The Path to Personal Success—in Outline Form
Have the right sperm combine with the right egg (luck)
Be born into the right evolutionary time (luck)
Be born into the right country (luck)
Be born into a modestly affluent neighborhood (luck)
Attend good schools (luck)
Have good teachers (luck)
Have good childhood friends (luck)
Have decent academic skills (genetics and environment is roughly 50/50)
Have good health care during your formative years (luck)
Have tremendous amount of willpower (mostly genetic and wanes with age—therefore luck)
Have pleasant personality traits (genetic and environment) (About 30% to 60% of variability in personality traits is due to genetic factors depending on the trait in question)
If the cards in your hand from the above are poor, your odds for success plummet—substantially. For example, studies show just how much. One study in Baltimore found that out of 800 youngsters in a ghetto who were studied for 30 years, only 33 were living in a non ghetto neighborhood as an adult. I guess living in a ghetto and lifting oneself up by his his/her own boot straps doesn’t work very often so pick your childhood neighborhood carefully. Smile.
From the reverse viewpoint, blacks or any other minority raised in a middle class/affluent neighborhood have no more likelihood of a criminal record than a white person raised in an affluent neighborhood. White men raised in ghettoes have a slightly higher rate of drug abuse and binge drinking. At age 28, 41% of white men in white ghettoes had a criminal record while blacks had 49%. The blacks claim this difference is due to an unfair judicial system.
Those who best adhere to the universal human innate ethical principle of the Golden Rule will achieve more contentment in life regardless of religious preference, ethnicity, culture, political bent, economic status, geographical location. Personal contentment is the reward for substantial allegiance to the Golden Rule. Aristotle put it this way: “the only way to assure yourself happiness is to learn to give happiness”. And not just to your own cabal of like minded like looking like believing souls, or just your own family genetic cabal.
Those who best learn when ‘enough is enough’ regarding any of life pleasures such as money, power, sex, popularity, eating, gambling, or any other pleasures which can become addictive/compulsive, will end up more contented than those whose vices become addictive/compulsive. Addictive and compulsive behaviors never can bring contentment by definition. Trump is the ‘poster boy’ for this fate.This man who has everything via his own self pompous declarations, spends all day everyday infuriated by friends, foes, and human diversity of almost any sort.
Those who receive the most help from people outside their own family, ethnic group, cultural group, or any other human grouping, are more likely to achieve success than those who receive little help from others. Personal handicaps can be fatal without outside help from strangers, the government, and those with whom we come in contact via our daily lives. That governance is best which maximizes the contentment for all the citizens and communities within its jurisdiction. All forms of government across the globe are now failing—badly in this respect. The newest trend is to find a minority of some sort the majority doesn’t like and literally chase them out of the country in question. The result is that we now have roughly 75 million global refugees living in tent cities. No one of course wants these refugees, while the countries which force them out face no penalty. This trend is growing exponentially. If 9/11 was a terrible tragedy with roughly 3000 fatalities, what kind of adjective is best for a tragedy involving 75 million people? Perspective often gets lost.
Learning to appreciate diversity, as opposed to fearing/disliking human diversity, is important as a means to achieve success/contentment in life. Inability to appreciate human diversity leaves a person very frustrated with life—so many heathens needing punishment, restrictions, and to be run somehow from our midst. The poor we can gate off into urban, rural, and suburban ghettoes—out of sight and out of mind, but a lot of diversity is too much too often right up in our face—if not in person, certainly via our endless smart phone informational overload. If someone is not hurting others with their actions/beliefs/politics, they are a good citizen. I suppose good citizens might even be in the minority.Is a democracy really a democracy when only about half the eligible voters vote?
