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Talent vs Luck: The Role of Randomness in Success and Failure

SurrealisticSlumbers

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So You're Smart, but You're Not Rich? This Eye-Opening New Scientific Study Tells You Why
Chris Matyszczyk

Don't you look at rich people and find too many of them, well, dull?

Don't you listen to rich people and think: "What have they got that I haven't? Other than money?" In fact, doesn't it astonish you a little that you know so much, see so much, and can do so much, yet you really don't have much money at all? A new study offers you a reason for your lack of wealth.

It's one that's going to hurt. The study, entitled "Talent vs Luck: The Role of Randomness in Success and Failure," looked at people over a 40-year period. Alessandro Pluchino of the University of Catania in Italy and his colleagues created a computer model of talent. I can't imagine that was easy or, to every mind, entirely satisfying.

After all, one person's idea of talent is another person's idea of Simon Cowell. Still, Pluchino and friends mapped such apparent basics as intelligence, skill, and ability in various fields. They then looked at people over a 40-year period, discerned what sort of things had happened to them, and compared that with how wealthy they had become.

They discovered that the conventional distribution of wealth - 20 percent of humanity enjoys 80 percent of the wealth - held true. But then they offered painful words. They still hurt, even though we know they're true: "The maximum success never coincides with the maximum talent, and vice-versa."

Never.

It's galling, isn't it, to look at some of the relatively talentless quarterwits who bathe in untold piles of lucre? "So what is it that makes the difference?" I hear you pant, with an agonious grimace. Are you ready for this? "Our simulation clearly shows that such a factor is just pure luck," say the researchers. The researchers actually looked at different events that had happened in people's lives and ranked them according to how lucky or unlucky these events were.

"It is evident that the most successful individuals are also the luckiest ones. And the less successful individuals are also the unluckiest ones," they said. The danger here is that such a conclusion offers a blessed excuse to many who have chosen not to use their talents in ways that might have brought them fortunes. But there are those, too, who actively don't seek to be wealthy, but prefer a life that makes them, well, happier.

The scientists, though, offer some rude awakenings to those who prefer to imagine that the wealthy have some special talent. "If it is true that some degree of talent is necessary to be successful in life, almost never the most talented people reach the highest peaks of success, being overtaken by mediocre but sensibly luckier individuals," they say.

This leads them to suggest that their research "sheds new light on the effectiveness of assessing merit on the basis of the reached level of success and underlines the risks of distributing excessive honors or resources to people who, at the end of the day, could have been simply luckier than others." I admit - perhaps you will too - that when I look at the likes of, say, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg or, well, other prominent types who enjoy unseemly wealth, I wonder just how talented they really are.

Indeed, I've worked over the years with one or two colossally wealthy types and come away, in more than one case, thinking, in the words of the great Los Lobos: "Is this all there is?" Perhaps, if this study is to be believed, the wealthy sorts simply couldn't believe their luck and managed to be level-headed enough to capitalize on it and intelligent enough to realize just how much power it gave them.

On the other hand, I meet so many wonderful, talented, fascinating people who never made much money at all. In the end, my test is very simple: "With whom would I rather have dinner? With whom would there be glorious laughter?"

I will leave you, though, with the researchers' words, ones that may say so much about our current world: "Our results are a warning against the risks of what we call the 'naive meritocracy' which, underestimating the role of randomness among the determinants of success, often fail to give honors and rewards to the most competent people."

They're talking about you, aren't they?
 

Tomb1

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Given that supply and demand results in mediocrity (cars today crumple right up in accidents and are just computer-built aluminum toy-boxes), true talent ends up streamlined and/or underpaid. Capitalism is really just casino gambling. Difference is the 20 percent that hit at a blackjack table know it was luck...in capitalism the illusion of control is all-pervasive. The only real way to control the outcomes in Capitalism is through crime. So long as the risk of being arrested can be mitigated through bribes and kickbacks, capitalism makes some crimes a rational choice because that means the game can be won without having to rely on or wait around for any luck, which may never come.
 

