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"Bill and I talk about this with our kids at the dinner table. Bill worked incredibly hard and took risks and made sacrifices for success. But there is another

"Bill and I talk about this with our kids at the dinner table. Bill worked incredibly hard and took risks and made sacrifices for success. But there is another essential ingredient of success, and that ingredient is luck – absolute and total luck. When were you born? Who were your parents? Where did you grow up? None of us earned these things. They were given to us." Totally true, and very important to remember, especially for the HN crowd.

beggi 12y ago
This is a sentiment lost on some people unfortunately.
rayiner 12y ago
Melinda's comments are truly amazing: > Melinda: Let your heart break. It will change what you do with your optimism. On a trip to South Asia, I met a desperately poor mother who brought me her two small children and implored me: "Please take them home with you." When I begged her forgiveness and said I could not, she said: "Then please take one." . . . When I talk with the mothers I meet during my travels, I see that there is no difference at all in what we want for our children. The only difference is our ability to give it to them. This is such a tremendously important message that I don't think you can even hope to accurately perceive the world without really internalizing it. The other day, someone told me a story. He was working maintenance in an apartment building, and went into a unit one day. Inside the unit, he saw a couple passed out on the couch, and a baby screaming in his crib. He went over to the baby, and saw a cockroach crawl out of his diaper. The diaper was stuck to the baby's skin. He called 9/11 immediately, the police came, and the building fired his maintenance company for not going to the building management first. This wasn't South Asia, it was here in the U.S. I heard that story, and then thought about how our daycare e-mails me daily an itemized list of the time of every diaper change and whether it was wet and/or BM. I thought about how unfair it is that she started life with a leg-up, from the hospital where she took her first breath, and yet how I'm totally driven to give her every unfair benefit I can ("you know honey, we could afford private school from pre-K if we budget carefully"). Intellectually, we want life to be fair for everyone, but being a parent means having this overwhelming urge to clear the path ahead for your offspring, burning down the forest if you have to. I'm certainly not going to send my daughter to an inner-city public school to make a point. What gets to me is our inability as a society to acknowledge the cognitive dissonance, and speak about this issue honestly outside of graduation speeches. To talk about traits like intelligence and patience in terms of what they are: winnings in the genetic lottery, rather than as the result of moral virtue. To acknowledge that "equality of opportunity" is a vicious fiction and understand that not as a call to any particular political ideology, but as a fact of the universe that we must reconcile with any political ideology.
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- bane 12y ago
  It's also possible to lift oneself out of low circumstances, but man-oh-man is it hard. My father ran away from his home in the late 40s/early 50s as a teenager to escape crushing poverty in the midwest (where shoes were literally an item to be shared amongst his siblings and starting a full-time job at 13 was normal). He joined the army, fought in Korea, came home and became the first person ever on my father's side to earn a college degree with copious help from the G.I. Bill. It meant he could move up to low-paid white collar jobs instead of blue collar labor jobs, but still he didn't become a "success." He taught school for a while, until the rampant crime of the poor parts of Chicago scared him away, and after that he bounced around in various jobs: owning a gas station, sales, traveling sales, etc. He finally settled in the business I grew up in. But it was not wildly profitable. My mother grew up in a family of non-college educated sales people and housewives. She attended 1 semester of community college before dropping out, married my father not long after and only ever really worked in the family business. To my knowledge, only 2 people on her side ever graduated from college: 2 of her brothers, both became reasonably successful. My parents paid the employees first before they got paid, so we often went months without money. I think during the best year ever, a year with near monthly lucky breaks, my parents combined income may have broken $90k. During our worst year, we spent 4 months homeless, living in a roadside motel full of drug addicts and other questionable types. When we had a home College and school was not a priority for me, I never took the SATs, and I guess it was assumed I would just inherit the family business. There's a long(er) story in between, but I'm the first person in my family to earn a Masters Degree and feel like I'm reasonably successful, upper-middle middle-class. I didn't do it all on my own, I was given some great opportunities and help along the way and seized those moments like my life depended on it and worked my tail off. A great many of my peers fell into two camps, those born into wealth pretty much all turned out great, great educations, great careers. I'd say I'm about middle of the pack with these folks. A few slid down a bit, usually various substance abuse issues were involved. But even then, many of those folks had the family resources at hand to turn their lives around when they had solved the substance problems. Those born into similar economic situations that I grew up in tended to stay in those situations. If they grew up in a single parent family and their mother worked part-time at the local Circle-K, there's a big chance that that's where they ended up as well or fell down even further. Thinking back, I can only think of 1 or 2 other kids I grew up with who worked their way out of the socio-economic conditions we grew up in. By and large, most of them didn't find a way out. What's disturbed me are the people who were also given great opportunities but squandered them. The ones who somehow were sponsored to attend college for free, but failed out because of too much World of Warcraft, or couldn't figure out how to operate a condom and ended up with 3 kids they couldn't care for. Pondering these folks, I suspect that the "Marshmallow Effect" is a real problem for them. Most of the life choices where they lost an opportunity to get ahead involved them taking a strategic and difficult, long, view of their life...with the option of doing something that felt good at the moment instead. They usually took the feel good option instead. Case-in-point, my best friend of more than 20 years has had opportunity upon opportunity come his way and blow them and has been more or less perpetually bankrupt since we got out of High School. He recently ran into yet another serious money and family problem prompting us to have a serious grownup conversation about his life-choices