by Eileen Schmidt

Created on: August 23, 2009

Intelligence comes in so many shapes and forms. You can obviously learn intelligence, after all, it is a learned trait. One can study, and information is free at the library. We can surround ourselves with intelligent people to maintain our intelligent appearance. We can learn to not act foolishly and can educate ourselves fairly easily.

Money, so hard to come by these days. Anybody can be smart in so many ways, but it is so hard to be rich. It takes money to make money, unless you are just born into it. I was born poor and have struggled my entire life to leave the land of poverty. This is not an easy thing to do. People can be so ridiculously smart with so many ideas, but have no money to take off running with those ideas. I can walk you through step by step on how to build a concrete foundation and retaining walls for a small house or a twenty-six story high rise. I can read a complicated set of blue prints containing a minimum of six different pages per room. I can proof read college level papers and have the actual instructors never find a thing wrong with it. I can speed read and retain every bit of information and I can type sixty words per minute. I know how to frame a house and have mastered over five different roof styles. I know the order in which blood flows through the body and over two thousand medical terms. I have impeccable customer service skills and can tell you how to successfully run a business.

I often times wish that I had been born rich so that when I learned these skills I could have been more successful with them. My credit was ruined in the blink of an eye because I married too young and my ex drained me for everything I had at the time. He opened accounts in my name without my permission. He opened everything from fraudulent bank accounts to credit cards to taking out a home loan and he got away with it. I had no choice but to be intelligent and creative in order to leave the life of poverty that I had always known. By the time I was nineteen I had over thirteen thousand dollars saved up (which he stole from me). I had worked a minimum of three jobs at a time since I was fifteen just to be able to do great things. I was almost there and it was all taken away from me.

All of this is not to say that if one is born rich that they cannot lose it, but my point is that money is hard to come by. The things that I have learned are probably a result of being poor, but nonetheless, I have always had the drive and desire to learn and do as much as I can in order to become successful. If I were born rich, I could have done all of things that I wanted to and opened the businesses that I had in mind. I could have spent more of my life doing rather than struggling to do. I could have gained all of this knowledge that I have that was one hundred percent free to me, other than my time, and done great things. I still can do those things. I just have to wait until I have the money.

Learn more about this author, Eileen Schmidt.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.