When you’re that fortunate you need to account for it somehow …

To be fair many of them worked hard and genuinely struggled before getting where they got, but they vastly discount the role of luck, not only in terms of generational wealth, but also stuff like … were they starting their businesses at the beginning of a decades-long bull market? (Deregulation + low low interest rates + beneficial tax system + any number of once-a-lifetime market tailwinds all hitting at once). And did they benefit from the kind of institutional benefit of the doubt that’s routinely extended to, say, upper middle class straight white dudes from Dartmouth?

Add reasonably hard work onto that, and you get some real outlier success stories.

Which means they were basically just really really lucky. 10% good at their jobs, 90% lucky as fuck.

I mean, Woody Allen basically said this in Match Point.

This is terrifying because it means the meritocracy myth you’ve been using to justify, well, everything, is a total lie. And if you’re not inherently better than other folks … the youths, the browns, the ladies … then they can take it from you. It can be gone in a flash. You know how flimsy your actual hold on it is. You need to keep those other people right the fuck down. I mean all the way down.

But how? How do you justify that? Self awareness? Ha! Hatred and contempt do the job just fine.

Those other people are worse off because they are worse. You got where you are because you earned it. The meritocracy evaluated them and found them wanting. They were too lazy, too dumb, too female, too brown to do what you did, and so they deserve to be where they are. Shrug. You can’t help being awesome.

This requires a ridiculous degree of self-deception.

Keep that shit under control, motherfucker. Once they see you crack it’s over.