Just Be Rich

If they (in the above story) were so smart and motivated (towards starting corps and getting rich), why'd they:

Make a family and let that get in the way of that?

Not H1B or student-visa / postgrad it to "high-income countries"?

Not cultivate and create their support network?

Not overcome "crippling" mistake?

And so on? And endless list of weak excuses for why they'll only ever be mediocre, but hey, they're just as smart as Elon Must and Steve Jobs. That idea can buzz off. If they were, they'd be doing like them.

Did Musk and Jobs always "have it easy"? No, they got back up. Take 100 Musk and Jobs clones, I think only 25 will make it to the same approximate place they did. The rest will get done in by random stuff, and scattered across various levels of successful but not super successful. But I think only 1 or 2 will be "failures" or "average people" without any major success.

That's the character of these people. Succeed anywhere. But the "story" about it in the above comment, this story make it like choices don't matter.

A story to excuse "they"s own failure. A smug content, well, "coulda shoulda woulda" while wrongly taking the responsibility away from "they" and the "Musks and Jobses" for what they each got.

Consolation that disempowers. It's bad to do so. To tell people "poor is a state that something else decided for you. You have not much power to escape."

A person I think must have had it so easy to never have to work out how much you can accomplish if you commit and persevere.

This sort of "smug, content, rich country attitude" that people in "high income countries" can afford to take, because everything, even the "poor levels" are so comfortable.

Easy times, so they never have to get pushed to learn to take themselves higher. Symptom of privilege and an easy, unchallenged life to have these armchair opinions that success is meted out by powerful forces outside the ken of individuals and their choices.

If one comes from adversity, one is more likely to learn their own power. But the easy-rich-country folk can choose to give themselves adversity to make up for this. Sad to see delusions like the above story. This delusion is the poverty of privilege, a sickness of the easy-riding armchair theorists content to coast through effortless existence.

Adversity does crush, and does demoralize, but I bet you 10 folk from "low income countries" have twice the mettle, grit and heart that 100 folks from easy-riding "high income countries" with their easy excuses, and zero-cost "regrets" can afford. Give me 10 of the first lot anyday, better than the whining mewling of ne'er-do-wells too lucky to know how impoverished they really are in spirit, and how much they could have accomplished had they wanted it more.

Heavy sigh. All these loser excuses the above "story" describes here pathetic and not the stuff that these "Musks and Jobses" would let get in their way. I think from the way you write about it, you have no idea. I think you, and many others, are blind to the absolute smug arrogance (and waste via consoling thinking) of telling yourself sure that guy could be as good as Musk but he didn't set it up that way, and made all these mistakes he couldn't recover from, is blaming externalities when he had choices. How dare you take that from them. How dare you take that from yourself. What you chose.

Musk's hardships: awful father, abusive father-son relationship, no SA support network, social anxiety, had to leave SA over "crippling mistake"

Jobs hardships: didn't know his real father, never felt belonged to the adoptive family, no support network had to go his own way, had child early and paid for the "crippling mistake" of abandoning that family, no money in 1976

Bezos hardships: didn't know his real father, bullied in high school, had kids early, made plenty of mistakes

Others: Keanu Reeves, Meghan Markle, you think you can take these people and just say, "they had it easy, the cream floats to the top", any woman who's been successful (has to have 10x the grit of men to move through all the shit they get), any person who gets successful (has to have 10x the grit of non-successful people to get there, and stay there).

Again, I'm sorry this is not at you, but this story that poor stops people, is such a broken story.

What country are you describing, pal? In Soviet Union it was "вольнодумство" ("freethinking"), which was a bad thing, to own personal cars / dachas by the highest members of partocracy only. Because that raised questions concerning their loyalty and belief in the system. But even they bought all that under the name of their wives and children. We've got plenty of memoirs of their scions to stop perpetuating the lies.

Wealth at its core is a proxy for quality of life. Today, as compared to 30 years ago, here's what even most low-income households can afford: * airline flights that cost a small percentage of what they used to * immediate access to any information via the internet * vastly improved medical care & surgical procedures, ranging from cancer treatment to lower infant mortality rates * the ability to easily keep in touch with loved ones wherever they are in the world * high definition flat-screen TVs and the ability to watch any any show or movie as soon as desired * online videos to learn how to do almost anything, for those motivated enough to learn * digital cameras in our pocket that allow us to always be ready to capture an amazing moment or scene for our memories

Wealth disparity is only a problem if it is due to theft.