This is a message for the upcoming generation.
The world isn't friendly, the world isn't nice, the world doesn't behave in ways that are necessarily going to be the way that you think is fair or right, the world acts by rules that are arbitrary and completely independent of you.
It's important to understand this because understanding that the world doesn't care about you is the first step towards accepting that. My generation is filled with people who see that the world is unfair and have decided to take it upon themselves to change the entire world. The problem is, these people can't even save themselves, forget about the world. That being the case, a lot of these people end up wallowing in uselessness. They're an embarrassment to the causes that they speak out for, because by attaching themselves to those causes, those causes end up looking like they are only cared about by useless people.
The things that are worth doing are hard. You end up having to put a lot of work in and usually for a very long time and along the way it doesn't feel like it's going to be worth it in the end because you're putting so much sacrifice into something. The changes are so incremental that in the moment you don't even notice them. However, at some point you do hit that point where you wake up and realize that you really accomplished something.
That's my message for you, it's very important to have grit and to stick to things that are hard if they're the right things to do. There have been studies done that try to predict the success of people in life, and the single best determinant of success is grit. The things worth doing usually aren't easy. Building relationships isn't easy. Building careers isn't easy. Raising a child isn't easy. Building a home isn't easy. Anybody who tells you that there's a shortcut is probably lying.
The only way that you can end up with a 20 year marriage is to spend 20 years. The only way to get 20 years experience in a job is to do the job for 20 years. From birth to 20 years old is to spend 20 years.
20 years is a really long time. 10 years is a really long time. When you're doing something for that long, it's not all going to be sunshine and rainbows. There's going to be days, weeks, months that aren't very good. Over 20 years you could even have a year or two or three that are just bad years. The thing is, the only way that you're going to get through those years is by not giving up, gritting your teeth, and making it to the next good time.
Deferring gratification is fully opposed to the idea of carpe diem, but it's also the way that you have a better tomorrow. When you're 18 it hardly seems possible that someday you'll retire and never work again in your life, but you will hit that someday. The question is what that's going to look like.
Deferring gratification can also ultimately feel better along the way even though you don't think so. Accumulating large amounts of consumer debt feels fantastic when you're doing it. When you are racking up consumer debt you get to buy whatever you want whenever you want to, and during the time that you're doing that you feel invincible like you can do anything. The problem is that later on you have to not do things that you could have done otherwise because eventually the bill comes due.
There's a very simple trick that helps defer gratification and have some grit. That is to understand just how blessed you actually are.
The reality is that if you're reading this, you are in the top fraction of a percent of the people who have ever lived in terms of the quality of your life. I know you might not think that, I know that you might look at the bad things going on in your life and you might say "you don't know me, you don't know how hard I have it", but the fact is, the fact that you can read this, the fact that you have a device capable of displaying this -- in the past a device like the one that you have right now would have caused world wars. And you just have it. It lets you do so many things basically for free that people had to work really really hard to do in the past. You can communicate with others basically for free. You can get entertainment basically for free. You can navigate the world, basically for free. You can find out about opportunities, basically for free. How incredible is that?
In the past knowledge was something constrained to certain classes of people. Knowledge of the skilled trades was limited to those who had apprenticed under the guild. Knowledge of spirituality was limited to the priest class, and even though they didn't have to all of the Bibles were in Latin. They weren't in Latin because Latin was somehow I'm meaningful aspect of the religion, if you think about it it's kind of ridiculous. Most of the Bible is about how terrible Rome is, and most Bibles ended up printed in the language of Rome there are historical reasons for that, but the big reason is to keep knowledge out of your hands. You should realize how blessed you are. Even when I was a kid, you'd have to go to the library to learn about things, and if you ever read a book on most things, you definitely were not going to become an expert on that thing based on the books in the library. Those books very often made massive assumptions as to your existing level of knowledge on a subject, and so even if you have the book in your hands that didn't mean that you had the ability to learn. Today, there are videos on almost any subject specifically intended to make those things accessible to any person. You can learn about smithing, you can learn about how to build a forge, you can learn about psychology, you can learn how to dance, and almost everyone who knows how to program learned most of their skills online. That is incredible, and you should be thankful. Your great-grandfather probably didn't have electricity as a kid, and here you are with the accumulated knowledge of the world.
