You’ve Been Programmed for Poverty

One of the biggest reasons that I see facing people who are not where they want to be in their careers, in their job, when it comes to making money, it boils down to one thing. It’s one thing that I personally struggled with for decades. In fact, it’s something that I still struggle with, because this problem, it never really goes away. And you need to be consciously aware of it, because our brains are our human desire there is to avoid this problem in particular and kind of seek control. So let me explain what this is. This is what I call the poverty programming trap. I have a video coming out on YouTube here very shortly on this very topic. So I’ve been writing about it recently.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this because I believe we have been programmed ever since we were little, from the very first day that we went to school to be poor. The way that we were taught how to function in the classroom, how to learn, how to grow, how to problem solve. I think from day one, we were taught the completely wrong lessons. We were taught to show up, face forward, raise our hand, do the homework, show up at this time, leave at this time. We were constantly being told what to do, when to do it, and how to do it. And then we were judged based on how well we were able to follow the instructions. Now, this makes us very good workers. It makes us very good at following instructions.

But the problem is, in today’s modern world, where we have AI, we have robots coming online more and more every single day. The problem is, if I can tell you what to do, then I could tell a machine how to do the thing, too, which means you are replaceable. And so the last bastion of human productivity in the face of the robot revolution is creativity. It’s the ability to go and proactively find and solve problems. It’s not waiting to be told what to do or how to do it. And this is important, because the thing that I struggled with, and I see a lot of young people struggle with this, is that they are waiting to be told what to do. They get out of college, they go into the workforce, and they just are like mindless automata, waiting around, waiting to be told what to do. And when you do this, you are just a cog in the machine, which means you’re replaceable.

If I have to tell you what to do, then it means I could tell literally anybody else what to do as well, if they have the same skill sets and experiences as you, and they could do the thing that’s not terribly valuable in the grand scheme of things, at least. It’s a very transactional basis. I tell you what to do, you go do it, and then you get this amount of currency in exchange, whatever that currency is, right? If you want to get ahead in life. The most successful people I know, they’re not sitting around waiting to be told what to do. They’re going out and proactively finding problems to be solved, and then they’re finding solutions to those problems. That’s what entrepreneurship is really fundamentally about. It’s about identifying a problem that your prospect has and then creating a product that delivers a promise to that person. So that’s one of the reasons I love entrepreneurship.
But the way that we were trained since we were young and in school was not to think like that. It was to follow instructions. If you want to break out of that trap, if you want to live life on your terms and be in control of what you do, when you do, why you do, how you do, with who you do it, then you need to become a proactive problem solver. Not just solver, but proactive problem finder. Because some of the best entrepreneurs I know, they’re not great at actually solving the problem. They’re really good at identifying the problem. And that’s really where product design comes in, is like recognizing, hey, there’s an issue here. What would it look like to solve that? They might not be the ones that do solve it.
There are plenty of founder relationships where one person has the vision, Steve Jobs. The other person, Steve Wosniak, has the technical capacity. Steve Jobs recognized that there was a problem to be solved here in the world of personal computing. He did not have the technical skills to go create the solution his partner, Steve Wozniak, did. And that is so common in the world. Like, you don’t have to be both good at identifying the problem and solving the problem, but you need to be one of the two, and that can be a match made in heaven. But the problem is, the problems are really worth solving in life. There’s not a technical Runway solution.
There’s not a blueprint already out there. So content that I’ll create is a lot of times, like, here’s the framework that I followed, here’s the blueprint to do such and such, and that’s good as a guide. But you can never rely too fully on what somebody else did to get to where they are, because a lot of what they did was contextual to the time in which they did it. So I can tell you, here’s what I did, and a lot of this will probably work for you, but not all of it. And so you have to be able to adapt and pivot and not just do what you’re told. I’m not here just telling you what to do. And this is important because a guy slides into my DMs the other day and he goes, hey, I’m tired of living this life. I want to be rich.
I want to be awesome. I want to be just like you. Whatever, blah, blah, blah, blah. I’ll tell you what, will you mentor me, you tell me what to do, and I will show up every single day and do that thing. And then in exchange, I will give you 30% of everything that I make. First of all, that is a terrible deal for me to tell you exactly what to do, and I only get 30% of what you produce. You are vastly overestimating your value in that equation. If you are just the hands doing the work, it needs to be at least flipped.
I wouldn’t get out of bed for less than 70% anyways. But more importantly, you’re coming to me, asking me to tell you exactly what to do, because you want the certainty, you want the guarantee that what you’re being told is going to work. You don’t want to do the thinking for yourself. You want to outsource that to somebody else. And you think if I tell you what to do, then you will have the success without any of the risk. That’s not how it works. That’s not how it works. I have no incentive to hold your hands and help you get rich.
Could I do it? Absolutely. But what is my incentive to doing that? Why would I take my time and energy away from the things that bring me fulfillment and meaning and passion in life to go and help you become rich? When I’m not getting really anything out of that transaction. So when I look at people, I get that question all the time, can you just tell me what to do? I’ll show up and I’ll do it. So many people believe that to be true, first of all. But it’s fundamentally not like if you’re the type of person who needs to be told what to do, you are just a worker. You’re never going to be rich. I’m sorry. You’re never going to actually build meaningful financial security.

You’re just not. That’s okay. Because this path of entrepreneurship, of problem solving, finding the problems and then solving them, that’s not for everybody. But you need to recognize where your strengths and your weaknesses are. And if you want that, if you want that lifestyle. If you want to be rich and you want to have that financial security at some point in your life, then you need to be willing to go out there and suffer with the lack of clarity without knowing for sure that there is a guarantee of getting that you can’t have the reward without taking commensurate amount of risk. Now, going to work in a factory, being told exactly what to do and then expecting a paycheck, that’s what a w two is. And so when somebody slides into my DMs and they’re like, hey, will you pretty much give me all the safety and security of a job and also all the upside of potentially building this thing? You’re asking for everything and you can’t have it.

So the most important thing here is you can’t sit around waiting to be told what to do. You can’t. Nobody’s going to tell you what to do. And if they are, they’re going to be paying you an amount of money that is, by definition, not going to ever lead you to financial freedom. It will not. And so that is the number one problem that I see facing people who are kind of programmed into this poverty trap. And again, it’s not your fault. This is what society did to us.

This is what the education system did to us. It taught us to go and expect somebody to give us the answers and wait to be told what to do and follow the plan, and then you will get the result. But that’s not how life really works. In some instances it does, but that is probably not the life that you want to be living if you’re watching a podcast like this. So I got a little ramped up there. I apologize. Hopefully this brings you a little bit of value and I didn’t get too ranty, but I appreciate you guys. We’ll catch you in the next episode, but until then, stay hyper focused, my friends.