17 ms·

I wish I could remember where I read this, but I once heard it explained to me as this: It's easy to deride the journey of the rich college student: 80-hour i

I wish I could remember where I read this, but I once heard it explained to me as this: It's easy to deride the journey of the rich college student: 80-hour internships at Goldman Sachs, unpaid positions in government, etc. But, the things that are done by successful people are hard, as hard as walking a tightrope. The difference is that rich students walk this tightrope over a bed of pillows. Poor students walk it over an open pit of spikes. Obviously falling off onto a cushion is easier. What's less obvious is how nerve-wracking it is to know that there are real consequences. Danger creates stress, and stress ruins results. Paradoxically, if you know you have more than one shot, you're more likely to succeed on your first try.

ethbro 10y ago
Family money also buys practice. As someone who grew up middle class surrounded by people above me on the social strata, the amount of activities wealthy kids get to train for life's challenges are mind boggling. When anyone on HN sat down to their first big interview, ask yourself what practice you had with applicable social skills? (Business culture, dress, and social norms, etc.) Now substitute someone who's never interacted with that world before, nor knows anyone from their neighborhood or social group who has.
- filoeleven 10y ago
  Not to mention the additional networking opportunities provided by growing up in that environment. Even absent more formal networking events, your chances of someone at a barbecue saying "oh, you're doing X? I have a friend at BigCompany, give me your resume and I'll pass it along" are much better than someone not in that class.
- wutbrodo 10y ago
  The idea that "class isn't about money" is a really important one, and a distinction that isn't evident in most people's lives. I grew up in a family that was historically pretty rich and both parents had advanced degrees, but a combination of health problems and mental illness meant that for most of my childhood, we had very little money. At the same time, I went to private schools (on scholarship) my entire life, so all of my friends and acquaintances were also upper upper middle class. I'm now an adult and am extremely successful, more so than any of my acquaintances. As difficult as my childhood could be, a big part of my success is probably attributable to habits and norms I picked up from my parents. As early as college, the amount of opportunities I've been exposed to just by impressing someone during conversation has been ridiculous. Part of this of course has been knowing my stuff, but undoubtedly it depends in part on my carriage and manner of speaking. And all of this is leaving out the direct networking opportunities inherent in the environment I grew up in.
dleslie 10y ago
And this is why Basic Income is the future; it doesn't help those with a bed of pillows to rely on, but it provides a bed of sod to those currently wary of spikes.
- logfromblammo 10y ago
  Even a bed of manure would be better than the spikes, which is good, because that's the only sort of safety net I imagine Democrats and Republicans could ever agree on providing.
  - rbanffy 10y ago
    The US will eventually catch up. What Bernie Sanders started will continue. People will demand living wages and family time. Excessive executive compensation will be questioned. Changes will come.
- ythl 10y ago
  What about people that squander their BI? We need safety nets below the safety nets... At some point shouldn't we let people fail?
  - dleslie 10y ago
    If an individual is unable to survive on a minimal fixed income then they are almost certainly in need of other social services. People can still fail while on BI; it won't protect you from losing your home, for instance. BI makes failing just a little less devastating.
  - psyc 10y ago
    This is just letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
nostromo 10y ago
This is even more the case with the legal system. Regular infractions (under-age drinking, recreational drugs, shoplifting) are minor speed bumps for kids in a middle-class family. But for a poor family, they can send people on the wrong track indefinitely.
- gautamdivgi 10y ago
  That is a travesty of our justice system (or maybe any justice system). The more money you have, the better your lawyers, the better deals can be cut. The rich & upper middle-class will probably just get off with a slap on the wrist (if that). The poor & lower-middle class with not so many means and court appointed lawyers get the harshest sentences and are basically used as statistics for your public prosecutors promotion and advertisement.
  - rayiner 10y ago
    I think that's an overly simplistic view. Are prosecutors dropping shoplifting charges for "upper middle class" people because they brought in an $1,000/hour lawyer? Real life prosecutors aren't quite so cartoon villain-y. The bigger issue is that (1) laws are enforced more harshly in poor areas because there is pressure on prosecutors to focus on high-crime areas; (2) poor people are much more likely to be within one degree of separation of someone the cops are interested in. In many schools in poor neighborhoods, "kids are essentially assigned a gang affiliation." http://www.npr.org/2013/02/21/172593743/chicago-kids-say-theyre-assigned-to-gangs http://www.npr.org/2013/02/21/172593743/chicago-kids-say-the.... In an upper class suburb, a shoplifting charge is easy to dismiss as youthful indiscretion. In a gang-infested inner city neighborhood, where the perpetrator might have friends or family with known gang affiliations, it becomes very easy (if not fair or just) to see an indiscretion as a sign of something much bigger.
    - tptacek 10y ago
      Yes, I believe they are. Prosecutors try to spend their time on the cases they can win. You don't even have to be criminally charged to see how farcical the system is: just go to traffic court sometime and watch how the system handles people with lawyers.
ryandrake 10y ago