Not only that, if you speak to your elders, there are a lot of things that are way better now than they used to be. Within your grandparents lifetimes, People ate staples like potatoes or rice basically every day. They would have to live on preserves basically all winter because there was no such thing as fresh fruit in January. They would eat meat and potatoes basically every day because that's what was available. Incidentally, if you ever want to know why people were a lot skinnier back then, it's because the food was a lot worse. In a lot of ways, life in the past was also irredeemably boring. People would end up playing the same songs over and over again on the piano or the guitar or whatever musical instruments they had, they'd read from the same few books that they could afford, over and over and over again. The concept of mass media the way we think of it today simply didn't exist 150 years ago. Facts would have to travel with a person or with a piece of paper, you couldn't get minutes old video of the most exciting things going on in the world at that moment every single day 24 hours a day. You definitely couldn't get thousands of commentators reporting on those facts and coming up with their own spin on analysis every single day. The whole concept of a 24-hour mass media was even fairly alien in the early 80s. Yes, television did exist, but a lot of people will tell you about watching the national anthem when all of the TV stations went off the air. It happened every single night. And that was within my lifetime, I remember sitting there watching the color pattern in the middle of the night wishing that the TV stations would kick back in. As much as we don't recognize it, the level of wealth of even the poorest person is absurd compared to the past. A poor person not only has a place to live, but very likely a television, maybe even cable tv, often a smartphone, and food is so plentiful for the poor that it's considered a problem that they eat too much and get fat! If you were to go back 150 years and tell the people of that year that the poor people were eating so much that they were getting too fat to work, they would laugh forever.
One reason that people do get fat, is genetic. When something is happening genetically, often you need to take a closer look because there's usually a reason. Traits that are completely deleterious are usually bred out within a few generations, so the ones that remain often have a reason. A perfect example is sickle cell anemia. It isn't common in most of the world, but it's very common in Africa. And the reason that it's so common is that sickle cell traits provide a level of resistance to malaria. So even though the trait is dangerous to those who have it, it remained because the people who got it survived. Do you know why even though being fat is a deleterious thing there are so many fat people, genetically? It's because in the past they were massive famines. Forget about not being able to afford the latest iPhone, people couldn't scrounge together enough food to live. For most of human history the poorest and often the richest couldn't get enough to eat and they would die of starvation. In many ways, the hardships that humanity has had to face are written into our bodies through evolution.
On the topic of things that would have killed the rich in the past, the past 100 years have been beyond revolutionary in the field of medicine. If anyone tells you about how things were in 1800, just tell them to shut up because it's not the same thing as we have today. Back then, you'd go to the hospital to die. Today, you go there to live. Things that were likely lethal diseases such as wasting illnesses are today one round of antibiotics away from being eradicated. Many of the worst illnesses in history are something you're already immune to because of vaccines. It's absolutely incredible, and every year things get better.
Human beings face something called the hedonic treadmill. This is basically the idea that as we improve our lives, it doesn't make us happier in a linear way. It doesn't matter what time in history you are in, look around you and I'm sure you'll see people who are living some of the best lives in the history of mankind, and they're absolutely miserable. That goes for the poor, but it also goes for the mega rich. You see rock stars and the kids of entrepreneurs and they don't know how to live. They are listless, and often this leads to tragedy. You'll look at somebody who has every reason in the world to be overwhelmingly happy and instead they're just not.
