I’ve noticed an interesting observation in my peers vs my wife’s peers. My wife, and most of her friends/family are Latino, and the children of immigrants. For my wife and her friends, they are the first in their families to go to college and get a degree. In spite of having little to no support (parents work multiple jobs to support their families, monolingual spanish generally, no college experience) my wife and her friends have excelled both in school and the workplace. She is part of a very successful group of individuals that literally boostrapped their way up.
In comparison, my peers and I (caucasian) have not shared the same success, but ironically had tons of support, wealthier families, etc. Most of my friends and family have parents that went to college, are well off (many had their parents pay for all of their schooling, mine definitely helped a lot financially and let me stay at home). In spite of this, myself and my friends did pretty mediocre in school. I ended up working a blue-collar job that doesn’t even require a college degree (though it does pay quite well, not knocking it), and several of my other friends/peers really struggled to find a job out of college.
It drives my wife nuts to hear my friend’s wife complain about the job market/economy as the reason she hasn’t found a decent job. Friend’s wife had every advantage imaginible, her parents were wealthy, they tutored her in subjects she struggled in, let her go to the college of her choice and paid for everything. My wife, on the other hand, had to stick to a college she could actually afford, worked full-time the entire time while double majoring and being the ONLY person in her family going to college at the time vs having an older sister/parent help with writing essays/study/etc. She got a job right out of school, and has been continuously employed since she was 15 regardless of economic ups and downs.
I wonder if the more help you get, the less motivated you are because you are always under the cloud of knowing you acheived something through someone else’s help/expectations. With no support, if you manage to see it through, its because it was 100% your own motivation and drive. Its interesting seeing the contrast between the two groups, but I’m wondering if it is just confirmation bias I’m seeing here.
In my experience, people who start off good enough at something aren’t generally motivated to improve, whereas people who had to work to get good enough seem to find it easier to keep improving, if only because that’s what they’re used to.
By any chance, are your wife’s friends female, and your friends male?
The reason I ask is that women outstrip men by every measure in higher education. Getting in, graduating, grades, etc. I don’t think anyone knows exactly why at the moment. However at least one recent Pew survey found women value education more. The effect is particularly notable among minorities:
*Black females earned 68 percent of associate’s degrees, 66 percent of bachelor’s degrees, 72 percent of master’s degrees, 62 percent of first-professional degrees, and 67 percent of doctoral degrees awarded to Black students. Hispanic females earned 62 percent of associate’s degrees, 61 percent of bachelor’s degrees, 64 percent of master’s degrees, 53 percent of first-professional degrees, and 57 percent of doctoral degrees awarded to Hispanic students. White females earned more degrees than White males for each level of degree except first-professional, for which they earned 46 percent of the degrees awarded.
*
Source: Fast Facts: Degrees conferred by race/ethnicity and sex (72)
Interesting snippet from the Pew study (the first link): Respondents with and without a college diploma thought that college was more central to a woman’s success than a man’s.
If it does, that’s not the same thing as making success more likely. If your parents have low socioeconomic status, it’s more likely, not less, that you will also have low socioeconomic status. It’s students from low income families, not unmotivated kids from high income families, who are more likely to drop out of high school. That difference may not be due entirely to motivation, but the end result is that you’re more likely to be poor if your parents were poor.
Thinking of one particular individual I know, whose father left the family so he and his 2 sibs were raised by their mother alone - he’s a lazy lump. He dropped out of high school, got his GED, got a menial part time job, doesn’t drive, and when he’s not working, he’s playing on the computer. He was going to join the army, but… he was going to go to the police academy, but… he was going to go to junior college, but… So, no, having a tough background isn’t necessarily a motivation.
Hello Again, yes, most of my wifes friends are women, but half of those in my peer group are as well. Even if I look at just the women in my peer group and compare them, theres still a marked contrast. All in both groups went to college, but their sucess during and after varied considerably.
Wife: Double majored undergrad, current Grad student, getting straight A’s.
Wife’s friend: Holds a masters, advancing career, supports her sick dad and recently divorced sister.