I knew someone who was so aggressively proud of their success, having founded and grown a successful business. He'd talk your ear off about how people like him were the ones adding value to society and how unsuccessful people are just lazy and don't try hard enough or don't take enough risks, or are just deadbeats, and how successful, hard working people are punished with taxes--you know, the standard soapbox speech. I mean, reading that description, he sounds like that cliche "Cartoon Republican Villain", but it really was that way! What he wouldn't easily admit was how this successful business was his sixth try, having blown what, to me, seemed like a small fortune on each of his previous attempts. He always had a rich family to fall back on, living off of them while he dreamed up his next attempt to "add value." Finally (inevitably), one of them stuck, so obviously this is proof that he's self-made and his success was due entirely to his own "hard work". If you grow up poor without a fallback, you pretty much have one shot, if you're even able to save up for that one. You mess up, and you're pretty much hosed. On the other hand, with an infinite money cushion, you get to keep shooting until you hit the target. What's the saying? Going from $0 to $1M is almost impossible--going from $1M to $2M is almost inevitable.
- googletazer 10y ago
  I see what you're saying, but to be the devil's advocate - someone at some point in the family of "Cartoon Republican Villain" was also a poor sob with a single shot to make it. The tragedy is that he forgot, or never knew about it.
  - CPLX 10y ago
    Not necessarily. There's been intergenerational wealth transfer going on in continuous unbroken lines for hundreds if not thousands of years.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - oatmealsnap 10y ago
    You've comparing the success of one poor sob with the success of a lineage of rich/poor sobs. It's much easier to be rich than to get rich, because a lineage has several shots to make it big.
arbuge 10y ago
>> What's less obvious is how nerve-wracking it is to know that there are real consequences. Danger creates stress, and stress ruins results. Paradoxically, if you know you have more than one shot, you're more likely to succeed on your first try. I think this depends on the person. Some people work better under pressure, others not. There is a real danger of postponing, procrastination, and not taking things seriously if you have a comfortable life already. I meet many successful people from very poor backgrounds who complain to me about their children being lazy and much less motivated than they were.
- projektir 10y ago
  The danger on the poor person is astronomically bigger than the one on the comfortable person no matter how you slice it. A lot of the time the comfortable person is just expected to do more without a good reason for it.
- eutectic 10y ago
  A successful person from a poor background an outlier, so you would expect the personalities and attitudes of their children to revert to the mean.
zo1 10y ago
That is all the more reason to praise and appreciate those individuals that come out ahead, despite such circumstances. But I would say it's not a reason to excuse and attribute poor performance due to difficult circumstance, which is generally the type of thing such a story/explanation is used for. And it's unfortunate that it's used for such a narrow use-case, when it could rather be used to inspire.
- projektir 10y ago
  If I think circumstances are the problem, I'm much more interested in addressing the circumstances than trying to inspire somebody. The one special inspired case is the narrow use-case, not the other way around.
speeder 10y ago
I am "half-way" privileged, for my country standards (Brazil), I am part of a tiny elite, having college education, a sister that went to do masters on MIT, money to buy a computer that for brazillian standards is very high end (even if I had to buy the chassis from a junkyard). Also knowing english is a rarity, coding, even less, both, even more uncommon (when I worked in a company that had 50 coders, only 5 knew english!) I did things, that I know that more talented people never would, for example moving "out of the blue" to another city to attempt to create an startup, or build an arcade machine and code it with money out of my pocket so I could later use this to get a job (it worked, I did got a job with that). This was because I knew, that if I failed, (and I actually did failed...) I had a place to return to, my parents home is not awesome, but I know I won't starve there, even if I had several weeks eating only mandioca that grows in our yard (the root that people use to make what is called in US "tapioca"), the fact I DO have a yard to grow food is already a rarity (in urban areas) in first place. Yet, frequently people ask me: "Why you don't move?" or "why you don't attempt a job in Canada/Japan/Singapore?" or "Why you don't go for a masters/doctor/phd?" The answer is always the same: my net worth is negative, although I won't starve, I can't risk more, having a boring job, even if just a cashier job or something like that, that pay my debts, is better than risking more debt, because here in Brazil personal bankruptcy doesn't exist, and compound debt is common, getting more debt can mean getting eternally in debt, and I want to avoid that fate, I have "richer" family members that fell to it, and their lives are absolutely screwed up (for example: I have uncles that own huge farms, yet spend most of their time hiding in distant cities, and placing their money in "strangers" bank accounts to avoid it being immediately seized, I have farmer uncle that struggle to eat because every time he has money, someone seizes it before he can buy food, and his farm is "frozen" by the government that wants it as tax payment, with taxes worth more than the farm itself)
- marcosdumay 10y ago
  It's a small point, but personal bankruptcy really does exist in Brazil. The rules are different from the US (may be even better for poor people), and sometimes surprising. But it does exist, and lawyers will help you if you ever need it.
  - 10y ago
phd514 10y ago
It's too easy to generalize this as a lack of money problem. Certainly lack of money is a factor, but so is attitude and character. There are plenty of examples of people from lower income backgrounds rising above their backgrounds even with setbacks along the way because they persevered through difficulties. There are also plenty of examples of people who failed and squandered lots of opportunities. There's an element of detached elitism in the idea that spreading around more money is going to solve a lot of those problems.
- pessimizer 10y ago
  As far as I can tall, people from underprivileged backgrounds make it through socializing and sleeping with people from privileged backgrounds as often as possible. Rich people attract opportunities (and are opportunities.) Being near them gives you your best chances, and your best opportunity in life to befriend those people is in university. > There are also plenty of examples of people who failed and squandered lots of opportunities. Rich people fail all the time. They fail up nearly as often as they fail down, though. And if they avoid drug problems, they never fail out.
