Summary

The article argues that successful individuals often overlook or deny the role of privilege in their achievements, and it calls for an honest acknowledgment of the advantages conferred by factors such as race, class, and environment.

Abstract

The author expresses frustration with highly successful people who attribute their accomplishments solely to personal habits and mindsets, without recognizing the privilege that may have contributed to their success. Using Steve Jobs as an example, the author points out that Jobs benefited from a free education and a supportive environment that allowed him to pursue his interests without immediate financial concerns. The article emphasizes that no one achieves success in isolation; there are always unseen contributors and systemic advantages at play. It criticizes the cultural glorification of individual achievement, often at the expense of recognizing collaborative efforts and the role of privilege. The author advocates for gratitude that includes an acknowledgment of the absence of adversity and the societal structures that have unfairly benefited certain individuals. By being honest about these advantages, successful people can foster a more equitable society that acknowledges and supports the extra work required by those who face systemic disadvantages.

Opinions

The author believes that successful people like Steve Jobs often fail to show gratitude for the privileges that contributed to their success, such as free education and a supportive environment.
The article suggests that Western culture overvalues individual accomplishment and overlooks the importance of teamwork and the role of privilege in success.
It is highlighted that many celebrated inventors and leaders, like Watson and Crick, benefited from the unrecognized work of others, such as Rosalind Franklin, and that this pattern of ignoring contributions continues today with figures like Elon Musk and Rachel Hollis.
The author asserts that the absence of adversity, such as a safe upbringing and quality education, is a form of privilege that is often taken for granted and not acknowledged as a contributing factor to success.
The concept of privilege is equated with unseen advantages and "invisible handouts" that some individuals receive throughout their lives, which they may not recognize or appreciate.
The article argues that true gratitude involves recognizing one's own privilege and the role it plays in personal achievements, rather than attributing success entirely to individual merit and effort.

It’s Time for All The Highly Successful People to Come Clean

True gratitude means admitting your privilege.

You know what I’m sick of?

I’m sick of highly successful people who attribute everything they’ve ever achieved to their own habits and mindsets.

I’d like to call bullshit on this, if only for a moment. Full disclosure: I’m a highly successful person. But I’m a highly successful person who believes in things like student loan forgiveness and universal basic income — for other people, if not myself.

My hate readers think I don’t like rich guys like Steve Jobs because I’m jealous of them. Honestly, I don’t like Steve Jobs because he was an ungrateful freeloader. According to legend, Steve Jobs dropped out of college to found Apple. The truth is, he didn’t drop out.

He simply stopped paying.

Jobs sat in on whatever classes he wanted at Reed College in the 1970s, holding long intellectual discussions with professors about font and design. Friends let him stay in their dorm, and he got free meals from a local temple. He then used a computer board built by another friend to get a job he wasn’t qualified for. Nobody ever tried to stop him from freeloading, because everyone thought he was a smart white guy.

Essentially, Steve Jobs got a free education. He didn’t pay for it. His peers at Reed College did.

After that, he spent the rest of his life bashing college grads as “bozos” and belittling formal schooling. It wasn’t until the end, speaking to Stanford seniors, that Steve Jobs showed the slightest sense of gratitude for the free courses in art and calligraphy that honed his aesthetic principles and turned him into a billionaire.

You know what that’s called?

Privilege.

Nobody ever achieves anything on their own.

Western culture has worshiped at the altar of individual accomplishment for centuries. We say we value teamwork and collaboration, but our success stories say otherwise. Our history books are littered with the names of brilliant white dudes. So is the internet. We never hear much about the help they got, or the people they took advantage of.

Here’s an example:

While Watson and Crick were getting drunk at bars in Cambridge, Rosalind Franklin was hard at work in her lab at King’s College in London. She was the one who found the rock solid proof for DNA’s double helix structure. They stole it from her and took the credit.

They spent decades mocking her.

