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From Rags to Riches: How These Top Three Billionaires Started Their Journey to Success

It’s a common thing to hear how the world’s richest people keep hoarding their money to stay on top. That’s why there’s a huge stigma against them where they’re shown as greedy vultures who take advantage of others for wealth. However, these notions are quite outdated and don’t apply to most modern-day billionaires, some of whom seem to have made their money from scratch. In fact, the richest people on earth who’ve inherited their wealth have mostly ended up losing their net worth over the years. It’s almost like it takes a certain mindset that’s built through hard work and determination to achieve the ranks among the richest and most successful people on this planet. Today, we’re going to go over the backstories of three of the most successful and inspirational billionaires alive to see how their upbringing influenced them to aim big. Here’s your chance to explore how the minds of the top performing people on Earth work.

Bill Gates

Believe it or not, Bill Gates was not born to a billionaire family! And while his background isn’t completely that of a poor person, he still had to struggle a lot during his younger years. His first test in life was to get into Harvard which is something that requires merit, not just tons of money. Bill was able to do that without breaking a sweat and was way ahead of Harvard in terms of his own learning and skills. Before long, Bill didn’t think that studying at Harvard was doing him much good, and the young genius started working at his garage to invent the system that would forever change the world for the better.

He invented the BASIC language which would eventually become the root for all sorts of computer languages widely used today. He went from working in a humble garage to becoming the owner of one of the wealthiest companies on the planet — Microsoft. There’s a story about Bill Gates tipping $2 at a restaurant. When asked about his thought process, he replied that he was the son of a woodcutter, while his son, who had paid a substantially larger tip, was the son of a billionaire.

Elon Musk

Elon has never been one to calm down and focus on one thing. We’ll have to emphasize on the “never calming down” bit because Elon has been grinding away at whatever he does until he reaches the results he envisioned. At one point, Elon was almost bankrupt when he was working on developing the online payment method which we commonly know as Paypal today. Back then, he had to sleep in his office and was pretty much working around the clock so that he could remain within his schedule. That was one of the lowest points in his life, and he had to partially rely on his wife for financial support (who came in huge for Elon during his time of financial stress and need). Now that Elon has successfully started a whole chain of multimillion-dollar businesses and has become one of the richest men on earth, he’s showing no signs of stopping. He still works as hard as he used to back in that office, and he’s still concentrated on solving all the world’s problems one at a time.

Oprah Winfrey

Oprah is one of the most influential people today, and no, she didn’t have a head start in life when it came to wealth, popularity and success. In fact, she had almost every disadvantage in life that you could possibly come up with. Her mother left her to her grandmother when she was just a child, and she had to move cities quite often between her mother and father. She didn’t have many friends back then and would often rely on farm animals for company. She was brutally abused on several occasions, but she stuck through and faced every hardship head-on. Some credit does go to her father for her success who made sure nothing came in between her and her studies. Soon enough, she rose through the ranks and became the celebrity we know her to be.

Billionaires hold a lot of inspiration for us if we dig into their backstories. Most people who are on the list of the richest people on earth have struggled to get there, and their stories hold a whole lot of wisdom.

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