Doug Batchelor The Richest Caveman, Part 1

What kind of a childhood do you think the son of an aviation magnate and a “show biz” maven had? If you think it was a happy one, you couldn’t be more wrong.

Doug Batchelor grew up with a millionaire for a father and a film critic for a mother. As a child, he quickly learned one thing: Money and fame did not equal happiness. He and his older brother, Falcon, who were both named after airplanes, barely saw their parents.

Their father was chasing business deals and drinking himself to sleep every night; their mother, who had begun her career as a songwriter before venturing to Broadway, yearned after celebrity. They were two people who could not be more different: Republican versus Democrat, businessman versus artist, Baptist versus Jewish—though eventually they both became atheists. But neither of them was happy.

And Doug was not happy either. He always felt that he was in the way.

When Doug was only three years old, his parents divorced, and the children were sent to boarding schools and summer camps. In all, Doug went to 14 different schools. You name it, he went to it—public school, Catholic school, Jewish school, even a free school with coeducational dorms. At age five, he was put in his first military school.

At age seven, he began thinking of committing suicide. While in New York, where his mom now lived, he would often find himself on the rooftops of skyscrapers, sticking his toes as far off the edge as possible. Later on, he also began to regularly smoke pot with his mom, who thought it would be safer for her children to use drugs in a controlled environment.

So it was not long before Doug began his first career—in troublemaking. By the time he was 13, he and his friends were robbing homes on one of the Sunset Islands, the exclusive neighborhood off of Miami Beach where his father now resided. He had been to jail and had even stolen from his friends. He did it because he was bored, because he wanted attention, and because he thought no one cared about him.

But all these things that might seem so exciting only made Doug unhappier, so much so that he ran away to Boston when he was only 15 years old.

Reflect: Are you looking for happiness in the things of this world, in other people, in your own achievements?