There’s a hundred stories like this one, if you have the stomach to dig deep enough. The people we often credit with brilliant inventions had lots of help. They were just too arrogant to admit it. Even worse, they went on to develop horrendous egos, and stooped to great depths to justify their superior attitudes. The trend continues today. We see it in men like Elon Musk, and women like Rachel Hollis, who posts on Tik Tok about how her morning routine entitles her to a weekly maid service.

They might pay lip service to the idea of “team efforts,” but only on the way to taking most of the credit for themselves. Anytime someone tries to remind them how their race or class or gender might’ve contributed to their overwhelming success, they get defensive. They tell sob stories. They act like we’re asking them to give it all back.

We’re not.

Something in our culture seems to trigger an “all or nothing” attitude toward achievement. You either did it all on your own, or your accomplishments are worthless, and you’re a total hack.

You know, it can be both:

You could be smart and hard-working, but you could also have gotten boosts by your circumstances. All you have to do is be honest about it, and make space for other people.

This is what privilege looks like.

I’ve met a lot of people who seem nice at first, until you start talking about privilege. Say the word, and their faces contort in horror. They start arguing with you, insisting they achieved absolutely everything on their own. They’ll bring up their grants and scholarships. They’ll lecture you about how they wake up at 4 am every morning.

They forget:

Taxes paid for those grants and scholarships. They grew up in a safe home in a safe neighborhood, protected by police who didn’t see them as a threat. They had two reasonably sane parents who loved them and worked hard to ensure their future. They never struggled with poverty or mental illness, or discrimination. Not everyone enjoys that.

The absence of adversity is a luxury.

Some of us grow up in dangerous neighborhoods. Some of us had an abusive parent. Some of us went to underfunded schools that couldn’t even afford textbooks. Some of us struggle with mental illness. Not everyone can overcome. If we do, it takes years of extra work. We wind up putting in twice the sweat and tears. Meanwhile, we lose jobs and opportunities to those who started out light years ahead.

Americans are fond of the word “handout.” We use it to talk dismissively about things like medicaid or unemployment benefits. Plenty of people out there consider stimulus checks “handouts.”

Another word for handout is help.

Privilege is what we call those little invisible handouts that certain people get their entire lives without ever having to think twice about it. They never listen to anyone who’s dealt with real adversity, so they never understand how help, handouts, and privilege are all different words describing the same basic thing. When someone gives them help, they don’t want to call it a handout — or a privilege. Of course, they’ll be the first ones to judge someone else for accepting any kind of help.

That’s the problem.

True gratitude is about admitting your privilege.

Americans love to talk about gratitude. We keep gratitude journals and jars. Celebrity influencers tell us to make lists of things we’re grateful for, in order to keep ourselves happy and humble.

Well, privilege is just another word for gratitude.

It’s not hard.

Try it:

Be grateful if you grew up in a safe, loving household. Be grateful if you haven’t spent most of your life battling discrimination and racial profiling. Be grateful nobody ever beat you up or raped you and never went to jail for it. Be grateful if you don’t live in fear of the next law that eliminates your human rights, or the next corporate boss who takes away your healthcare and steals your tips when you’re not looking.

Be grateful if you received a quality education, with teachers who spent extra time on challenging material. Be grateful if you have all of your organs, and a brain that produces the right mix of hormones. Be grateful if you’ve never been through physical or emotional trauma. Be grateful if you have a metabolism that keeps you thin, even if you eat like a horse and drink every night. Be grateful if you can breathe without the assistance of an expensive device, and that your body can process toxins all on its own, even when you’re asleep. These are things you have that countless others don’t, through no fault of their own.

Be grateful if the biggest obstacle you ever encountered was your own attitude toward life. Don’t assume that just because all your own strife was internal, that so is everyone else’s.

Admitting your privilege is about showing some gratitude for all that. It’s about realizing half of your success is an accident in your favor, and you had nothing to do with it.

You are lucky.

It doesn’t matter how successful someone is, or how hard they worked. A truly gracious person acknowledges their privilege.

They don’t try to hide it.

It’s that simple.