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Is Poverty a 'State Of Mind'?
in United States
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- Walt Disney
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  Considerate: 87%  
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We were doing a craft with the kids that involved paint. They had let their stuff dry for a bit and I got a chance to get a wipe out to clean off my hands. Before I could, some of the people in the village came over and gave us water to clean up with. This water is only available to them once a week at a pump near their village. The military only allows that water, though a pipe runs right through the village, and they just have to fill up as much as they can along with many other villages. Yet they used it for us to clean up.
Over here, you have many people who do not work and don't have an education demanding that McDonald's pay them as if it was a job meant to provide for a family and then demands free stuff. Where does that free stuff come from? We who work 40 hours a week and then have 1/4 of our income go to them. I know, there are people who aren't like that, but the majority are pretty whiny.
Yes, it is a state of mind. You can be in poverty and live a happy life.
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One big difference is sense of entitlement. They never had more and didn't see their neighbors have more.
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I dont agree however about cutting funding for underprivileged.
- Walt Disney
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Source: book, abudance: the future is better than you think
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Look at Benjamin Franklin - He was 15th of 17 Children, his Father and sole breadwinner was a candlemaker (Poverty class skill). Ben had 2 years of formal schooling.
How about Ralph Reuben Lifshitz, his parents were immigrants from Belarus, Father was a house painter, Ralph worked after school every day as a stock-boy to help his family make ends meet. He shared a single bedroom with his Mother, Father and 2 brothers, he is now known as Ralph Lauren and is the 76th richest man in American.
Or maybe Frederick Douglas, born into Slavery in the U.S., taught English by his Master's wife, sold to a cruel slave owner after being caught practicing the alphabet, risked his life by escaping to Massachusetts where he became an outspoken abolitionist, spectacular orator, best-selling author and newspaper publisher. After the Civil War he became president of the Freeman's Bank Savings, Marshall of DC, Minister and Consul-general to the Republic of Haiti. During the 1888 Republican convention he was the first Black Man to receive a vote to be nominated for Presidency.
The list goes on and on. It would actually seem that people who have it harder...somehow manage to produce the most brilliant minds in History. It's almost as if strife and hardship breeds the need for ingenuity, creativity, willpower and the drive to persist no matter the odds. I honestly think in today's society...people are unhappy with themselves because they have too much. I spent over 4 years in Iraq watching Children play in trash heaps...4 little boys outside our compound used to play in a scrapped tub that sat at the top of a pile of scrap metal...pretending to sail a ship. They were the happiest little street urchins you've ever seen. People worked from dawn until dusk to provide for their family...which usually consisted of 3 generations all in one house. They slept on their roof in the summer because it was too hot to sleep inside, dealt with little to no electricity and had no running water in their homes. But they were all truly happy...happy to just be alive and to spend time with those that were close to them.
"There's going to be a special place in Hell for people who spread lies through the veil of logical fallacies disguised as rational argument".
"Oh, you don't like my sarcasm? Well I don't much appreciate your stupid".
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There is no denying that rich people tend to have a very pragmatic and optimistic mindset. Talk to any self-made millionaire - they are all people of action, they constantly look for opportunities to improve their situation, they rarely blame anyone for their issues and just look for the best course of actions at the moment. They also raise their kids similarly: they teach them the concepts of individual responsibility and pragmatism, and it is not rare for the children of self-made millionaires to try their own luck in enterpreneurship as early as in mid-teen years.
The poor people, in contrary, tend to have a very pessimistic and self-defeating attitude. They believe that they are destined to be poor, they expect other people to drag them out of their misery, and they rarely do much to improve their situation, rarely partake in self-education in order to gain marketable skills.
HOWEVER... These are mere trends, but they hardly exhaust the subject. There are examples, even if not very common, of people who had the right mindset and worked hard to pull themselves out of poverty, never getting anywhere. Similarly, there are self-made rich people who just got lucky at some point, who happened to be at the right place at the right moment, who met just the right people in just the right circumstances. I would say that my parents exemplify the former (they have a billionaire's mentality of self-reliance and individual responsibility, but their skills and their ability to sell them are just not quite there), and most of the Russian oligarchs exemplify the latter.
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Idealism is good and all, but such a smart person as Ben Carson surely realizes that life is more complicated than the binary "Your wealth = your state of mind". That said, I know one thing for certain: if you do not want to play a lottery and want to have a serious chance at becoming wealthy and successful - then you do have to employ the right mindset, the mindset directed at your personal success. This mindset is not nearly as hard to obtain as it might seem, and there are countless psychological books with easy and practical methods that can get you where you want to be mentally in just a few months, as long as you are serious about it.
So, I would conclude that Ben Carson's statement is very practical and philosophically reasonable, even if not entirely correct in the absolute sense.
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If an individual commits a crime, and gets into trouble because of the crime that they committed, because before they committed the crime, they had an opportunity to get a job and or go to work and create a living for themselves, but balked at the working opportunity to go and commit a crime instead?
The same situation with poverty, if an individual has the opportunity to work themselves out of a poverty situation, why not work to do just that?
To examples of how some are making and working to better their lives, the TV shows, "Funderdome" with Steve Harvey, and "Shark Tank" where you get to see an individaul or groups of individuals who are entrepreneurs/ inventors, who are working on creating a better life for themselves and their families.
So if there are thousands if not millions of people who are working at bettering their lives, I guess these individuals could choose one of two mindsets to fuel their lives with, fuel their lives and mindsets with continued poverty and live with the poverty, or fuel their lives with working and work to make something of themselves by continuing that working mindset?
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Bible verses? Really? I might as well just add some out-of-context Harry Potter paragraph in here, and it would make just as much sense.
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