And what is the son’s name and where did he say it?
Besides the immediate advantages of race, family, wealth and ready availability of top-shelf education, a lot of people who think of themselves as “self made” - more usually expressed as “I did it myself without any help” - had business, tax and career advantages helping them along. Working in a subsidized or protected industry, taking advantage of business loans, grants and tax exemptions, and being given preferential contracts all count as “help” in my book - but I have lost track of the pompous, usually conservative types who swear they never took a nickel of public money in any form. (Which is their basis for denying the meanest help for the most needy - they don’t really need it, see?)
Mitt Romney? (Although his dad wasn’t a ‘billionaire’. Just successful. People throw the term “billionaire” around as if there were a lot more of them than there really are.)
My wristwatch costs thousands of dollars. That doesn’t mean I can flip it into a $30 billion company.
It’s true that no successful person is 100% “self made” because part of being successful is developing networks with other people who can help you be successful. It’s also making smart decisions like where you apply to colleges, what you study and what sort of career you want to pursue.
Sure, there are random elements of chance and luck. But I think the OP is ignoring the choice aspect of success.
Good post, Martin Hyde. That supplies some very helpful context.
How would you describe someone like Howard Hughes or William Randolph Hearst, who were certainly born wealthy, but went on to make even huger fortunes in industries unrelated to their family wealth?
I just looked up the backstory for both, I would not consider either to be self-made.
Howard Hughes parents died before he was of legal majority (21 at the time), he had himself declared an emancipated minor and took an inheritance worth millions. So it’s unambiguous with him, he became wealthy because he inherited money. That he later became much wealthier means he was a successful businessman, but not self made.
William Randolph Hearst was given a newspaper to manage by his millionaire father, and from that starting point built up his publishing empire. Note “given a newspaper to manage”, so that violates my “gift” criteria. If someone didn’t inherit to become wealthy, and wasn’t gifted wealth and becomes wealthy–they are self made. Hughes inherited, Hearst was gifted wealth, neither are self-made.
Just really successful.
I feel like the term “self made man” implies not growing up with those sort of advantages. Like an immigrant who comes to the US and starts a business.
obligatory Onion link:
http://www.theonion.com/video/ceo-worked-way-up-from-son-of-ceo,34330/
I think the phrase that most people think of when they object to people that refer to themselves as a ‘self made man’ is “he was born on third base and brags as if he hit a triple.”
Not specifically within the op’s scope, but 9 times out of 10 successful people come from privileged backgrounds. Barrack Obama’s parents divorced, but he was sent to one of the most expensive private schools in Hawaii. Bill Gates’ family was upper-middle class, and he didn’t drop out of any school, he dropped out of harvard. Poor people don’t get into harvard.
Off the top of my head:
- Harrison Ford: Famously supported his family before he became a star by roofing.
- Stephen King: Worked as a school teacher before Carrie was published.
- James Cameron: taught himself directing by reading master’s theses in the USC library, apprenticed as a model maker under Harvey Corman.
- Abraham Lincoln: Worked in a general store while studying to take the bar exam.
I agree very few people are self-made in the most pure sense; most get assistance of some sort. But I disagree with the notion that people who are well off must have been raised in the Hamptons by parents who ate caviar and drove BMWs.
Very anecdotal, obviously, but let’s use, um… me as an example.
My parents divorced when I was ten years old. Dad left. My mom was an administration assistant at a local elementary school and trying to raise three kids on her own. She would clean homes in the evenings to make ends meet. She made $20 for two hours of work, and that included help from me and my other siblings. Needless to say, we didn’t have much.
When I graduated from high school I had a 2.8 GPA and a bad attitude. I told the school counselor I wanted to go to college. He chuckled and said I should enroll in a trade school.
I applied to engineering school at a fairly respected university and was duly rejected. No hope for me, right?
I was approved for a government grant (because I was so poor) and enrolled in the college’s general studies program. I took calculus and physics classes and worked my butt off. Got a 3.8 GPA after the first year, and was accepted into the engineering school my sophomore year. I graduated in 1992 with a BSEE and have been fairly successful ever since. (Got my MSEE in 2009.)
So did I get help? Yep - from the government (via grants), and my mother would contribute as much as she could. But statistically I “should” have ended up like my brother and sister - strung out on dope and sporadically employed. I beat the odds primarily through hard work and determination.
I think the concept of self-made man has been warped into something it historically and typically wasn’t about. It wasn’t a way to brag that someone did something “in a vacuum, with no help from family or society, and succeeded only through their own efforts”, but instead was to distinguish people who had found success financially/in society (in terms of prestige/political power etc) through their own efforts.
