Ms. Napier had a friend in the '60s who was on a long term visit from England, and thought the United States was a wonderful place. But then the police – Rizzo’s goons in Philadelphia – grabbed him. They drove him to a particularly bad neighborhood at night and beat him badly in an alleyway and left him there. He wasn’t accused of doing anything wrong, he just had long hair. He was never the same after, and when he recovered sufficiently he went back to England. It was a really sad story.
So, there are certainly characteristics other than race and gender that can get you beaten up. I don’t know how we can ever feel OK about how the world operates.
On a less tragic note, the brother of a high school friend of mine worked at the Wil Wright’s in Westwood Village. Before leaving work at night, he used to fill his pockets with peppermint sticks and suckers. Because he had long hair, he was pulled over a lot. One night the cop had him empty his pockets.
Cop was not well pleased with the cascade of candy.
Yeah, Rizzo was a fascist. Boston cops were a bit better, it being a college town. And I had an MIT sticker on my car, so I suspect the cop might have been worried that my parents had money and could give him shit if he went too far out of line.
Cambridge police were never a problem, but they knew that MIT and Harvard paid most of their salaries.
Where does success come from?
Oh, very nice. And how’d you get that, eh?
By exploiting the workers! By hangin’ on to outdated imperialist dogma
which perpetuates the economic and social differences in our society.
I am also grateful to the Soviet Union, for if it had not launched Sputnik there is a good chance Canada and the US would not have poured so much money into universities and I would have had a blue collar job and probably gotten myself killed at work. I also appreciate the people who went on strike in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s to win things like employment insurance, safer workplaces, better wages, and Medicare.
Oh yeah, you had an advantage. I’m white, my childhood was a violent train wreck of dysfunction and I had an advantage, big time. If I was black, I probably would be dead or in jail.
I am not White, and yet even my successes are more due to factors outside my control than any effort I put in. Mostly family and friends, but still. By the OP’s methodology, I’d say:
10% Capability
5% Effort
30% Demography (I’m not White, but I’m not Black, either, which counts where I am. And I am male.)
35% Know/Related
10% World
10% Random
I think it’s interesting that we somehow defaulted to answering about financial success. I haven’t seen (or perhaps I missed) the guy writing about how he’s a complete financial failure but he’s an amazing husband and a great father and supports his community so he’s very successful. Not saying this is bad, just interesting.
So for me:
40% plain hard work. Working 5% harder than the guy next to me, working 20 minutes a day longer
10% being a grinder. Sticking to it, not giving up
10% working at a job that allows upward mobility
20% living in a western society that allows that upward mobility
20% smart enough. Not the smartest, but you need to be in at least ‘B’ territory
10% being really great at math
I was given advice a long time ago. Work hard and stick with it and people will get out of your way. I didn’t really know what that meant, but as I got older I understood it. Be the person, there, when someone is needed and jump in. Others will quit, screw up, be lazy or not savvy enough to grab the opportunity
Good point, describes my best friend in High School. He was a good worker. but more interested in his family than career. So, maybe success has to be measured against a personal goal.
It shouldn’t be just financial success. Or maybe it should, not that I prioritize financial success over other kinds of success.
Where the thought came from is that I do a lot of work in diversity, equity and inclusion in my corporate workplace, and in years past much of my volunteering was in that area (it’s mostly moved to a different area these days).
There is this huge persuasive effort in my workplace and no doubt many others, trying to reinforce the myth of meritocracy. As I understand, this myth maintains that success comes from merit, which is a combination of innate ability plus effort. Implicit in this persuasion is that success means specifically financial success (and perhaps power and authority in the corporate structure), and that we all automatically want to achieve this. Moreover, we should appreciate the people who are wealthy and powerful, because they have achieved what we all want, so they are good examples to emulate. You’ll notice that they will also be the purveyors of the myth, which happens to reinforce their successful positions. That’s the myth.
But then there are countercurrent signals. Recognizing kinds of success that aren’t financial or power based is one such signal. Another signal is all the data indicating our demographic identities have a great deal of influence. This is the one that has been in my mind lately. The purveyors of the myth generally don’t like this signal, because it indicates they don’t entirely deserve their success, and we can’t necessarily achieve it like they suggest we can, and therefore we have much less reason to admire them and do whatever they want us to do.
In fact, the more I think about it, the more the myth of meritocracy seems like it is its own reason for success (as they define it). Buying into the myth and fitting the profile of people who succeed will tend to make the purveyors treat you as one of them, and tend to get less successful people to do what you want them to do and so enhance your own success.
