Wealth is not success
Let’s stop conflating wealth with success
I was watching a documentary on Equinox where they portrayed the members of their top tiered personal training membership as, “highly successful” clientele.
I take issue with this.
Let’s stop using success and wealth interchangeably. These people are no doubt monetarily rich, loaded, flush with cash. But successful? I’ve seen and met waaaaaay too many 30 year olds with VP and Director titles who make no mention of their boss being their dad. Often their dad who, in turn, made no mention of his original and only boss being….you guessed it, his dad.
I found a book at a little library near my house that had some terrible title about how to “make it” before you turn 30. The title alone made me laugh. I opened the first page and there was a quote from Jared Kushner, about how hard work pays off, about “focusing on the positives,” about how by 30 he was overseeing billions of dollars in transactions….zero mention of daddy.
This is word for word what it said, I dare you not to laugh:
”Jared Kushner is a principal of Kushner Companies, a diversified private real estate organization. At twenty-seven, he has been involved in over $4.5 billion of real estate transactions. This real estate scion and publishing force climbed the corporate ladder by a young age, but it was a family crisis that taught him what was most important.”
That’s not success, that’s luck + deception. So many people claim to have hit a home run without telling you they were born on third base.
Some wealthy people are successful. But the older I get and the deeper I look, the more I see wealth and success as one of those Venn diagrams that barely overlaps—it’s certainly not a circle.
The rich sure as hell won’t tell you that, though.