- st3v3r 10y ago
  Yes, there are tales. But that's all they are: Tales. They're not statistically significant. And you can have all the "attitude and character" in the world, but if you've got a family to feed and shelter, most people are going to take the rational course of action and get a job so they can provide for that family, rather than take the riskier path.
  - JoeAltmaier 10y ago
    As I've posted before, my old minister used to say "We can have all of the morals we can afford"
tptacek 10y ago
You are also partially describing stereotype threat (there's more to it than that).
- yummyfajitas 10y ago
  Stereotype threat is yet another victim of the replication crisis - i.e. it probably doesn't exist. It's repeatedly failed to replicate. Funnel plots show significant evidence of publication bias. http://www.sciencedirect.com.sci-hub.cc/science/article/pii/S0022440514000831 http://www.sciencedirect.com.sci-hub.cc/science/article/pii/... https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/85192141/2013-ganley.pdf https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/85192141/2013-ganley.pdf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype_threat#Failures_to_replicate_and_publication_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype_threat#Failures_to_... https://replicationindex.wordpress.com/tag/stereotype-threat-and-womens-math-performance/ https://replicationindex.wordpress.com/tag/stereotype-threat...
logfromblammo 10y ago
Going by the "one shot" metaphor, if poor folks even get that shot, it might just be a hand-load where the case, slug, and powder were all scavenged by sweeping the floors at the firing range, and the primer inherited from a dead relative. You're more likely to hit what you're aiming at if you're not worried about whether you're going to blow up your favorite hand when you pull the trigger.
jccalhoun 10y ago
As a first generation college student who is now an adjunct professor, I woulds extend the tightrope metaphor: many of those who grow up rich have known about the tightrope their whole life, have seen how everyone around them has managed it, and have been trained to do it. Many of us who grew up poor grew up not knowing anything about tightrope walking until we were thrown on it, didn't have anyone to teach us about it because no one we knew had ever done it, and didn't even know how to get to the other end.
- totalZero 10y ago
  That's the real issue: example. It's like the plumber who bills the customer $20,000 for tapping a steam valve with a wrench, not because of the tapping, but for the expertise of knowing where to tap. Kids from rich families are exposed to a lot more information and guidance. I went the route of investment banking, et cetera, and I was flying blind a lot of the time. There was an a-ha moment when I realized that advice from my parents was about as good as random advice, because sometimes they didn't really have a good mental model for my life and career. I took a lot of bad advice before this became clear to me. Meanwhile, one of my buddies could lean on his family for advice because they went the business route before he was born. It's not the cushion, it's the coach on the other side of the rope that makes the difference.
slackstation 10y ago
Respectfully, this is kinda BS. Your average American kid has already won a genetic lottery. Being born and raised in America is already great. I grew up the kid of immigrant parents from an African country and I am an immigrant myself at 5 years old. I have a great job at a major well known tech company in a technical programming position. I'm not the kid that got straight A's. I was the smart fuckup. I almost flunked out of high school. I dropped out of college. I could barely program worth a damn out of college. It was hard work learning not only how to program but, all of the other skills that college didn't teach but, are critical to a working professional programmer (git for instance). Now, I'll argue there weren't a bed of nails. There were a bed of pillows. I had to move back in with my parents multiple times through my twenties. I thought back then that I was walking over a pit of spikes but, it turns out I wasn't. Today is much different than even a decade ago, so much more than a generation ago. You can teach yourself how to program. You can work a minium wage job while you teach yourself. You can't do it in LA, SF, NYC but, you can live in the parts of the US that no one talks about and learn. It takes time and dedication but, one can do it. I fully financially supported my brother for two years and he didn't learn or do really anything with that time other than barely pass a bad coding bootcamp and then struggle to find a job with that inadequate education. The greater difference is the person and their perseverance than economic circumstances. As a poor person who made it by screwing up again and again and again and again. Unless I have astronomical luck, I really don't think it's that hard. Seriously, if you have the intelligence to program, you should be able to find a minimum wage job or what I did, work nights doing security. I learned programming (reading programming books and coding) while I watched warehouses, trucking depots and the gate at gated communities. It was still a fuckton of hard work but, the hard part was the programming not figuring out how I was going to feed myself. Maybe I'm somehow this unicorn of blind exceptionalism but, while I felt depressed and that it was hard at the time, it doesn't feel that hard now. I just kept working and it was more of less inevitable. Even today, I keep telling my brother that if he keeps working at it, it will eventually work.
- carussell 10y ago
  > Seriously, if you have the intelligence to program, you should be able to find a minimum wage job or what I did, work nights doing security. Minimum wage work may be enough to sustain someone who has a high school diploma, but well does that work for someone who did go to school, sank tens of thousands in loans, and then had to leave before finishing, assuming they have no support network?
draw_down 10y ago
Sort of. It's not just that, it's that though the things successful people do are hard, underprivileged people also have to try hard just to get to the entry point. Getting people to even look at you or recognize that you could do the job is itself an extra measure of labor before the job even begins.
