Cirque du Soleil co-founder, longtime street performer, accordion player, fire breather, high stakes poker player, billionaire, and astronaut tourist, Guy Laliberte' spent his first night in London on a park bench. Not full blown homelessness, but a huge chance to take as a young man. He mentions it at 1:36. For him, street performing kept him going, and took him around Europe. Later he traveled the world with Cirque du Soleil, and then traveled to space, spending a week in the International Space Station.
As I work to move out of full blown homelessness myself, I get a lot of attitude from people who see every person without a current place to live is a complete failure, AND an hard drug addict, AND an alcoholic, AND mentally ill, AND just plain lazy. Many people on the streets fall into one of those categories, and some don't. Most homeless people just spend a few days or a few weeks without a place to live after some kind of tragedy. You never notice those people, in most cases. There's been a long and strong P.R. campaign to label all homeless people as hopeless and worthless. That's fits in with the personal and political ambitions of certain groups. I've been called a straight up "worthless piece of shit," by one of a group of guys, with baseball bats, outside my tent one night, while in North Carolina.
But I happen to know that, while it is really hard to escape long term homelessness, there are a lot of well known people who lived in a shelter for a while, lived in their cars, or maybe even actually lived on the streets at some point, and went on to great success at one thing or another. Time will tell how my story works out, but here are some people you have most likely heard of that were homeless, in some fashion, as some point.
In this Steve Harvey show clip, vine and internet star DeStorm Power tells how he went from the streets of New York City, to internet success, and on to the entertainment industry. This success story happened in the last few years. Did you know that Steve Harvey was homeless as well? He lived in his car for about three years as a young, touring, comedian. So did Jay Leno, early in his career.
Robert Kiyosaki, best known for his personal finance bestselling book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad, lived in his car for three weeks with his wife Kim Kiyosaki. Then they spent nine months living in some friends' basement while they put together a business plan and went on to build a successful business. Now they own thousands of apartment units between them, stocks, oil drilling rights, and many other investments. They also teach others how to do the same.
Legendary computer entrepreneur, Steve Jobs, was basically on the couch tour as a young man for a few months, before he found a focus, building personal computers... and a little company called Apple. Comedian and actor Jim Carrey was homeless as a kid. He joked about it early in his comedy career, "We were Canadian... I thought we were just camping."
Those are just a few of the better known people who were once homeless. Here's a list of 53 famous people, including a couple I named above, who were homeless sometime in the past. Just a reminder that a person's situation right now, can, and usually does, change. All the people you see every day in life, homeless or not, have stories, most of which you don't know. Where they are now, can be far from where they wind up later...
I just started a new blog for Marvin Davits, to promote Marvin's business, installing dinghy davits on boats and yachts. Check it out.
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