I was recently reading about Andrew Carnegie. He came from nothing to become not only the richest man in the world but the first to give away hundreds of millions of dollars in his lifetime. An uneducated immigrant from Scotland, he lived with his mother and brother in a shanty in Pittsburgh during the Industrial revolution, got a job at a textile mill as a bobbin boy and kept his eyes and ears open.

He heard about a rich guy who let manual laborers use his library. As a factory worker, Carnegie didn’t qualify, so he wrote to the man and asked that factory workers might also be admitted. The rich man said yes and Carnegie got to work reading everything he could get his hands on. He was allowed to bring one book home at a time to read and when he finished it, his mother read it, too. She became his most trusted adviser.

Carnegie operated the way your successful friends do. Most of the people he worked with in the factory never left and were always poor. I think he would have whole-heartedly embraced the Rocky Horror mantra: Don’t dream it. Be it.