I worked with high school kids and college kids for a while. I saw this exact mindset far too much.
Students were obsessed with picking apart people's success stories and attributing all of the success to some external factor. I can't tell you how many times I heard someone bring up Bezos just so they could tell me about the $300K loan he got, or Musk so they could talk about the emerald mine story. We tried to discourage using celebrities like Bezos or Musk as role models anyway, but people were drawn back to them because they enjoyed picking them apart.
There's something satisfying about this mindset that can explain away every success story as the result of factors out of their control. It's comforting to tell yourself that the only reason you didn't become a billionaire is because your parents didn't give you a $300K business loan or own an emerald mine or whatever other justification they could come up with.
It was a lot of work to try to defeat this mindset and get students focused on what they could incrementally accomplish within what they were working with. Honestly, getting them to let go of the celebrities like Musk and Bezos and others was half of the battle, but they also couldn't care less when we tried to introduce local successful business operators who ran companies they had never heard of.
It's tough. Social media makes it harder, and honestly the people who read Reddit seem prone to the worst of it.
That kind of mindset is arguably the norm for the rest of the world. Tall Poppy Syndrome in the UK and Australia, or worse, the extreme bullying in Japan and Korea. It's perhaps what made the USA so unique in having a culture that was opposed to that and willing to take risks. So it's pretty sad to see the USA drop it's own individualism in favour of collectivism.
Students were obsessed with picking apart people's success stories and attributing all of the success to some external factor. I can't tell you how many times I heard someone bring up Bezos just so they could tell me about the $300K loan he got, or Musk so they could talk about the emerald mine story. We tried to discourage using celebrities like Bezos or Musk as role models anyway, but people were drawn back to them because they enjoyed picking them apart.
There's something satisfying about this mindset that can explain away every success story as the result of factors out of their control. It's comforting to tell yourself that the only reason you didn't become a billionaire is because your parents didn't give you a $300K business loan or own an emerald mine or whatever other justification they could come up with.
It was a lot of work to try to defeat this mindset and get students focused on what they could incrementally accomplish within what they were working with. Honestly, getting them to let go of the celebrities like Musk and Bezos and others was half of the battle, but they also couldn't care less when we tried to introduce local successful business operators who ran companies they had never heard of.
It's tough. Social media makes it harder, and honestly the people who read Reddit seem prone to the worst of it.