Why the “Self-Made” Success Story Is a Myth
This is such nonsense. First of all, there are absolutely people who come from dirt poverty and become wildly successful. Second of all, plenty of people receive lots of help from their parents and amount to precisely nothing. IMO it&#x27;s fair to refer to your success as &quot;self made&quot; if you exceed the median success level of your class peer group by a substantial margin.<p>If you immigrate from Africa with nothing, and you get yourself a law degree and an upper middle class income - that&#x27;s self made success. If you&#x27;re born in the US and your entire family is lawyers, maybe that same accomplishment is not &quot;self made success&quot;. But if you say, start Microsoft and become a billionaire i&#x27;d say that it&#x27;s fair to call that self-made success.<p>I feel like this trope that self-made success is a myth comes almost entirely from people like the author of this article. People who were born with lots of advantages, who still couldn&#x27;t hack it. They want to justify their own failure to live up to their family&#x27;s expectations by tearing other people down. Whether or not self-made success is a thing, self-made failure certainly is, and i&#x27;d say the author of this article more than qualifies for it.