Now worth $200 million, Sarah Jessica Parker says growing up in poverty created her ‘work ethic’

“I am one of eight kids that struggled financially,” Parker recently said in a commencement speech to Northwestern University students.

“For the most part, as children, we had what we needed, but we rarely had the things that we wanted, and I consider that a great gift because it created in me a hunger, a focused ambition, and a work ethic that’s sort of a point of operation and pride for me.”

Essentially, pining for things she couldn’t afford meant she had things to work towards. And that’s the message she wanted to leave with the next generation entering the workforce: don’t lose your appetite for bigger ambitions.

“Despite the successes you are sure to achieve, material or otherwise, never stop wanting,” she said, while warning that the alternative is “resignation to complacency and inertia.” 

Sarah Jessica Parker says she took on ‘bad movies’ to pay the bills, but it didn’t kill her Hollywood dreams

No matter where you’re starting from, Parker stressed that no dream is too big. 

“I wholeheartedly disagree with the definition of dreamer as one who lives in fantasy as impractical or unrealistic,” she added. “To dream is to have vision.”

As the poet Norman Vincent Peale famously said: “Shoot for the Moon. Even if you miss, you’ll lang among the stars.” 

And Parker is a clear example of that. 

She began working at eight years old, playing the lead in an NBC TV after-school special, The Little Match Girl, for $500—and later spent years taking roles she didn’t love to pay the bills. But the 61-year-old said the experience didn’t kill her Hollywood dreams. 

“I’ve had many of those detours in my own life that you might be able to name: bad movies, bad television shows, that I did to pay the rent or to eat, but I challenged myself not to let those less-than-inspiring deviations erode my greater goals,” she said to the class of 2026. 

Parker’s not just preaching to students. The actress and her husband, Matthew Broderick, have previously insisted they’re raising their three children to “understand what it means to earn money,” including dressing her son in hand-me-downs.  

“Their needs are met… They’re warm in the winter and cool in the summer, but they should pine for things,” the “Sex and the City” star told iHeartRadio in 2023. “And they should also, I think, be interested in how do they contribute to the things at a certain point.”

CEOs agree that ‘ample doses of pain and suffering’ create success

Parker’s not the first to tell students that overcoming adversity is the ultimate rite of passage for successful people. Delta’s CEO, Ed Bastian, told this year’s graduates that enduring hardships in life is an “investment” in their careers and future selves. 

In fact, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told Stanford graduates that not having enough of it could even hold them back.

“People with very high expectations have very low resilience—and unfortunately, resilience matters in success,” Huang said during an interview with the Stanford Graduate School of Business. “One of my great advantages is that I have very low expectations.”

The tech genius—who with a net worth of $180 billion is one of the world’s wealthiest people—was born in Taiwan in 1963 and spent the bulk of his early life in Thailand, before moving to the U.S. at 9 years old.

And just one example of Huang’s hardship was his daily high school experience: The teenager had to cross a dangerous footbridge with missing planks over a river to get to his public school in Kentucky, where he was then relentlessly tormented. Bullies even tried to toss him off the bridge, but he reframes his tough experiences growing up as “opportunities for setbacks and suffering”—setting him up for the CEO job today.

“I don’t know how to do it [but] for all of you Stanford students, I wish upon you ample doses of pain and suffering,” Huang added. “Greatness comes from character and character isn’t formed out of smart people—it’s formed out of people who suffered.”