Last Updated on May 11, 2024

I want to tell you a story about a young entrepreneur named Bob who just finished high school. He comes from a low-income family. However, he is good at computer programming. He creates one website in his free time, and it makes some money. He creates another, and it makes some more money.

Years go by, and he has thousands of websites and makes millions of dollars.

His friends from high school stopped hanging out with him because he didn’t share his money. He feels he doesn’t have to because while they were partying, he was working on websites. Is this person evil? No, he is not.

In the United States, a staggering 79% of millionaires are considered self-made, as revealed by a Ramsey Solutions National Study of Millionaires. This data shatters the myth that wealth is primarily inherited, highlighting that most millionaires have earned their wealth through their own efforts, not through a stroke of luck or inheritance.

Now, why does he pay his employees so little? Well, Bob has no choice in the matter. Bob’s company went public and started trading on the stock market.

Bob took the company public because he needed more money to build more websites. The cheapest way to get more money was to make the company tradable on the stock market.

When a company goes public, it has to do what is in the best interest of the stock owners. 

If Bob paid the cleaning lady a million dollars, he could be sued and fired from his own company because he is not doing what is in the best interest of the stock owners. By law, he has to.

The only way for the cleaning lady to get paid more is to learn more valuable skills like programming, so Bob can then pay her fair market value for her job, meaning a little bit more or less of what the job usually pays.

The cleaning lady would rather watch TV than learn a new skill. Is Bob evil? Absolutely not.

So don’t be lazy. Be like Bob and let other people call you evil.

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