Good judgement, while its origins seem to be mixed, plays an important role in success. Here is primarily where our ‘being’, however defined, plays a personal role in success. Nothing above should be interpreted to mean that we—ourselves, whatever is meant by our inner selves, do not play a role in our lives. A complicated card game depends a great deal on the cards dealt, but some of any success depends on personal decisions we make with our cards at various points in the card game. However, why we make decisions as we do is not any direct genetic expression, but arrived at via genetics and the environmental milieu of our lives. At any rate, even if our decisions in life were 100% genetic, that too would make it entirely luck. The ‘I” word is thus very elusive as to any meaning in evolution. God’s laws which govern the evolutionary process pay no attention to any “I” of anybody. We all badly want “I” to mean so much more, which is exactly why organized religions are created by various human societies. Believing in a particular religion does have some beneficial side effects, like giving us hope, resilience to stressful situations, etc., but the reality is this: If we picked 10 people most like Hitler and ten of the most religious people of various religions, and put each of them and one of the Hitlers in front of a speeding object, and repeated this over and over, none of the participants would have any more likelihood of being hurt less. What religion could ever boast, for example, that if you join and follow that religion, you would have a statistical advantage from dying on the battlefield, or being killed in a car accident, or dying from cancer, being raped, or getting better grades on a test, and so forth. The stats are certainly in and no religion wins an advantage with these stats. Besides, why would God select his favorite ‘flock’ via inherited religion?
Another point to be made about success in life is this. Bernie Sanders is right—life is rigged with favoritism to the wealthy, the majority, and the best physically endowed. If we try to help the less fortunate via unique outside the box of rigged or established policy or rules, any success mostly depends if this effort will in any way help us acquire more money personally, more power via a title, more popularity, a promotion, more influence with the powers that be (positioning oneself to gain a promotion of some sort), bring an advantage to someone close to us like a family member or close friend—in other words, if the effort will somehow bring to us a personal advantage—the effort is likely to be a failure. This last point is personal. Most of my battles professionally were of this nature and consequently generated some pretty serious hearings/votes/ as to my survival professionally. Many would complain that, in the case of myself, I got away with doing anything I wanted while others could never break rules, policies, or an approved way to do things without severe punishment. But the truth seems to be, that IF our efforts are solely to help others achieve some personal success in their lives, and we will not gain anything personally via these efforts, there will always be some administrators, colleagues, students, other public figures outside our own administrator, who will admire the results, if not the methods, employed to achieve help for the other person or group of persons in question. I learned an important point about success early in my career, when my employment seemed sure to be terminated as several administrators teamed up to fire me. But at the start of the hearing, before all the nitty gritty points being made by these administrators were even discussed, the President of the Institution, who I had never even met, had his Vice President investigate me and deliver this message at my hearing as best I can remember it: He dumped a large box of letters on the conference table, all supporting my retention stating: “The President wants this matter ended immediately. The faculty member in question draws no salary for running the program in question, it is not in his contract with this institution for him to go out and get funding for the program, no one under contract with this institution is salaried in the Program including himself and he is given no money from our institution for running this program. The students involved in this program are not our own students, Dr. James does not choose the high school students who come here for internship experiences in various departments throughout the hospital—high school teachers choose the students; no employees who work for the Hospital or the University Nursing Program are paid anything for setting up these internships with these high potential but low achieving high school students, and the Foundation which funds this Program has threatened to pull funding from much larger programs with us if we dismiss Dr. James. The complaints for dismissal seem to relate to his employment of a coordinator of the program who gets the students to and from their department of internship while they are here at the hospital. While it is true this person only has a GED high school degree, he is not involved in teaching anything to the interns or is involved in the planning structure of the program. It is claimed Dr. James hired this person without his Chairperson’s permission. The documents at the hiring office show his Chairperson’s signature for the employment is on file. The other complaints for dismissal pertain to his lack of support for a certain experimental teaching method, despite the fact he has been elected by the Nursing Students as Teacher of the Year for all three years he has been employed here. The accusations seem personal, not objective. The President suggests that Dr. James report directly in the future to a designated administrator in the administration building, that he be given an office over here in the Administration building where we can keep closer observation of him, and he be given a secretary to assist him with this funded program. High school teachers and administrators state a high percentage of the participants have been motivated to improve their high school grades. The position for a coordinator for the program will be eliminated since it is a minor part time employment and it will not be fair to the current coordinator, who has received support from all persons in the departments who cooperate with this Health Careers Program—unfair to let him be the target for any further debate about his role in the Program or his educational status. The Director of Personnel will assist this current coordinator in gaining meaningful employment elsewhere.”
