Operation: PAPERCLIP by IKC - Journal on Personal Thoughts and Stories
POVERTY IS NOT A BADGE OF HONOR
We’ve all seen it…
Some boomer talking about walking 10 kilometres to school crossing a mountain and 2 streams. Some inspirational talking boomer on how he juggles 3 jobs to make ends meet. Some big honcho boomer on how he had to suck it up to horrible bosses to make his career work. Some other boomer bragging about hardships and poverty…
You get the picture. It’s sad, difficult, and downright against the Geneva Conventions! 
They say these “difficult” times provided the push for them to succeed. That’s well and good but what irks me is that they have to shove it on our faces that those difficulties are “part of the process” and that we just have to go through them. 
According to them you just HAVE TO go through the same suffering they went through in order to enjoy success - There is NO OTHER WAY!
Well, there’s two (2) points I’d like to bring up:
1. A lot of those boomer braggarts who “came from the gutter” are STILL IN THE GUTTER.
You can’t talk about your hardship and difficult trials as though they were a badge of honor IF YOU HAVEN’T SUCCEEDED YET. You have to show something out of those trials and difficulties before you can make stories out of them. You cannot talk about the gutter in the past tense without getting out of it first!
The only time that YOUR STORY MATTERS is only IF YOU SUCCEED.
2. Here’s an idea: What if… We could learn from the experience of others?
I mean, we don’t have to go through the cutthroat competition of the Gilded Age to figure out how John D. Rockefeller built his fortune, right? Do we have to go through the devastating poverty of farm life to learn how Henry Ford built his automobile empire? Do we have to go through the boom-bust cycles of Jesse Livermore’s fortunes and personal life for us to be proficient in investing and trading?
No. We can learn from (thousands if not millions) others who have done and succeeded at these endeavors before us.
In closing, poverty is not a badge of honor until we become wealthy. Suffering and hard times are not accomplishments until we get past those hard times. We do NOT have to suffer ourselves for us to learn the lesson. We can stand on the shoulders of those who came before us. 
Keep your sad story for yourself for when you cry, you cry alone. Yet when you rejoice in triumph, the world rejoices with you. It is what it is.
Your story only matters if you win - SO WIN!
May you break resistances and reach new highs!