Jokes aside, I think there’s a subtle cause and effect mixup.
If you “have it easy” you develop confidence, and that both emerges thanks to privilege but also is an actual advantage granted by privilege.
You do find more success if you don’t hesitate too much, but you will always hesitate more if you have no safety net.
It’s the fallacy of “I made all my own success.” I hear this all the time from well-off people who come from well-off families. They very well may have created everything they have, but they are also completely ignorant of the opportunities created for them simply by being raised in a well-off family. There is zero concept of choosing between dental health or eating, car repair or heating, etc.
I think what also falls on deaf ears is that even if those people don’t “make their own success” that they’d like to loudly proclaim, chances are that there are near-guaranteed positions that they can fall back into or family and friends they can go live with while they plot for their next endeavour.
It is a little.
People are wired to trust confident people. The problem is the smartest people know no plan is perfect, evaluate possible problems and have a plan to handle them.
That comes off as doubt.
But an idiot will never worry about problems that haven’t shown up yet, they’ll run forward with 100% confidence till they go off a cliff like Wiley Coyote. Then blame the people who said that would happen and claim they made it not work by verbalizing possible complications.
And I know that sounds like trump supporters, because it is them.
It’s also the Biden supporters who kept insisting he could beat Trump and prevented us from having a competitive primary where Dem voters had a say in the candidate.
They blamed Dem voters for saying Dem voters didn’t want Biden.
And they blamed Dem voters for talking about how Kamala needed to stop moving to the right or trump would win.
And when trump won, they immediately started blaming everyone that pulled the fire alarm for setting the fire.
Brexit is the ur-example of this. We said it would hurt the economy, they blamed us for talking the economy down with our fear mongering.
Yep, same thing that made humans burn medicine women as witches.
It’s basic psychology, all animals are pattern recognition machines, and we get stressed when we don’t understand the cause of something.
And we don’t need a correct or even plausible thing to blame, as long as there’s some scapegoat and your ingroup all blames the same thing, as far as our brains are concerned, the matter is settled. Even if we’re still upset at the negative consequences, we now have something to blame so our brains stop worrying about it, the matter is settled.
Where it’s maladaptive is if we just blame random shit like Zeus being mad that someone ate a goat burger with cheese on a Friday, we don’t address what the actual cause was, so we get the negative consequence again.
it’s also the con in con-man
Lack of confidence is a barrier to success.
Most of the ‘keys to success’ are really about things that are a barrier if you don’t have them.
there’s five hundred doors and they’re all locked and if you’re missing one key you’re fucked. confidence is one of those keys. being the child of a billionaire is another one.
I mean, Elizabeth Holmes is kind of proof that this is true. She’s not the only one either.
She’s successfully serving an 11 year term in a Fed Pen in Bryant, Texas…
Strategic job hopping is the key to success.
If we embrace survival bias, then yes. From my perspective, late stage capitalism is increasingly like a game of musical chairs where opportunities for success are steadily decreasing year after year.
Tall men are more likely to get promoted.
women will pick the tallest guy regardless
