4 ms·

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 - Par

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.
CJefferson 10y ago
I'm not clear what point you are trying to make. No-one is entirely independently successful, but there is a big gap between (for example) someone whose parents give them nothing, and someone whose parents "lend" them $1 million to get started.
- jedmeyers 10y ago
  It often happens that those parents in addition to $1m also "lend" a vast amount of knowledge of how certain social structures and systems work, and how to operate efficiently within them. They also can serve as a "trust provider", which is a great thing to have when executing business transactions. If given the opportunity to choose between those things and the money, I would take the "inside knowledge" every time. So even if (for some reason) you decide to limit the amount of money parents can "lend" to their children, it still won't solve the issue of disparity. p.s. You think Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos got to where she was couple of years ago (before the fiasco unfolded) just because her father, a former Enron employee, gave her some money?
  - CJefferson 10y ago
    That sounds like an interesting experiment. My parents provided neither money, nor knowledge on social structures. Personally, I'd take the money. I can learn social structures, I can't "learn" a giant pile of bootstrap money.
    - Swizec 10y ago
      > Personally, I'd take the money. I can learn social structures, I can't "learn" a giant pile of bootstrap money. But if you already know the social structures, you don't need to learn the pile of money. You can just go ask for it!
      - int_19h 10y ago
        It very much depends on the society in question. The value of social capital has a different price tag in cash (in a sense of how much real value you can derive by leveraging it) in different places.
elihu 10y ago
I don't think anyone is truly independently successful. We might be able to make rough comparisons that one person is more independently successful than another, but we all share in the success and failure of other people. I think it's more constructive to talk about whether or not people took full advantage of the opportunities that they had and whether they had more and better opportunities than others.
pyrale 10y ago
The fact that you found so many external factors contributing to success are maybe an indication that measuring the degree to which success is your own doesn't yield very interesting data. I would argue that the only purpose/use of this measure is to deny that we should expand the of people benefiting from external factors of success. But I'm quite biased on this issue, so maybe you have another use for this data ?

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.

CJefferson 10y ago

I'm not clear what point you are trying to make. No-one is entirely independently successful, but there is a big gap between (for example) someone whose parents give them nothing, and someone whose parents "lend" them $1 million to get started.

jedmeyers 10y ago
It often happens that those parents in addition to $1m also "lend" a vast amount of knowledge of how certain social structures and systems work, and how to operate efficiently within them. They also can serve as a "trust provider", which is a great thing to have when executing business transactions. If given the opportunity to choose between those things and the money, I would take the "inside knowledge" every time. So even if (for some reason) you decide to limit the amount of money parents can "lend" to their children, it still won't solve the issue of disparity. p.s. You think Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos got to where she was couple of years ago (before the fiasco unfolded) just because her father, a former Enron employee, gave her some money?
- CJefferson 10y ago
  That sounds like an interesting experiment. My parents provided neither money, nor knowledge on social structures. Personally, I'd take the money. I can learn social structures, I can't "learn" a giant pile of bootstrap money.
  - Swizec 10y ago
    > Personally, I'd take the money. I can learn social structures, I can't "learn" a giant pile of bootstrap money. But if you already know the social structures, you don't need to learn the pile of money. You can just go ask for it!
    - int_19h 10y ago
      It very much depends on the society in question. The value of social capital has a different price tag in cash (in a sense of how much real value you can derive by leveraging it) in different places.

elihu 10y ago

I don't think anyone is truly independently successful. We might be able to make rough comparisons that one person is more independently successful than another, but we all share in the success and failure of other people. I think it's more constructive to talk about whether or not people took full advantage of the opportunities that they had and whether they had more and better opportunities than others.

pyrale 10y ago

The fact that you found so many external factors contributing to success are maybe an indication that measuring the degree to which success is your own doesn't yield very interesting data. I would argue that the only purpose/use of this measure is to deny that we should expand the of people benefiting from external factors of success. But I'm quite biased on this issue, so maybe you have another use for this data ?