6 Inspiring Rags to Riches Stories (That Are Bullshit)
Everyone likes a good "rags to riches" story. After all, if some dude can go from living in a cardboard box to being the CEO of a major corporation, we can do it too!
Unfortunately, it doesn't take a lot of digging into most of these stories to find out they've been, well, inflated a bit. And sometimes, they're complete bullshit.
#6.
Bill Gates
The Rags to Riches Story:
Bill was a college dropout who finessed his way into the upper echelons of IBM to sell his operating system. Now he sleeps on a bed made of solid gold. According to the media, Bill Gates is the Rocky Balboa of the business world. They've compared him to other college dropouts; from Kanye West to some guy who runs the IT Department at Bradley College. Gates proved that if you're smart and willing to work hard, you can build an empire! And you don't even have to go to college! Yay!
Why it's a Load of Crap:
First of all, the college Gates left was Harvard, not the community college that most of the people who cite his story are thinking of leaving. He entered Harvard by scoring 1590 out of 1600 on his SAT--the man was, and still is, a genetically mutated genius. But one with the type of parents who could afford Harvard.
Luxury office, giant window. Just your average college dropout.
In fact, Gates's parents have a lot to do with his success, and even why he was able to drop out of school. At a very young age, Bill was staying up all night experimenting with computer programming. Keep in mind, this was the late 60s and early 70s, so having access to a computer was like having access to a helicopter. He gained incredible amounts of experience because his upper class parents were able to enroll him in an exclusive prep school that had a computer available. This was only possible because Bill's father was a prominent attorney, and his mother's side of the family wasn't exactly poor either.
Later, Gates left college because it didn't provide the training in computer programming that he needed for the software business he was running on the side. It wasn't that Gates couldn't keep up at Harvard; Harvard couldn't keep up with Gates. Again, this is the kind of risk you can take when you have well-to-do parents who can get you right back into school if things don't work out. If the dude scraping by on student loans and corn dogs tries the same thing, he's probably going to wind up bussing tables at Chili's the rest of his life.
Of course here is where Gates used his genius and creativity to invent the modern operating system...
Oh, wait, no. It turns out he bought the program that would later become MS-DOS from another programmer, for a one-time fee of $50,000. He then took it to IBM and other PC manufacturers and made a pile of money big enough to ski down it.
Now, we're not saying Bill Gates isn't a smart guy or that he didn't work hard. By all accounts he puts in more hours working than most people put into being awake. But, an "Upper Middle Class Guy With an Extraordinarily Fortunate Background to Riches" story is a completely different deal than a "Rags to Riches." The dude wasn't exactly an orphan begging for scraps. And it's not like he was turning tricks as a male whore to put his start-up capital together, the way Steve Jobs did [citation needed].
#5.
Debbi Fields (Founder of Mrs. Fields Cookies)
The Rags to Riches Story:
According to the "About Us" section of MrsFields.com:
"Debbi Fields, a young mother with no business experience, opened her first cookie store in Palo Alto, California in 1977. They told her she was crazy. No business could survive just selling cookies. Humble beginnings launched Mrs. Fields into a worldwide celebrity."
If you're willing to ignore people who call you crazy, you too could be the nemesis of diabetics everywhere.
Why It's a Load Of Crap:
It's true Debbi Fields had no business experience. But you know what helps when you're a 20-year-old bravely entering the world of business with nothing but savvy and a cookie recipe? Being married to Randy Fields, a man who was both a decade older than her and owned a successful investment firm.
Mr. Fields, CEO.
The capital they raised to get started came via Randy's contacts. Yes, the cookies were good enough to attract customers; we would never try to disparage the power of a really good cookie. But the real success came when Randy and the company's IT Manager developed software that efficiently handled supply chain management. This kept costs low while still charging outrageous prices for the cookies.
Debbi had the financial backing of a business maverick, and sold a product everyone loved. So why did everyone call her crazy when she opened her first store? The picture gets a lot clearer when you read the bio on her personal web page. Debbie gives credit to herself, her innovations and her determination.
Did you know she invented cookies?
She also places herself in the same company as three of the world's greatest history-changing innovators: Henry Ford, Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell. Apparently, keeping America's cookie jars full ranks up there with changing they the world talks, travels and learns. We're stunned she hasn't had her image carved on Mount Rushmore.
#4.
Jewel
The Rags to Riches Story:
Jewel lived in a van!
Jewel lived in a van!!
Jewel lived in a van!!!!!!
This line is shouted in every single story ever written about Jewel. And just in case that doesn't melt your frozen heart, the van story is almost always followed up with the fact that her family was so poor growing up that they didn't have running water.
