I believe the idea of self made individuals is ridiculous and almost never exists.
Most people are victims of their circumstances in one way or another.
For example, at the root of the cause could simply be being born more intelligent than others due to your mother being abnormally smart, but shy and therefore marrying a poor man.
You were made by your mother and your father and therefore any attributes you may or may not have are made by their choices.
I don’t see how anyone can ever truly be self made.
Obviously nobody is completely self-made - taken to the extreme, that would be ridiculous and physically impossible. The working definition of ‘self-made’, however, is something like: “having achieved success through personal determination, effort etc, starting without any unusual privilege”.
In other words, your conception of ‘self-made’ is, I would say, a bit of a strawman.
To be fair to MrManFace, the term is laughably overused. To the extent of saying a billionaire CEO’s son is a self made man in another industry(bet his father’s connections and money had nothing to do with it).
Of course people leverage every advantage they can to get ahead. Of course “self-made” is kind of a silly idea if you look at it in a black-and-white way. How can someone be “self made” if they exist in a community and achieve their success based on how they interact with that community?
So??
“Self made” is, at best, a label more than a literal term. It means that a person worked hard and faced forms of adversity they had to work through on their way to success.
Whether someone is truly “self made” is kind of meaningless, or at best on a scale that would be judged subjectively.
You’re right in that nobody grows up in a vacuum. Some people have predominantly negative influences, expectations and experiences, and others have primarily positive. The majority of us have some mix of both.
It’s all in how you define what’s normal. What you describe IS pretty much the norm for most middle class families The expectation from that is that one would take that foundation and build on it by going to college and getting a decently well paying job and starting a family of their own.
By that yardstick, someone from that background who ends up a multi-millionaire without a significant starting stake from family or friends is rightfully considered “self-made”.
Just because some people start off above or below the ostensible starting point doesn’t at all negate the achievements of people- you could very easily (and accurately, IMO) say that someone from a poor, single-parent family in the barrio who goes to college and ends up with the same decently well paying job and family is self-made.
Similarly, you could also claim that some trust-fund kid who grew up in the Hamptons who ends up with the same job and family was kind of a fuck-up.
I think you’re working from a biased sample. Try looking at the biographies of some famous people who are refered to as “self-made.”
As for the general question, to use a common metaphor, we’re all a combination of the cards we’re dealt and the way we play them—though some people unduly emphasize one or the other, depending on whether they have an external or internal “locus of control.”
My great grandfather is a self made man. Wanting a fresh start away from the restrictions of his Irish/Italian upbringing, he bashed himself in the head with a shillelagh so as to forget the education he had received from his upper-middle class upbringing. He then built a ship with his own two hands and sailed across the Atlantic, where landed on a little undiscovered island off the coast of New England. He was a proud man and wouldn’t accept handouts, so he proceeded to murder every single person or creature living on the island, so as not to be tempted. Then he burnt all the vegetation, just to make sure he was starting with a clean slate. After a few lean years of living off fish he caught with his bare hands (he would not accept the use of any technology he didn’t invent), he was able to create a thriving farm growing nothing but crops from species of plants he had discovered himself.
He went on to form several thriving business. However his one regret was that he never considered himself a “self made man” since he was unable to invent the technology to either genetically engineer himself or travel back in time and impregnate his own mother.
Andrew Lloyd Webber grew up in the lower middle class. His father was a failed composer who told both his sons “Only go into music if you can’t find anything else to do.” He limited his son’s musical training to a year at Oxford. ALW’s first songs and shows failed miserably.
Yet he continued on, and didn’t do so bad in the self made man department.
Really the OP has a bit of a sour grapes tone to it. “I too could have achieved a meteoric rise to the middle if I had all the benefits my peers were given.” While it is true that no one grows up in a vacuum (except my great grandfather…who literally grew up in a vacuum), some people manage to create something extraordinary with the tools they were given while others produce jack shit even with all the advantages you could imagine.
Most of the people I know who “went to good schools, come from good families and had parental assistance well into their 20s” didn’t become “self made men”. They became middle managers in large corporations.
I know some people whose parents assisted them with their mortgages, funded the businesses they started up, left very comfortable inheritances for them, etc. Nothing wrong with any of that, but their success in life is not self-made (and as it happens, they don’t claim it is either).
I also know a couple of people who, through extraordinary business acumen, personal drive, dedication, hard work and determination, built up their own hugely successful businesses, starting from no more than the average person had on leaving home. These are people I would describe as ‘self-made’.
Sure, the folks in the second category weren’t just abandoned by their parents and raised by wolves in the wilderness, so if we were to insist on an absolute, anal defintion of ‘self-made’, they would not qualify, but really, what’s the point of insisting on such a useless definition?
I agree. I’ve been doing a report on Jeff Bezos, the kingpin of Amazon. Everyone says what a wonderful self-made man he is, but he put $10,000 towards his company and his parents also invested thousands of dollars towards it.
That’s not to say Jeff wasn’t amazing, and didn’t pull off a lot of shit by himself. But he:
was born white, and a man
was born to parents who had the money to invest in this sort of stuff
worked at Wall Street - how many non-whites and non-men work at Wall Street, even in this day and age
was born in an era that an internet bookstore could take off
He was absolutely amazing and worked very hard for where he is now. But to say that anyone could do it is foolish…for one thing I don’t have parents that can put that kind of money into anything.
I think watching Downton Abbey has really helped me come to understand this issue better, as obviously I did not grow up in a society with such strictly defined classes. [Not claiming America is a classless society, but it’s not so clear cut as it was in the UK with a landed nobility.]
In one of the seasons of Downton Abbey, the Lord Grantham’s eldest daughter is engaged to a man who runs a newspaper empire. There is a scene where the newspaper publisher tells her, “I’m not ashamed of being a self-made man. I’m proud of it.”
It’s an important scene because it really distinguishes what differentiates self-made versus not self-made. Lord Grantham and his daughter are wealthy and privileged solely based on who they are, as in who came before them in their family tree. They have not worked, and in fact would consider it embarrassing to have to work, to accumulate their wealth. Their wealth, prestige and what limited power still remained with the nobility at that time was entirely inherited.
A self made man, whatever his background, is someone who achieves wealth/power/success through working for it. That’s to me the distinguishing factor. So it’s a very simple question/answer tree to determine if someone is self made:
Is this person wealthy?
If yes, got to question 2.
Did this person inherit their wealth or were they gifted their wealth from their parents or other family?
If no, they are self-made.
The concept of being “self-made” did not arise to distinguish between people who were born into upper middle class families, went to good schools, and then worked up the ranks to be a CEO utilizing familial connections and connections from their Ivy League college from people who grew up in a shack and became billionaires. It’s to distinguish between people who are beneficiaries of inherited or gifted familial wealth (best exemplified by European nobility for example) and people who through their own efforts became wealthy/successful. It’s not a claim that being self-made means you were born in squalor, taught yourself to read and write and then self-taught yourself a classical education and then invented something with your bare hands that made you a millionaire.