jedmeyers 10y ago
At what point does one have to start to be considered independently successful? - You inherited a lot of wealth and a CTO position at a father's company - Parents gave you money and bought you stuff - Parents gave you a place to live - At least you had one parent - Being an orphan, at least you were born in a first-world country - At least you were born at all, thanks to the medical care in a third world country So, unless you are an orphan from remote parts of Africa who built a Fortune 10 company from scratch your success is not your own? We all owe it to the girl who invented the wheel. But then maybe she had a rich parent who gave her stone carving tools to play as a child, so that's not really an achievement, is it?
- wehadfun 10y ago
  I would say Parents gave you money is when most would consider your success tied to your parents.
  - softawre 10y ago
    Is that because the majority of us happen to fall just below that rung and want to consider our success "real"?
    - refurb 10y ago
      Exactly. It's like the old saying "An alcoholic is someone who has one more drink than I do." One could make the argument that everyone in the US has more priviledge than someone stuck in Syria in the midst of a civil war.
- marme 10y ago
  FYI the first wheels were wooden, it is common misconception that the wheel was invented in the stone age. Human civilization invented farming and pottery many centuries before the invention of the wheel
  - jedmeyers 10y ago
    That it correct. My comment was intended to be more of an allegory than a foray into ancient history.
dtran 10y ago
Author here. Thanks for reading and for sharing this analogy—it very aptly captures the sentiment. Thanks for that. I just wanted to say that not only was this post extremely difficult to write, but I really hesitated to publish it. When we start talking about privilege or lack-thereof, the conversation generally veers towards comparisons, which is only natural. If you grew up more fortunate than someone else, you say, "Wow, I can't imagine what that must have been like," whereas if you grew up less so: "I grew up with less than this guy or this girl and I'm not complaining" or whatnot. While that's a natural first instinct, I think we can, and must, move beyond that, to have real discussions. I definitely had more opportunities and grew up in much more fortunate circumstances than many people. As some people have pointed out, just being born in America and having a mostly stable home was very fortunate. Just because I grew up poor, I don't claim to know or understand your circumstances, unique set of challenges, or anything about growing up as an orphan in middle America, a black kid in Compton in a broken home, or a refugee fleeing a war-torn country. But we shouldn't be comparing the sharpness of spikes or depths of the abyss below us— we should be focused on getting as many kids across as we can, and providing safety nets to as many as possible. Talking about these things is hard, but I think it's a good start.
- OliverJones 10y ago
  Glad you published it, Mr. Tran. Thanks! I happen to volunteer at a drop-in center in my town's family public housing project. As it happened, I saw your article shortly after my colleagues and I had wrangled $1000 for a poor immigrant kid on short notice. It was a tuition payment for a program for high school kids at one of our local world-renowned medical schools. So, I was able to send your article to my colleagues, the kid, and her mother saying "this is why we do what we do." Now we have to support this kid while she participates in this program. Hopefully she'll talk to us about what she's going through, and put any shame aside. Almost anybody reading this can do something to help open up opportunity. It doesn't have to be a grand gesture requiring megabucks. If you don't have time to get organized, give some money to the scholarship fund at your local community college. If you do have time to get organized, call the guidance counselor at your local high school and ask if there's a support program for first-generation college-bound students or something similar. Who knows? Maybe you'll meet somebody who ends up taking a trip to Sweden one day to collect a Nobel Prize. You can say "I knew her when."
hammock 10y ago
>Paradoxically, if you know you have more than one shot, you're more likely to succeed on your first try. True and I'll give an example of a technique I use (which is somewhat common) when recording vocalists in the studio. The singer will get in the booth and I'll ask them to sing a run-through. Even say "we're not recording this one." But of course we are recording. And many times it's this rehearsal take that ends up being the best one.
PythonicAlpha 10y ago
> if you know you have more than one shot, you're more likely to succeed on your first try That is most likely also one of the reasons, why there are more (successful) Entrepreneurs in the US than in Europe. At least in Germany, when your first startup fails, you are broke and nobody will give you any funding any more (not to forget, that to get your first funding, is much harder in Germany).
tn13 10y ago
> Obviously falling off onto a cushion is easier. The whole notions of cushion and spikes is relative too. For some having a roof above your head might sound like a blessing. I will probably hang myself (metaphorically speaking) than go back and stay with my parents thought I will get a house and food twice a day. Large mass of those so called "privileged" people perhaps have to take equal amount of stress even though in absolute terms we might think they are better off.
psadri 10y ago
Sometimes, knowing that you have no fallback position, can be motivating. Someone growing up in a cushy life may never be motivated to try very hard at anything. Someone growing up with hardship may be highly motivated to create a better life for themselves.
mattm 10y ago
Another way I've heard this put is imagine you have a classroom. "Success" is a bucket at the front of the classroom. Now, every kid gets a ball and tries to hit the bucket. The privileged ones at the front have greater odds of hitting success no matter their skill level. Some underprivileged kids from the back may hit success but the odds against them are much greater.
- aaron695 10y ago
  This is actually the opposite. OP reasoning is more - Everyone is at the back. Everyone has a bucket of balls to try with. Except underprivileged people get an electric shock when they miss.
efaref 10y ago
The really poor also don't have the rope.

