Can you believe about a person with no well-off, still a self-made billionaire? In this world, there are several ordinary people, who had achieved extraordinary success. Here we shall discuss about financial success. What is the parameter to call that success a financial success? Is it when the person from a poor or middle-class family earning in lakhs or is it when he or she earning in crores?
When your family is not there to support you financially, still you succeed and earn in lakhs or crores with your good deeds, then we shall call this a mind-blowing achievement. We feel glad and share such inspiring examples with our loved ones.
But, what if that person becomes a billionaire (values in dollars), not even a millionaire? That too without any family back-up to start with. So we shall go through one of the most inspiring real story of such a man in this article.
How many of you curse your parents or elders for not providing financial support when you asked for it? Many a time, you feel that they are not providing support and that’s why you are not able to perform to the fullest.
We ignore the other side, that there may be some genuine reason, it may be true that they are not having their own financial back-up. So in that case they are not able to provide you support. Now it’s you, who can find out your own way. You can start with something very small, which is under your own capability. Then slowly, once you learn the process, you can grow that business at a rapid pace.
That growth can be much faster, even beyond your imagination. You must not lose your focus on your financial goal during this process. There is a vast difference between earning money and managing money. Managing money requires much more skill than earning money.
Most people think that all the millionaires and billionaires in this world are those peoples, who have inherited money. But the reality is a bit different. Across the world, over 70% of billionaires are self-made, and the rest 30% of billionaires inherited their wealth.
Other factors which people have in their mind are that all these self-made billionaires must have all the favorable conditions during their journey. This can never be true for a journey to go from Zero to billion-dollar ($1 billion > ₹7000 crore).
Yes, one thing was sure that these successful people were more powerful than their problems all the time. They were always bigger than their problems. They know that problems are part of the journey, so whenever a problem comes, they find out the solution and moved on. For them, problems were the stepping stone in this journey.
This amazing and real story is from the book ‘The Billion Dollar Secret‘ by Rafael Badziag, Which I recently read. The principles described in this book are so powerful that your thought process will be in the extraordinary world of financial fortune.
Billionaire Misconception: Billionaires come from well-off, supportive families
If you think a person must be born into a wealthy, supportive family to have a chance at becoming a billionaire, you are likely unaware of the story of Mohed Altrad.
Mohed Altrad was born a nomad in the Syrian Desert. His Bedouin tribe lived in tents. They set up a camp where they found water for the animals and stayed there as long as the vegetation was enough to sustain their herds. Then they folded the tents and moved farther in search of better pastures.
When Mohed was born, his father disowned him. He expelled Mohed and his mother from their home and slaughtered his brother to death. Mohed was forced to live with his mother on the periphery of the tribe, his life so unimportant that nobody even noted the day or year of his birth.
Even today he doesn’t know when he was born. He told me that the dates he uses now were invented because his children wanted to celebrate his birthday with him. That is far from being the end of this Dickensian tale. When Mohed was four, his mother died.
His grandmother assumed responsibility for him and raised him with the belief that his destiny was to become a shepherd. She didn’t want him to go to school because she thought it was for “do-nothings.” Every day, Mohed escaped from home and walked barefoot through miles of desert to the nearby village, where he could attend school.
The teacher gave him a notebook and a pencil because he didn’t have either of these things. He had gone to school empty-handed, as well as barefoot. The only thing Mohed owned was a torn djellaba (a type of robe), which he had outgrown years earlier. On several occasions, Mohed tried to get basic support from his father to obtain the bare necessities but was consistently rejected and humiliated by him—sometimes even beaten.
When Mohed was in third grade, however, a miracle occurred: He received a present from his father—an old bicycle. It was the first and only gift his father ever gave him. With that bike, Mohed’s entrepreneurial genius appeared for the first time.
He rented the bike out to his schoolmates for a fee, earning him a bit of money. It wasn’t much, but it allowed him to purchase some school materials. Realizing that school was his only chance to get out of his lot in life, Mohed studied hard. Soon he became one of the best students in his region and was granted a scholarship to study abroad.
Many years later, after he completed his education, Mohed took over a bankrupt scaffolding company in France and developed it into a world leader in the industry. Over the next 30 years, he added over 200 companies to his business, the Altrad Group. Today, Mohed Altrad is a billionaire.
In 2015, he was named World Entrepreneur of the Year—the best entrepreneur in the world, if you will. So, if you think one needs to be born in a well-off, supportive family in order to become a billionaire, you have been clinging to a misconception. Mohed Altrad was born a Bedouin on the margins of society in a poor country. He was disowned by his family, who wanted him to become a shepherd. But this didn’t stop him on his way to achieving unbridled success, proving that it can be done.
“Rich people believe ‘I create my life.’ Poor people believe ‘Life happens to me.’”— T. Harv Eker
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