Your Life is What You Make of It. Fortune is No Object.
Offline I'm so weary of this one. Living in what seems to be an entreprenuer's wet dream in Alberta, this rhetoric gets spat into my ear on a daily basis:
Where you are is a result of the choices you make. Luck has nothing to do with it[.
It's moralistic bullshit, lofted as some sort of almighty and ultimate truth by individuals who've become affluent and wish to believe that it's essentially because they're just plain better than the rest of us schmucks. Yes, of course making good decisions is going to be beneficial for you. But it's a miles long leap to state that bad things and shitty circumstances only come your way as a result of poor decision making or a negative outlook. And it's also quite a detour around logical and realistic thinking to conclude that negative people only ever wind-up shoveling poo for the duration of their lives.
I think this 'ultra moralistic' train of thought should be included as an irrational precept. It seems like it's all over the place, it's designed to mostly to make people feel inadequate and it makes already wealthy people a ton more wealth in the form of 'self-help' books and 'motivational' seminars.
"Let me say only this much to the moral issue involved: Suppose Germany had developed two bombs before we had any bombs. And suppose Germany had dropped one bomb, say, on Rochester and the other on Buffalo, and then having run out of bombs she would have lost the war. Can anyone doubt that we would then have defined the dropping of atomic bombs on cities as a war crime, and that we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them?But, again, don't misunderstand me. The only conclusion we can draw is that governments acting in a crisis are guided by questions of expediency, and moral considerations are given very little weight, and that America is no different from any other nation in this respect."
- Leo Szilard
I agree. Much of success is due to things such as circumstances of birth, who you happen to know, and yes random luck.
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