I didn't say that these success stories are invalid, but I do think that they're told in a disempowering way. The focus of the story is not "The amazing story

I didn't say that these success stories are invalid, but I do think that they're told in a disempowering way. The focus of the story is not "The amazing story of 20 billionaires and how they found success" but the fact that they started with nothing. However this (and every other story I've seen like it - at least that I can remember) glosses over the true practicality of those early stages. Larry Ellison had some odd jobs then founded a software company. My original post complains that about the "scale" of the story - because it ends at 1,000,000,000 the differences of $10,000 or even one or two million dollars sometimes that people were fortunate enough to have in order to fund their enterprise are too small to register but they're incredibly important. Also in response to: They only had the same resources that everyone on this board has My guess is that the majority of people on this board aren't as poor as the people I'm referring to when I say "taunting the poor". I don't by any means consider myself poor and I'm not complaing that I feel taunted by this, but perpetrating this rags to riches story over and over again and saying that people start "with nothing" is demoralising to the truly disempowered. I think it would be more appropriate to tell these stories in an empowering way: where very minute practical details of day to day survival were addressed whilst telling the story of how Larry Ellison "founded a software company" after "starting with nothing" then "having odd jobs".