they say no. You know, there just could be so much going on in their lives, they're just not in a place to be able to do that. Or maybe you haven't done enough work yourself. You know, I would suggest, you know, before you approach a professional writer and ask for help in that way, do your work, publish them. Publish a couple short stories. You say, well, I published here and here. Would you look at one of my stories and help me understand what I need to do to get to the next level? And if you've done your work and you approach them honestly and maybe bought them dinner, they're likely to say, well, this is different. This person, you know, is. Is carrying their own log. So I'll just tell them what direction to drag that log in. You're not asking them to carry the log for you. They're not, you know, but they can point out the direction that you need to go. You need to train like this. You need to meet this person. You need to change this. And I have found that masters are so generous, are so willing, if you're doing your work, they love you. Because masters in a very rarefied territory. So they love meeting other people who are exploring the same rarefied territory. So that's like, you know, how to win friends and influence people. Study that. Study how to become a master at something so that if it's true, if this lady was true in her comment, it's almost impossible to get rich if you're born poor unless you have some freakishly amazing talent and, and at least one adult to see it and help you develop a freakishly amazing talent. Find the people to help you. That's all for today. I've got to do yoga and you know, just take care and send me notes if the things that you want me to address because this is my bliss. This is what I love. Watch my podcast or you know, it's@lifewriting podcast.com My wife, Tananarib Dhu and I talk about the artist life and living it with integrity and energy. And we'd love for you to join us. LifeWritingPodcast.com Take care. Bye. Bye.