ethbro 10y ago

Family money also buys practice. As someone who grew up middle class surrounded by people above me on the social strata, the amount of activities wealthy kids get to train for life's challenges are mind boggling. When anyone on HN sat down to their first big interview, ask yourself what practice you had with applicable social skills? (Business culture, dress, and social norms, etc.) Now substitute someone who's never interacted with that world before, nor knows anyone from their neighborhood or social group who has.

filoeleven 10y ago
Not to mention the additional networking opportunities provided by growing up in that environment. Even absent more formal networking events, your chances of someone at a barbecue saying "oh, you're doing X? I have a friend at BigCompany, give me your resume and I'll pass it along" are much better than someone not in that class.
wutbrodo 10y ago
The idea that "class isn't about money" is a really important one, and a distinction that isn't evident in most people's lives. I grew up in a family that was historically pretty rich and both parents had advanced degrees, but a combination of health problems and mental illness meant that for most of my childhood, we had very little money. At the same time, I went to private schools (on scholarship) my entire life, so all of my friends and acquaintances were also upper upper middle class. I'm now an adult and am extremely successful, more so than any of my acquaintances. As difficult as my childhood could be, a big part of my success is probably attributable to habits and norms I picked up from my parents. As early as college, the amount of opportunities I've been exposed to just by impressing someone during conversation has been ridiculous. Part of this of course has been knowing my stuff, but undoubtedly it depends in part on my carriage and manner of speaking. And all of this is leaving out the direct networking opportunities inherent in the environment I grew up in.

dleslie 10y ago

And this is why Basic Income is the future; it doesn't help those with a bed of pillows to rely on, but it provides a bed of sod to those currently wary of spikes.

logfromblammo 10y ago
Even a bed of manure would be better than the spikes, which is good, because that's the only sort of safety net I imagine Democrats and Republicans could ever agree on providing.
- rbanffy 10y ago
  The US will eventually catch up. What Bernie Sanders started will continue. People will demand living wages and family time. Excessive executive compensation will be questioned. Changes will come.
ythl 10y ago
What about people that squander their BI? We need safety nets below the safety nets... At some point shouldn't we let people fail?
- dleslie 10y ago
  If an individual is unable to survive on a minimal fixed income then they are almost certainly in need of other social services. People can still fail while on BI; it won't protect you from losing your home, for instance. BI makes failing just a little less devastating.
- psyc 10y ago
  This is just letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.

nostromo 10y ago

This is even more the case with the legal system. Regular infractions (under-age drinking, recreational drugs, shoplifting) are minor speed bumps for kids in a middle-class family. But for a poor family, they can send people on the wrong track indefinitely.

gautamdivgi 10y ago
That is a travesty of our justice system (or maybe any justice system). The more money you have, the better your lawyers, the better deals can be cut. The rich & upper middle-class will probably just get off with a slap on the wrist (if that). The poor & lower-middle class with not so many means and court appointed lawyers get the harshest sentences and are basically used as statistics for your public prosecutors promotion and advertisement.
- rayiner 10y ago
  I think that's an overly simplistic view. Are prosecutors dropping shoplifting charges for "upper middle class" people because they brought in an $1,000/hour lawyer? Real life prosecutors aren't quite so cartoon villain-y. The bigger issue is that (1) laws are enforced more harshly in poor areas because there is pressure on prosecutors to focus on high-crime areas; (2) poor people are much more likely to be within one degree of separation of someone the cops are interested in. In many schools in poor neighborhoods, "kids are essentially assigned a gang affiliation." http://www.npr.org/2013/02/21/172593743/chicago-kids-say-theyre-assigned-to-gangs http://www.npr.org/2013/02/21/172593743/chicago-kids-say-the.... In an upper class suburb, a shoplifting charge is easy to dismiss as youthful indiscretion. In a gang-infested inner city neighborhood, where the perpetrator might have friends or family with known gang affiliations, it becomes very easy (if not fair or just) to see an indiscretion as a sign of something much bigger.
  - tptacek 10y ago
    Yes, I believe they are. Prosecutors try to spend their time on the cases they can win. You don't even have to be criminally charged to see how farcical the system is: just go to traffic court sometime and watch how the system handles people with lawyers.

