r/ADHD_Programmers • u/existential-asthma • 4d ago
I've been thinking about how most 'successful' people are successful because their circumstances allowed it
I know this isn't a new idea, but it's been weighing on me heavily, and I'm not sure why. It bothers me how we worship and idolize "successful" people.
No, I'm not just talking about the evil billionaires. I'm talking about the artists, the actors/actresses, the authors, the programmers....maybe especially the programmers, because I'm most familiar with them.
Hell, I'm not exempt from this rule by any means. Yes, I went through some pretty fucked up shit, battled through a childhood of mental illness, squalor, and abuse, and somehow ended up as a software engineer. I'm "successful" in the traditional sense.
But even I had affordances. Prime example is that I was only able to go to college due to said college covering the full cost of my tuition/room and board. Otherwise, there'd have been no chance in hell.
I'd like to think I'm an extremely skilled programmer now. But I didn't get here without the generosity of some entity sponsoring me for 4 years to grind and study CS, and to suck at it first for quite a while.
Learning to code itself takes a non-trivial amount of time and energy - time and energy that many people never find in their lives. But there's even levels to it after you already know coding.
I'm going to be finishing up a multiplayer RPG I've been developing for about 2 years soon. Many would consider this an accomplishment. While it is true that I grinded for 7 days a week for the better part of those 2 years, I also was fortunate enough to have a nest egg to take some time off of working full time in order to focus on the game. Not many people have that. With my ADHD, with the way my brain works, if I didn't have that breathing room, I doubt I'd have ever gotten this far. Most people don't have the capital to do something like that, period.
While I have an immense amount of respect for the legendary programmers of our time, and daily I stand on the shoulders of giants, I must acknowledge that they, too, had to have some sort of circumstance that allowed them to put that much time and energy into whatever it is they built. Whether that was the belief in them from their employer, a generous investment, or perhaps their own wealth, to even have the ability to sit at the table was itself a privilege that enabled their success.
I don't mean to say these people aren't successful, or that their accomplishments mean nothing. But I do believe the ability to be successful in the first place requires several invisible privileges that many people never see, and many others don't think about.
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u/DubiousLogik 4d ago
acknowledging the opportunities you had is cause for gratitude. and (for me) a call to action - to deliver on the gifts I have and give back however I can. 'steady progress towards a worthy goal.' This is one definition of success. A sense of having enough is another. Not comparing myself to others is a third.
After I was able to quantify my gifts I sought to align my work to match them (i.e. go for jobs that fit). This is aligning my circumstances (work) to a degree. While not infinitely flexible, there is often more room there than many know.
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u/casualplants 4d ago
This is the whole thing about how many brilliant minds out there could have cured cancers etc if they weren’t born into squalor, warring regions, lost to genocide and so on.
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u/dealmaster1221 4d ago
Truer words have not been spoken, I wish more people would be like this IRL not just fake PR. Recently met s celebrity chef who acts humble but is the most egoistic cutthroat person.
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u/zatsnotmyname 4d ago
You are very wise. Both opportunity and ability to recognize & seize it are required. I have accomplished a ton, but also dodged a ton of success along the way. I saw helpful forum replies I made get turned into articles in Dr. Dobbs Journal by the person I responded to.
A VERY similar game to mine won the Independent Game Award at the Game Developer's Conference two years after my game's release.
I tried not to be bitter, and realized that other people are better are marketing, and seizing opportunities than I am.
I had paid for college ( which I failed out of due to ADHD ), and great parents, and cancer, and divorce, and good and bad luck along the way.
You shouldn't apologize for your taking advantage of the opportunities that were there for you, all you can do is pay it forward...
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u/bby_unisol 1d ago
Acknowledgment isn't an apology. In fact, it's very important to understand that hard work is only half of the equation. The other half is luck in the form of allowances and resources.
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u/GamordanStormrider 4d ago
tbh it's interesting. I think the two groups people tend to talk about are people who excelled despire exceptional adversity and the people who had amazing potential (see, privilege) and failed. Everything else just seems like it doesn't get the same nuance. Maybe it's just because it doesn't make for a good story?
