{"id":671,"date":"2009-07-21T06:54:26","date_gmt":"2009-07-21T11:54:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.richestmanintown.com\/?p=671"},"modified":"2009-07-21T06:55:12","modified_gmt":"2009-07-21T11:55:12","slug":"the-salary-trap","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.richestmanintown.com\/blog\/2009\/07\/21\/the-salary-trap\/","title":{"rendered":"The Salary Trap"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A stable salary can be addictive: like a drug, it feels good, helps you cope with the ups and downs of life, and it is very hard to give up. But dependence on a salary is a major impediment to becoming the richest person in town. The regular fix of a paycheck from the other guy makes you risk-averse, and the ability to take risks is one of the qualities that defines an RMIT. It certainly defines <strong>Jon Huntsman<\/strong>, Salt Lake City\u2019s richest man. His rags-to-riches trajectory is not uncommon among RMITs\u2014in fact, growing up without advantages can be a huge advantage.<\/p>\n<p>Huntsman grew up very poor, the son of a rural schoolteacher whom he described as a \u201charsh disciplinarian.\u201d During his high-school years, Huntsman lived in a Quonset hut in student housing at <strong>Stanford University<\/strong>, where his father had moved the family so he could pursue a PhD in education. Though the living situation was Spartan, to put it mildly, it also brought Huntsman to Palo Alto High School, where he became the student body president and earned a scholarship to the <strong>University of Pennsylvania<\/strong>\u2019s <strong>Wharton School<\/strong>. He always knew, however, that he did not want the kind of life his father had favored. \u201cI always felt trapped in my personal situation,\u201d he told me. His humble beginnings gave him the drive to make his own money and make his own way. Huntsman\u2019s career trajectory has been more like an electrocardiagram than a straight line upward\u2014his company was on the verge of bankruptcy twice and he\u2019s beaten cancer three times\u2014but he worked through the tough times knowing that he could get by on very little if he had to.<\/p>\n<p>Like Huntsman, Richmond\u2019s <strong>Robert Jepson<\/strong> was raised in very modest circumstances. \u201cMy parents had separated and we lived with my grandmother in Richmond, Virginia,\u201d he told me. \u201cEvery day was a struggle. As a child, at least on the surface, I wasn\u2019t aware of our struggle, but on a subliminal basis, I knew that being poor was not the way I wanted to live my life. My formative years were a great motivator to reach up for a higher rung on the ladder of success.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>All of the RMITs who started out life poor combine the strong desire to better their circumstances with an equally strong sense of self-reliance. Many of them learned through hard experience that with a salary comes dependence on someone else\u2019s business decisions. While they hungered for the financial stability, they also knew what true stability means\u2014independence. Which means being the one signing the paychecks, not the one collecting them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A stable salary can be addictive: like a drug, it feels good, helps you cope with the ups and downs of life, and it is near impossible to give up. But dependence on a salary is a major impediment to becoming the richest person in town. The regular fix of a paycheck from the other guy makes you risk-averse, and the ability to take risks is one of the qualities that defines an RMIT. It certainly defines <strong>Jon Huntsman<\/strong>, Salt Lake City\u2019s richest man. His rags-to-riches trajectory is not uncommon among RMITs\u2014in fact, growing up without advantages can be a huge advantage.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[222,114,153,157],"tags":[243,247,246,248,244,172,249,163,245],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.richestmanintown.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/671"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.richestmanintown.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.richestmanintown.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.richestmanintown.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.richestmanintown.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=671"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.richestmanintown.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/671\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":675,"href":"http:\/\/www.richestmanintown.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/671\/revisions\/675"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.richestmanintown.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=671"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.richestmanintown.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=671"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.richestmanintown.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=671"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}