Wife’s other two friends: Run a sucessful bookselling business together, help support their families.
On my end
Female Friend: Been in community college on and off for ten years, works mcjobs.
Best friends wife: Family paid her entire college, barely graduated, sporadically employed (quit a few jobs)
Stepbrothers girlfriend: Aced undergrad but hasnt found a job since she graduated 1+ years ago.
I think it’s much more likely that the lazy losers your wife grew up with were too irritating for her to hang out with, so she stopped being friendly with them years ago and only retained the hardworking friends. And I bet the hardworking successful people you grew up with weren’t very interested in socializing with your group of slacker friends. But there were undoubtedly lazy and hardworking kids in each socioeconomic group.
The really unusual thing, to be honest, is that you and she liked each other enough to get married and haven’t killed each other yet. I suspect you’re a little more hard working than you think, or she would have dumped your ass before the third date.
But all that being said, she really should cut people some slack. It’s wonderful for her that she’s had the same job for 15 years. It also means she knows nothing about the job market right now and how difficult it is even for well educated hard working people to find work.
The women in my peer group all got a lot of support. Most of them didn’t have to work while they were in college and none did internships or anything like that, so its not like they were busy with a million things while in school. They also never needed to take care of anyone (not even themselves).
One theory my wife has is that when your parents dont speak english, you get called to translate for a lot of things. My wife “grew up” pretty young because she had to help her parents with appointments, bills, etc. This gave her a head start in being frugal, organized, and proactive. In contrast, I had a helicopter mom who never wanted me to fail and always tried to do stuff for me. It took longer to get the self confidence to tackle these things as an adult compared to my wife.
I like the theory in the first paragraph. Also, my wife hasnt worked the SAME job fifteen years, shes been employed since she was fifteen (she quit some jobs for better ones). But she sees a lot of people with entitlement issues, and it bothers her when they complain how hard it is to find work when they dont realize they dont interview well or are passing up jobs that are beneath them. Yeah, some people are just unlucky jobwise but not those shes seeing.
As for us, I work very hard at my job, and try not no feel entitled to things. She values that. Plus I’m a great kisser
My personal theory is that having an easy upbringing has a positive correlation to success even taking into consideration all other factors while having a hard upbringing has a negative correlation with success.
The reason it seems the opposite is you only see the people the people with hard upbringings if they are sucessful. The majority are ground down by the harshness.
There’s another possibility here. It could be that your wife just is frugal, organized, and proactive, because that’s her personality, and you are less so, because that’s yours. Kids come pre-configured with personalities, and they aren’t interchangeable. Your wife might not have turned out like you if she had been raised in the environment you were, and you might not have turned out like her if you had been raised in the environment she was.
I think it depends on the ways in which it was tough, and the person him/herself. If your wife was fortunate enough not to inherit a history of mental illness, and her parents were good and loving people who were hard-working, she had more advantages than you seem to think. There’s a big difference between a kid who has enough to eat and hardworking, loving, mentally-healthy parents, vs. a kid with a drugged-out single mom who temps as a prostitute between crack pipes and doesn’t give a shit about putting dinner on the table tonight.
Your wife might have been so motivated because her parents were stable and loving and hardworking, even though they weren’t rich people. It’s not necessarily fitting to say that she had a “tough background” without more information. Plenty of people with money could be said to have tougher backgrounds than your wife despite their net worth, due to things like inherited mental illness, neglect or outright abuse, parents who don’t value hard work or education whatsoever, and any number of observed-&-subsequently-acquired addictions.
Money ain’t everything. It’s all well and good to say your wife bootstrapped her way to an education. It sounds like she has worked hard, and I’m not denying that she’s earned her place in life. But she LEARNED to work hard. A kid who was never taught the value of hard work or education is extraordinarily unlikely to bootstrap their way to success anytime soon. That’s just not how life works.
I like the movie Cinderella with Russell Crowe as the boxer who has to win his bouts in order to feed his family.
When fighting his way up the ranks as someone who won’t give up, he’s asked what it is he’s fighting for. He says, “Milk.”
That will motivate the shit out of you.
