There is this myth of the self-made person, someone who strikes out on their own and through thick and thin is able to achieve greatness or achieve their ambitions and goals in life. But what I think about whenever I’m confronted with this way of thinking is a famous poem, and I’ll paraphrase here, no one is an island unto themselves. What that means to me is basically that we are all interdependent, that we depend on one another for our needs, whether that’s depending on the people who work at your grocery store to provide groceries that are safe and healthy or depending on a loved one for basic care and compassion.
We have this kind of duality or polarity when it comes to how we see each other and how we see ourselves. On one extreme there is this idea that you have to strike out on your own and you have to make your own way. On the other end is that we’re all interdependent and maybe it’s not about how much work you put into something but actually how much support that you have and how much of a social network you have.
What I want to get down to is this idea of opportunity. Opportunity used to be about making rules that somehow treat people fairly. It was about making a rule that says you can’t treat this person in this way or this person in that way. So it’s about fairness. I think that’s a good way of starting to think about opportunity, but I don’t think it’s it’s gone far enough. I think we can continue to evolve the way we understand what opportunity means, what opportunity means for each other, and for our own lives.
A more conventional, more state-of-the-art, and even a more scientific way of looking at opportunity is to look at the conditions that allow someone to achieve success, the conditions that provide support, foundation that allows someone to achieve success in whatever aspect of life they want to pursue.
It reminds me of another saying, that we all stand on the shoulders of giants, and what that means is that nobody has started from a blank slate. We’re all building off of what previous generations have done and the opportunities other people have enabled us to have. I think this is a really important thing to recognize right off the bat.
When I talk about opportunity with my students a lot of times I get this kind of attitude of “so that means everybody in the class gets an A, right?”. But opportunity is about ensuring that everybody has a fair chance. No, it’s not about giving everybody an A. It’s not about everyone getting the same stuff or the same things. It’s about ensuring that everyone has an equal chance of successfully getting an A. It’s about making sure that someone who starts at “point A” and someone else who starts at “point B” can both arrive at their destination with a reasonable expectation of success.
Opportunity is an important and complex idea and I want to pick this apart in a little bit more detail later. But I want you to think about who has given you opportunities in your life. How have those opportunities come about? Have they been because of the places you’ve lived? Have they been because of the things you’ve done? I don’t want to diminish your efforts if you’ve spent your life pursuing an objective and really grinding it out. That’s awesome. That’s what life is all about. But it’s not only about that. It’s about that duality. We work hard to achieve our goals, but also we’ve been giving a foundation whether that’s by our parents or the place that we live or anything else, We’ve been given a foundation that’ll allow us to thrive and succeed.
