You’re Not Self-Made

And like it or not, you never will be

Probably the number one myth that permeates the zeitgeist of our time is that of the self-made individual. 

The myth purports that, for individuals who have found success, they have done so through hard work and a lot of tenacity, and that anyone who follows their same process, who listens to their story, can find their own way to success. 

From the Founding Fathers to the billionaires of today, the myth is constantly reinforced such as in America where the “American Dream” is within everyone’s reach. These stories, like all stories we hear and tell, play an important role within our lives. The cultural stories we are inundated with have a direct relation on the lives we live from the thoughts and opinions we come to form to the jobs we pursue. 

As the psychologist Dan McAdams has written:

“Culture provides each person with an extensive menu of stories about how to live and each of us chooses from the menu.”

Stories are a driving force in how we take on the world. We have stories about how the world works, who we are supposed to become, what our success should look like. Stories are incredibly powerful mechanisms to help us get through the day. Life is incredibly difficult. The stories we tell ourselves help to propel us day-in and day-out through these times. As Joseph Campbell put it:

“Myths inspire the realization of the possibility of your perfection, the fullness of your strength, and the bringing of solar light into the world. Slaying monsters is slaying the dark things. Myths grab you somewhere down inside.”

But by perpetuating the lie of the self-made individual, we set false beliefs for the people who wish to achieve success. 

One needs hard work, that is a given. There are very few people in life who have achieved success through little effort. But hard work alone won’t do it. For every self-made millionaire or billionaire, there are thousands who worked just as hard, if not harder, who did not make it. 

Like it or not, success is built on some aspects we cannot control, such as randomness and pure luck. We miss the randomness of chance encounters and the vital roles those play in setting us up for success. Stephen King as we know him today literally would not have been who he is had it not been for his wife seeing his manuscript for Carrie, his first novel, in the trash, taking it out, reading it, and telling him to keep working at it. King himself had given up and decided to just remain a teacher. Had his wife not seen the manuscript, had she been out of town or the trash was taken out, or more trash was placed on top of the manuscript, Stephen King very well may not have been who he is today. 

Or networks. Few people understand the power of networks and how those, when leveraged, really help turn the dial for potential success. Instead, we still live in the myth that if you build something good or great, people will come. But there is so much out there, so much noise, it is incredibly hard for this to happen. The self-made myth misses the understanding that not everyone has a network or environment that allows individuals to flourish. 

We often like to play up the qualities of being smart, creative, and hardworking. But in truth, we should be recognizing networks and friendships that helped get people to success, as well as luck and randomness. By permeating the lie, we also don’t give any credit to all of those who did help us get to success. 

But if we stop the myth of the self-made individual, we remove the rose-colored glasses of stories we like to tell. We bring these “titans of industry” down to a more normal level, and it removes the myth they have attempted to hawkishly cultivate around their own aura. And when faced with the truth, we have a more accurate understanding of what it takes to succeed. And when we have this, it means we have more power—more control, to properly direct our energies. We have a better understanding of the hard work that has to go into something, we have an understanding that we need to build a solid network, that we need to find ways for chance encounters, for luck to somehow find its way to us. We cannot manufacture luck, but we can give it opportunities to find us. 

None of us are self-made. We’re products of thousands of variables including time, culture, country, network, and age. Some people strike at the right time, while others never do. 

Our desire for success permeates these myths because we feel it gives us control, if someone else could do it, so can we. People want to feel like there is hope, and so they want to believe successful people when they exclaim they are self-made because it makes us feel like our hard work will eventually pay off. But the thing is, people who say they are self-made want to show what they have accomplished, they like to be the center of attention, and they’re occupied with status. 

“Most of us would like to be thought of as a kind of hero,” writes Will Storr in his book Selfie, “which is to say, we hope to have a good ‘reputation’ in the daily, fluid social stories of our tribe.”

But by cutting down the myth, by being truthful to reality, we become more centered around what needs to be done. The glasses are off, but the gloves are on, and we’re in a better position to try and control our fate, to fight our way tooth and nail to success. By perpetuating the self-made lie, we risk losing out on success because we don’t properly judge what it takes to achieve it. By seeing the truth, we grab fate by the horns and help to better control it.

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Until next week,

D.A. DiGerolamo