Just imagine, if this can happen to people who have everything, it'll happen to you. Unless you keep yourself grounded, remember to look around and realize all the things you have to be thankful for every day. I know that things aren't always great, that there's things that are going on that maybe absolutely terrible. People who just focus on the negative all the time are going to be miserable no matter how good their life gets. I've seen it first hand.
The other thing that I think really helps, is human beings require a purpose. People with no reason to live die. You see it in a lot of places, and people who don't know any better think that the problem is that they just don't have it good enough, but for most of history life has sucked, but people found a way to be happy, and life was so much worse than anything anybody alive today could have imagined. Some people today live in fear of a fairly unlikely crime being committed against them. For most of history, there was a very real chance of being eaten by a predator, or dying of a disease randomly, or of dying in childbirth. Throughout history, death was the main export of the human race.
Despite all of that death and all that suffering, people found a way to keep moving forward. I think a little bit of it has always been the fact that if you work hard and play your cards right tomorrow can be better than yesterday. When things are looking bad, that doesn't mean it's time to give up. It means it's time to get excited that you have an opportunity to make things better.
One warning on that, there are a lot of people who are miserable and think that what they need to do is go out and change the world. All that's going to do is make you more miserable because you can't save the world until you save yourself. The first step is always to try to improve your own life, and once you've done that try to improve the lives of the people around you, and maybe if you are tremendously successful you might have a once in a generation opportunity to save the world. That's not where you start though.
I find that when working, people lose their grit after some time with an employer. Union jobs are particularly prone to this because people are constantly being told they deserve this or they're entitled to that. Stop thinking about yourself as someone with entitlements, and start thinking of yourself as an independent contractor even when you're employed full-time. You should always be looking for the best customer, and if you think your current customer isn't doing it for you, then try to find a better one. If you can't find one, then be happy that you've got the best deal in town, rather than complaining about all the things you don't have.
Another thing to keep in mind is that everything is a trade-off.
People all want to be the CEO. Well let me tell you, most people might want to be CEO for a week, or a month, maybe even a year. But after year 2, 3, 5, 10? No way. There is no work/life balance when you're a CEO, you're on call all the time, you might have to go from sleeping in bed to a plane to nowhere to discuss some stupid little thing at any time of the day or night and your work day is regimented by the minute because you're constantly having to sit in on everything. You constantly have to watch every word you say because people are constantly trying to glean meaning out of every syllable, and people will get incredibly upset at anything you say regardless. There's always going to be a large contingent of people who hate you. There's always going to be a large contingent of people in the population that are trying to find a way to use you as an excuse for a massive lawsuit. There's always going to be people in power in government trying to find a reason to make your job harder. The money is nice, but is that really what you want your life to be for decades?
Different places do different things in different ways too. For example, most union jobs are substantially lower paid than their non-union counterparts, unless you don't bring much to the table. Janitors making union jobs do fantastic, but tradesmen and engineers not so much. On the other hand, union jobs bring with them a whole bunch of weird entitlements in the sense of they are entitled by the contract to have that thing. Whereas one skilled worker might be required for a job at a non-union facility, you might need half a dozen skilled workers to complete the same job in the same amount of time because you can't let anybody step on anybody else's toes and do someone else's job.
People working for big companies and people working for small companies both I think look at the other and assume that the grass is greener. The smaller companies are much more agile, whereas the larger companies are flush with resources. Compared to a smaller company, a larger company may spend unimaginable amounts of resources on frivolous things even while they're spinning down the drain. Both sets of people probably would feel just as repressed in the other's place. The company with unimaginable resources is trapped in a plodding structure that won't let you steer very easily, and the company with unimaginable agility is trapped without the sort of resources that would really let them take advantage of that agility.
Not every job is perfect for every person. Everyone is different in how they can sustain different sacrifices, and so what's great for you might be terrible for me. That difference in what is tolerable is important -- if everyone wanted the exact same thing then there'd be one job and everyone would want to do it.
