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> People who are successful never make these kinds of comments. I have no idea what qualifies as "successful" to you, but I consider myself modestly successful and I make these kinds of comments. As a mid-level engineer at Google, I make > $200K yearly and own a home in one of the more expensive markets in the country. I'm sure that isn't impressive to millionaires, but it places me in the top 10% of earners and allows me to live quite comfortably. Yes, I acknowledge that I got to this point with a lot of hard work. I went to a state school in the Midwest. I held part time jobs for the first few years, and for my final years of college I worked a full time job at night and went to school during the day. After graduating I landed a decent job, but pushed myself further by also picking up freelance work on the side. I was very conscious of the gap in skill that I perceived between myself and "real engineers". After a year of this, my skills had improved to the point where I could land a job at a west-coast startup. Luckily for me, this startup had a few big names attached to it that piqued Google's interest: after only 6 months at this startup a Google recruiter contacted me, and I leapt at the chance to interview. It had always been my dream to work at Google, so I took the opportunity seriously. For months, I'd leave work and head to a restaurant nearby to eat and study. I'd order dinner then do coding practice problems in a notebook until the restaurant closed. I'd go home and spend a little time with my fiancée, then after she went to bed I'd type my work into a compiler, fix any issues, then do a few more practice problems, going to bed around 2 or 3. Eventually this lead me to a state where I felt comfortable interviewing, and luckily I did well enough that I received an offer. The point I'm trying to make with this long-winded story is that I am familiar with hard work, and yet in spite of that I attribute quite a bit of my success to luck. "The victim mentality of blaming the rich" is not something that only poor, lazy people do. Even I feel that inequality is partly a result of those with money and influence pulling the ladder up behind them. |
And that's where you are wrong.
Look at it this way: You do very well. Are you actively trying to undermine those below you? Are you out there impeding the guy making a living driving for Uber from succeeding? Or the gal who wants to learn programming to get a better job? Or your co-workers?
How exactly do you, someone who by most measures is doing very well, conspire to impede others while growing your empire and sucking-up 80% of the opportunities at your level.
I've been an entrepreneur all my life and I've made high seven figures along the way. I can't remember a single instance where I ever thought of pulling the ladder up behind me. I was too busy making sure our competitors didn't eat us alive. And so were all of my friends doing similar things. I barely had any time for my family, let alone conspiring to be part of some evil master plan.
Look, folks with money are people, not some caricature fabricated in these victim mentalities. If this evil-ness applies to them it has to apply to you and me. Because you are rich by most standards. You have the potential to put away a million dollars or more simply by working where you work. How many people in the US can do that? Will you turn evil? Are you evil? No. Of course not. Don't apply caricatures to others while you would not, even for a minute, apply them to yourself.
As a general position I deplore negative views of reality. Things are not that bad. In fact, in the US they have never been better. Opportunities abound. I mean, just look at you. It took hard work to get where you are. Most people would not do as you did.
Is there an element of luck? Maybe, but the saying that says "luck is opportunity meeting preparation" applies in your case, doesn't it? Would it be right to vilify you because you are in the upper n%? No, of course not. You worked for this moment and you deserve it. If others want it they need to work for it, not sit on the sidelines bitching that you and others are pushing them down.
Given the range of opportunities in the US I contend one of the reasons for lack of mobility is this lack of drive. People are content playing with their iphones and bitching about the latest political figure on Facebook while some of us are working our asses off and doing very well for it.
As a general sentiment, I think we need (as a country) change to an entrepreneur and business friendly mentality. We need to teach kids business and entrepreneurship starting in elementary school. We need to stop vilifying the very things that drive economies. We need to have agencies like the SBA do a better job of empowering startups (they are horrible).
Schools are permeated by people who know nothing about business and entrepreneurship and, in a good deal of cases, vilify them. This has consequences. And we are looking at some of them. As a child I had the opportunity to attend high school both in the US and in South America. The contrast between the two school systems at the time (don't know now) was incredible.
In Argentina I was being taught accounting, business, marketing, economics, etc. Here, well, nothing of the sort. Another big difference I remember were what I would call the "militant teachers". It isn't uncommon in the US at both high school and college levels to have teachers and professors who use class time to pontificate about their own twisted views of reality rather than teach what they are there to teach. Kids are affected by this. And our teacher's unions pretty much guarantee these people can't be fired, which is exactly what should happen to them.
Once again, some of what's wrong in the US is the result of what we are going to our kids in school. If we want to change both our internal wealth balance and our economic standing in the world we have to start with our kids and what they are learning in school.
My fear is that, to some degree, it might be too late. We don't have another generation to "save" us. China is at or past the inflection point. We have lost so much focus over the last several decades that we've fallen behind significantly in many respects. And, while it is still true that there are tons of opportunities available to everyone in the US, it would be much better if we changed our focus away from Ivanka's clothing line or the latest political scandal and laser-focused on everything we have to do to make things better for everyone.