to date. He wasn't even aware that he had had these opportunities I spoke of and our parting words were that he was going to make a concerted effort to get a better job and work on solving his money situation instead of leeching off of everybody around him. It's 3 months later, he hasn't finished his resume, has "applied" for 3 jobs in that time, and moved to a more expensive apartment he can't possibly pay for given his current situation. Why did he move? "My lease was up and I wanted a better location, near a better school district for my son." His son who won't start school for 3 more years. With so much left to do, you'd expect that he be spending his nights and weekends working a second job, or some other meaningful activity. No, Steam shows he spends most of his time after work screwing around. This is all anecdotes of course, but I suspect that it's applicable in a great many places as well. Help and opportunities are out there if you're poor. But you have to work 2 or 3 times as hard as the other person who grew up rich and wealthy. While my school-mates were being given a generous monthly allowance, their parents credit cards, new computers and condos closer to school with a brand new SUV to drive the quarter mile there and back, I was working a full-time job, taking night school, driving an hour and a half to school and back in a car I was praying wouldn't die on me, sleeping 4 hours a night, and literally eating instant noodles 3 times a day for months on end. But I'm thankful every single day that I had: a car to drive, a job to drive to, school grants to cover my education, teachers who understood my situation and let me turn things in a day late, a boss who understood as well and let me take time off for exams and studying and more. I treated each of those opportunities as precious and tried to make 130% of them. And as time went on, doing so turned each of those initial opportunities into more opportunities, a snowball effect.
paulhauggis 12y ago
I'm fine with attributing a small part of success to luck. I'm not fine when lots of people just assume that the only reason you are ever successful is due to luck.
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- MichaelGG 12y ago
  No, it's like luck is the final requirement. It's mostly a given that you've got to grind and try hard and get yourself out there. But after you've done all that, it's a LOT of luck. People that take it the wrong way are the ones that don't try or just hang around, "because it's all luck". Just like folks that read a paragraph about physics, then decide everything will happen how it happens, so there's no need for them to do anything.
dominotw 12y ago
>Totally true, and very important to remember, especially for the HN crowd. Remember and do what?Ins't this morality of convenience. If we really cared we would stop parents from passing on their advantages to their children and raise children on a collective common ground.
- ScottBurson 12y ago
  We don't have to stop parents completely from passing on their advantages to their children -- which is good, because that would be impossible. What we could and should do, however, is equalize public education spending per child across the entire US. The system we've always had, of funding education out of local property taxes, is grossly unfair.
  - dominotw 12y ago
    >We don't have to stop parents completely from passing on their advantages to their children We have to. Parents don't just pass on their advantages, they pass on their values which probably are more important than economic advantages. No amount of school reform will fix instances where kids have to go back to house with a missing father and a overworked mother. Doing anything else and saying shit like 'lets remember we are lucky' is purest of pure hypocrisy.
dpweb 12y ago
It's not a level playing field that's true, but too much of this thinking enables us to fall into a very convenient trap when we fail, and general outlook about the real reasons for our circumstances. That it's all nature and nurture and we have no free will and no real control over our destinies. This idea should be met with violent resistance. Free will doesn't only exist, it's the only thing that matters. If I have no control over my life then I have no life. I see this as part of the current public debate about haves and have-nots, growing inequality, etc.. which is an important debate. It's nice that the richest persons in the world have some humility about their success and speak so publicly, but we must not fall into the trap that luck and things outside our control are really what matters. People born with nothing make it huge, rich kids with everything become total failures. This is absolute proof that free will exists and is what matters most.
ucarion 12y ago
We can go further, though. Intelligence and tenacity are also things that were given to us. You don't choose to be smart, nor do you choose to be hardworking.
- WalterBright 12y ago
  You don't choose to be hardworking or tenacious? Really?
  - ucarion 12y ago
    Let's say you somehow "chose" to be hardworking. Since not everyone is hardworking, it seems that not everyone makes the right choice. Did you "choose" to choose to be hardworking? It's turtles all the way down. Whether you're born rich, smart, hardworking, or adaptable is all luck. In the end, your brain is a mesh of deterministic neurons -- "choices" are impossible.
    - bellcurvetopper 12y ago
      If you're interested in exploring the consequences of this line of thought, check out the philosopher John Rawls. If you'd like, I can try to summarize what are quite nuanced arguments and conclusions, though you're best of reading his works directly. Michael Sandel (of Harvard fame) is the best living champion of his ideas, and his book "Justice" is thorough and approachable. Sandel also has an EdX course with the same name, and he covers John Rawls towards the end. Rawls is my favorite philosopher on the topic of social justice, and I can't recommend him highly enough.
  - barry-cotter 12y ago
    Intelligence as measured by IQ, and conscientiousness are both quite heritable. The estimates of IQ's heritability vary between 0.4 and 0.8.
lifeformed 12y ago
My friends and I realize both this, but we draw different conclusions from it. Some of my friends have an attitude of, "we are so lucky to be born with the advantages we have, we should live simply, strive not for material success but just personal fulfillment." At first I thought that was a great philosophy, to just be content with what you have (look at how little others have!). However, the more I think about it, the the more I realize that this attitude is a waste of an opportunity. We are given such a prime position to make a difference. My attitude is: work hard, strive for success, and use your success to give back and help others in need. I could do the minimum and support just myself and be content, but I could also push myself and make lots of money, and use it to help many people. I guess Gates is the best example of this.
stesch 12y ago
See Philip Greenspun's article "How to Become As Rich As Bill Gates" http://philip.greenspun.com/bg/ http://philip.greenspun.com/bg/

