He replied “if you dig deep, somewhere in their story, start, middle or before the end, privilege showed up & their story changed”. We rarely talk about the importance of those that held the door open for others to come through. Parents, friends, relatives or random strangers.

“But what about those that had these privileges & wasted it but look at us, we made good use of it”. He laughed, “I have never worried about being homeless even in my worst moments, there’s always something to go back to & build from. Hope is a gift most people don’t have”.

There will always be people who decide to make nothing out of themselves, privileged or not, but that doesn’t invalidate the absense of accumulative advantages when most success stories are told. The onus is on us to leave the door open for others to create their own stories too.

There is something inherently wrong about shaping certain narratives that invalidates the hustles of others simply because certain truths were omitted. Let’s talk more about moments of privilege that changed our lives as much as we talk about the journey that led to it.

This excerpt from the Outlier “The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all by themselves. But in fact they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and

make sense of the world in ways others cannot. It makes a difference where and when we grew up. The culture we belong to and the legacies passed down by our forebears shape the patterns of our achievement in ways we cannot begin to imagine.

It’s not enough to ask what successful people are like, in other words. It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn’t.
Biologists often talk about the “ecology” of an organism:

the tallest oak in the forest is the tallest not just because it grew from the hardiest acorn; it is the tallest also because no other trees blocked its sunlight, the soil around it was deep and rich, no rabbit chewed through its bark as a sapling,

and no lumberjack cut it down before it matured. We all know that successful people come from hardy seeds. But do we know enough about the sunlight that warmed them, the soil in which they put down the roots, and the rabbits and lumberjacks they were lucky enough to avoid?”.