Outside of work, the concept of privilege has been turned into something that it really isn't. Fact of the matter is, everyone has some kind of privilege. There is poor privilege and Rich privilege. There is black privilege, white privilege, Latino privilege, and Asian privilege (and within all of those every nationality, every province, every city has their specific privilege for their specific situation). The more of these things you get to be the more you realize that everything has its trade-offs. The key point here being nobody has a monopoly on it. Certain people who want to reduce the amount of grit in the world go around acting as if one group has a monopoly on privilege, and they turn that word into a racial epithet, pretending that it's actually couched in sciences and academia. You know, they used to do the exact same thing to black people. Go back 100 years, you'll find all kinds of scientific sounding reasons why blacks were inferior to whites. In fact, head on to the darker parts of the internet and you'll find the exact same thing today.
Anybody who is telling you that anybody is going to grow up without challenges is selling you something. Anybody who tells you that anybody is going to grow up without some unique advantages is also selling something. I'm not saying it's totally equal, I'm just saying that it isn't totally lopsided with one group having a monopoly on advantages and another group having a monopoly on disadvantages.
Instead of dwelling on why you're better than someone else or why someone else is better than you, be thankful for the advantages that you have and move on with your life.
Finally, remember at every moment in your life that this moment will end and soon another will start. If things are great right now just remember that tomorrow is another day and maybe the things that are making you happy today will change. And if things are terrible right now just remember that tomorrow is another day and maybe the things that are making you unhappy will change, particularly if you are actively working to change them. Making your way through the hardest times in your life is the defining factor between those who find success in their lives and those who don't. A lot of people give up, they blame the world, they don't want to put the time in, they aren't grateful for the good things in their lives, they don't recognize how bad things could be, they forget the hedonic treadmill, they start to count their entitlements, they forget that everything is a trade-off, and they start to count all of the good things that have happened to other people and all the bad things that have happened to them, and they give up. They don't give up because it's the correct tactical decision in a long-term strategy, they give up because it's easier in the moment and so they fail, and they blame everybody else.
The world isn't friendly, the world isn't nice, the world doesn't behave in ways that are necessarily going to be the way that you think is fair or right, the world acts by rules that are arbitrary and completely independent of you.
It's important to understand this because understanding that the world doesn't care about you is the first step towards accepting that. My generation is filled with people who see that the world is unfair and have decided to take it upon themselves to change the entire world. The problem is, these people can't even save themselves, forget about the world. That being the case, a lot of these people end up wallowing in uselessness. They're an embarrassment to the causes that they speak out for, because by attaching themselves to those causes, those causes end up looking like they are only cared about by useless people.
The things that are worth doing are hard. You end up having to put a lot of work in and usually for a very long time and along the way it doesn't feel like it's going to be worth it in the end because you're putting so much sacrifice into something. The changes are so incremental that in the moment you don't even notice them. However, at some point you do hit that point where you wake up and realize that you really accomplished something.
That's my message for you, it's very important to have grit and to stick to things that are hard if they're the right things to do. There have been studies done that try to predict the success of people in life, and the single best determinant of success is grit. The things worth doing usually aren't easy. Building relationships isn't easy. Building careers isn't easy. Raising a child isn't easy. Building a home isn't easy. Anybody who tells you that there's a shortcut is probably lying.
The only way that you can end up with a 20 year marriage is to spend 20 years. The only way to get 20 years experience in a job is to do the job for 20 years. From birth to 20 years old is to spend 20 years.
20 years is a really long time. 10 years is a really long time. When you're doing something for that long, it's not all going to be sunshine and rainbows. There's going to be days, weeks, months that aren't very good. Over 20 years you could even have a year or two or three that are just bad years. The thing is, the only way that you're going to get through those years is by not giving up, gritting your teeth, and making it to the next good time.
Deferring gratification is fully opposed to the idea of carpe diem, but it's also the way that you have a better tomorrow. When you're 18 it hardly seems possible that someday you'll retire and never work again in your life, but you will hit that someday. The question is what that's going to look like.