I despise this system. The closer I get to retiring, the more I like the idea of divorcing myself from some aspects of it, particularly the workplace structure with its identities. The gristle I’m gnawing on particularly is that the myth is self perpetuating, which makes the core of the problem those self congratulatory people who buy into it.
Well, I think a number of workplaces at least want to present the appearance that raises, bonuses, and promotions are awarded based on measurable achievement, rather than favoritism, politics, family ties, the right schools, or other factors.
I know a number of white born-middle-class US boomer males with college degrees whose lives are, if not a shambles, are hardly models of success by most standards, and these people are not addicts of any kind either. They simply lack an ingredient. They work hard but lack sufficient executive function to prioritize correctly. They lose track of stuff. Some are hoarders, some lack the ability to get out of a toxic relationship or get into a healthy one. It’s different for each, but even at the plushest economic times for white males in the US, there are plenty of people who are bright and talented but fail to live up to anyone’s expectations including of course their own.
Frankly I think “where does your or my failure come from” as least as good a question. Because even if all your stars but one align, sometimes that one is enough.
In this culture, the most individualist in the history of the world, the last thing we tend do is make connections between what and who we are and the web which holds us up. The people I mention above are doing okay because of their support networks, and without it, it is hard to imagine their lives. But that is just as true of ‘successful’ people.
I’m with you, and I’ve been stuck managing in such companies. It’s not all surprising that the people who rose to the top in such companies think they did it purely on merit and not on luck. It is also very difficult to measure merit in any kind of repeatable way. Few of us produce easily measurable output.
Not to mention other factors. Does the person who produces less because they are in a group with an incompetent manager really less meritorious than one in a group with a great manager?
Meritocracy is bullshit. And I was pretty much a winner in the system, so I don’t say that out of spite.
I know I’ve been a failure for years. Reading this thread it’s good to know I’m not delusional about that. Being a failure (or even worse, a loser) is pretty much never attributed to luck.
I don’t know. I presume nobody held a gun to your head to work at a company like that. People change jobs or careers. They start their own businesses. They figure out how to work the system to get ahead. Sure some luck is involved. It’s not all luck though.
I think luck has a great deal to do with it as well.
I mean, I’m descended from a functionally illterate child runaway who by dint of hard work and luck became a longshoreman on the Galveston docks. His son (my grandfather) started working at a bank out of high school, and over the decades, and despite being drafted in WWII, worked his way up to VP/Chief Loan Officer of that bank. His son (my father) was the first in that side of the family to go to college, much less graduate. I’m the second to get a graduate degree (my aunt got one before me).
So I’m reasonably successful, but most of that is due to family lessons and norms about spending and education that were inculcated into me for my entire life. I was lucky to have that, as well as being born white. I understood institutional racism when I realized that black men in the same situation as my ancestors would have not been allowed to work on the docks, work at the bank, go to college, etc… like mine were able to, and solely because of the color of their skin. Not that my ancestors didn’t work like hell for what they had, but there were a lot of others who were denied even the chance to try for it.
So luck is a lot of it. But not all; a good chunk of my success has been hard work on my own part, combined with prudent decisions. I mean, I could have partied and not sacrificed to go to graduate school. Or I could have chosen to stick in a couple of dead-end jobs because they were comfortable. Or I could have slacked during grad school and partied like crazy. Or not taken my jobs seriously between then and now.
It’s a combination of luck and hard work. I’d say 60/40 for most white men, but it more than likely varies for other combinations of ethnicity and gender.
Heck, I certainly wasted many of my opportunities, but I still was lucky enough to end up supporting myself fairly comfortably most of the time, usually without being ashamed of what I was doing to do it (yeah, I may have a low bar of “success”). I’d go further and say it’s probably at best 80% luck/20% doing the things necessary for luck to have a chance for any of us (such as hard study or networking), if I were going to stick random-ish numbers on it.
I mean, I worked my ass off 15, 10, and 5 years ago. If I hadn’t been notified of a job opening when folks were deserting my company out of anger 5 years ago, I’d probably be as comfortable as I was 5 years ago, but that wasn’t as well off as I am now. Getting that job wasn’t assured, but the skills I had built up by being an unaccredited tech worker turned out to be exactly what my new employer was looking for. I’ve succeeded at my new job to financial and professional ends that I hadn’t dreamed of a few years ago.
And none of that was really due to “me”. By luck I was repeatedly stuck in an environment that I enjoyed exploring, which also rewarded me for experiment and only mildly punished me for failure. Heck, even when faced with failure, I’m fairly cheerful. I’m pretty sure that trait is more luck from the environment that created me than anything I’ve created.