ryandrake 10y ago

I knew someone who was so aggressively proud of their success, having founded and grown a successful business. He'd talk your ear off about how people like him were the ones adding value to society and how unsuccessful people are just lazy and don't try hard enough or don't take enough risks, or are just deadbeats, and how successful, hard working people are punished with taxes--you know, the standard soapbox speech. I mean, reading that description, he sounds like that cliche "Cartoon Republican Villain", but it really was that way! What he wouldn't easily admit was how this successful business was his sixth try, having blown what, to me, seemed like a small fortune on each of his previous attempts. He always had a rich family to fall back on, living off of them while he dreamed up his next attempt to "add value." Finally (inevitably), one of them stuck, so obviously this is proof that he's self-made and his success was due entirely to his own "hard work". If you grow up poor without a fallback, you pretty much have one shot, if you're even able to save up for that one. You mess up, and you're pretty much hosed. On the other hand, with an infinite money cushion, you get to keep shooting until you hit the target. What's the saying? Going from $0 to $1M is almost impossible--going from $1M to $2M is almost inevitable.

googletazer 10y ago
I see what you're saying, but to be the devil's advocate - someone at some point in the family of "Cartoon Republican Villain" was also a poor sob with a single shot to make it. The tragedy is that he forgot, or never knew about it.
- CPLX 10y ago
  Not necessarily. There's been intergenerational wealth transfer going on in continuous unbroken lines for hundreds if not thousands of years.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- oatmealsnap 10y ago
  You've comparing the success of one poor sob with the success of a lineage of rich/poor sobs. It's much easier to be rich than to get rich, because a lineage has several shots to make it big.

arbuge 10y ago

>> What's less obvious is how nerve-wracking it is to know that there are real consequences. Danger creates stress, and stress ruins results. Paradoxically, if you know you have more than one shot, you're more likely to succeed on your first try. I think this depends on the person. Some people work better under pressure, others not. There is a real danger of postponing, procrastination, and not taking things seriously if you have a comfortable life already. I meet many successful people from very poor backgrounds who complain to me about their children being lazy and much less motivated than they were.

projektir 10y ago
The danger on the poor person is astronomically bigger than the one on the comfortable person no matter how you slice it. A lot of the time the comfortable person is just expected to do more without a good reason for it.
eutectic 10y ago
A successful person from a poor background an outlier, so you would expect the personalities and attitudes of their children to revert to the mean.

zo1 10y ago

That is all the more reason to praise and appreciate those individuals that come out ahead, despite such circumstances. But I would say it's not a reason to excuse and attribute poor performance due to difficult circumstance, which is generally the type of thing such a story/explanation is used for. And it's unfortunate that it's used for such a narrow use-case, when it could rather be used to inspire.

projektir 10y ago
If I think circumstances are the problem, I'm much more interested in addressing the circumstances than trying to inspire somebody. The one special inspired case is the narrow use-case, not the other way around.

speeder 10y ago

I am "half-way" privileged, for my country standards (Brazil), I am part of a tiny elite, having college education, a sister that went to do masters on MIT, money to buy a computer that for brazillian standards is very high end (even if I had to buy the chassis from a junkyard). Also knowing english is a rarity, coding, even less, both, even more uncommon (when I worked in a company that had 50 coders, only 5 knew english!) I did things, that I know that more talented people never would, for example moving "out of the blue" to another city to attempt to create an startup, or build an arcade machine and code it with money out of my pocket so I could later use this to get a job (it worked, I did got a job with that). This was because I knew, that if I failed, (and I actually did failed...) I had a place to return to, my parents home is not awesome, but I know I won't starve there, even if I had several weeks eating only mandioca that grows in our yard (the root that people use to make what is called in US "tapioca"), the fact I DO have a yard to grow food is already a rarity (in urban areas) in first place. Yet, frequently people ask me: "Why you don't move?" or "why you don't attempt a job in Canada/Japan/Singapore?" or "Why you don't go for a masters/doctor/phd?" The answer is always the same: my net worth is negative, although I won't starve, I can't risk more, having a boring job, even if just a cashier job or something like that, that pay my debts, is better than risking more debt, because here in Brazil personal bankruptcy doesn't exist, and compound debt is common, getting more debt can mean getting eternally in debt, and I want to avoid that fate, I have "richer" family members that fell to it, and their lives are absolutely screwed up (for example: I have uncles that own huge farms, yet spend most of their time hiding in distant cities, and placing their money in "strangers" bank accounts to avoid it being immediately seized, I have farmer uncle that struggle to eat because every time he has money, someone seizes it before he can buy food, and his farm is "frozen" by the government that wants it as tax payment, with taxes worth more than the farm itself)

marcosdumay 10y ago
It's a small point, but personal bankruptcy really does exist in Brazil. The rules are different from the US (may be even better for poor people), and sometimes surprising. But it does exist, and lawyers will help you if you ever need it.
- 10y ago

phd514 10y ago

It's too easy to generalize this as a lack of money problem. Certainly lack of money is a factor, but so is attitude and character. There are plenty of examples of people from lower income backgrounds rising above their backgrounds even with setbacks along the way because they persevered through difficulties. There are also plenty of examples of people who failed and squandered lots of opportunities. There's an element of detached elitism in the idea that spreading around more money is going to solve a lot of those problems.

