Self-Made*

I’m self-made. 

I grew up acutely aware of the difficulties of navigating life financially constrained and how communities can be affected by violent crime. Determined to chart a future different from the environment I witnessed, I worked painstakingly hard to set myself up to attend college—the clear gateway to economic mobility. 

From an early age my goal was to play soccer in the top college conference and matriculate through one of the country’s best engineering programs. I remember disparaging comments and unsolicited opinions of how far-fetched my plans were, but I used it as fuel for motivation on my way to being recruited by my dream school. 

Once there I struggled adjusting and was placed on academic warning, my first realization of how the quality of my K-12 education compared to that of my affluent peers. Still determined, I worked through the subtle suggestions from faculty to switch majors and went on to be the first in my family to graduate from a four-year university. 

After graduation I turned down an engineering offer and joined Teach For America that touted acceptance rates lower than Ivy League colleges. My placement took me back home, teaching high school math to students multiple years behind grade level from my same neighborhood. I found that same doubt in kids like me I had left behind four years prior, but undeterred went on in my subject area to produce the highest statewide assessment passage rate in school history and the highest average grade level growth district wide. 

I then took a shot at Wall Street, securing a spot in the highly coveted summer internship program. The feedback from my first rotation was summarized bluntly as a “disappointment” and not a fit for the firm. No stranger to adversity at this point, I made the necessary adjustments and eventually secured an offer on the delta one derivatives trading desk. 

A decade plus later you’d say I’m an economic success. I’m happily married, have three kids, a homeowner in an affluent suburb, and have an established career. The American Dream sans the white picket fence (not our feng shui). Surely, I’ve proven an ability to not simply play the passive victim role in spite of my circumstances? Having pulled myself up by my own “bootstraps” can’t anyone do the same to transcend obstacles to achieve economic success? 

Not quite.

For too long I believed this narrative to be true—regardless of your predicament, if you work hard enough you can achieve upward mobility. Unfortunately, the American Dream has devolved into the American Illusion. There are numerous examples of individuals who have reached higher successes while overcoming greater adversity than myself. I share my story because it’s just that, mine. The fatal flaw is that believing in these narratives, regardless of how numerous they may seem, falls victim to survivorship bias. This is especially true when someone believes in the most powerful story we can tell ourselves. Our own. 

You see, I am self-made*. I did put in an incredible amount of work and overcame adversity to get where I am in life. I also benefited from privilege and caught breaks along the way. Both those statements can be true. It’s the causal effect of this dynamic that has given me a lens through which I now view the world and thus have a few principles I believe: 

Economic success is a function of three variables: personal effort, privilege, and chance. To achieve upward mobility, some nonzero positive contribution from each of these variables is necessary. 

I would not have gained admittance into an “elite” university without serious effort in my athletic development when I was younger. That effort however was buttressed by privilege. I grew up a citizen of a first world country in a household where my married parents both were present and supportive of my endeavors. I was fortunate to have a God given talent to play soccer better than the average person and through scholarships was able to develop that talent through adolescence. Through my uncle, a family friend, and parents pooling money together, I was able to fly to a summer camp where my dream school ultimately made their decision to recruit me. All of these privileges were simply characteristics of my environment. 

It was then by pure chance that I ended up balling out that week and getting recruited for the last spot in that year’s recruiting class. I could’ve had an off-week performance wise, suffered a minor sprain or strain that left me sidelined for a few days, or the program could have only needed four recruits that year instead of five. A host of different events could have led to a different outcome. 

The point is this, any serious analysis of my successes reveals an impossibility of being solely a function of my efforts and that the other two variables outside my control, privilege (which is unearned) and chance (which is random), played a role. 

It stands to reason then that personal effort is probably overstated while privilege and chance are under appreciated. 

The first principle establishes the existence of the necessary inputs for economic mobility, but this speaks to the magnitude in relation to each other. Privilege plays a significant role in that it creates an environment conducive to successful outcomes. It helps stack the deck in one’s favor. When I went on academic warning, I had a resource only athletes were privy to, an on demand tutoring network free of cost. To achieve the results in my classroom (which ultimately was by the sheer will of my amazing students) I relied on robust TFA resources and support from my mentor teacher, none of which my non-TFA peers had access to. The opportunity I had to interview for the Wall Street summer internship was through a formal TFA relationship. I wasn’t competing on equal footing against the thousands of individuals who were submitting applications to a web portal, I was competing against a small subset of TFAers who were interested in Wall Street. It’s these privileges that serve as a dynamic filter, narrowing the field of “deserving” candidates for any one opportunity for success. 

