Actually you can make $10,000 from nothing weeding or mowing. Of course, you have to be willing to do hard things like get rejected door to door, but it's extremely possible.
If 'nothing' == 'buying a lawn mower, a truck, a trailer, and a weed wacker' then you'd be correct. Although I'm not sure which part of the the Bronx you think I should setup my mowing business in because the last time I checked, there isn't any grass.
There was a great comment on here by Mahmud, I think, about how he used to make a few hundred dollars per day with a bucket of water and some sponges washing windows.
It is possible to make money with work ethic and no capital.
I'm sure there are many ways to make money with no capital, I was responding to what I perceive to be the flippant 'if only poor people just WORKED, they wouldn't be so damn poor' mentality. A hell of a lot of people work their ass off and are still poor.
I'll go further than that. Hard work doesn't actually correlate with salary. I know this becuase I have an incredibly easy job while my cousin busts his ass everyday at two jobs. He works more hours than me a week, and each of those hours is far harder, and one of his jobs actually involves risk of personal injury. All of them are outside in the heat. He gets pissed off at me because he works so hard and I seem to not have to work at all, but at the end of the day, hard work is not a recipe for sucess. He does stuff that plenty of other people are willing to do, while I do stuff that a lot of people never bothered to learn (at some point, they probably decided that they 'didn't like math' and closed the door for themselves).
Hard work is a necessary but insufficient condition for sucess. Yes, you have to work your butt off in order to suceed; but you can toil everyday and get nowhere very easily. You have to work hard on the right things in order to get ahead.
That realization has a lot of implications. One of them is relevant for this conversation: working hard may or may not lift you out of poverty. You can't extrapolate from "he lives in poverty" to "he isn't working hard". I've worked at a McDonalds, I've pumped gas, I've mowed lawns. All of those jobs were significantly harder than what I do today, and all of them paid barely enough to support myself, much less work towards a better future.
You could work full time at McDonalds and then put in an extra 20 or 30 hours a week at another minimum wage job, and not get ahead. Or you can work full time at McDonalds and go to a vocational school at nights and probably get ahead. They are both equally hard work, but one will likely lead you to a better life and one won't. But that doesn't mean the people in the first group aren't working hard.
Some people are able to perceive that they are working hard but on a treadmill. They then do something to change that. It may work, it may not. If not they try something else, until they find a way to get a little more success out of the hard work. They then repeat the process. It's exactly the same as an entrepreneur who fails at a start-up attempt but learns and adapts the next time, only on a smaller, personal-income scale.
Other people never seem to realize they are running in place, or if they do, they don't have the drive to make any changes and just accept it.
You might also be willing to have an imagination and try a different kind of business.
(FYI, I hired a kid last year to mow my lawn a few times, he had a used push mower, no car, trailer or truck, he simply pushed the mower from house to house. He made $2000 over a summer after subtracting the $150 for the mower and the $50 in gas he used)
Think metaphorically. Around you are people with money who have to do odd jobs they don't like. If you're willing to do that work, they will pay you for it.
It doesn't have to be skilled. Think shoveling dog poop http://www.azcentral.com/ent/pop/articles/0420doody0420.html . If you can't find an equivalent where you live, you either live in a paradise where no one has annoying chores, or you aren't looking very hard.
I think kind of by definition poor people don't have much money to spend on luxuries like having someone scoop their dogs' poop. Though, where I grew up there were lots of people with money who had odd jobs that they didn't like doing themselves. You could be a drug dealer, the muscle, a lookout etc. But it's not like people don't know this, they just don't want to be arrested or worse.