Why it's a Load of Crap:
First, the stuff about her childhood. Her family didn't go without running water because they were poor. Jewel's father elected to drop out of society to live of the land, and settled in Alaska to do so. They were hippies, not hobos. Jewel's upbringing was unconventional, sure, but at least she didn't grow up in homeless shelters like true badasses such as KRS One, Tupac Shakur and ... Shania Twain.
"How will I take long, luxurious showers without water?"
Later, Jewel followed in her father's footsteps, choosing to quit work and live in a van to keep costs down and focus on her music. Ballsy? Sure, but all musicians live in their car for a while. Legally, you're not allowed to call yourself a musician unless you've got some sort of transient-living under your belt.
Again, we're not just talking about hard asses like Kurt Cobain, whose biography includes a spell camping out under a bridge. Creed lead "singer" Scott Stapp and Matchbox 20 front"man" Rob Thomas lived in their cars while pursuing the dream.
Don't take our word for it, take it from those celebrated rock and roll historians, Boston:
Well, we were just another band out of Boston
On the road to try to make ends meet
Playing all the bars, sleeping in our cars
And we practiced right on out in the street
Sleeping in a car is rock and roll! And she had a van; hell, that's a freaking mansion in the struggling musician world.
The inside of Jewel's van.
So common is the van in rock and roll, that there is a website dedicated to giving the van dwellers of rock an occasional couch to sleep on (at BetterThanTheVan.com).
So why don't we hear about Scott Stapp, Rob Thomas and Shania Twain's hard ass upbringings as much as Jewel's? Well, it would seem that Jewel's tale of unprecedented hardship might be part of a calculated PR strategy. For instance, if you're tired of the van story, her online bios will have you know that she also "washed her hair in public restrooms, subsisted on carrots and peanut butter, fell in with street gangs, dated older men and even shoplifted." Come on guys. This isn't high school, it's rock and roll. If you're going to be the bad girl, you're going to have to give us something a little worse than "dating older men," and a little less hilariously far-fetched than "gang involvement." Stevie Nix's PR team should have some suggestions.
Good article. #2 (Rowling) in particular has even less shine to her if one knows that intentional-welfare is currently a real social problem in the UK, having mutated into a viable life strategy for a large chunk of the population.
ReplyNOOOOO! NOT J.K. ROWLIIIIIING!
ReplyHeh, just kidding, I already knew her rags to riches story was a little fakey... i just didn't realize quite how fakey it was. Still, I enjoyed most of the Harry Potter books. Well. The first 3 were enjoyable, but pretty clearly the work of a "developing" author, and the last two kinda felt smashed together and dashed off. It's like she went from amateur hack to "this s**t will sell no matter what" hack within the span of 10 years. That's probably a record!
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ReplyIt's a first and safe place for people who wanna to start a short-term relationship....no bounds or limits in front of true love.
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One that always nags me is Michael Moore. Politically, I kind of like the guy, but his blue-collar roots story is kind of flimsy. I grew up in a family of auto workers outside Detroit just like Moore, but he tells it as though when he was a kid a blue-collar job meant you were poor. Auto workers made just as much if not more than most salaried "professionals." A fact easily forgotten now that "blah, blah, no one respects manual labor anymore..." Me, with my fancy college degree, can barely pay my rent; my grandpa put 7 kid through college welding car doors or something.
ReplyIt should be noted that College educations no longer cost 4 grand a ride.
Would love to see one of these about Donald Trump, the "Self made man"...who's dad handed him the business and millions of dollars.
ReplyI think Cracked has on several occasions spoken of how Donald Trump's life and success are just a whole series of failures that someone else footed the bill for.
That would be putting it mildly, I believe Cracked has on several occasions called Trump a bag of dicks and then point by point broken that down into smaller, easily consumable dick "goodie-bags" which could double as an argument for summary execution for asshattery.
Lady Gaga is another bullshit story. She claims she grew up 'lower middle class', but her parents put her in a private school where the tuition was $35k per year.
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesI wouldn't describe 'lower middle class' as 'rags'
still bullshit though
There are these things called student loans. They suck, sure, but if you really want to go to an expensive school despite not having much money, they allow you to do it. Assuming you don't suffocate under all your debt after you graduate.
He entered Harvard by scoring 1590 out of 1600 on his SAT
ReplyYou don't need rich parents if you're that smart
perhaps. but you do need connections if you are dumb enough to drop out without a backup plan. He was smart enough to not need them but JUSTIN CASE
You do if you want to pay for Harvard. Getting that high of a mark still won't help you get into Harvard. There are a ton of other geniuses getting those grades.
f**k feel-good society!
ReplyFun fact: Jewel also attended a fine arts boarding school in Michigan her junior and senior year of high school as a voice major.
ReplyNo, for JKR life was not hard and her situation was one most people in the UK would envy from that start rather than any kind of rags to riches:
Reply Hide All See All 10 RepliesShe's from one of the wealthiest parts of Edinburgh, while ostensibly "on welfare" she owned (in a country where renting your property is still extremely common) a house in Morningside which, for anyone who don't know Edinburgh, is worth several hundred thousand pounds.
