Quote: (11-08-2017 06:08 PM)Hannibal Wrote:
Quote: (11-08-2017 07:55 AM)Suits Wrote:
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Here's my life story.
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Repped.
Cheers, buddy.
I'm actually surprised by the response to this particular post. I wrote it to make a particular point, but to be honest, virtually all of the "challenges" I wrote about are things that only a self-entitled person would complain about.
In fact, I feel incredibly blessed. I was born in a wealthy nation where even being poor beats being middle class in much of the world.
Poker left me the following rep point last night: "You can’t help but admire him after reading about what he has had to overcome in life, much respect."
This surprised me as well, because while I suppose that I have overcome some challenges, I see the process of growing as a person over the last 30 years of my life more of a matter of simply becoming a man and going through perfectly normal rites of passage.
For every disadvantage I've faced, I've also had a huge advantage to compensate.
The problem with the way Western society has developed is that everyone is fixated on getting a bigger piece of the existing pie. That's what feminism and various equal rights and anti-discrimination movements are about.
Instead of focusing on creating new pies (and thus creating new jobs and products/services that make life better for humankind), everyone is arguing over who deserves to go to Harvard the most. No one has enough self-belief to be convinced that they can be equal successful wherever they go to school.
Going to the best school they can is important so that employers will value them more and they can bump someone else out of a finance/banking job and take it for themselves.
In fact, I feel incredibly lucky, because I never felt any desire to follow established paths. Rather, I wanted to do something completely unique with my life.
My parents weren't perfect, but while they made some mistakes, they did a lot of things right. They encouraged me to continue to pursue various creative outlets (publishing a neighbourhood newspaper when I was 9, writing code for hours when I was 11 years old, attempting to build websites - although I always sucked at that, playing guitar in bands, trying to write a book). My dad made woodworking tools and materials available to all his children and taught us how to use them. There was always lots of blank paper available in a drawer in the living room.
I'm still on the journey now to business success, but I see the fact that creating value and pursuing bringing something new into the world (as opposed to simply hoping be hired by someone who will see how talented I am and pay me lots of money) is a culmination of both my natural traits (which I was blessed to be born with) and having parents who encouraged me to be myself and never settled for established paths in life.
Two years ago, I symbolically burned every copy of resume and vowed to never have one again. This wasn't a challenged to myself, but rather a completely reasonable path to pursue. I knew that I had gifts and abilities and I also knew that they were unlikely to be fully utilized in anyone else's business, so expecting someone to hire me and pay me in accordance with my capabilities was a bad plan. Much better to create a job for myself that best leveraged all of my abilities as effectively as possible and cut out the middle man in the process.
Quote: (11-08-2017 03:57 PM)Laska Wrote:
Quote: (11-08-2017 07:55 AM)Suits Wrote:
(5) Had parents who homeschooled me for 8 years and didn't teach me basic social skills, so I've been 5 years behind my peers my whole life.
Homeschoolers usually either have terrible social skills, or they're Bill Clinton level exceptional in that regard. Out of curiosity, why did your parents homeschool you? Was it because of your ADHD?
My parents homeschooled all of their children. It was the best of all the possible choices, as the available school options in our area were poor (both public and private). My parents toured the local elementary school option, talked with the teacher and realized that a public school was not a healthy place to send their children 5 days a week. Instead they opted for the local private elementary school, but when my older sister still couldn't read by 3rd grade, they researched homeschooling and decided to give it a shot. They ended up homeschooling all of their 5 children through to at least 6th grade. We all went back into the regular school system by the 9th grade.
I'm 31 now, so ADHD wasn't a term that people were familiar with when I was in elementary school. It's something I wasn't "diagnosed" with until high school. Until then I was deemed "absent minded."
My parents attempted to give us opportunities to socialized, but we never got enough practice with unexceptional people. Nearly all of the people we met through homeschooling social groups were nice kids from smart families, not that simplistic children I met in high school who showed extreme disrespect for their teachers and cared about nothing more than winning popularity contests.
When I arrived in university, people were a lot friendlier, but I had no idea how to gain friends and contribute positively to a social group. Not all of my siblings struggled with this. A big part of it were my basic genetics. My head was always in the clouds when I was young and I just didn't bother paying attention to and learning social clues.
If I were to have children, I would make a point of raising the boys to have strong social skills and confidence, in addition to encouraging their creative growth.