The Street-Smart Salesman: How Growing Up Poor Helped Make Me Rich

Chapter 3

Why Not Me?

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear—not absence of fear.

—Mark Twain

 

Once I was admitted to SEEK at the City College of New York, instead of feeling on top of the world, I found myself consumed with a brand new fear. As one of several hundred college freshmen with fresh hope and deeply troubled childhoods, some abusive and many times worse than mine, I became worried that I would soon be exposed as the dumbest kid of them all, maybe even of all time. I fought not to surrender to my fear of the possibility that I might be an actual 100 percent idiot, unteachable and unemployable, doomed to spend the rest of my life angry and scavenging.

New fears will replace the old ones. As far as I can tell, that's a universal rule. Money, financial security, nothing buys freedom from fear, sorry to say. No one—no one—rich or poor, lives free from fear. The rich live better than the poor, without a doubt, but the rich have their fears, too—fears of being unloved, unappreciated, losing their money, sickness, loneliness, and death, in no particular order. The rich and the poor have at least that much in common. But the rich don't have to confront their fears all day, every day, as the poor do.

Poor people live with constant low-level fears subject to spike under various and sudden circumstances, as well as the kind of oppositional, double-edged fears that chip away at a person's self-image: fear of being invisible coupled with fear of being noticed; fear of failure ...