pessimizer 10y ago
As far as I can tall, people from underprivileged backgrounds make it through socializing and sleeping with people from privileged backgrounds as often as possible. Rich people attract opportunities (and are opportunities.) Being near them gives you your best chances, and your best opportunity in life to befriend those people is in university. > There are also plenty of examples of people who failed and squandered lots of opportunities. Rich people fail all the time. They fail up nearly as often as they fail down, though. And if they avoid drug problems, they never fail out.
st3v3r 10y ago
Yes, there are tales. But that's all they are: Tales. They're not statistically significant. And you can have all the "attitude and character" in the world, but if you've got a family to feed and shelter, most people are going to take the rational course of action and get a job so they can provide for that family, rather than take the riskier path.
- JoeAltmaier 10y ago
  As I've posted before, my old minister used to say "We can have all of the morals we can afford"

tptacek 10y ago

You are also partially describing stereotype threat (there's more to it than that).

yummyfajitas 10y ago
Stereotype threat is yet another victim of the replication crisis - i.e. it probably doesn't exist. It's repeatedly failed to replicate. Funnel plots show significant evidence of publication bias. http://www.sciencedirect.com.sci-hub.cc/science/article/pii/S0022440514000831 http://www.sciencedirect.com.sci-hub.cc/science/article/pii/... https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/85192141/2013-ganley.pdf https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/85192141/2013-ganley.pdf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype_threat#Failures_to_replicate_and_publication_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype_threat#Failures_to_... https://replicationindex.wordpress.com/tag/stereotype-threat-and-womens-math-performance/ https://replicationindex.wordpress.com/tag/stereotype-threat...

logfromblammo 10y ago

Going by the "one shot" metaphor, if poor folks even get that shot, it might just be a hand-load where the case, slug, and powder were all scavenged by sweeping the floors at the firing range, and the primer inherited from a dead relative. You're more likely to hit what you're aiming at if you're not worried about whether you're going to blow up your favorite hand when you pull the trigger.

jccalhoun 10y ago

As a first generation college student who is now an adjunct professor, I woulds extend the tightrope metaphor: many of those who grow up rich have known about the tightrope their whole life, have seen how everyone around them has managed it, and have been trained to do it. Many of us who grew up poor grew up not knowing anything about tightrope walking until we were thrown on it, didn't have anyone to teach us about it because no one we knew had ever done it, and didn't even know how to get to the other end.

totalZero 10y ago
That's the real issue: example. It's like the plumber who bills the customer $20,000 for tapping a steam valve with a wrench, not because of the tapping, but for the expertise of knowing where to tap. Kids from rich families are exposed to a lot more information and guidance. I went the route of investment banking, et cetera, and I was flying blind a lot of the time. There was an a-ha moment when I realized that advice from my parents was about as good as random advice, because sometimes they didn't really have a good mental model for my life and career. I took a lot of bad advice before this became clear to me. Meanwhile, one of my buddies could lean on his family for advice because they went the business route before he was born. It's not the cushion, it's the coach on the other side of the rope that makes the difference.

slackstation 10y ago

Respectfully, this is kinda BS. Your average American kid has already won a genetic lottery. Being born and raised in America is already great. I grew up the kid of immigrant parents from an African country and I am an immigrant myself at 5 years old. I have a great job at a major well known tech company in a technical programming position. I'm not the kid that got straight A's. I was the smart fuckup. I almost flunked out of high school. I dropped out of college. I could barely program worth a damn out of college. It was hard work learning not only how to program but, all of the other skills that college didn't teach but, are critical to a working professional programmer (git for instance). Now, I'll argue there weren't a bed of nails. There were a bed of pillows. I had to move back in with my parents multiple times through my twenties. I thought back then that I was walking over a pit of spikes but, it turns out I wasn't. Today is much different than even a decade ago, so much more than a generation ago. You can teach yourself how to program. You can work a minium wage job while you teach yourself. You can't do it in LA, SF, NYC but, you can live in the parts of the US that no one talks about and learn. It takes time and dedication but, one can do it. I fully financially supported my brother for two years and he didn't learn or do really anything with that time other than barely pass a bad coding bootcamp and then struggle to find a job with that inadequate education. The greater difference is the person and their perseverance than economic circumstances. As a poor person who made it by screwing up again and again and again and again. Unless I have astronomical luck, I really don't think it's that hard. Seriously, if you have the intelligence to program, you should be able to find a minimum wage job or what I did, work nights doing security. I learned programming (reading programming books and coding) while I watched warehouses, trucking depots and the gate at gated communities. It was still a fuckton of hard work but, the hard part was the programming not figuring out how I was going to feed myself. Maybe I'm somehow this unicorn of blind exceptionalism but, while I felt depressed and that it was hard at the time, it doesn't feel that hard now. I just kept working and it was more of less inevitable. Even today, I keep telling my brother that if he keeps working at it, it will eventually work.

carussell 10y ago
> Seriously, if you have the intelligence to program, you should be able to find a minimum wage job or what I did, work nights doing security. Minimum wage work may be enough to sustain someone who has a high school diploma, but well does that work for someone who did go to school, sank tens of thousands in loans, and then had to leave before finishing, assuming they have no support network?

draw_down 10y ago

Sort of. It's not just that, it's that though the things successful people do are hard, underprivileged people also have to try hard just to get to the entry point. Getting people to even look at you or recognize that you could do the job is itself an extra measure of labor before the job even begins.

