I've been reading Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. Actually consuming it might be a better description.
It is a clear straightforward case for why the classic claim that success or failure is determined solely on your individual gumption is wrong; that hard dedicated work is the path to becoming rich and successful. The Horatio Alger myth that all it takes to be a Bill Gates or Warren Buffett is hard work and your own individual merit.
I admit on the face of it this myth feels correct to most everyone. And obviously no one could claim that personal responsibility and accountability play a part. But an economy is a collective effort and humans are social actors--we evolved that way. Outliers does a great job of breaking this down and showing us that the story told about extremely successful people misses the boat. That its not just intelligence and ambition--that it has just as much to do with family, the place and time of birth, and many other things that seem happenstance.
A basic understanding of how and why individuals thrive allows us to empower people so that humans flourish in productive rather than destructive manners. The "every man for themselves" mentality, and the economic policy the comes from it, which conservatives promote to the hilt is a fiction. But most books on success that i've seen miss this point. In fact there are tons of books on being successful and for the most part they get it all wrong as Gladwell has noted:
If you go to the bookstore, you can find a hundred success manuals, or biographies of famous people, or self-help books that promise to outline the six keys to great achievement. (Or is it seven?) So we should be pretty sophisticated on the topic. What I came to realize in writing Outliers, though, is that we've been far too focused on the individual—on describing the characteristics and habits and personality traits of those who get furthest ahead in the world. And that's the problem, because in order to understand the outlier I think you have to look around them—at their culture and community and family and generation. We've been looking at tall trees, and I think we should have been looking at the forest.
Gladwell's book is a great place to start for those who buy into the "every man for themselves narrative."
In my own life I came to this conclusion a long time ago. When I looked at my grandfather and his life. He got up before the sun, had breakfast, and then went to work on his farm. From there he would head to the mill, where he worked for almost his entire life. After work he would head home, eat dinner with his family, and head back to the farm until after dark.
He was a good man he did his best to raise his family, do right by his friends and neighbors, and be a positive influence in his church and community. He never complained, he "never met a stranger," as the phrase goes, and he lived to the best of his abilities. He died with next to nothing in his bank account, but he had a family of children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren who loved and respected him.
The man was smart, but lacked an education, as he had to drop out of school to help feed the family. He wasn't rich, but was it really because he wasn't intelligent or work hard enough? Or is there something else that goes into this equation. I realized very young that there had to be other things outside of our control that impact our "lot in life."
Read Outliers, it will help clarify for you the why's of success, failure, and everything in between.
For more on outliers you can go here.
Outliers doesn't "explain it all" and he never claims that individual work and merit have nothing to do with it. But Outliers helps us see that things are a little more complex than framing success as an "it can happen to anyone" narrative that would leave us to believe that punishing successful people through equitable taxation structures is actually punishing(sic) those who "made it."
I think a statement I read from Warrent Buffett's a long time ago in a Peter Singer essay sums it up best...
“If you stick me down in the middle of Bangladesh or Peru, you’ll find out how much this talent is going to produce in the wrong kind of soil.”
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