Siúil a Rúin

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This is on point - a talk by Leonard Mlodinow's The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules our Lives

 

Tomb1

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also, for people that don't want to be criminals but want to gain some control over outcomes in a capitalist rat-race, next best thing they can do is adopt (if they are not already born with) ruthless qualities similar to those that make criminals successful but unlike criminals, still play inside the law -- the CEO, the Corporate Raider, the Business/Real Estate Tycoon, the Insurance Defense Litigator.
 

Cellmold

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This is not that surprising.

Though it reinforces my understanding of the pre- commitment concepts people tie themselves to for self-protection. In other words: you tend to push harder and drive yourself harder if you believe there is a conscious will behind every outcome. Which is a buffer against hopelessness and nihilism.

This then results in taking more chances and thus exposing oneself to greater risk/reward, but it is still ultimately a gambling framework where the house usually wins.

The causal aspect of our existence is just too complicated and uncomfortable to reconcile. Even if you convince others, the only response is to double-down on the utilitarianism and simply do something more useful, like try harder.

And that has a point to it, the constant toil against the likely odds that you will not be successful. The evolution of our species seems predicated upon this ignorance or dismissal, because we would not have bothered to progress in any area if we were defeated by an inconvenient reality.

How else could we be exploited by our own nature? Even as we seek to exploit each other.

It's why that 'naive meritocracy' is so pervasive. If any one of us were benefiting from it to an extreme degree, can we look at ourselves and say that we wouldn't fall into the same traps?
 

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So You're Smart, but You're Not Rich? This Eye-Opening New Scientific Study Tells You Why
Chris Matyszczyk

Don't you look at rich people and find too many of them, well, dull?

Don't you listen to rich people and think: "What have they got that I haven't? Other than money?" In fact, doesn't it astonish you a little that you know so much, see so much, and can do so much, yet you really don't have much money at all? A new study offers you a reason for your lack of wealth.

It's one that's going to hurt. The study, entitled "Talent vs Luck: The Role of Randomness in Success and Failure," looked at people over a 40-year period. Alessandro Pluchino of the University of Catania in Italy and his colleagues created a computer model of talent. I can't imagine that was easy or, to every mind, entirely satisfying.

After all, one person's idea of talent is another person's idea of Simon Cowell. Still, Pluchino and friends mapped such apparent basics as intelligence, skill, and ability in various fields. They then looked at people over a 40-year period, discerned what sort of things had happened to them, and compared that with how wealthy they had become.

They discovered that the conventional distribution of wealth - 20 percent of humanity enjoys 80 percent of the wealth - held true. But then they offered painful words. They still hurt, even though we know they're true: "The maximum success never coincides with the maximum talent, and vice-versa."

Never.

It's galling, isn't it, to look at some of the relatively talentless quarterwits who bathe in untold piles of lucre? "So what is it that makes the difference?" I hear you pant, with an agonious grimace. Are you ready for this? "Our simulation clearly shows that such a factor is just pure luck," say the researchers. The researchers actually looked at different events that had happened in people's lives and ranked them according to how lucky or unlucky these events were.

"It is evident that the most successful individuals are also the luckiest ones. And the less successful individuals are also the unluckiest ones," they said. The danger here is that such a conclusion offers a blessed excuse to many who have chosen not to use their talents in ways that might have brought them fortunes. But there are those, too, who actively don't seek to be wealthy, but prefer a life that makes them, well, happier.

The scientists, though, offer some rude awakenings to those who prefer to imagine that the wealthy have some special talent. "If it is true that some degree of talent is necessary to be successful in life, almost never the most talented people reach the highest peaks of success, being overtaken by mediocre but sensibly luckier individuals," they say.

