27 November 2007 119 views No Comment Print This Post  Email This Post

My grandfather literally came to the United States with nothing. In 1947, a group set up to help Jews get out of Europe managed to get him on a boat to New York, along with the clothes on his back. From there, they put him on a train to Nebraska and got him a job driving a truck.

He had an eighth grade education. No English. No family. He married the nice girl working the counter at the Woolworth’s in Omaha. She had a high school diploma, and not much else.

Today, they are amazingly successful. They own real estate, donate money to good causes and are generally pillars of the community. I don’t know how much they’ve made — I actually don’t want to know — but they are definitely wealthy by anyone’s standards.

I know how my grandparents did it, too. Sheer willpower and hard work. That is the real secret to building wealth — no lotteries, no get-rich-quick schemes, just a willingness to work hard and take responsibility for your own efforts. It took my grandfather about four years from landing in Nebraska to realize that he’d never make much money working for other people.

He struck out on his own. He bought a little motel: he did all the handyman work and my grandmother did maid service. They ran a grocery store. They opened a furniture store. Between the two of them, they managed to handle just about every business they could get into. Somewhere in there, they even managed to raise four children (each of whom runs at least one business of their own— there are no cubicle monkeys in our family).

My grandparents’ story is the quintessential tale of entrepreneurship. The fact that it leans towards the stereotypical doesn’t make it any less valuable. Personally, I’ve always been able to look up to their example, and learned early on that I’m the only one who can make sure that I succeed. I don’t know that I could do what they did, though. The thought of starting entirely from scratch, in a country where I didn’t even know the language, is scary. I’d like to think I’d manage, but I don’t know. But their example has been enough to push me. If my grandparents could do so much with so little, I refuse to do any worse.

Just like I learned from my grandparents, making money isn’t complicated. I just have to work hard and work for myself.