beggi 12y ago

This is a sentiment lost on some people unfortunately.

rayiner 12y ago

Melinda's comments are truly amazing: > Melinda: Let your heart break. It will change what you do with your optimism. On a trip to South Asia, I met a desperately poor mother who brought me her two small children and implored me: "Please take them home with you." When I begged her forgiveness and said I could not, she said: "Then please take one." . . . When I talk with the mothers I meet during my travels, I see that there is no difference at all in what we want for our children. The only difference is our ability to give it to them. This is such a tremendously important message that I don't think you can even hope to accurately perceive the world without really internalizing it. The other day, someone told me a story. He was working maintenance in an apartment building, and went into a unit one day. Inside the unit, he saw a couple passed out on the couch, and a baby screaming in his crib. He went over to the baby, and saw a cockroach crawl out of his diaper. The diaper was stuck to the baby's skin. He called 9/11 immediately, the police came, and the building fired his maintenance company for not going to the building management first. This wasn't South Asia, it was here in the U.S. I heard that story, and then thought about how our daycare e-mails me daily an itemized list of the time of every diaper change and whether it was wet and/or BM. I thought about how unfair it is that she started life with a leg-up, from the hospital where she took her first breath, and yet how I'm totally driven to give her every unfair benefit I can ("you know honey, we could afford private school from pre-K if we budget carefully"). Intellectually, we want life to be fair for everyone, but being a parent means having this overwhelming urge to clear the path ahead for your offspring, burning down the forest if you have to. I'm certainly not going to send my daughter to an inner-city public school to make a point. What gets to me is our inability as a society to acknowledge the cognitive dissonance, and speak about this issue honestly outside of graduation speeches. To talk about traits like intelligence and patience in terms of what they are: winnings in the genetic lottery, rather than as the result of moral virtue. To acknowledge that "equality of opportunity" is a vicious fiction and understand that not as a call to any particular political ideology, but as a fact of the universe that we must reconcile with any political ideology.