Deferring gratification can also ultimately feel better along the way even though you don't think so. Accumulating large amounts of consumer debt feels fantastic when you're doing it. When you are racking up consumer debt you get to buy whatever you want whenever you want to, and during the time that you're doing that you feel invincible like you can do anything. The problem is that later on you have to not do things that you could have done otherwise because eventually the bill comes due.
There's a very simple trick that helps defer gratification and have some grit. That is to understand just how blessed you actually are.
The reality is that if you're reading this, you are in the top fraction of a percent of the people who have ever lived in terms of the quality of your life. I know you might not think that, I know that you might look at the bad things going on in your life and you might say "you don't know me, you don't know how hard I have it", but the fact is, the fact that you can read this, the fact that you have a device capable of displaying this -- in the past a device like the one that you have right now would have caused world wars. And you just have it. It lets you do so many things basically for free that people had to work really really hard to do in the past. You can communicate with others basically for free. You can get entertainment basically for free. You can navigate the world, basically for free. You can find out about opportunities, basically for free. How incredible is that?
In the past knowledge was something constrained to certain classes of people. Knowledge of the skilled trades was limited to those who had apprenticed under the guild. Knowledge of spirituality was limited to the priest class, and even though they didn't have to all of the Bibles were in Latin. They weren't in Latin because Latin was somehow I'm meaningful aspect of the religion, if you think about it it's kind of ridiculous. Most of the Bible is about how terrible Rome is, and most Bibles ended up printed in the language of Rome there are historical reasons for that, but the big reason is to keep knowledge out of your hands. You should realize how blessed you are. Even when I was a kid, you'd have to go to the library to learn about things, and if you ever read a book on most things, you definitely were not going to become an expert on that thing based on the books in the library. Those books very often made massive assumptions as to your existing level of knowledge on a subject, and so even if you have the book in your hands that didn't mean that you had the ability to learn. Today, there are videos on almost any subject specifically intended to make those things accessible to any person. You can learn about smithing, you can learn about how to build a forge, you can learn about psychology, you can learn how to dance, and almost everyone who knows how to program learned most of their skills online. That is incredible, and you should be thankful. Your great-grandfather probably didn't have electricity as a kid, and here you are with the accumulated knowledge of the world.
Not only that, if you speak to your elders, there are a lot of things that are way better now than they used to be. Within your grandparents lifetimes, People ate staples like potatoes or rice basically every day. They would have to live on preserves basically all winter because there was no such thing as fresh fruit in January. They would eat meat and potatoes basically every day because that's what was available. Incidentally, if you ever want to know why people were a lot skinnier back then, it's because the food was a lot worse. In a lot of ways, life in the past was also irredeemably boring. People would end up playing the same songs over and over again on the piano or the guitar or whatever musical instruments they had, they'd read from the same few books that they could afford, over and over and over again. The concept of mass media the way we think of it today simply didn't exist 150 years ago. Facts would have to travel with a person or with a piece of paper, you couldn't get minutes old video of the most exciting things going on in the world at that moment every single day 24 hours a day. You definitely couldn't get thousands of commentators reporting on those facts and coming up with their own spin on analysis every single day. The whole concept of a 24-hour mass media was even fairly alien in the early 80s. Yes, television did exist, but a lot of people will tell you about watching the national anthem when all of the TV stations went off the air. It happened every single night. And that was within my lifetime, I remember sitting there watching the color pattern in the middle of the night wishing that the TV stations would kick back in. As much as we don't recognize it, the level of wealth of even the poorest person is absurd compared to the past. A poor person not only has a place to live, but very likely a television, maybe even cable tv, often a smartphone, and food is so plentiful for the poor that it's considered a problem that they eat too much and get fat! If you were to go back 150 years and tell the people of that year that the poor people were eating so much that they were getting too fat to work, they would laugh forever.
