Sandra Newman @sannewman
THE SEVEN SECRETS OF HIGHLY SUCCESSFUL PEOPLE
- Private school
- Legacy lvy admission
- Nepotism hire
- Seed capital from family
- Club memberships
- Personal assistant, nanny, ghost writer answer
- Journalists who ask, “What’s your secret?” and uncritically publish the
I came from dirt poor and I’m wealthy now. In my opinion the key to success comes down to a few things.
Education: My mother made $15k per year and my private school tuition was $375/month. This also provided me with friends that were not dirt poor (this also helps a lot). My wife received the best education the Soviet Union had to offer, which is better than anything we could even imagine stateside.
Need: Hunger is s great motivator. It also gives you this every present fear that if you take your foot off the gas, you’ll be hungry again.
Luck: This one is obvious. Plenty of people are hungry and plenty of people have good educations and still struggle.
I think my wife and I did well because we teamed up early. Had we tried solo I think we would have failed.
You seem to have neglected the most important one: privilege.
Millions of Americans are stuck in a cycle of generational poverty. Really difficult to manage even the first one when you’re grinding to just put food on the table daily, and that’s the reality for 46 million Americans right now.
This ultra-priviliged, ignorant “you just gotta grind for it” attitude is literally what this meme is making fun of. Congrats on being the butt of the joke and doubling down on it.
Somehow I highly doubt your mom spent 1/3 of her pre-tax income to send you to private school. And based on how much she paid for it, I assume you went to private school in the 80s. The median family wage these days can’t afford rent, much less $15-20,000 a year private schools, which by the way is what they cost this century. And if my assumption is correct about you growing up in the 80s, that $15,000 a year is the equivalent of nearly $59,000 a year today - higher than the median family wage, so not quite dirt poor.
People don’t want to hear that. They want to keep believing that they’re poor not because they made a suboptimal choice but because the system conspired against them. My advice is pretend rich people aren’t real and make your life and the people’s around you the best you can.
How can we ignore that super-wealthy people exist when there’s a causal link between their situation and ours? They’re rich and most people are poor, and they are rich because others are poor. Wealth doesn’t generate itself, and no human can generate a billion dollars in value alone, even by working 170-hour weeks.
People getting richer doesn’t automatically make someone else poorer. The total amount of resources the human species has access to is constantly growing as our productive power increases. In fact, most of the time the total productive power increase is directly linked to someone getting richer.
Sure they can. J.K. Rowling is a billionaire. How many people did she exploit by writing 7 books? The people who worked on the trains or in the coffee shops she hung around and bought coffee from? The idea that people only collect wealth by depriving someone else of it is a pre-modern understanding. Same with the idea that value is related to hours worked.