For many years, (at least as far back as the movie Trading Places), I've been a believer that the #1 influence on success in life is social environment. Being born in America, to nurturing parents, middle-class, white - these are all things that matter a lot to success for my generation, whether we want to admit it or not.
Warren Buffett goes a step further, and simply calls it luck. After all, our environment is the product of luck, since people have no control as to when or where or how they were born and raised.
It follows then, that if a healthy person was born with these favorable and/or lucky environmental characteristics, but is still an underachiever, there must be another reason why. And after still more years, I've become a believer that much of it just boils down to laziness.
There are two types of lazy. The first is just your plain, dumb, do-nothing lazy. The second is more prevalent, yet harder to see. It's the lazy person who only acts like and wants everyone to believe they're working.
Yet here again, it took many years for me to realize how many fake-working-lazy-people there are. And here again, there are subsets. One is the kind that does one small thing in a day, but takes that to mean they worked all day. Another is the kind that does nothing but personal matters all day (e.g. personal email or Facebook posting), but assumes that's a day of work. Still another is the kind that gets to work late, takes an extra long lunch, and then leaves early.
This laziness is only magnified by summertime, when our society collectively decides we should slow down our pace of work. It's certainly a lot easier for the truly lazy to hide their work ethic in the summer.
Regardless of the manner and timing, it's basic laziness that determines the underachieving destiny of those born into a fortunate social environment.
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