I have no business being rich. I grew up curling my bangs in a trailer park, using food stamps to buy popsicles, dating boys who milked cows, bringing boom boxes to stone quarries, and thinking tinted car windows were the ultimate sign of prestige.

If you made a sitcom hybrid of My Name is Earl, Roseanne and The Office, you’d find my 15-year-old self waving awkwardly from the back of somebody’s blue pickup truck—except probably literally, since The Office takes place in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and I’m from nearby.

My relationship to work, and my ideas about what adults did for work, was distorted at best⎯royally catastrophic at worst. My mom had me as a single mother with a severe social phobia. We lived on a combined monthly income of $567 from Social Security Disability, $200 in child support, and a couple extra hundred bucks here and there. We moved into our first trailer when we were living on less than $9,000 a year.

She’d spend her days holed up reading John Grisham, sampling cocktails of prozac and the lorazepam, tenderly caring for her tomato garden and spending her afternoons napping.

I loved her, but that didn’t stop my fourteen-year-old self, who didn’t understand such things, from seeing her as weak.

Why can’t you just get a job? I’d yell, annoyed when I’d see her struggle to pay the heating bill one day, and the next stroll in the door with a forty dollar carton of Marlboros. We had Marlboro sleeping bags, Marlboro thermoses, Marlboro coolers. Apparently when you buy enough forty dollar cartons of cigarettes, you end up with an unnatural supply of red and yellow camping gear, courtesy of rewards points. Points my mother would try to get me excited to “cash in” as she flipped through the official Marlboro magazine, hoping to ease my disapproval. But my disapproval only grew. It was bad enough she was killing us both with those things. Did she have to get a fucking prize for it?

I hated living in a trailer. I hated sneaking out the back door and walking around the block to show up at the bus stop from a different street, hoping no one would guess where I really lived. I hated feeling like it was a prison sentence, that my place was in the world had been decided by something so entirely outside of my control.

In the 6th grade, a boy named Craig got up on a chair and announced to our classmates in a singsongey voice: “Ashley lives in a trailer! Ashley lives in a trailer!” He sang it like a song, every word carving a bitter promise into my heart that this place in the world wouldn’t be my place. I would be better than the two-story, two car garaged Craig’s of the world. And I’d prove it. Someday.

It was six years later, when I first heard about the interview.

Andy McKelvey, billionaire business mogul and founder of the Monster.com empire, stood up, walked over, and shook my hand. A week later, I accepted a $120,000 scholarship to a private liberal arts college.

By then, my mother wanted to die; she told me the pain was too much. She wished for a gun. As it seemed to my then 20-year-old self, my mother was even lazy about dying.

After I got the call—”come quick”—I experienced a lifetime of firsts: First eulogy (couldn’t stand it) , first estate sale (couldn’t keep it), first apartment in the city of Philadelphia (couldn’t afford it), first car loan (definitely couldn’t afford it), first Grey Goose martini (pretended I could afford it), first bank account (proved I couldn't afford it), and first “real” job ($32,000 seemed like a bazillion).

Later, once I’d realized that the ‘real world’ was smoke and mirrors and adults had no idea what they were doing, I’d go onto experience a whole new world of firsts: first grad school class, first freelance writing business, first house I built with a man, first time I left a man, first time I left the country.

It was in Chile where I built a new identity for myself as the kind of woman that went places.

There, I had my first employee, my first business partnership, my first article in Entrepreneur magazine, my first million dollars.

Looking back at my mother's tax returns from 1995, I went from experiencing life at $5,618 in annual income, to experiencing life at $500K+ a year—all before I turned thirty. I went from growing up, living in a trailer using hair dryers to heat the pipes in the winter time, to running a business on my Macbook, traveling the world, drinking good wine, often earning $5,618 a day.

My success, albeit unconventional, was not groomed.

But each hard day became a lesson.

And together, what I discovered was this:

Your circumstances are not life sentences.

No matter where you’re starting, you have the power to create. Painters have always had the power to paint, photographers have always had the power to photograph, writers have always had the power to write.

Whatever type of artist you are, you have always had the power to create your art.

What's changed, however, is the market.

By leveraging the power of the internet, every single one of us now has a global market at our fingertips. And for FREE.

No longer is it just big businesses who have the money to be able to reach enough customers.

Now, your customers are just a click away—and oftentimes, thanks to that thing we call a search engine, they're already looking for you.

And do you know what that means, when you have people actively searching for your art?

It means there's a demand.

And do you know what you can do with demand?

You can step up to the plate, start creating, and provide a supply.

And do you know what happens when you've got a lot of demand, and just a little supply?

PROFIT HAPPENS.

In a most basic sense, this is precisely how we can leverage the internet to reinvent ourselves from scratch, starting this very minute.

It's smart.

It's hip.

And it's authentically good.

Because it gives you the power to control your own circumstances in ways that we never could have in the past.

Your dreams are not frivolous.

As a matter of fact, your dreams are necessary.

Necessary not only for your own good...

...but for the well-being of us all.

We need you to create.

We need you to put yourself out there.

And we need you to share your dreams with us.

Because inspiration builds upon inspiration.

And without you, we will be sorely lacking.

Lacking in the confidence to pursue our own dreams.

Which will ultimately end up on the backburner...

...in the same place that so many dreamers have permanently stored their unrequited inner longings.

And the day that happens to enough of us, will be the day that the human race dies.

Because without dreams, we aren't human.

We're merely tools.

Objects.

Factors of production.

So, please, I beg you.

Go now.

Create.

Because you are the only one who can.