"Alone on a dark gritty street, Adam Shepard searched for a homeless shelter. He had a gym bag, $25, and little else...His goal: to have a furnished apartment, a car, and $2,500 in savings within a year."
This guy actually is a college grad with connections, but he wanted to stress test the accessibility of the American Dream so he took to the streets to start from nothing to make it on his own. He had to cut his experiment short after 10 months, due to an illness in the family, but..."by then he had moved into an apartment, bought a pickup truck, and had saved close to $5,000."
Check out the whole article, it's a quick read and it's quite good. The bottom line is this: he made it. No one handed it to him and no one rescued him, he simply had to work for it. Here's the best part of the interview:
"One guy, who arrived [at the shelter] on a Tuesday had been hit by a car on [the previous] Friday by a drunk driver. He was in a wheelchair. He was totally out of it. He was at the shelter. And I said, "Dude, your life is completely changed." And he said, "Yeah, you're right, but I'm getting the heck out of here." Then there was this other guy who could walk and everything was good in his life, but he was just kind of bumming around, begging on the street corner."
He wrote a book about it, too.
1 comment:
that is pretty amazing, especially the fact that he says he never mentioned his education. I wonder however, if such a thing would be possible for a non-white American citizen, particularly one who doesn't speak "proper" English or one who doesn't speak English well at all. I don't totally doubt it, but I do wonder...
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