[redpoint5]

Originally Posted by Isaac Zachary

I still do not agree that "where there's a will there's a way" is truly valid.

Positivity doesn't guarantee any particular good outcome, it merely keeps the door open for when opportunity is within reach and overall results in better outcomes than the utterly destructive victimhood mindset, which shuts all doors for opportunity. Be Tigger, not Eeyore.

I assume you were born in the USA, in a country that's rich and has a lot of opportunity and antidiscrimination laws.

I always attribute being born in modern times, and not some miserable time in the past as quite the privilege. Living in an age where fossil fuels are mightily leveraged to the great prosperity of all people is a privilege. Living in the US where laws are favorable to commerce and innovation is a privilege. Finally, my biggest privilege was having 2 parents.

My genitalia and skin hue have no bearing on anything related to economic success whatsoever. Only racists and sexists push that narrative.

Sure, there are those stories of how some poor kid in Africa where people make $1 a day strives hard to make things better for himself and ends up working his way up to being a millionaire. But those kinds of stories are more about luck and coincidence than the actual hard work. There are a lot of people in this world who have worked extremely hard their whole life and tried to make as good of financial decisions as possible and still ended up poor and with nothing to show for all they did.

The wealthiest person in the world is African.

Hard work is only half the equation though, the other half is working smarter. Working hard but inefficiently is not a recipe for wealth. Part of the "smarter" equation is locating oneself where more opportunity exists.

My wife was accepted to school in Philadelphia, and in that moment I accepted that I might quit my job and move across the country, following opportunity. Fortunately she was also accepted to OHSU, so we stayed put.

Then she was offered a job in Silverton on a Wednesday, and we were moved into an apartment down there by that Saturday, following opportunity.

Another thing to is that every choice usually has a trade off. A single guy who doesn't work may have a hard time finding someone to marry him. But a guy who works too much and doesn't spend hardly any time with his family is also asking for a divorce.

Everything does have a trade-off, even an infinite opportunity cost. There's no excuse for a single guy to be poor though unless there's some severe cognitive dysfunction. I amassed 10's of thousands simply saving on a $17/hr paycheck working 40hrs/week, with no benefits. If I wasn't such a dummy, I'd have figured out how to do something even more profitable, not simply accept a job after meeting a guy at a bar.