Likewise, chance plays an outsized role given that seemingly small events in life can cause drastically different outcomes (think “butterfly effect” from chaos theory–results sensitivity from small changes in a nonlinear dynamic system, i.e. this little thing called life). This isn’t to say positive outcomes wouldn’t still have occurred, but rather that unsuccessful outcomes could have just as likely occurred. My summer internship first round interview was with a fellow alum who was also an athlete. Would I have made it through had another individual with no shared experience interviewed me? My “superday” consisted of only one interview, which to this day I still believe was a scheduling mishap where they forgot to call me back and thus feeling guilt just extended me the offer. Would I still have gotten the offer going through the traditional gauntlet of multiple interviews in one day? The highly scientific answers to these questions are “maybe, maybe not”, but the events that would have transpired in the “maybe not” fork in my hypothetical life could have taken me a number of directions that would’ve resulted in a number of different life outcomes. 

To put it succinctly, social psychology reveals a tendency for success attribution to one’s behavior instead of environmental or situational factors. While personal effort is necessary and work ethic shouldn’t be discouraged, privilege and chance serve as material contributors in economic success. 

It’s worth noting at this point that privilege and chance are subjective, but objectively out of my control. Is being born in the US, predisposed to athleticism, staying healthy through the most important week of soccer in my life, or being interviewed by a fellow alum privilege, chance, a combination of the two? While I could argue being the benefactor of privilege in any sense is a function of chance, my use of chance applies to the outcomes of specific events in life. Performing well during the soccer camp was in my opinion happenstance. I could argue however that was a function of privilege, having been well nourished through having food security, enjoying adequate rest leading up to the camp, or being at peak fitness levels from my training back home. Privilege and chance are interconnected, but important to not be distracted by my classification exercise to miss the broader implication of both being externalities of my effort. 

Lastly, and leaning into a more mathematical representation, privilege seemingly behaves as a nested exponential function within the broader economic success equation. Meaning, there are compounding effects from privilege which seeds, supports, and then entrenches economic success. Benefiting from initial privilege set me up to be recruited, which ultimately secured my privilege of having the pedigree of an “elite” university. This pedigree then led to further professional and social groups of privilege, all of which increased the probability of establishing my current economic circumstances and aid in keeping them intact. Just as with investing, the impact of compounding is massively influenced by timing. The earlier the better. This is why, and certainly was the case for me, post-secondary education is emphasized as key to mobility given that it dictates the first step in a long career. It’s the reason why within education reform early childhood education is targeted, lending a longer runway for compounding returns. This is all within the context of one person’s life and in extrapolating this concept further it helps to reconcile the staggering effects observed in society that generational privilege produces. 

With this logic in place, it leads me to a few conclusions that influence my world view. I’m proud of my work ethic to have obtained certain achievements in life. Based on the first principle, without it I wouldn’t have been successful, and no one can take that from me. However, I’d be disillusioned to think there weren’t other variables at play and in the absence of such I could’ve ended worse off, which no one should blame me for either. While I previously was critical of my peers in the higher socioeconomic strata as being born on “third base” I’ve come to shift my focus because just like my peers, I can identify ways in which I myself am privileged to even have had a chance at bat. My focus instead is on those who are on deck and won’t get their shot before the inning closes, or those in the dugout, or those peering through the chain link fence not even on the roster. It’s these individuals who might have the potential to be the MVP in having the highest propensity for the personal effort variable but will never test the variable of chance because they lack privilege and thus opportunity. To be clear, I’m crowding out that opportunity. I could show leadership and advocate for a proper rotation through the batting order. I could decide to sit out a game or two. Will that hurt my chances of most home runs in a season? Sure, but my desire for such ambitions is probably jeopardizing the team’s overall success and more importantly, it’s simply the right thing to do. I think everyone who wants to play should get a swing at bat, makes the game more enjoyable. 

Just my three cents.