Sandra Newman @sannewman
THE SEVEN SECRETS OF HIGHLY SUCCESSFUL PEOPLE
- Private school
- Legacy lvy admission
- Nepotism hire
- Seed capital from family
- Club memberships
- Personal assistant, nanny, ghost writer answer
- Journalists who ask, “What’s your secret?” and uncritically publish the
People don’t want to hear that. They want to keep believing that they’re poor not because they made a suboptimal choice but because the system conspired against them. My advice is pretend rich people aren’t real and make your life and the people’s around you the best you can.
I think you missed the point. You could have all of the building blocks. But without either privilege or luck you will not gain any traction.
How can we ignore that super-wealthy people exist when there’s a causal link between their situation and ours? They’re rich and most people are poor, and they are rich because others are poor. Wealth doesn’t generate itself, and no human can generate a billion dollars in value alone, even by working 170-hour weeks.
People getting richer doesn’t automatically make someone else poorer. The total amount of resources the human species has access to is constantly growing as our productive power increases. In fact, most of the time the total productive power increase is directly linked to someone getting richer.
Sure they can. J.K. Rowling is a billionaire. How many people did she exploit by writing 7 books? The people who worked on the trains or in the coffee shops she hung around and bought coffee from? The idea that people only collect wealth by depriving someone else of it is a pre-modern understanding. Same with the idea that value is related to hours worked.