[stavros]

Culture is invisible to those who are in it, and I expect this point is also largely invisible to mostly everyone in the article's audience: The author never defines success, just takes it as a given that everyone agrees on what success is, and he seems to mean "become rich".

There are many other kinds of success: Becoming famous, making people laugh, living a contented life, having a great family, having lots of good friends, etc.

Normally, this wouldn't bother me so much, but it irks me that the author refers to the people who have perhaps chosen a different definition of success than the standard capitalist "wealth at all cost" as "leeches".

I guess my definition for someone who pursues wealth at all cost, without regard for anything else, wouldn't be much more charitable than that.

[bluetomcat]

The implicit definition of "success" from the article is probably navigating through the capitalist value system established by the market, and making a profit. It also implies that this "market-based" monetary value system is fair. There are much more complex and incomprehensible underlying social interactions that create this value system as it is. Your output as an individual is hardly ever proportional to success in that sense.

A successful CEO has climbed the corporate ladder and social hierarchy, and now their decisions are a force multiplier that mutates the values in that system. A busy carpenter is stuck doing chairs and desks, and the values of chairs and desks are dependent on everything else in the economy.

[stavros]

And yet I've met CEOs who keep saying how they want to quit and become carpenters.