One reason that people do get fat, is genetic. When something is happening genetically, often you need to take a closer look because there's usually a reason. Traits that are completely deleterious are usually bred out within a few generations, so the ones that remain often have a reason. A perfect example is sickle cell anemia. It isn't common in most of the world, but it's very common in Africa. And the reason that it's so common is that sickle cell traits provide a level of resistance to malaria. So even though the trait is dangerous to those who have it, it remained because the people who got it survived. Do you know why even though being fat is a deleterious thing there are so many fat people, genetically? It's because in the past they were massive famines. Forget about not being able to afford the latest iPhone, people couldn't scrounge together enough food to live. For most of human history the poorest and often the richest couldn't get enough to eat and they would die of starvation. In many ways, the hardships that humanity has had to face are written into our bodies through evolution.
On the topic of things that would have killed the rich in the past, the past 100 years have been beyond revolutionary in the field of medicine. If anyone tells you about how things were in 1800, just tell them to shut up because it's not the same thing as we have today. Back then, you'd go to the hospital to die. Today, you go there to live. Things that were likely lethal diseases such as wasting illnesses are today one round of antibiotics away from being eradicated. Many of the worst illnesses in history are something you're already immune to because of vaccines. It's absolutely incredible, and every year things get better.
Human beings face something called the hedonic treadmill. This is basically the idea that as we improve our lives, it doesn't make us happier in a linear way. It doesn't matter what time in history you are in, look around you and I'm sure you'll see people who are living some of the best lives in the history of mankind, and they're absolutely miserable. That goes for the poor, but it also goes for the mega rich. You see rock stars and the kids of entrepreneurs and they don't know how to live. They are listless, and often this leads to tragedy. You'll look at somebody who has every reason in the world to be overwhelmingly happy and instead they're just not.
Just imagine, if this can happen to people who have everything, it'll happen to you. Unless you keep yourself grounded, remember to look around and realize all the things you have to be thankful for every day. I know that things aren't always great, that there's things that are going on that maybe absolutely terrible. People who just focus on the negative all the time are going to be miserable no matter how good their life gets. I've seen it first hand.
The other thing that I think really helps, is human beings require a purpose. People with no reason to live die. You see it in a lot of places, and people who don't know any better think that the problem is that they just don't have it good enough, but for most of history life has sucked, but people found a way to be happy, and life was so much worse than anything anybody alive today could have imagined. Some people today live in fear of a fairly unlikely crime being committed against them. For most of history, there was a very real chance of being eaten by a predator, or dying of a disease randomly, or of dying in childbirth. Throughout history, death was the main export of the human race.
Despite all of that death and all that suffering, people found a way to keep moving forward. I think a little bit of it has always been the fact that if you work hard and play your cards right tomorrow can be better than yesterday. When things are looking bad, that doesn't mean it's time to give up. It means it's time to get excited that you have an opportunity to make things better.
One warning on that, there are a lot of people who are miserable and think that what they need to do is go out and change the world. All that's going to do is make you more miserable because you can't save the world until you save yourself. The first step is always to try to improve your own life, and once you've done that try to improve the lives of the people around you, and maybe if you are tremendously successful you might have a once in a generation opportunity to save the world. That's not where you start though.
I find that when working, people lose their grit after some time with an employer. Union jobs are particularly prone to this because people are constantly being told they deserve this or they're entitled to that. Stop thinking about yourself as someone with entitlements, and start thinking of yourself as an independent contractor even when you're employed full-time. You should always be looking for the best customer, and if you think your current customer isn't doing it for you, then try to find a better one. If you can't find one, then be happy that you've got the best deal in town, rather than complaining about all the things you don't have.
Another thing to keep in mind is that everything is a trade-off.
