Quote Originally Posted by Lukie View Post
I think your points earlier about some in other countries really not having a realistic chance of becoming rich are pretty spot on. e.g. one couldn't convince me that a starving kid in Africa has much of a chance

As it relates to those who have access to a computer, the internet, enough time to surf FTR, and literary ability to read this message there isn't a comparable excuse.

Among the rich that I know (friends and acquintances) there is a certain amount of drive, responsibility, and refusal to fail in all of them that I would not expect to see among the typical poor person.
This all sounds spot on. I guess I just see drive and responsibility as attributes of circumstance and not innate. I believe that you could take the same person and have him put up in two different environments and see him turn out to be two different people: one driven, hungry, with an intuition that is honed to the problems at hand, and one that turns out more or less worthless by comparison. But both are still innately the same person.

That is to say that your life could have developed in such a way that you would possess an entirely different skill set than you do today but still be entirely the same person. In a sense, in a parallel universe there may exist a fat, nerd Lukie who is entirely driven to develop the mathematical understanding of a world of entirely imperfect shapes and patterns which arise from simple and regular events on a tiny scale but fails because of legal intervention into his life's pursuits. And there could exist another Lukie still, essentially the same, who slipped into a bit of a meth habit.

This all builds upon a central belief of mine: that we're all 100 fold more similar than we are different. There don't exist supermen - just normal men who seemingly manage to accomplish things on a super scale.

So the rich don't strike me as special, though every bit of their life story could show how they had a deep desire and ability which lead to accumulated wealth, nothing that went into building them was destined for greatness. Just as the poor don't strike me as worthless, though every bit of their life story could show how little they endeavored to succeed and how often they seemingly chose to fail.