The Myth: Most Millionaires Were Born Into Money
Another common myth is that millionaires were born into money or inherited it. But that’s not often the case. In a recent survey, Fidelity Investments found 86 percent of millionaires are self-made. And among the more than 100 millionaires I interviewed for my book, each was self-made and only 26 percent of them said they even had connections to important people beforehand.
Take Dani Johnson. The speaker, bestselling author of “First Steps to Wealth” and “Grooming the Next Generation for Success” and producer of highly popular success seminars, started at the very bottom. After growing up on welfare and living with abuse throughout her childhood, Johnson ended up pregnant and single at 17. After a brief marriage at age 21, Johnson was left homeless and in debt. But she wanted to make a better life for herself.
She’d been introduced to a multi-level marketing business a couple of years earlier and decided it could be a chance to change her situation. After attending a panel session in which four millionaires talked about how they’d built their incomes through the business, Johnson decided it was worth a try. “I was told my whole life up to that point that I was nothing but a failure and I could never do anything right. I just sat there and thought to myself, ‘Man, if I’m the dumbest person in the room and it takes me 20 years to figure this out and to learn how to do what they do, and if I fail their income by 90 percent, then I would still do better in business for myself than I ever would staying at my job that I had at the mall.’”
For Johnson, the key to success wasn’t being born into money; it was being willing to give herself a chance. She started her first business from the trunk of her car and a payphone booth, and in her first four days, managed to sell $4,000 in products, generating $2,000 in profit for herself. The next month, while still working part time as a cocktail waitress, she made $6,500 and her income “just continued to skyrocket from there,” she says. Today, she teaches others how to build success, no matter where they start out.