People all want to be the CEO. Well let me tell you, most people might want to be CEO for a week, or a month, maybe even a year. But after year 2, 3, 5, 10? No way. There is no work/life balance when you're a CEO, you're on call all the time, you might have to go from sleeping in bed to a plane to nowhere to discuss some stupid little thing at any time of the day or night and your work day is regimented by the minute because you're constantly having to sit in on everything. You constantly have to watch every word you say because people are constantly trying to glean meaning out of every syllable, and people will get incredibly upset at anything you say regardless. There's always going to be a large contingent of people who hate you. There's always going to be a large contingent of people in the population that are trying to find a way to use you as an excuse for a massive lawsuit. There's always going to be people in power in government trying to find a reason to make your job harder. The money is nice, but is that really what you want your life to be for decades?
Different places do different things in different ways too. For example, most union jobs are substantially lower paid than their non-union counterparts, unless you don't bring much to the table. Janitors making union jobs do fantastic, but tradesmen and engineers not so much. On the other hand, union jobs bring with them a whole bunch of weird entitlements in the sense of they are entitled by the contract to have that thing. Whereas one skilled worker might be required for a job at a non-union facility, you might need half a dozen skilled workers to complete the same job in the same amount of time because you can't let anybody step on anybody else's toes and do someone else's job.
People working for big companies and people working for small companies both I think look at the other and assume that the grass is greener. The smaller companies are much more agile, whereas the larger companies are flush with resources. Compared to a smaller company, a larger company may spend unimaginable amounts of resources on frivolous things even while they're spinning down the drain. Both sets of people probably would feel just as repressed in the other's place. The company with unimaginable resources is trapped in a plodding structure that won't let you steer very easily, and the company with unimaginable agility is trapped without the sort of resources that would really let them take advantage of that agility.
Not every job is perfect for every person. Everyone is different in how they can sustain different sacrifices, and so what's great for you might be terrible for me. That difference in what is tolerable is important -- if everyone wanted the exact same thing then there'd be one job and everyone would want to do it.
Outside of work, the concept of privilege has been turned into something that it really isn't. Fact of the matter is, everyone has some kind of privilege. There is poor privilege and Rich privilege. There is black privilege, white privilege, Latino privilege, and Asian privilege (and within all of those every nationality, every province, every city has their specific privilege for their specific situation). The more of these things you get to be the more you realize that everything has its trade-offs. The key point here being nobody has a monopoly on it. Certain people who want to reduce the amount of grit in the world go around acting as if one group has a monopoly on privilege, and they turn that word into a racial epithet, pretending that it's actually couched in sciences and academia. You know, they used to do the exact same thing to black people. Go back 100 years, you'll find all kinds of scientific sounding reasons why blacks were inferior to whites. In fact, head on to the darker parts of the internet and you'll find the exact same thing today.
Anybody who is telling you that anybody is going to grow up without challenges is selling you something. Anybody who tells you that anybody is going to grow up without some unique advantages is also selling something. I'm not saying it's totally equal, I'm just saying that it isn't totally lopsided with one group having a monopoly on advantages and another group having a monopoly on disadvantages.
Instead of dwelling on why you're better than someone else or why someone else is better than you, be thankful for the advantages that you have and move on with your life.
Finally, remember at every moment in your life that this moment will end and soon another will start. If things are great right now just remember that tomorrow is another day and maybe the things that are making you happy today will change. And if things are terrible right now just remember that tomorrow is another day and maybe the things that are making you unhappy will change, particularly if you are actively working to change them. Making your way through the hardest times in your life is the defining factor between those who find success in their lives and those who don't. A lot of people give up, they blame the world, they don't want to put the time in, they aren't grateful for the good things in their lives, they don't recognize how bad things could be, they forget the hedonic treadmill, they start to count their entitlements, they forget that everything is a trade-off, and they start to count all of the good things that have happened to other people and all the bad things that have happened to them, and they give up. They don't give up because it's the correct tactical decision in a long-term strategy, they give up because it's easier in the moment and so they fail, and they blame everybody else.
- replies
- 0
- announces
- 0
- likes
- 0