This leads them to suggest that their research "sheds new light on the effectiveness of assessing merit on the basis of the reached level of success and underlines the risks of distributing excessive honors or resources to people who, at the end of the day, could have been simply luckier than others." I admit - perhaps you will too - that when I look at the likes of, say, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg or, well, other prominent types who enjoy unseemly wealth, I wonder just how talented they really are.

Indeed, I've worked over the years with one or two colossally wealthy types and come away, in more than one case, thinking, in the words of the great Los Lobos: "Is this all there is?" Perhaps, if this study is to be believed, the wealthy sorts simply couldn't believe their luck and managed to be level-headed enough to capitalize on it and intelligent enough to realize just how much power it gave them.

On the other hand, I meet so many wonderful, talented, fascinating people who never made much money at all. In the end, my test is very simple: "With whom would I rather have dinner? With whom would there be glorious laughter?"

I will leave you, though, with the researchers' words, ones that may say so much about our current world: "Our results are a warning against the risks of what we call the 'naive meritocracy' which, underestimating the role of randomness among the determinants of success, often fail to give honors and rewards to the most competent people."

They're talking about you, aren't they?

You know how many use meritocracy as a defense of their ideology and use the word "self-made" people who are not actually self-made? Many!
You know how many people actually defend meritocracy as an ideology on its own, requesting equal opportunities for everyone (equal opportunities for every children) and requesting something to be done about the randomness? Nearly zero!
Most people enrolled at meritocracy defense dont actual defend meritocracy, they defend that the money they have is meritocract, which is a lie...

I already seem a lot of usurpation in the terms of meritocracy because of that. You cant judge or mistreat people even rationally because of their money, simply because the system is not meritocratic. This isnt even funny as betting with cards... but rather annoying. And here I am giving in a little bit of anger that dont belong me about an issue that isnt my fault...

There is an semi-abandoned movement of meritocracy, called meritocracy party, it partially started in 2008 by Britrish. Never gained much traction. It is called Meritocracy Party, although it is quite against party on themselves. I dont consider myself from any ideology in specific, but this one is worth mentioning and its not a bad one (it has it flaws although). It helps clear how much deep meritocracy can be and clear about what meritocracy isnt. I didnt came here to convert anyone into that, but I want at the end of the post point the hypocrisy..

Resuming the movement:
- Equal Opportunity for Every Child by making decent forms of health and education accessable to all children, and having the best educational places picking it students by merit and not by money. They defend public hospitals and public schools and university. Since the best universities and health centers are not done by pure voluntarism, they defend it to be done by the government.
- Limit the inheritance to one million dollars, some people inside that movement thinks that it should be zero. But zero inheritance would make things too complicated.
- The motto is for children but the real motto is expanded to nearly everyone.
- THey defend that the politicians must be qualifided for that, so with proper qualification, including hours and hours of study and tests, they can be candidates. Some might defend they even have minimal IQs.
- Only those with proper education should be able to vote. And I would suggest minimal of critical thinking for that.
- They defend that everybody has the right to have a house, because thats a minimal pre-requisite for opportunity for everyone.

Heres the hypocrisy: Most people who use the term meritocracy, state its a meritocracy, self-made man, judge other people based on pure money and the random social prestige of it, are completely against the limitation of inheritance, are in favor of all schools to be private so the students get the best education based on what their parents can afford and not by their own merit and are against the housing-right politic, so, basically, most people who say "its all merit" are actually completely against meritocracy!! Here it is the second hypocrisy: The people who usually use the term meritocracy use it to defend the super-rich. The Meritocracy Party is against the SUPER rich (note the word "Super";they are against the super rich not against the rich) and are against the billionaries (but not millionaries).