Different people react differently to different circumstances. I don’t think there is any one set of circumstances that is guaranteed to lead to a successful or unsuccessful life. But individuals certainly have circumstances that are a good fit to bring out their best. I don’t think any of us are in a position to create theories based on observation, because few of us have a wide enough selection of acquaintances to get the gist of the full spectrum of humanity.
Some well off kids get lazy and expect everything to be handed to them. Others really seize their opportunities as a chance to shine- and I think you find as many of the latter as the former. Same with kids from poor circumstances. Some get tougher and more creative, others get disenchanted, bitter or give up.
With your wife, I think the way her peer group comes together is a part of it. Successful people from humble backgrounds life path diverges from their peers pretty quickly- while I was in college, the people I grew up with were having babies, getting in their first real trouble with the law, holding low-wage jobs and generally just having a really different set of life experiences. As soon as we turned 18, we went on very different paths. When we get together, we don’t have a ton of common ground or shared experiences.
But people from a well-off background can have shared experiences and interests even if they do not end up with the same career outcomes. The probably spend some time in college, travel, live in the city, enjoy some of the “finer things”, etc. So people from well-off backgrounds end up with a peer group who have a wider set of outcomes. You can talk to your slacker friends about your iPhone or your next vacation. Your wife probably couldn’t do that to hers- they’d have a totally different set of references.
My friend who taught ESL for years in community colleges reports that the bulk of the immigrant Mexicans in her classes were unmotivated, wasting both her and their time. Those of the caliber of the OP’s wife were rare. Immigrants from most other countries were noticeably harder working as a group. She partially attributed it to the ability of Mexican immigrants here to live within their communities and never really leave it – there are enough Mexicans that they can find services in Spanish in just about everything. Of course that is very limiting but certainly requires less effort and adaptation.
This is my experience, as well. I teach in a school that is very socioeconomically diverse: we’re 65% free-or-reduced lunch, but much of the other 35% is real money. I’ve seen plenty of rich, spoiled brats and I’ve seen plenty of rich kids who had a real sense of responsibility to take advantage of the opportunities they had. I’ve seen desperately poor kids–war refugees–who graduated in the top ten, took part in every extracurricular, went on to great schools, all while supporting disabled parents. And I’ve seen poor kids who were just angry and resentful and hopeless.
I think a lot of it is personality, as Anne Neville says, and a lot is the parent’s influence.
Exactly. Statistically, if your parents have a high socioeconomic status, you’re more likely to have a successful life. But that’s not a guarantee. There are plenty of people whose parents were high on the socioeconomic totem pole who didn’t turn out well, and vice versa.
I think it has a lot to do with your personality, your parents’ personalities, and the fit between your personality and your environment.
Peer groups tend to self-select for similar people. As even sven pointed out, your wife is going to have the most in common with other successful people with lower-class backgrounds, so those are probably going to be the people she chooses to spend time with. Kind of like how most of my friends have PhDs in astronomy. (I feel dumb around them, having only a master’s degree.) I often forget that most people in the US, let alone the world, do not have PhDs in astronomy, because most of the people I spend time around do.
I know there were about 150 astronomy PhDs awarded in the US in 2006. Most of the people who got those were probably about 28 years old. Assume 100 of those people were Americans. There were 3.3 million people born in the US in 1978. That gives us a rough estimate of one American in 33,000 getting an astronomy PhD. You can see that the people I know are not an unbiased sample of the US. Not even close. The OP’s wife’s peer group may be similarly unrepresentative.
This has been true of a lot of immigrant groups. There were German- and Swedish-speaking enclaves in the US at the beginning of the 20th century. There are expat communities of Americans in other countries, who aren’t always interested in immersing themselves in the local language and giving up English. Learning a new language as an adult is just plain hard. Not too surprising that immigrants tend to communicate in their native language, given the choice.
Also, a lot of these immigrants are probably working, in addition to going to ESL classes at community college. They’re probably tired at the end of a long working day. Again, not unique to Mexicans, or immigrants. It’s hard to be motivated when you’re tired.