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bane 12y ago
It's also possible to lift oneself out of low circumstances, but man-oh-man is it hard. My father ran away from his home in the late 40s/early 50s as a teenager to escape crushing poverty in the midwest (where shoes were literally an item to be shared amongst his siblings and starting a full-time job at 13 was normal). He joined the army, fought in Korea, came home and became the first person ever on my father's side to earn a college degree with copious help from the G.I. Bill. It meant he could move up to low-paid white collar jobs instead of blue collar labor jobs, but still he didn't become a "success." He taught school for a while, until the rampant crime of the poor parts of Chicago scared him away, and after that he bounced around in various jobs: owning a gas station, sales, traveling sales, etc. He finally settled in the business I grew up in. But it was not wildly profitable. My mother grew up in a family of non-college educated sales people and housewives. She attended 1 semester of community college before dropping out, married my father not long after and only ever really worked in the family business. To my knowledge, only 2 people on her side ever graduated from college: 2 of her brothers, both became reasonably successful. My parents paid the employees first before they got paid, so we often went months without money. I think during the best year ever, a year with near monthly lucky breaks, my parents combined income may have broken $90k. During our worst year, we spent 4 months homeless, living in a roadside motel full of drug addicts and other questionable types. When we had a home College and school was not a priority for me, I never took the SATs, and I guess it was assumed I would just inherit the family business. There's a long(er) story in between, but I'm the first person in my family to earn a Masters Degree and feel like I'm reasonably successful, upper-middle middle-class. I didn't do it all on my own, I was given some great opportunities and help along the way and seized those moments like my life depended on it and worked my tail off. A great many of my peers fell into two camps, those born into wealth pretty much all turned out great, great educations, great careers. I'd say I'm about middle of the pack with these folks. A few slid down a bit, usually various substance abuse issues were involved. But even then, many of those folks had the family resources at hand to turn their lives around when they had solved the substance problems. Those born into similar economic situations that I grew up in tended to stay in those situations. If they grew up in a single parent family and their mother worked part-time at the local Circle-K, there's a big chance that that's where they ended up as well or fell down even further. Thinking back, I can only think of 1 or 2 other kids I grew up with who worked their way out of the socio-economic conditions we grew up in. By and large, most of them didn't find a way out. What's disturbed me are the people who were also given great opportunities but squandered them. The ones who somehow were sponsored to attend college for free, but failed out because of too much World of Warcraft, or couldn't figure out how to operate a condom and ended up with 3 kids they couldn't care for. Pondering these folks, I suspect that the "Marshmallow Effect" is a real problem for them. Most of the life choices where they lost an opportunity to get ahead involved them taking a strategic and difficult, long, view of their life...with the option of doing something that felt good at the moment instead. They usually took the feel good option instead. Case-in-point, my best friend of more than 20 years has had opportunity upon opportunity come his way and blow them and has been more or less perpetually bankrupt since we got out of High School. He recently ran into yet another serious money and family problem prompting us to have a serious grownup conversation about his life-choices to date. He wasn't even aware that he had had these opportunities I spoke of and our parting words were that he was going to make a concerted effort to get a better job and work on solving his money situation instead of leeching off of everybody around him. It's 3 months later, he hasn't finished his resume, has "applied" for 3 jobs in that time, and moved to a more expensive apartment he can't possibly pay for given his current situation. Why did he move? "My lease was up and I wanted a better location, near a better school district for my son." His son who won't start school for 3 more years. With so much left to do, you'd expect that he be spending his nights and weekends working a second job, or some other meaningful activity. No, Steam shows he spends most of his time after work screwing around. This is all anecdotes of course, but I suspect that it's applicable in a great many places as well. Help and opportunities are out there if you're poor. But you have to work 2 or 3 times as hard as the other person who grew up rich and wealthy. While my school-mates were being given a generous monthly allowance, their parents credit cards, new computers and condos closer to school with a brand new SUV to drive the quarter mile there and back, I was working a full-time job, taking night school, driving an hour and a half to school and back in a car I was praying wouldn't die on me, sleeping 4 hours a night, and literally eating instant noodles 3 times a day for months on end. But I'm thankful every single day that I had: a car to drive, a job to drive to, school grants to cover my education, teachers who understood my situation and let me turn things in a day late, a boss who understood as well and let me take time off for exams and studying and more. I treated each of those opportunities as precious and tried to make 130% of them. And as time went on, doing so turned each of those initial opportunities into more opportunities, a snowball effect.