I have my A on that, I can explain how the randomness happens. I already did that so let me quote myself:
There is one thing that I hope clarify your understanding, I call it as “the chess championship principle”, which belongs mostly to number 3 (randomness filtering) and it is inside the game example. In a chess championship, every new game is a completely restart. Every piece comes back to a start position, every new game is truly a new game. Now just imagine if there was a different rule, like, for example, if you win the match you are awarded the right to start with two queens in next matches until you lose a match. Imagine if every win was awarded a better advantage for the next game. What would happen? Well, you can only have one opponent per match in chess. If you are lucky on the start, your first opponent is a newbie, and you will win the match and gain advantage for the next one. In the next match, another newbie, more advantages. At the same time, suppose another chess player that is your twin brother that plays exactly like you with same skills, have a grand-master chess player at first round. He loses. Then one pro at the other. He loses. Then he becomes your opponent. You, with three queens, against him with only one, same skills, who wins? You. This example is just a wordly explanation of something that is inside math, and it is basically this: If there is a dependency on the initial condition (if the latter results depends on the former results), and if the initial condition is subject to randomness, then the whole system is subjected to randomness. What I call Chess Championship Principle is this in english: When the next match depends on the former match, and the former match (or any former of the former of the former ….. match) is subject to randomness, this match is subject to randomness as well. Regular Chess Championships resets the table in every new match and the result from a new match dont have any interference from the last one. So, in this championship example where winners can have extra queens, if we spread chess players from the same level, they will have very different results and it will be dictated by how lucky they are with their first opponents. Some of these players will likely match the same results that they would have without this system if they are not too lucky or too unlucky (lets call too hazardous, since english should have a proper word for the opposite of luck).

I seem to have gone way off topic but I am not. The capitalism we know – any system we know, include “kingism”, socialism, whatever – dont fullfill all those 4 (and we could have more) meritocracy conditions. Including Chess Championship Principle for capitalism! What actually happens is that the capitalism never truly resets the game, and that the game has a clear dependency on the beggining, those who gets hazardous keeps it for the rest of their lives despite the hazardousness comes from a bad market time, no inheritance, crysis, whatever.. So, as we expect, people from the same “skills” (hard work, effort, hability, inteligence, etc...) are spread over several different incomes, it is imminent that there are some coincidences – people who were not too hazard but not too lucky – with “skill” and income matched. These ones are the perfect to fruitpick and get used as evidence that everything is properly working with merit. And, of course, some will start from ‘zero’, but will have a fortunate series of events that led them, aha!, fortunate (first matches, except the one counting heritage, were lucky)! But guess what – a series of events with them being at the right time at right place doing the right activity, so it is possible to fruitpick one case of that and say ‘you see, he/she did it, why not you?’ and all the speech comes after that question (“it is just victimism of yours and etc...”). You can fruitpick any unfair cases as well, such as too income for zero “skills” or too much “skills” for low income.
Complete post:
https://www.typologycentral.com/for...35-dangerous-donald-trump-84.html#post3174219

Meritocracy Party US website:
About - The Meritocracy Party
 

Virtual ghost

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Some will hate me for this but "getting rich" is actually very average intelligence goal in life (in the most cases). I think I even watched a documentary years ago about how after a certain point intelligence leads to completely different path from pretty much everything mainstream ... and money is clearly in that category. Being rich and "fulfilled" are two different parameters.
 

SearchingforPeace

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When I was in high school, one summer I went to a few free "summer honors"programs, where high school kids would take a class at universities and get a college class credit. These were mainly recruiting trips, but I met other bright students, one of which became a good friend for years.

We grew up in the same area and he was very bright. He was also Hispanic and had been recruited to be a scholarship student at a very elite prep school, to provide diversity. He was disdainful of the intellect of his fellow students at the elite private prep school.

He went from there to Harvard, also on a free ride diversity scholarship. We stayed in touch and he was extremely shocked at the low relative intelligence of the Harvard students. He even found the "bright" ones to be lazy and uncurious. Almost every one had a job waiting with a family member as soon as they graduated, so they were just checking a box on the way to the "meritocracy".

I am reading "Kochland" about Charles Koch and Koch Industries. 3 brothers inherited the company. Charles was the ruthless MFer who was a predator on his own family as well as the country. He instilled a culture of breaking laws and trying to get caught, stealing from customers, environmental damage, etc.

