I can't dismiss my roots as a kid growing up during the Great Depression in the ordinary midwestern town of Gr... — Richard M. DeVos

I can't dismiss my roots as a kid growing up during the Great Depression in the ordinary midwestern town of Grand Rapids, Michigan. From the standpoint of money and material possessions, we were barely scraping by.

Author: Richard M. DeVos

Insight: There's something honest about refusing to edit your own past. Most people who eventually succeed want to rewrite their origin story, to make it cleaner or more dramatic than it actually was. But insisting on your actual roots—the ordinary town, the actual struggle—keeps you tethered to something real. It's harder to become disconnected from people when you remember what it felt like to barely scrape by. What's interesting is how scarcity shapes you differently depending on how you respond to it. Some people carry poverty as shame they want to escape and forget. Others carry it as information. DeVos seems to mean the second thing: those years taught him something that mattered, not because struggle is noble, but because it showed him what matters and what doesn't. That kind of clarity is valuable, especially when you have actual resources later on. It's a counterweight to the drift that can happen when doors suddenly open. The real weight of this idea hits when you think about your own kids or people around you who've never had that particular education. Not hardship for its own sake—plenty of people suffer and learn nothing. But the specific lesson that you can want things and work toward them without expecting the world to hand them over. That's something you either learn early, or you learn it much more expensively later.