"You Must Be Doing it Wrong!"

In the society we live in everyone is supposed to be striving for "success," and in doing so driving for "the very top." (Every student should be aiming for Harvard, everyone should be aiming for a place in the three commas club, and so forth.)

Yet anyone not completely detached from reality (admittedly, not being completely detached from reality makes it very hard to accept the "conventional wisdom" of this society) knows that there is very little room at the top, and even many, many rungs down from the top. There is in fact so little room that an individual can be doing everything "right," and yet getting nowhere, because the opportunity that no man makes makes all the difference between middling, even paltry-seeming accomplishment and "the commanding heights."

Yet in spite of this reality the conventional tendency is to assume that those on the commanding heights did the right things, and others didn't.

You're not a billionaire? Then you must have been going about it the wrong way, they decide, and start second-guessing every decision you have ever made in your life--never mind whether they are themselves billionaires.

The stupidity and obliviousness of this kind of response are staggering--and par for the course where the cult of success is concerned.