Slumdog Entrepreneurs: Millionaires in Spirit

You will encounter few cities on the planet with slums like RIo de Janeiro’s “favelas”. They are essentially war zones between drug kingpins and local police, often corrupt and acting on behalf of their own interests. The result is essentially a slum in which thousands of people live where gang violence is prevalent and where residents are often damned to a life of poverty. For a bit of perspective, one in five people living in Rio’s favelas have lost a family member to the drug-war, and nearly as many blame the police as they do the drug dealers.

City officials say that one year ago under no circumstances could researchers, taxies, or even pizza delivery boys enter a favela. But in the last year things have changed, drastically. The Brazilian government has utilized special SWAT-style police forces to reclaim one slum at a time, removing the drug lords by force and installing police officers with no previous history in the neighborhood to maintain the peace. So far, eight favelas have been pacified. Improved safety and security in these eight locations has fostered a sense of entry-level entrepreneurship, opening the door for many families to pursue means of financial sustenance.

Flourishing convenient stores, small cafes, and tire-shops are popping-up like wildflowers where before the risk was too great for residents looking to invest their humble savings in a store of some kind. Let me remind you, these are not 7-11s, Subways, or JiffyLubes. These are bare-bones, rubber-to-the-road entrepreneurs pulling together a few shelves, a pad of paper, and a small range of drinks, packaged snacks, and perhaps a few essential toiletries to sell in a one-hundred square-foot shack. Though for favela residents, this is an unspeakable improvement from even one year ago.

Though there still exists a significant risk to these slumdog entrepreneurs (revived gang activity, flash floods, or the perils of maintaining a profit), many are finding innovative ways to leverage the help of the entire community to support their venture. It basically works like this: a group of families pool together enough money to start one convenient store. They all work to make sure it succeeds, so that in return they’ll utilize the funds from the first to start a second and so on. This community operative works beautifully and on a trip to Honduras some years ago, I saw the same dynamic successfully utilized for farming.

So at this point you may be wondering what Brazilian favelas have to do with Payoff.com. It turns out, a lot. One of Payoff’s cornerstones is that of entrepreneurship. Many Americans consider entrepreneurs to be people like Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, or Donald Trump. While they are indeed entrepreneurs, so are the thousands of ordinary people every year who set-out to establish there very own pizzeria, coffee shop, pet store, community bank, or even a hotdog stand. They are entrepreneurs too, people who are pursuing their passions.

Millions of Americans complain everyday about how much they dislike their jobs though lack the courage to quit and pursue their true passion. In a country like the U.S., where a world of opportunity is set before us, why do we bury our motivation? We settle for less in a country with more than a country like Brazil, where even the poorest citizens are looking beyond their risks (which are infinitely more severe than ours) and pursuing a lifestyle that grants them freedom. We can learn a lot from the slumdog entrepreneurs in Rio, for they’ve demonstrated a will and found a way to make something that only one year a go seemed impossible, possible.

Pursuing your passion, even in a recession, no longer seems so difficult to manage when compared to the mountain of resistance facing our fellow entrepreneurs in the favelas. While pursuing your passion is most definitely a life-changing decision and one that should be taken with care, we encourage you to consider your passions and decide what must be done to pursue them. Life is much too short to spend doing something you don’t enjoy.