Have you ever been broke? I don’t mean broke till your next paycheck, I mean flat broke? No money, no prospects, no contacts, no home and no job?

If you were in that situation you might be able to make a pretty good case that the deck was most certainly stacked against you.

According to a recent NBC News poll, 54 percent of all respondents said they felt the system was stacked against them.

I was fortunate enough to experience all those things for several months. Why do I say fortunate? Because I could not be who I am today had I not had that experience.

How Does Poverty End?

Was the deck stacked against me during those tough times? You bet. Was I to the point I wanted to give up? Absolutely.

So why didn’t I?

In the picture above notice the panhandler is using a clear cup so there are visible bills inside. That works well and will influence some people to give a bill rather than change. The more down and out you look the better you will do.

One day I decided that panhandling for money was not the way I wanted to spend the rest of my life. If my current situation were going to change then I would have to be the one to change it.

The first step to ending poverty is to change the things in your life that contribute to it. Nothing positive will happen unless you make it happen.

At that point in my life there was no such thing as, “Jobs American’s won’t do.” I would have done any job, for any pay, at any time.

How Does Success Begin?

Success is not a thing it’s a mindset. It’s an attitude. It’s a way of thinking that contributes to changes that improve one's life.

When I speak of success I’m not thinking of money or material things. You can be a successful store clerk or janitor with the right attitude.

The big secret is learning and moving from one opportunity to the next. It might be learning things at one job that you can take to another for more income. Or it might be advancing within your current company by making yourself more valuable.

Experience and motivation can’t be taught — only experienced. You have to adopt them into your cognitive thinking process. That required current knowledge and adding new knowledge.

I was an athlete in high school and college. As a result I was highly competitive. I knew that bad times are temporary unless I chose to make them permanent. And I didn’t want to do that.

Some Final Thoughts

You may feel the deck is stacked against you, that somehow someone else gets all the breaks, that you are not destined to ever be a member of the 1 percent club.

That way of thinking is a self-fulfilling prophecy. There is only income inequality if you allow it to exist.

A successful person at any income level has either knowledge or experience that someone is willing to pay for. The more of it you have the more valuable you are to someone who needs that knowledge and experience.

Start changing things today by reading, learning everything there is to know about the company you work for. Why do they do what they do? How do they do it?

That kind of knowledge has value.

Is the deck stacked against you? Comments below.

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