What you learn — and don't learn — when nobody in your family had the language for the life you wanted.
I grew up in a house where money was not discussed.
That sounds simple, but it isn't. What it meant in practice was that I learned nothing about money from the people responsible for raising me. Not how to make it. Not how to save it. Not how to think about it. The information that other families pass along at the dinner table — even casually, in the way they talk about a car payment, a vacation, or a credit card bill — was missing from our table entirely.
When I asked for something, the answer was usually one of three sentences.
You don't work, so don't ask.
Like I have extra money.
There's no money in the ATM.
That last one I remember the most. I didn't understand banking yet, but I understood the message. The ATM is broken in some special way for our family. Money isn't in there for us.
This wasn't anyone's fault. My parents had what they had. They handed down what they knew, which wasn't much, because nobody had handed it down to them either. Multiple generations of working people, each one absorbing the same model: go to work, get paid, pay the bills, repeat. End of curriculum.
I was the middle child of seven. Two older brothers, an older sister, two younger sisters, a younger brother. The older ones got attention because they were close to being adults — close to being useful, close to being help. All three of them dropped out of high school and went to work. The younger ones got attention because they were small and needed it. I was in the middle. Not the eldest, not the baby, not in distress. I got less than either group.
My siblings have said to me, in different ways over the years, that I never seemed quite like part of the family. They weren't being cruel. They were noticing something real. I wasn't not part of the family. I just wasn't being shaped by it the same way.
That left a lot of empty space. And I filled it with television.
I want to be careful about how I describe what television did for me, because it wasn't a teacher. Television didn't teach me about money. There wasn't much to learn there, not in my case.
What television did was show me, in episode after episode, that other people lived completely different kinds of lives than the one I was living.
The families on the screen talked to each other. They had conversations at the table about things other than what was wrong. They went on vacations. They had houses that didn't double as the place a family of nine fought for space. They had neighborhoods where people knew each other and looked out for one another. They had something I didn't have a word for at the time but recognize now as quality of life — not in the brochure sense, but in the texture of every day.
I used to laugh at the things TV kids got away with. The mouthing off. The breaking of small rules. The casual disrespect that the parents shrugged off or smiled at. In my house, those scenes were science fiction. We would have had funeral arrangements.
But underneath the laughter was something else. There was a recognition. That world exists. It's not made up. Someone, somewhere, lives like that. And it isn't us.
That's what television actually showed me. Not a curriculum. A comparison.
The trouble with growing up by comparison instead of by instruction is that you absorb a lot of information about what's missing without ever learning how to acquire it. You can see, vividly, that other people have something you don't. But you can't see the steps they took, or their parents took, or their grandparents took, to get there.
"You absorb the gap. You don't absorb the path."
For years, this manifested as a particular kind of stuckness. I knew, intellectually, that other lives existed. I had seen them. But I had no model for how the other lives got built. Nobody in my family had built one. Nobody in my immediate neighborhood had built one. The people on television hadn't earned their way onto the screen in front of me — they were just there, fully assembled, with no behind-the-scenes footage.
The closest I ever came to a mentor in those years was a Home Economics teacher who recruited me into an Amway meeting when I was a teenager. I went because I needed money. I left understanding pretty quickly that whatever this was, it wasn't going to help. The other "mentors" who showed up over the years followed the same pattern — people who wanted something from me, not people who wanted to teach me something.
There's a line I caught myself thinking for a long time:
I never had a good mentor. The only ones who showed up wanted something from me.
That line was both true and useless. True, because it accurately described my experience. Useless, because it stopped me from looking for the next mentor. From going to find them in places I hadn't tried yet. The line about not having a mentor became the reason I didn't have one.
I'm not telling this to ask for sympathy. There are far worse versions of it. There are far worse versions in my own family. I'm telling it because I think this particular pattern — growing up in an information void and not realizing it until much later — is more common than people admit. And I think it explains a lot about why some people stay stuck in patterns that, from the outside, look easy to escape.
You can't escape a pattern you don't see. And you can't see the pattern if nobody in your life has the language for it.
Headway exists because of this gap. Not because I figured everything out and now want to be inspiring. Because I spent decades figuring out, slowly and badly, what should have been taught at the dinner table. And because there are millions of people walking around right now in the same condition I was in at seventeen — capable, willing, hardworking, and missing the thing that nobody ever gave them.
If that's you, I'm not going to tell you it's fair or unfair. It just is. Your starting line is your starting line.
But once you can see the void — once you can name it as a missing curriculum, rather than a personal failure — you can start filling it in. Yourself. Late. Imperfectly. From whatever sources you can find. A book. A free course. A blog post written by someone who grew up in the same kind of house.
That's what Headway is. It's not a substitute for the family that should have taught you this. There is no substitute for that. But it's a place to start.
The information void is real. So is the way out of it.
What was missing from your upbringing may not have been affection, opportunity, or resources. It may have been language — the words and models for building the life you wanted. When nobody hands them to you, you spend decades constructing with the wrong tools. The good news: the void can be filled. Late, imperfectly, from wherever you can find the source. That's not a lesser path. That's where the work actually begins.
Subscribe and we'll let you know when a new Founder's Journal entry publishes — plus our weekly newsletter with practical tips on money, mindset, and building something of your own.