While she was writing the first book she had various female relatives look after her kid, and she still collected the child benefits, something she’s entitled to, and shouldn’t pass up, but which should looks pathetic when set alongside the sob story of her hard life.
There are also a great many cafeterias around the city advertising with newspaper cut-outs stating that “J. K. Rowling wrote the first book here”, with a following story that the “struggling, single mother wrote on the café’s napkins” because she “couldn’t afford a (20-pence) notebook”. What they all fail to mention is that these places ask you to move on unless you order anything, and that even the cheapest cup of tea is more than a pound! More than 5 times the price of a single notebook.
So no, there's nothing to admire, or even vaguely respect, about J. K. Rowling. She's a mediocre writer of below-par books ripping off other writers and concepts left right and centre, who sold a lot partially on a made-up sob story.
'kay.
Rags-tp-riches or not they are great books that have kept up the market for literature and inspired Children to read. There are worse writers out there getting paid millions, like Stephanie Meyers and Nicholas Sparkes, who merely inspire middle aged women to masturbate.
I am SO tired of jealous writers ripping on J.K. Rowling. She's good. You're not. Get better or shut up.
Thanks for saying exactly what's in my head. I'm glad to see I'm not the only one that DOESN'T worship her. She's an... ok writer. Good for small kids. That's all.
Hold up you guys! Everyone's entitled to their own opinions, even if some of them sounds like the person should drop everything and try dying. Now quit bitching on the internet.
Hey I like the Harry Potter series and absolutely hate Twilight but that's no reason to make inspiring middle aged women to masturbate seem trivial.
I've never understood the rabid fans of her's. I mean, yeah, the books are decent enough for 5th grade kids who are poor readers, but defending her as if she were Kurt Vonnegut or Anthony Burgess, etc. is rather absurd.
Maybe you consider her books sub-par--maybe others consider them wonders of the modern world. I think she deserves some credit for putting as much effort and time into them as she did. Too many inspiring writers think that they can just throw something together and an editor will magically turn it into a bestseller. Books that last longer than a few years as a fad need lots and lots of writing, revising, and re-revising!
Well, by now she's more than paid back what she used in welfare with her taxes, so I can forgive her.
I enjoy reading Twilight and watching movies based on Nicholas Sparks' books because imagining middle aged women getting off to it gets me off.
So writing a novel is a surefire way to make money? I did not know that.
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesMore like, if you want to live off welfare, you might as well write a book that'd inspire it's own theme park.
Writing, ESPECIALLY novels, does not usually provide enough money for someone to live on. Most writers have a) another source of income from another job b) a spouse with money. The only writers who make enough to live on just happen to be the same ones you see in the spotlight constantly.
although you are being facetious, e-readers and the internet have had a bit of an effect getting writers a fandom or at least some exposure.
Bizarre thing is, Mrs. Field's Cookies has probably closed and reopened at least 4 times that I can think of at our local mall. I keep wondering A) Why does it fail? and B) Why do they keep bringing it back to the same mall if it keeps failing?
Replyscary thought i know but could they be closing because they don't pass health inspections?
Because its a franchise. They, the parent company, Mrs. Field's, keep selling their franchises to suckers who keep failing because the market for corporate cookies is failing. Pity the poor slob who's trying to get ahead by buying a franchise.
I don't recall any of JK Rowling's books having a rags to riches story so that is complete bullshit.
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesPerhaps you didn't read the article, it's about J.K. Rowling's PR campaign making it seem like she is a rags to riches story for her creation of the book series, not that she wrote a rags to riches story.
And, not to be a TOTAL geek, but Harry Potter went from living under a cupboard and wearing ill-fitting hand-me-downs to inheriting a vault full of his late parents' money. Kind of rags to riches, there.
Not really, HP didn't have to do anything but wait for his riches. That's like saying bill gates kids are rags to riches. they had to wait to be born
Who the f**k is Kurtis Warner???
ReplyWho the f**k is Kurtis Warner???
ReplyEven with his parents help, Bill Gates still did all that he's done without a piece of paper that says "degree." He was, however, lucky to ride the computer wake in its early days.
Reply Hide All See All 3 Repliesyes, he did it without a piece of paper that says "degree" but he had a piece of paper that trumphs that. it says "i'm a god damn genius, i can do whatever i want and still make millions."
Therefore his story is nowhere as inspiring as people make it out to be. It's no longer "You too can get rich!". It's "You too can get rich, if all unlikely opportunities in life come just at the right time, AND you'll be good enough to take them. And you'll probably won't have opportunities like him, so sorry, keep living like you did".