And he is a huge believer in "meritocracy" even though he inherited his wealth and power and is personally responsible for pushing BS meritocracy on the country.
 

SD45T-2

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Given that supply and demand results in mediocrity (cars today crumple right up in accidents and are just computer-built aluminum toy-boxes)
"Crumpling right up" (in conjunction with having a hardened passenger compartment) is one of the key things to reducing the likelihood of you getting killed in a collision. Along with seat belts and airbags, having crumple zones absorb as much of the impact as possible reduces intrusion into the passenger compartment. It's one of the reasons the total number of road fatalities per year in the US (which peaked at about 55,000 in the early '70s) went down even as the population and number of miles driven went up.

Crumple zone - Wikipedia

Impact attenuator - Wikipedia

 

Vendrah

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"Crumpling right up" (in conjunction with having a hardened passenger compartment) is one of the key things to reducing the likelihood of you getting killed in a collision. Along with seat belts and airbags, having crumple zones absorb as much of the impact as possible reduces intrusion into the passenger compartment. It's one of the reasons the total number of road fatalities per year in the US (which peaked at about 55,000 in the early '70s) went down even as the population and number of miles driven went up.

Crumple zone - Wikipedia

Impact attenuator - Wikipedia


I didnt catch up that detail that wasnt detail, but what you said is super correct.
 

Yuurei

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A truer thing I have never read on this forum.

Reminds of an interview with Morgan Freeman and...someone else.
Morgan was going on with the time old fallacy about ‘bootstraps’. And the other was arguing that you can pull your bootstraps until they snap but without a5 least a little luck, it wont matter.

Someone can be the world’s greatest actor but if they are never discovered-and by the right person-they’ll get nowhere.

Then of course, there is the fact that the majority of one-percenters in the world today only got thier from the luck of being born into a rich family.
 

Jaguar

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When Steve started with Woz in his parent's garage making computers, they didn't have a pot to piss in. Hewlett-Packard was started in a garage, 10 miles from Steve's house. Mark Cuban's family was working class. While in college he was starting businesses. What is inside a person who ends up making money is a fire in their belly. Passion. Drive. The unwillingness to relent.

I didn't get any allowance from my parents so I started a business in high school. When other kids were getting high or chugging beer, I was chartering busses to go to a ski resort and using the school cafeteria as my office. No one taught me what to do. I just intuitively knew what would work out and where things would lead. When I talk with people who have money, everyone sounds the same - they started young. And none of us wanted to work for anyone else.

I've always had a distaste for the word bootstrapping because it's conventional:
Bootstrapping is building a company from the ground up with nothing but personal savings and, with luck, the cash coming in from the first sales.

I cringe reading that shit. With luck? Personal savings? I knew kids would run to sign up for my ski trips to the resort. Luck, my ass. There was nothing available to them except what I was offering. It never entered my mind it would fail, and it didn't. I had so much demand for the service, I got yelled at by the school principal for turning the cafeteria into my office. Did I have even one penny of my own money in it? Nope. Not a penny. I pre-sold all the seats on the bus and paid the company for their cost. Anything above the cost was my profit. It was that simple.

Some do a great disservice to young people by claiming they have to come from a rich family to make money. You should be ashamed of yourselves for lying and worse still, thinking you have a right to shit on their lives. To those people I say: shit on your own lives. But leave the kids alone with a fire in their belly to go as far as they can go. And to those kids I say: Go for it. You have my support.

Peace out.
 

Vendrah

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When Steve started with Woz in his parent's garage making computers, they didn't have a pot to piss in. Hewlett-Packard was started in a garage, 10 miles from Steve's house. Mark Cuban's family was working class. While in college he was starting businesses. What is inside a person who ends up making money is a fire in their belly. Passion. Drive. The unwillingness to relent.

