Tonight I listened to Wes Cecil’s lecutre on abundance in society, and one of the topics that he touched on was that as a society we always tell myths and lies to children. This got me thinking about some of the narratives that we tell ourselves/that are prevalent in Western culture, and especially tech cutlure. I think one of the most persistent ones in Western/tech culture is the myth of being ‘deserving’, or ‘wanting it bad enough’, ‘trying hard enough’, or ‘picking one self up by the bootstraps’

I bring up the myth of ‘wanting it bad enough’, because one of the recurring themes that I hear from multiple angles/sources(including Slashdot, Hacker News, various podcasts, etc…) in the tech industry is that finding success is a function of ‘wanting it bad enough’. I assume that those who repeat such myths do so with all good intention, but anyone who has gone through trials and tribulations while also critically reflecting on those hardships, knows that the idea of ‘wanting something badly enough does not make it so’. For instance, wanting a pain in your side to go away, does not make it so, nor does wanting it to stop raining or snowing stop precipitation. All of this is to say that there are factors, forces, institutions, and influences that are far beyond our control, and one of those influences is luck.

Robert Frank’s lecture at the London School of Economics, does a good job of explaining that luck in the labor market is extremely neccessary, because as he puts it “If you have a lot of talent and you work hard you probably won’t be a big success”. You likely won’t be a ‘big success’, because everyone around you is likely to be smart, hardworking, and talented as well, meaning that in order to stand out from the crowd there needs to be some factor there…luck.

A story of luck in the labor market: Bryan Cranston by all accounts should not have gotten the role of Walter White in Breaking bad, this is because FX wanted it to go to someone who had previous lead experience. The network chose John Cusack and Matthew Brodderick over Cranston, however both of them turned down the role. Cranston got the role, and as he acknowledges in an interview there were two parts to it: 1. he “wanted it badly”, but perhaps even more important, Cranston acknowledges: “Without (series creator) Vince Gilligan being my champion to get the role, it never would have happened”.

Frank expands on this even further by noting that even if luck only accounts for 2% of a person’s success, that edge can be enough, especially when placed at just the right moment in time.

If you run simulations of a foot race and there are bounds on talent and 

effort, which there surely are, and that talent and effort accounts for 98%

 of what they do, and if you simulate that contest thousands of times, most

  of the time the hardest working person doesn't win.

In the general labor market issues of meritocracy are even worse, take this business insider story for instance:

Yla says he's delivered more than 40 boxes of doughnuts to companies

 like Lyft, Uber, Instacart, and Postmates, and he plans to continue his 

 campaign for the foreseeable future.  So far, he's landed more than 10

  interviews with tech companies and ad agencies in San Francisco. 

Most would say that a 25% response rate is fairly terrible, but it’s ok, because he ‘wants it bad enough’…but what about those who are as talented as Yla is, but lack the financial, or social means to make such a campaign happen, despite the fact that they may be just as talented or driven?

Going back to the original issue though of myth construction surrounding “wanting it bad enough”, there exsist a few problematics with this out of hand:

• Haves vs. have nots

This sort of myth perpetuation re-entrenches the myth of the ‘genius coder’, who ‘has something’ that others don’t, in this case that “wanting it bad enough” is effective for success.

In an age in which social stratification is ever increasing, espeically in tech hubs(SF, NY, Silicon Valley, etc…), these sort of myths only perpetuate that stratifaction along social, and temporal lines(e.g. those who have more access to privelege are usually able to access/trade time more freely).

• Ignoring that which is beyond our control

Going back to Cecil’s talk, he mentions that one of the myths that we often tell kids in US culture/Western society is that ‘you can be anything you want to be’. This is fundamentally untrue because of that which is beyond our control, and is the same type of issue that was alluded to earlier that there are structural, economic, and social forces often beyond our control that affect our outcomes much more heavily. At best, we can only influence our outcome, while the myth is that we can control it.

• Internalization

This also creates/carries on the myth that someone who is trying at coding but doesn’t ‘get it’, isn’t ‘trying hard enough’ and forces them to internalize that something is wrong with them, how they think, or how they work. I know because I’m one of those people who for the longest time connected the fact that I didn’t understand some things was because I didn’t try hard enough, and I connected my self worth and value with understanding, but luckily I had mentors along the way that were able to decouple my notions of worth from notions of understanding. What they helped me realize was that perhaps its not my understanding that is deficent, but rather how it was taught/explained, or that the material itself is dense, complex, and requires a whole host more resources than are readily available to me.

Does hard work matter? Yes. Does talent matter? Yes. Does effort matter? yes. This article is not attempting to argue that hard work doesn’t matter, but what it does argue is that the myth of ‘wanting something’ or ‘trying harder’, often doesn’t turn out the way we think it does.

I think Saron’s Lucky talk (I still cry when I listen to the talk), deals with this subject very well, and I’m OVERJOYED to see intiatives such as tech hire connect those who have, with those who do not, and in the tech community I think we can all take Anjuan’s advice and use/lend our privelge, by NOT perpetuating these sorts of problematic myths when we have a platform to speak.

I’m one of the thousands of people who are trying to understand tech/coding, and it can be overwheleming, but as someone who is of low socioeconomic status I’d love a way to make sense of things in the tech community as a whole…because I want that badly enough.