Freedom, inefficiency, and prosperity are not infrequently found together. - Samuel Eliot Morison.

Thus, while those who are very wealthy like to believe that they are worthy of the financial rewards they have accrued, many poorer people don’t want to mess with the dream that they too might achieve such riches if only they work hard enough. For them to concede that perhaps the system was stacked against them—that money had become far better at begetting more money than working long hard shifts—would be tantamount to abandoning their sense of agency and their cherished beliefs that what made their countries different was that anyone who worked hard enough could be whatever they wished to be.

It’s not about finding what you can do better than others, but about finding what you can do exceptionally well relative to other ways you could expend yourself.

For some people in the study, making the economics work proved relatively easy, whereas for others it proved much more difficult. Family wealth served as a significant means to pursue a hedgehog in only six of the 34 lives we studied, whereas in ten of 34 cases people endured at least one significant phase of scarcity while in pursuit of a hedgehog. Yet whether easy or difficult (or somewhere in between), they committed to focus their inner fire in line with their encodings and they figured out how to make the economics work.

“On the downside, he doesn’t see himself sometimes. When something he does is shit – you know, he does sometimes actually just make a mistake – he can’t see it and thinks it’s gone wrong for some complicated reason to do with him being so brilliant.