Why You Must Leave Town: The Difference of Perspective

Here’s what I’ve observed

If you want to be more successful than your parents and relatives, you have to leave town. They don’t mean to hold you back from your dreams, but it is inevitable. They see the world based on their experiences. You see the world based on your dreams. This is a massive mismatch. 

But before I explain, I’ll catch you up on what has been happening. There are times when there is just nothing. No ideas. No stories to relate to you, my friends and entrepreneurs. 

Stories come from encounters. And Covid has shut down new encounters with entrepreneurs.

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been isolated. I took a couple of weeks off from the Paparelli Zoom Chats. I used the time to travel to Denver with Kathy to celebrate her mom’s 90th birthday. The picture shows all the cards she received from relatives and friends. I took the picture because I couldn’t believe how many people are still in her network. By the way, that’s Sue in the background.

Her dad was from North Carolina but raised in northern Wyoming.

His dad died in a buggy accident when Roy was 2 years old. In his mid-teens he struck out to work a ranch in southern Wyoming aiming to save enough money to buy his own homestead. By twenty-five, it all started to come together for him. He now knew sheep ranching, had money, and met Annabelle who became his wife.

Annabelle moved from Hamilton, Ohio, to begin her new career as a teacher. She found a job in Baggs, Wyoming, teaching in a one-room schoolhouse. They married, got two homesteads through the Homestead Act, and lived in a cave on Annabelle’s 160 acres. He was now a landowner and had the beginnings of a sheep ranching operation. The very beginnings. 

And then came the kids. Four boys and four girls. With each one, the homestead began to expand, and so did his business. By the time Roy died at 58 in a car accident one night on a dark and lonely highway outside of Baggs, he owned over 33,000 acres with over 5,000 sheep and was invested in three sheep ranching businesses. One man from humble roots with no dad did all that from scratch. He saw an opportunity, left his family, and took it. He built a life and wealth. 

As I recount this story, I think of my own life. I left Jersey City, New Jersey, to go to college in Miami, Florida. 

My sister, Janet, had moved there five years earlier and set up a life for herself. She did what she always wanted to do. Something she wasn’t allowed nor encouraged to do while in Jersey City. She pursued her dream of becoming a professional artist. She bucked the odds and did it. And it wasn’t easy. She had to make enough money to buy supplies, advance her education, have a place to live, and put food on the table. She worked as a barmaid, waitress, and school teacher. An art teacher, of course.

So I followed her to Miami. I escaped the life people wanted me to have and discovered a new life. My parents and relatives were all middle class, blue-collar workers. Their view of life and what I could achieve was limited to their experience. They wanted my sister and me to get jobs, get married, and earn a living.

She was a girl. They wanted her to be a secretary. But she surprised them. She applied to State Teacher’s College in Jersey City, attended, and graduated. The first in our family to earn a college degree. She became a teacher. My parents then wanted me to get a college education, followed by securing a good job. 

So leave the people who tell you what you should become. And become the person God planned from the beginning. Where else would your big dreams come from!

I guess I had something after all.