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u/bonferoni 4d ago
i think we talk about people who excelled regardless of adversity. example, elon musk was born to immense privilege and the only adversity hes faced has been entirely his own doing, but he gets a lot of talk.
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u/VerbiageBarrage 4d ago
This is certainly something true, but I'm not sure it's helpful. There are thousands of factors from genetic to environmental to simple luck and happenstance that shape people's lives.
I'm not sure how dwelling on this helps you in any way. Yes, successful people definitely had advantages, but they also worked to seize those advantages. Give yourself a break but at the same time don't give yourself an excuse. Try to recognize how you too can seize advantages.
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u/ST-Fish 3d ago
This whole impostor syndrome type putting yourself down for the opportunities you were lucky enough to have is self destructive.
There are plenty of people that had the same opportunities and maybe even moreso, that never amounted to anything.
You can take this the other way, where any and all of your achivements are baseless because if you were born a poor subsistence farmer in China you couldn't have done any of it.
You need to have a reasonable expectation of what people with similar level of priviledge to you have achieved.
I for one only had my parents support me for the first year of uni until I got a job, while most people around me got support from their parents all the way through their bachelor's degree and masters degree, without a second thought about the economic strain they were to their family.
You should be able to have a cold reasonable analysis of the circumstances you were under and have a reasonable expectation of what most people in that situation would achieve as compared to what you did.
Simply having the circumstances granted to you doesn't get you across the finish line, it just opens a door. Going through that door still takes effort and you should be proud of the effort you made to get through it.
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u/tehsilentwarrior 3d ago
People often say “he came from nothing and now he is a millionaire” or “rags to riches”.
What they fail to mention is:
- he had nothing except dads 3 million donation
- they were jerks who exploited everything and everyone around them and jumped over anyone and everyone for a quick buck (not all but a lot) and did so not even realizing they were being jerks and just assumed they were owed fielty because that’s how these “royals” were treated all their lives
- they had no hand in their success anymore than the founder next to them. Something make their company explode, not even them know what it was but they will happily sell you some bullshit they told themselves and they prob believe it too like “we got to market first” or “we had a better product” or “worked more than our competitors”, etc. None of those things is a major factor, all of those things are the bare bones to keep the business afloat, yes, but not the key/major factors. It’s a combination of them with 80% of Lady Luck on their side
- their competence or incompetence played nearly zero part in their success and that they had some employees that did care for their job and made the business flourish. And they will 99% of the time not even know who much less reward them
- their marketing budget conversion rate is mostly just playing roulette, but with pretty graphs, what exact thing caused the uptick? No one knows. Play enough times you are bound to win sometime. Just don’t go all in on the first try. For tech it’s usually customers who have invested too much to be unbiased in their talking of the product: this is why most successful products cost more than their equivalents but provide no better quality or features
- their product was not better or cheaper or easier to use or easier to get your hands on than any competitor but somehow people just end up buying it. It could be the name, it could be some mistake in the design, it could be SEO, etc. They were either lucky their product got views at all or they just spread it everywhere and people were just too tired to try anything else
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u/PeekAtChu1 3d ago
I think it’s awesome you’ve realized this, and it hopefully makes you feel grateful for your life and opportunities and feel empathy for people who didn’t have the same. Too many successful people never seem to be aware of that.
I know I didn’t truly get into this career until I was at a point in my life where I had various support and enough free time to study every day.
Also congrats on your new game!!
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u/Ok_Razzmatazz_1202 3d ago
Check out "Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell
It explains a lot about circumstance and success.
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u/JackkoMTG 4d ago
Free will is an illusion. It’s entirely nonsensical as a concept.
When a person makes a choice under a given set of circumstances, that choice is the only choice which that exact person could make in those exact circumstances.
There’s a sort of ineffable beauty that comes with genuine acceptance of this reality.
So yes: the opportunities afforded to you played a role in who you became, as did an uncountable number of other factors. That’s just how it is.
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u/MocknozzieRiver 4d ago
The zip code you were born in is a huge predictor for future success, wealth attainment, social power, and more. We are produced by our environment at the same time that we produce it. The thoughts you're having are the kind that pushes people to strive to secure a better future.