When you’re little and have no sense of what the world is like, your parents will most likely tell you that if you work hard, you will be successful. It’s not one of those statements that has five hundred exceptions and loopholes and “if” statements; it’s just a statement parents and people make to younger people, and we’re supposed to believe it. No one tells you, though, that “hard work” and “successful” seem to be subjective, and what “success” is to one person could be “failure” to another. No one tells you that you might get evaluated differently if you are white vs. black vs. Asian, or that as a woman, you might not be taken as seriously as an engineer or a doctor or any other field that is male dominated (which, if you really think about it, is really any profession that is not nursing, flight attending – really all the professions that have no intrinsic “power” associated with them). Sometimes, when you work really hard, you may not succeed. There – I just shattered a lot of poor kids’ dreams.