I didn't get any allowance from my parents so I started a business in high school. When other kids were getting high or chugging beer, I was chartering busses to go to a ski resort and using the school cafeteria as my office. No one taught me what to do. I just intuitively knew what would work out and where things would lead. When I talk with people who have money, everyone sounds the same - they started young. And none of us wanted to work for anyone else.

I've always had a distaste for the word bootstrapping because it's conventional:
Bootstrapping is building a company from the ground up with nothing but personal savings and, with luck, the cash coming in from the first sales.

I cringe reading that shit. With luck? Personal savings? I knew kids would run to sign up for my ski trips to the resort. Luck, my ass. There was nothing available to them except what I was offering. It never entered my mind it would fail, and it didn't. I had so much demand for the service, I got yelled at by the school principal for turning the cafeteria into my office. Did I have even one penny of my own money in it? Nope. Not a penny. I pre-sold all the seats on the bus and paid the company for their cost. Anything above the cost was my profit. It was that simple.

Some do a great disservice to young people by claiming they have to come from a rich family to make money. You should be ashamed of yourselves for lying and worse still, thinking you have a right to shit on their lives. To those people I say: shit on your own lives. But leave the kids alone with a fire in their belly to go as far as they can go. And to those kids I say: Go for it. You have my support.

Peace out.

Are you calling most posters here liars and me as well? Be happy that there are MODs who definitely dont want me adressing and responding your offense with another one.

Well, anyway, perhaps you miss this part of my post:
"I seem to have gone way off topic but I am not. The capitalism we know – any system we know, include “kingism”, socialism, whatever – dont fullfill all those 4 (and we could have more) meritocracy conditions. Including Chess Championship Principle for capitalism! What actually happens is that the capitalism never truly resets the game, and that the game has a clear dependency on the beggining, those who gets hazardous keeps it for the rest of their lives despite the hazardousness comes from a bad market time, no inheritance, crysis, whatever.. So, as we expect, people from the same “skills” (hard work, effort, hability, inteligence, etc...) are spread over several different incomes, it is imminent that there are some coincidences – people who were not too hazard but not too lucky – with “skill” and income matched. These ones are the perfect to fruitpick and get used as evidence that everything is properly working with merit. And, of course, some will start from ‘zero’, but will have a fortunate series of events that led them, aha!, fortunate (first matches, except the one counting heritage, were lucky)! But guess what – a series of events with them being at the right time at right place doing the right activity, so it is possible to fruitpick one case of that and say ‘you see, he/she did it, why not you?’ and all the speech comes after that question (“it is just victimism of yours and etc...”). You can fruitpick any unfair cases as well, such as too income for zero “skills” or too much “skills” for low income.

It is not hard to understand, I hope, but let me: The conclusion is that, since the meritocracy basic conditions are NOT met, you cannot possible do any evaluation about that subject using money and income, so, basically, you cant say the rich are super virtous guys and they are skilled and hard-working and blah blah blah worship them as a god and blah blah etc... because the system is not a meritocracy and the system rules didnt meet minimal criteria to be a meritocracy. This makes the money prestige meaningless in deep terms - means you have more purchasing power and doesnt imply that you are more skilled, more profficient, or better than anyone else. This in no way does mean that all persons works equally or have equal skill, but it means that you cannot evaluate that using money or wealth as a criteria. And more direct to you, it doesnt mean that all your income came from luck and no hard work or intelligence wasnt involved, it means that knowing that you are rich or not (meh I dont care and know you know why) dont make you more hard-working, innovative, or any special at all just because of your money. What happens is that luck can overwrite hardwork in some cases, reading all my text make clearer at least in an abstract (but still realistic) matter of why and how.

And the reason of people getting angry about it is a great amount of suffering created by super unequal distribution making people rich or poor with much noisy-random criteria. The question is not even if some people deserve to suffer and die from poor, but rather that people are suffering from poverty through random/unfortunate criteria instead of them deserving to live that. Thats why it is not only cruel, but quite stupid and destructive. To be honest, I try to forget about everyday so I rather have somebody else pointing this, since it isnt my fault anyway (if its yours or not, it depends).
 