See, a piece of paper that says "degree" is like a key that unlocks some doors labeled "opportunity" if you're fortunate enough to have had rich parents and a genius intellect kick a few of those doors open for you, that key isn't going to be nearly as valuable to you as it might be to someone in a less fortunate situation.
you almost have the gates story right, IBM partnership
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesIn 1980, IBM approached Microsoft to write the BASIC interpreter for its upcoming personal computer, the IBM PC. When IBM's representatives mentioned that they needed an operating system, Gates referred them to Digital Research (DRI), makers of the widely used CP/M operating system.[35] IBM's discussions with Digital Research went poorly, and they did not reach a licensing agreement. IBM representative Jack Sams mentioned the licensing difficulties during a subsequent meeting with Gates and told him to get an acceptable operating system. A few weeks later Gates proposed using 86-DOS (QDOS), an operating system similar to CP/M that Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer Products (SCP) had made for hardware similar to the PC. Microsoft made a deal with SCP to become the exclusive licensing agent, and later the full owner, of 86-DOS. After adapting the operating system for the PC, Microsoft delivered it to IBM as PC-DOS in exchange for a one-time fee of $50,000. Gates did not offer to transfer the copyright on the operating system, because he believed that other hardware vendors would clone IBM's system.[36] They did, and the sales of MS-DOS made Microsoft a major player in the industry.[37]
tl;dr
Man, that sure is something that you just pulled off wikipedia.
Well, look at that, the citation numbers were even left in.
Thank you for calling out JK Fraudling!
Reply Hide All See All 5 RepliesEverytime someone says she was on welfare and became a success it pisses me off to no end. Sure, it's hard to hold down a job and raise a child on your own, but millions of women do it, my own mother did it.
Fair enough, she opted out of the system to take a chance on her book, but to make it out like she lived some epic, unprecedented hardship really grinds the f**k out of my gears and insults all the women who do it every day without the applause.
So suck on that fanboys.
"She still wrote a good book series, and I never knew she was on welfare. Nor do I care now that I learned that was once thing people thought and that it's only marginally true... If Cracked wrote an article called 'The 4 Babies JK Rowling Shot in the Process of Writing Harry Potter', I would still like the series and I still wouldn't care if JK Rowling was a s****y person or not. I'd just be inclined to say, 'what a hilariously fucked up b***h who wrote a series of books I enjoy'."
Ryuka: why are you quoting yourself?
In the UK she actually campaigns for mothers struggling on benefits to get better finances and childcare options etc, telling stories about counting out pennies in the supermarket and stuff. Now while I admire her work for these charities and it must have been hard, I did always wonder why an educated woman seemed to lose all employment opportunities when she had a child, considering we have laws over here to prevent that being an issue as much as possible. Now I know it was by choice. Wow.
well, I am very sorry to tell you this Camaran, but Rowling WAS on welfare and she DID become a success... And I really don't understand how you can be so motherfuckin pissed off by that?
and on top of that I am actually pretty sure (and I will be using just as many citations for this as the writer of the article did in the section about Rowling) that it was her publisher who "elaborated" on her harsh life. Just as they added the 'K' to her initials, because they "thought it would look better on the cover", i think there's a fairly good chance they thought that the fact that she had written the scripts while being a single mother on welfare was a pretty good story, and that it could probably be exploited in a commercial way. I don't know what you call it in English, but in Denmark we call that an "ugly-duckling"-tale (after an H.C. Andersen fairy-tale of the same name, which I hope you are familiar with), and it is an extremely common and sure-fire marketing stragedy as far as I know. I am pretty sure I never heard her, personally, complain very much about her former life, and indeed she has donated millions and millions of pounds to charity... No, she wasn't the worst-off in the world, her country, nor her city, but she was relatively poor and she was a single mother who worked very hard to make an almost ridicously intricate plot stick together through seven novels... They're not exactly superbly written by adult-book standards, but they are very well structured and immensely well thought-out in my opinion...
Dude, my mom raise five people on a one person's salary (My dad's plumber check, my mom has various disease that makes it hard to work)with barely any extra money, and only got on food stamps when two more people and a baby was forced on her.
I think all welfare recipients should be forced to write a novel to stay on it. Think of all the wonderful stories they have to tell!
Reply Hide All See All 3 Replies"I'm totally on board, I would love to get on Welfare with only the stipulation I needed to write a novel. It would motivate me to write more and give me money in the process. Double score."
And think of all the proofreaders who would get employment out of it, if the muppets who have the time to spend all day on the internet are anything to go by.
that would provide a lot of entertainment. if they linked a twitter or something to it, like "follow a teen" does, it might even help subsidise the welfare lol
You want the real thing? Britain's own Sir Alan Sugar. Grew up in public housing, went on to be one of the richest people in the nation.
ReplyThe real achievement is becoming that rich while never selling a decent product. The man's a f*****g genius.