Thus, I learned one can be a ‘rebel’ and help those with unfair or unfortunate hurdles in their lives if the ‘rebel’ in question receives no personal gain from his/her actions. Achieving success for the less fortunate outside the normal way of doing things, can be achieved IF, and only if, the engineer of success for these others does not benefit personally from the manipulative effort.
The above outline illustrates how important help is to the many unfortunate people for whom luck has not been kind to them. For those in the worst case scenarios, were it not for bad luck, they would have no luck at all. Thus help for them has to come from sources other than their own desires. Clearly people build people, or keep them down, or ignore the needs of others. Each person with an abundance of good luck can help others via direct personal contact, or thru charitable organizations, or through their votes at the ballot box. God, however God is perceived, through His/Her/Its laws which govern the evolutionary process, has given the humans species the innate ethical principle (the Golden Rule) which enables more humans to achieve more contentment in their lives. A prayer, singular or endless, does nothing—the Golden Rule has the potential to bring about widespread social progress and contentment.
So it would be my wish that more people would adhere to the Golden rule through their own actions, and collectively via good government: that all communities and groups receive the needed assistance for their less fortunate, so that the maximum number of humans across the globe receive the maximum amount of contentment with their lives. The Golden Rule should be everyone’s politics and everyone’s religion. If the human species cannot manage this as a species, the evolutionary process will effectuate a change on evolutionary time, not human time.
Right now the Golden Rule is losing badly here in the United States and abroad. This, coupled with the inability to understand that violence begets violence, that climate change is already here, that human over population is already here—while the sequestering of way too much wealth by 2-5% of populations world wide bodes ill for the near future. We, as a species, are out of control. We may not become extinct as a species, but billions are going to die from all walks of life at the very least. Millions already are.
The Path to Success as described here is basically the path which existed for my generation in the United States. Today’s youth globally, no matter their country of birth, now face three new categories which are going to affect their path to success. All of these are global in nature and cannot be solved by individual nations.
1.Global human overpopulation
2. Climate change
3. Use of violence to settle conflicts (terrorism by groups and
individuals; use of weapons of mass destruction by governments of large industrialized nations)
4.The massive accumulation of wealth in the hands of less than 5% of a country’s population.
Wars by uniformed soldiers on battlefields are a thing of the past. Today’s conflicts will be throughout all communities via terrorism, computer hacking of vital services, and a blind rage by various well armed groups against each other. It is by no way clear how such inane violence can now be stopped or what will be left after such massive implosions of societies everywhere.
In the short term may good luck be at your back and a good life already been had. For those younger, hang on to your hat, it is going to be a rough ride. While I am sometimes affectionately, or with varying degrees of repulsion, known as Professor Doomsday, this view of current realities plays a large role in my own self imposed semi hermit-hood. For whatever reasons, I have always been sensitive to the plight of the less fortunate—as groups or individually. At my age, without a title and institution behind me, any direct face to face involvement with the less fortunate is a waste of time and too stressful for me. I am hopelessly stuck in a mode of ‘everybody matters’ except those whose activities and beliefs are harmful to generic others. My FANAFI Fund (Find A Need And Fill It) provides grants to the least fortunate and the environment. I spend more on my FANAFI Fund than I do on my own living costs. That I can do this is seeped in luck (am good at shuffling papers around for monetary gain and then receive the endless tax breaks on money earned in this fashion). This FANAFI Fund, in my mind, entitles me to be a semi-hermit. Every day I get up and do what I want for as long as I want with activities that stimulate my mind or generate contentment from simple things. It is sort of a “I help the less fortunate and then adopt a “reward myself” kind of mentality. I am reminded in closing here of the preacher who asked his congregation if there was anyone present with no enemies. Only one older person raised their hand. “How did you achieve this?” the preacher asked. The old man replied: “I out-lived the bastards”.
