A Silver Lining Behind Every Cloud

It didn't dawn on me that my business and personal growth were dependent upon the lessons learned from poverty until about age 23.

I'm not talking about class warfare or social injustice. I'm talking about the whole social infrastructure in which these skirmishes play out—how people win in the game of life. Not just the making of money, but also the mechanisms of how people grow; the business and social connections that create opportunities for upward mobility, climbing the ladder up the ever-growing hierarchy of social groups, and all the activity that leads up to and away from it. Since the age of eight I was driven to experience all that—the steady pace of business and personal growth.

It's not surprising that it took 22 years to figure out that my experiences in poverty would be the footing for everything I would achieve in life. When you live in abject poverty, the last things you think about are its advantages. Being dirt poor affects every aspect of your life. Starting out with nothing means you have to work for everything—things that people in other economic groups take for granted—like human dignity. And then there is the constant struggle for survival, not just for food and shelter, but for life itself.

For most of our lives we lived in constant crisis—evictions, homelessness, extreme violence, hunger, and parental abuse. By the age of eighteen, all eight of us children had experienced and seen the worst in human behavior. I took two things from this experience. First, I would never take my safety for granted-ever. Secondly, I would never stop running—running away from poverty.

I left home at the age of 18. By the time I was 23 I had come a long way from the bottom of society. That's when it dawned on me that everything I had accomplished up to this point in my life, and everything that I would accomplish in the future, was reliant upon the lessons of the past.

Doug Wallace is an attorney, a successful entrepreneur and a published author. His book, Everything Will Be All Right is a memoir, scheduled for nationwide launch on October 1, 2009. Doug chose to write his story of growing up in poverty as a way to call attention to the unimaginable hardships for the generationally impoverished. Launched October 2009, available now at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Borders Kindle, Sony Reader, and retail book stores everywhere