Above or below the Wealth Median

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^^^
at least in my case, you're preaching to the choir I know what it is like to struggle and fail until one runs out of energy. as clint eastwood said in some movie, "a man's gotta know his limitations."

I didn't say that anything would guarantee achieving one's goals, I am not talking about wealth when I say goals or success, but more like reaching a state of contentment where you are happy with who you are and what you do most of the time in daily life.

I am not interested in being above a wealth median, as I find happiness in learning, studying, doing science research where I could make enough salary to support myself, but I would not be rich.

I am not a believer in any horatio alger myth, I have just learned from my own life eggsperiences that in order to achieve my goals, I must take actions, some of which are hard for me, but I must do it, if I want to do what I want to do in life.

I had some luck with my genes, but I also put in lots of effort, and I reject the idea that my genes contributed the most to my circumstances in life.

My circumstances are nothing glorious, I am just a poor student/researcher, but I have found much happiness in my daily pursuits.

was not referring to you. but I was referring to people who have done well in life through a combo of luck and pluck who look down their noses at those of us who still struggle. that lately has become the American way, to step on people when they are down. the people who believe that all it takes to succeed is willpower are the ones who just don't understand that willpower itself is a resource that some of us don't have. or that we may have oodles of willpower but no luck or brains to back it up.

For me, psychological factors and/or executive dysfunction led to self-sabotage and squandered opportunities.

I reject the idea that what I worked for is primarily attributed to luck and genes, I think that I had a good genetic basis for intellectual potential, but I also had strong autistic traits from birth, and these are likely also genetic. I attribute most of my successes and failures to what I did and choices I made.

I've made a lot of good choices that weren't easy, even for NTs--going to a good school thousands of miles from home, and then relocating even farther to get a job that required my unique skill set.

I do my own taxes to better understand the tax code. I may not have voted for President Bush, but the American way is to take full advantage of the tax breaks he signed.

the quality of one's frontal lobes plus the quality of intra-brain region/hemisphere communication, is the major determinant, of how well one can surmount one's circumstances. in this regard, some folk [many on the street, jail-bound, in prison or dead] are SOL. people with "noisy" brains don't do well in general. a living example of this was the tragic case of phinneas gage, a railroad worker who got an accidental lobotomy when a railroad spike was explosively driven through his forehead through the frontal lobes. he survived but his good sense [executive function, sound judgment] left him the moment the spike exited through the top of his head, carrying away the brain matter that had been the repository of said good sense. google him and you will read a sad story.

I remember Phinneas Gage from a psychology class in the early 1970s. There are many sad stories.

I think that when some people see someone else doing well or succeeding, they might attribute the other person's success to luck or higher quality frontal lobes whatever that means instead of the person's own efforts to do what they are doing and trying to deal with difficulties that they may also have, including EF problems, social problems, sensory problems, etc. There seems like an insistence sometimes that people are lucky, won genetic lottery, have rich parents, lesser autistic traits, etc, even when the person says that they worked really hard for what they have, had to deal with as many or as strong autistic traits as many others, didn't have economic advantage, etc.