A distinctly American storyline is that a person can become anybody they wish. The only limits are the lack of initiative and persistence. While a certain amount of raw talent is valuable, the key to success is an individual’s willingness to press forward and upward. What then distinguishes successful from less notable individuals is largely a matter of resolve, grit, and energy. This is said to be the American Dream. Unshackled from your relatives or your past, each person is able to make themselves into whoever they wish. Frederick Douglass described such a person in his essay “Self-Made Men” which is quote below:
Self-made men are the men who, under peculiar difficulties and without the ordinary helps of favoring circumstances, have attained knowledge, usefulness, power and position in the world. Men who have learned from experience in the hard battle of life the best uses to which life can be put and the best that can be got out of life in this world. … They own nothing to wealth, inherited or to early and approved means of education. They are what they are, without the aid of many of the favoring conditions by which other men usually rise to distinction in the world.
The Frederick Douglass Papers at the Library of Congress: "Self-Made Men." Address before the Students of the Indian Industrial School at Carlisle, Pa. - Folder 5 of 16.
Douglass depicts the self-made individual as someone who has not received special favors in order to become powerful and successful. Such a person has only him- or herself to thank for their successes. They rely upon their own pluck and the wisdom gained from experience in order to become great. There was no head start provided to such individuals. Nothing special in terms of dollars or training propelled them. The spark, the fuel, and the guidance that controlled the trajectory is entirely their own. Others may achieve success because it is handed to them. The self-made person had to use his or her own hands to grab opportunities, rely upon their head to make wise choices, and depend upon their heart from which they derived the desire and commitment to success.
The master narrative claims of success as due to one of two causes: being given the power by inheritance (and hence unearned) or creating one’s own success by combining talent and tenacity. This storyline offers hope to those who were not blessed at birth with wealth or privilege. Becoming successful is not restricted to those who were lucky to be born into the right circumstances. Instead, we can make our own luck. Success in terms of power, position and prestige are won by those who have earned it. According to this storyline, the winners have become such because of their own merits, not because someone handed the prize to them for an arbitrary reason. The corollary moral of this storyline is that those who are not successful find themselves in those conditions because they did not apply themselves. Whatever talents they might have held were not appropriately and earnestly applied. Otherwise, success would have been attained.
Such a master narrative works well for those who are born to success and/or have not had barriers placed in their paths. Further, this storyline is reinforced all of the time: athletes who persist through injuries, tycoons who rose from poverty to great wealth, and politicians who were raised in working class families and became world leaders. "There," we can say, "is someone who worked really hard and succeeded." The counter-story which is rarely heard is that those who may have worked just as hard may not have succeeded. By linking success to tenacity, we can attributed lack of success to laziness. Therefore, we can justify the historical failures of a gender, an ethnicity, or a nationality to that simple equation. The tragic result is that this myth places full responsibility upon the individual -- and effectively absolves anyone from being responsible for anybody else.
