Experiments With Hope - Episode 25: Poverty and Laziness

NOTE: This episode was recorded on December 17th, 2018 and moved from YouTube on January 18th, 2021.

Few people talk about the link between poverty and entrepreneurship. We prefer to talk about the "rags to riches" success stories. But, the fact is that there are more poor and struggling entrepreneurs than there are rich and prosperous entrepreneurs. This is why most new businesses fail after 5 years. Lack of adequate cash flow. In my opinion that makes this something worth talking about...whether we want to or not. 

In my experience, the primary cause of entrepreneurial poverty in a country like the United States is laziness. If you think this is mean or insensitive, please get the hell off my website and go back to your Karl Marx books. Some people start out poor, as I did, and have to work their way out of poverty. But, in my experience, most people are poor, not because they're too lazy to work, but because they're too lazy to think. In fact, I've found that, ironically, people will work with their hands ten times harder than they have to, because they're too lazy to stop and think. 

And let me be clear that when I say "think," I'm not talking about mere mental activity. I'm talking about the conscious effort to think creatively and proactively. The Author Wallace Wattles summarizes this beautifully in Chapter Four of his book The Science of Getting Rich when he says...

“To think what you want to think is to think TRUTH, regardless of appearances. Every man has the natural and inherent power to think what he wants to think, but it requires far more effort to do so than it does to think the thoughts which are suggested by appearances. To think according to appearance is easy; to think truth regardless of appearances is laborious, and requires the expenditure of more power than any other work man is called upon to perform.

There is no labor from which most people shrink as they do from that of sustained and consecutive thought; it is the hardest work in the world. This is especially true when truth is contrary to appearances. Every appearance in the visible world tends to produce a corresponding form in the mind which observes it; and this can only be prevented by holding the thought of the TRUTH.” 

-Wallace Wattles, The Science of Getting Rich (Chapter Four)

Think about the last time you were doing some boring or repetitious task because you wouldn't stop and think for even a few minutes about a more efficient way to do it. This is what I mean when I say that most people (myself included at times) will work harder than we have to with our hands, to avoid working with our minds.  When it comes to this, poverty and entrepreneurship actually SHOULD be incompatible. The problem is, too many entrepreneurs never make the transition from working like an entrepreneur to thinking like one. 

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