jedmeyers 10y ago

At what point does one have to start to be considered independently successful? - You inherited a lot of wealth and a CTO position at a father's company - Parents gave you money and bought you stuff - Parents gave you a place to live - At least you had one parent - Being an orphan, at least you were born in a first-world country - At least you were born at all, thanks to the medical care in a third world country So, unless you are an orphan from remote parts of Africa who built a Fortune 10 company from scratch your success is not your own? We all owe it to the girl who invented the wheel. But then maybe she had a rich parent who gave her stone carving tools to play as a child, so that's not really an achievement, is it?

wehadfun 10y ago
I would say Parents gave you money is when most would consider your success tied to your parents.
- softawre 10y ago
  Is that because the majority of us happen to fall just below that rung and want to consider our success "real"?
  - refurb 10y ago
    Exactly. It's like the old saying "An alcoholic is someone who has one more drink than I do." One could make the argument that everyone in the US has more priviledge than someone stuck in Syria in the midst of a civil war.
marme 10y ago
FYI the first wheels were wooden, it is common misconception that the wheel was invented in the stone age. Human civilization invented farming and pottery many centuries before the invention of the wheel
- jedmeyers 10y ago
  That it correct. My comment was intended to be more of an allegory than a foray into ancient history.

dtran 10y ago

Author here. Thanks for reading and for sharing this analogy—it very aptly captures the sentiment. Thanks for that. I just wanted to say that not only was this post extremely difficult to write, but I really hesitated to publish it. When we start talking about privilege or lack-thereof, the conversation generally veers towards comparisons, which is only natural. If you grew up more fortunate than someone else, you say, "Wow, I can't imagine what that must have been like," whereas if you grew up less so: "I grew up with less than this guy or this girl and I'm not complaining" or whatnot. While that's a natural first instinct, I think we can, and must, move beyond that, to have real discussions. I definitely had more opportunities and grew up in much more fortunate circumstances than many people. As some people have pointed out, just being born in America and having a mostly stable home was very fortunate. Just because I grew up poor, I don't claim to know or understand your circumstances, unique set of challenges, or anything about growing up as an orphan in middle America, a black kid in Compton in a broken home, or a refugee fleeing a war-torn country. But we shouldn't be comparing the sharpness of spikes or depths of the abyss below us— we should be focused on getting as many kids across as we can, and providing safety nets to as many as possible. Talking about these things is hard, but I think it's a good start.

OliverJones 10y ago
Glad you published it, Mr. Tran. Thanks! I happen to volunteer at a drop-in center in my town's family public housing project. As it happened, I saw your article shortly after my colleagues and I had wrangled $1000 for a poor immigrant kid on short notice. It was a tuition payment for a program for high school kids at one of our local world-renowned medical schools. So, I was able to send your article to my colleagues, the kid, and her mother saying "this is why we do what we do." Now we have to support this kid while she participates in this program. Hopefully she'll talk to us about what she's going through, and put any shame aside. Almost anybody reading this can do something to help open up opportunity. It doesn't have to be a grand gesture requiring megabucks. If you don't have time to get organized, give some money to the scholarship fund at your local community college. If you do have time to get organized, call the guidance counselor at your local high school and ask if there's a support program for first-generation college-bound students or something similar. Who knows? Maybe you'll meet somebody who ends up taking a trip to Sweden one day to collect a Nobel Prize. You can say "I knew her when."

hammock 10y ago

>Paradoxically, if you know you have more than one shot, you're more likely to succeed on your first try. True and I'll give an example of a technique I use (which is somewhat common) when recording vocalists in the studio. The singer will get in the booth and I'll ask them to sing a run-through. Even say "we're not recording this one." But of course we are recording. And many times it's this rehearsal take that ends up being the best one.

PythonicAlpha 10y ago

> if you know you have more than one shot, you're more likely to succeed on your first try That is most likely also one of the reasons, why there are more (successful) Entrepreneurs in the US than in Europe. At least in Germany, when your first startup fails, you are broke and nobody will give you any funding any more (not to forget, that to get your first funding, is much harder in Germany).

tn13 10y ago

> Obviously falling off onto a cushion is easier. The whole notions of cushion and spikes is relative too. For some having a roof above your head might sound like a blessing. I will probably hang myself (metaphorically speaking) than go back and stay with my parents thought I will get a house and food twice a day. Large mass of those so called "privileged" people perhaps have to take equal amount of stress even though in absolute terms we might think they are better off.

psadri 10y ago

Sometimes, knowing that you have no fallback position, can be motivating. Someone growing up in a cushy life may never be motivated to try very hard at anything. Someone growing up with hardship may be highly motivated to create a better life for themselves.

mattm 10y ago

Another way I've heard this put is imagine you have a classroom. "Success" is a bucket at the front of the classroom. Now, every kid gets a ball and tries to hit the bucket. The privileged ones at the front have greater odds of hitting success no matter their skill level. Some underprivileged kids from the back may hit success but the odds against them are much greater.

aaron695 10y ago
This is actually the opposite. OP reasoning is more - Everyone is at the back. Everyone has a bucket of balls to try with. Except underprivileged people get an electric shock when they miss.

efaref 10y ago

The really poor also don't have the rope.