The advantage of being poor

A friend of mine commented on one of his young employees as,

“The worst combination you can get — someone who isn’t interested in the work and doesn’t need the money.”

There are lots of advantages of being born into a well-off family. Your family can provide you introductions to get your first job. You can take low-paid or under-paid internships or research assistant jobs to gain valuable experience. Your parents can pay your rent so that you can afford to live and work in Manhattan or Santa Monica or Menlo Park while you are getting a foothold in the industry.

There is one advantage young people raised in poverty may have, though, and that is that they really need the money. Those tales of working your way up from the mail room have an element of truth in them.

Recently, I was interviewed about my first job. I was a dishwasher and the manager actually told me that they hired me because I was willing to wash dishes and didn’t seem to be obviously crazy, unlike some others they had interviewed. I was in high school, broke and had no experience doing anything. I showed up every day and worked because I needed the money. Before too long, I got a job as a waitress. When I left there, it wasn’t too hard to find another waitress job, because I had experience.

In college, still broke, I had a series of temp jobs. First, I worked for a law firm and part of my job was to replace pages in binders with the correct pages for laws that had been changed. This was before the…