The billionaire who revitalized Brooklyn’s waterfront went from working on a farm to building a real estate empire worth billions. Here are the lessons he learned on his building from nothing journey.

Long before real estate billionaire David Walentas transformed a swath of rundown Brooklyn shoreline into the thriving Dumbo (“Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass”) neighborhood, he was a kid growing up in Rochester, New York during the Depression, learning lessons the hard way.

His father, a Russian-Lithuanian first-generation American who worked at the post office, suffered a stroke when Walentas was five that left him paralyzed. To support him and his brother (then ages 3 and 4), his mother worked constantly, and when that still wasn't enough, she sent the boys off to live and work on nearby farms.

“We were kind of like orphans or indentured slaves,” he says. “We got up at five o’clock, milked cows, shoveled shit, took the school bus, came home and did it again.”

That early experience was hard – sleeping in the cold during the winter and the heat during the summers was never easy for Walentas – but fueled his ambition. “I think the biggest lesson I learned was that I wanted to be more successful,” he says.

The problem was Walentas did not have a roadmap. “When you're poor like that… you don’t talk to anybody that knows anything,” he tells Forbes. “Back in the Depression, people didn't go to college. I never really had a mentor.” So he had to forge his own path. As a high school senior, sitting in a principal’s office, he noticed a poster for a Navy ROTC scholarship. He signed up on his own, circling two preferred schools: Harvard, because he’d heard of it, and the University of Virginia because “it........

© Forbes