Julius_Van_Der_Beak

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Some do a great disservice to young people by claiming they have to come from a rich family to make money. You should be ashamed of yourselves for lying and worse still, thinking you have a right to shit on their lives. To those people I say: shit on your own lives. But leave the kids alone with a fire in their belly to go as far as they can go. And to those kids I say: Go for it. You have my support.

Why do you think people who don't have an entrepreneurial mindset don't deserve things like health care or clean water?
 

Yuurei

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When Steve started with Woz in his parent's garage making computers, they didn't have a pot to piss in. Hewlett-Packard was started in a garage, 10 miles from Steve's house. Mark Cuban's family was working class. While in college he was starting businesses. What is inside a person who ends up making money is a fire in their belly. Passion. Drive. The unwillingness to relent.

I didn't get any allowance from my parents so I started a business in high school. When other kids were getting high or chugging beer, I was chartering busses to go to a ski resort and using the school cafeteria as my office. No one taught me what to do. I just intuitively knew what would work out and where things would lead. When I talk with people who have money, everyone sounds the same - they started young. And none of us wanted to work for anyone else.

I've always had a distaste for the word bootstrapping because it's conventional:
Bootstrapping is building a company from the ground up with nothing but personal savings and, with luck, the cash coming in from the first sales.

I cringe reading that shit. With luck? Personal savings? I knew kids would run to sign up for my ski trips to the resort. Luck, my ass. There was nothing available to them except what I was offering. It never entered my mind it would fail, and it didn't. I had so much demand for the service, I got yelled at by the school principal for turning the cafeteria into my office. Did I have even one penny of my own money in it? Nope. Not a penny. I pre-sold all the seats on the bus and paid the company for their cost. Anything above the cost was my profit. It was that simple.

Some do a great disservice to young people by claiming they have to come from a rich family to make money. You should be ashamed of yourselves for lying and worse still, thinking you have a right to shit on their lives. To those people I say: shit on your own lives. But leave the kids alone with a fire in their belly to go as far as they can go. And to those kids I say: Go for it. You have my support.

Peace out.

That usually means you're done.

Well, aren't you?

Kidding. I know you arent, because despite your supposed success you have nothing to do with your time but sit around all day waiting for people to respond to your trolling arguments. Go spend your money on a hibby or something.

And stop being so sensitive fir God's sake! If I were successful I wouldn't feel the need to prove shit to anyone.
 

Vendrah

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If I were successful I wouldn’t feel the need to prove shit to anyone.

[MENTION=195]Jaguar[/MENTION] aside (Im not stating he is necessarily an exception), thats the case of a lots of rich and "successful" people, and its the reason many of them uses the meritocracy word so much.
They want to be recognized, really and so much, some of them wants the top, and sometimes for efforts that are real, sometimes for efforts that dont truly exists (and its very hard to know the difference); But very few of them are in disposal to make the whole system really a meritocracy. And this small spark of desperate for recognition, without the proper conditions to it, ignites many bad things on this world with sometimes not them acknowledging that themselves. For some to be really rich, some has to be poor (a place without poor dont have any rich by definition), and some may die or suffer from poverty when there is enough inventions and conditions to prevent that. And from this desperate to recognition, comes conflict (not necessarily war), and from conflict, there is a suddenly leash of anger, and even things can get tense to the point of generating general-anxiety. And some people even get proud of a tension they actually supported.

Meritocracy isnt even my philosophy anymore, however, if it is to make people suffer from proverty, at least make it fair (supposing it is even possible to be fair) or make an effort to make it fair.

Sorry, but I needed to write and post these words at least one time in my life. My apologize if I make things more tense by this post. I would like to end saying that not all rich are guilty at all; Those who works effectively create/generate far less than they earn, on a very significant scale, are.
 
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