Their own efforts meaning, they worked at it themselves and were not made rich by someone giving them a pile of money through gift or inheritance. That doesn’t mean they had parents who never gave them a dime, or never received any help from society or etc. Very few people would meet that definition and even then it would depend on how far you want to talk about “societal help.”
Andrew Carnegie came over from Scotland at the age of 13 and immediately got a job working in a textile mill (his family was extremely poor), and eventually at the age of 15 he got a job working as a telegraph operator. He had many breaks go his way, for example a local businessman opened up his extensive library for Carnegie to read from, and Carnegie acquired a strong practical education from those books. His second job as a telegraph operator, he quickly advanced because of the patronage of a manager with the company who really liked Carnegie. When he started as a telegraph operator Carnegie did everything he could to be the very best at his job, and he also made sure to meet as many people as possible and become friends with prominent business people. That’s how he met his ultimate mentor/patron, Thomas Scott.
Scott was the President of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company and Carnegie likely never would have became quite possibly the second wealthiest man in history (excepting monarchs/rulers), without Scott’s early influence. But at the same time, Carnegie attracted Scott’s attention because he was a go-getter, because unlike many other operators he wasn’t coming in to punch a clock and earn his few dollars a week and go home. He saw the operator job as a rung on a ladder, and he aggressively took steps to network and get very proficient at the job. He advanced rapidly at PRC and eventually learned a lot about running a major business (railroads some of the largest concerns around in the 1840s/1850s) under Scott’s guidance.
He also built his early small fortune with Scott’s help. Scott knew a lot about other companies that PRC did business with, and he would tell Carnegie about future deals going down and Carnegie would invest what money he could to his advantage using information the general public did not know, from a well positioned place to have the information. This would be illegal insider trading today, but would not have been criminal in Carnegie’s time.
So even Carnegie, one of the frequently cited epitomes of the self made man wouldn’t meet the much harder definition of becoming wealthy “solely on his own, with no help.” But importantly no one just gave him a bunch of money, Carnegie started from squalor and worked from the age of 13 to aggressively advance himself in life. If he’s not a self made man then the term shouldn’t exist at all, and I am not one who thinks it’s a term that shouldn’t exist. It just should be understood in context, and also understood that luck and great fortune in who you know and what they do for you is almost always a part of every person’s successes in life.
You’re not getting into Harvard if you had to drop out of high school to support your family. If you worked after school, you’re probably missing the extracurricular activities required. Poor people also can’t afford prep school to get high test scores. You have to come from upper middle class to be able to afford a rounded high school resume. Put it another way, SAT scores follow income.
The concept of a “self made man” feeds into America’s fetish for individualism and into people’s egos, especially men’s egos - note the term is gendered. But it has no basis in reality; humans are social species for a reason and can’t accomplish anything without the help of others, or even survive to adulthood.
Every once in while, you read of someone who started out as a sales clerk in some company, worked twice as hard as everyone else, was promoted to a management position, moved into upper management and ended up as CEO. It’s rare but it happens. Even so, you will find that he caught someone’s eye and became a protege.
Then I think of Steve Jobs. Looking at the whole story, cofounding Apple, kicked out, saw a hired gun run the company into the ground, brought back and grew the company into greatness is really a candidate for being a self-made man.
That’s not the same as “poor people don’t get into Harvard.” They do. Every year.
Harvard goes looking for them. Poor kids who got good test scores and grades despite hardship. This kid is at MIT right now. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/magazine/the-boy-genius-of-ulan-bator.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0
By every definition, my family is poor. My children qualify for Medicaid. My husband is disabled from his wreck, and will be out of work for at least another six months. Son and Daughter 1.0 both attended state universities on academic scholarships. Son 2.0 is on track for the same. But it’s the second daughter who might well be the poor kid who gets into Harvard: sports, academic teams, student government, amazing grades, awards like mad, volunteer work. No, she won’t be attending test prep schools, and she may well have a summer/after school job, but a determined student can certainly balance all of those activities - in fact, I’d argue that the demonstration of that ability to manage one’s time is an important factor in being offered that type of scholarship.
I’ve worked hard to get where I am, but my family was able to put me through college, so I could graduate without any debt, or having to work through school. So I don’t consider myself to be “self made.” Perhaps I could have been, if I’d won more scholarships, or decided to put myself through college anyway.
But yeah, in society, nearly everyone who gets somewhere has help of some kind or another. If nothing else, from basic government services and existing technological and agricultural infrastructure. Not that I think that’s useful criteria in this case.