This week, with SpaceX's IPO, Elon Musk became the first person with a fortune of a trillion dollars. Searches for "how to start a business" and "is it too late to start" spiked: when someone climbs that high, a lot of people quietly wonder whether they could too.
It's worth looking at someone who started much further down. In 1998, Sara Blakely was 27, had $5,000 in savings and a job selling fax machines door to door. She had no fashion contacts, no design training, no investor. She researched patents herself at the library at night and cold-called, one by one, the hosiery factories of North Carolina until one said yes. Fourteen years later, Forbes named her the youngest self-made female billionaire in the world.
Most people look at these stories and feel admiration, and under the admiration, distance. "What she did is huge. But that's her. The distance between that person and me is infinite."
And they close the tab feeling slightly worse than before they opened it.
This isn't about what Blakely achieved.
It's about the concrete, boring list of what she did NOT have and you do:
1. She spent two years on what today takes two afternoons. Checking whether her idea was already patented meant going to the library, night after night, reading records by hand. Today a tool does that search in minutes. Finding factories meant cold-calling phone numbers, one by one, and hearing no dozens of times. Today you locate them, compare them and write to them in an afternoon. What cost her two years of manual friction now fits in a weekend.
2. She had a single pair of hands; you have ten analysts at your side. Blakely wrote her own patent application to save the lawyer she couldn't afford. She drafted her own sales material. She played designer, salesperson and admin because there was no one else. Today, for the price of a coffee a month, anyone has an intelligence at their side that writes, researches and organizes without sleeping. The part that exhausted her no longer exhausts anyone.
3. She had to ask permission to reach people; you don't. Her product needed to get into a department store to exist, and that depended on a buyer agreeing to see her. Today you can sell to the whole world from a desk, with no one opening the door for you. The gatekeeper she had to convince is no longer at the door.
The difference between Blakely in 1998 and you in 2026 isn't talent. It's that she built a billion while carrying a weight that has been taken off you.
Do the math, without emotion. Blakely had $5,000, a day job, no training and a notebook. You have access to more knowledge, more tools and more reach than she would have dreamed of, probably for less money.
The uncomfortable question isn't whether you can do what she did. It's this: if she did it carrying that weight, what exactly is it that stops you, who don't carry it?
When the weight that held back the founders of the past disappears, an opportunity doesn't open: a chain does. And most people don't see it because they keep looking at the summit instead of the ground under their feet.
Millions of people now have your same tools, but don't know how to use them. Walking someone from "I have the idea" to "I have the first sale," with what used to require a team, is a whole business.
Every time you get past a step that cost Blakely months —incorporating, validating, selling—, that path can be packaged for the next person. What's scarce isn't the tool: it's the clear route through it.
Plenty of people with a good idea don't want to touch anything technical. Building the service that executes on the cheap tools, for those who already know what they want, has immediate demand.
The question isn't how to be the next Blakely. It's: what specific weight that held back someone you admire no longer exists for you, and what are you going to do with the hands it freed?
Blakely built a billion with $5,000, a day job and a notebook. You're not missing what she had. You have a surplus of what she didn't. The only thing that costs today the same as in 1998 is starting.