paulhauggis 12y ago

I'm fine with attributing a small part of success to luck. I'm not fine when lots of people just assume that the only reason you are ever successful is due to luck.

deleted 12y ago
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MichaelGG 12y ago
No, it's like luck is the final requirement. It's mostly a given that you've got to grind and try hard and get yourself out there. But after you've done all that, it's a LOT of luck. People that take it the wrong way are the ones that don't try or just hang around, "because it's all luck". Just like folks that read a paragraph about physics, then decide everything will happen how it happens, so there's no need for them to do anything.

dominotw 12y ago

>Totally true, and very important to remember, especially for the HN crowd. Remember and do what?Ins't this morality of convenience. If we really cared we would stop parents from passing on their advantages to their children and raise children on a collective common ground.

ScottBurson 12y ago
We don't have to stop parents completely from passing on their advantages to their children -- which is good, because that would be impossible. What we could and should do, however, is equalize public education spending per child across the entire US. The system we've always had, of funding education out of local property taxes, is grossly unfair.
- dominotw 12y ago
  >We don't have to stop parents completely from passing on their advantages to their children We have to. Parents don't just pass on their advantages, they pass on their values which probably are more important than economic advantages. No amount of school reform will fix instances where kids have to go back to house with a missing father and a overworked mother. Doing anything else and saying shit like 'lets remember we are lucky' is purest of pure hypocrisy.

dpweb 12y ago

It's not a level playing field that's true, but too much of this thinking enables us to fall into a very convenient trap when we fail, and general outlook about the real reasons for our circumstances. That it's all nature and nurture and we have no free will and no real control over our destinies. This idea should be met with violent resistance. Free will doesn't only exist, it's the only thing that matters. If I have no control over my life then I have no life. I see this as part of the current public debate about haves and have-nots, growing inequality, etc.. which is an important debate. It's nice that the richest persons in the world have some humility about their success and speak so publicly, but we must not fall into the trap that luck and things outside our control are really what matters. People born with nothing make it huge, rich kids with everything become total failures. This is absolute proof that free will exists and is what matters most.

ucarion 12y ago

We can go further, though. Intelligence and tenacity are also things that were given to us. You don't choose to be smart, nor do you choose to be hardworking.

WalterBright 12y ago
You don't choose to be hardworking or tenacious? Really?
- ucarion 12y ago
  Let's say you somehow "chose" to be hardworking. Since not everyone is hardworking, it seems that not everyone makes the right choice. Did you "choose" to choose to be hardworking? It's turtles all the way down. Whether you're born rich, smart, hardworking, or adaptable is all luck. In the end, your brain is a mesh of deterministic neurons -- "choices" are impossible.
  - bellcurvetopper 12y ago
    If you're interested in exploring the consequences of this line of thought, check out the philosopher John Rawls. If you'd like, I can try to summarize what are quite nuanced arguments and conclusions, though you're best of reading his works directly. Michael Sandel (of Harvard fame) is the best living champion of his ideas, and his book "Justice" is thorough and approachable. Sandel also has an EdX course with the same name, and he covers John Rawls towards the end. Rawls is my favorite philosopher on the topic of social justice, and I can't recommend him highly enough.
- barry-cotter 12y ago
  Intelligence as measured by IQ, and conscientiousness are both quite heritable. The estimates of IQ's heritability vary between 0.4 and 0.8.

lifeformed 12y ago

My friends and I realize both this, but we draw different conclusions from it. Some of my friends have an attitude of, "we are so lucky to be born with the advantages we have, we should live simply, strive not for material success but just personal fulfillment." At first I thought that was a great philosophy, to just be content with what you have (look at how little others have!). However, the more I think about it, the the more I realize that this attitude is a waste of an opportunity. We are given such a prime position to make a difference. My attitude is: work hard, strive for success, and use your success to give back and help others in need. I could do the minimum and support just myself and be content, but I could also push myself and make lots of money, and use it to help many people. I guess Gates is the best example of this.

stesch 12y ago

See Philip Greenspun's article "How to Become As Rich As Bill Gates" http://philip.greenspun.com/bg/ http://philip.greenspun.com/bg/