Free Will and Success

[DarkRange55]

What is the top personality trait that drives someone to be successful? What is the one personality trait that is the most class segregated or dependent on what class you are in? What is the one personality trait that is the most class segregated or dependent on what class you are in? I'm going to be talking about how certain personality traits and values ultimately end up leading you into a specific social class whether or not you were born in that class. And this is for a society that has a relative amount of social mobility such as the United States of America. You have a better chance, but the odds will still be stacked against you for institutional reasons. Assuming places that do not have a rigid caste system, the main driver for what social class you'll be in is your belief in the level of personal agency that you have.

The general definition of personal agency is the capacity of an individual to believe that their own thoughts, feelings, and decisions are in their control and that they matter for the course of their future or destiny. You'd think that this is something that everybody believes, but when you look deep down, people who really have true personal agency—those who really think hard about where am I going in life, why, where do I want to be, how am I going to get there, and how am I going to do it—are a far smaller percentage than you would like to believe.

Especially in the post World War II modern era where we have things like the government, the public education system, mainstream media, social media, and a variety of other forces that allow people to not have to make their own decisions. They let whether it's advertising, big corporations, the government, major political parties on one side or the other, religious groups, etc., make all of their decisions for them and don't really question why the rules of society are the way they are. Why do I do what I'm supposed to do? Society tells them they're in a certain place and they stick to it and don't really think too hard about it.

A lot of people don't really want the stress or the burden of having to draw their own map in life or to steer their own course. That takes a lot of not only mental cognitive load but also emotional and spiritual cognitive load that a lot of people in our society were not conditioned to bear. So in reality, the number of people who really do have true personal agency is probably somewhere between 10 to 20 percent of the US population and probably even lower in many other countries in the world.

So what is the relationship between social class and personal agency? Is it that high-class people are more likely to have high agency because being born with a certain level of wealth allows the freedom to have personal agency, or is it that somebody with high personal agency is self-motivated and will put in the work needed to get to a higher social class? The answer honestly is a little bit of both. There has been a lot of academic research on this topic.

But really the core findings summarized from all of these is one: higher social class reliably correlates with a higher degree of personal agency, particularly on the counter-elite track. Statistically, from a psychological and professional profile base, the people who have the most degree of personal agency in modern society are upper middle class entrepreneurs or counter-elite business owners. It's actually the other side—the Ivy League class and the institutional professional class—that have some of the lowest degree of personal agency. And I'll get into the reasons why. This is not purely an income thing, but there is a correlation between those who move up the ladder and their personal agency.

Second really big point is that if you grew up in a high-scarcity environment like a broken home or low socioeconomic status where you were struggling for basic needs like food or shelter, you were more likely to have a permanent external locus of control and reduced personal agency because you feel like even your basic survival is at jeopardy due to forces outside of your control, which is often the case in childhood. It's your parents that really shape your life at that point. You will lose the faith to have a degree of control of your own life and you'll think it's all external.

Money and better health outcomes such as prioritizing good diet and fitness. Child stability is a major driver of adult agency regardless of income level. This is income-adjusted. So if you grow up from a poor background but you have a stable family that makes sure your basic needs are met and that you're not really in stress survival mode or dealing with forces that cause problems, this is one of the biggest social drivers that drives down personal agency.

A high degree of personal agency creates related traits like conscientiousness, self-control, and future orientation. All of these predict success in education, higher incomes, more wealth, particularly the willingness to save.

The system is structured because people have the same core personal traits, one of them being personal agency, which gets inherited throughout generations. And that's why whether you're in Africa, China, Europe, North America, or South America, the people who are at the top in previous generations often climb back. This goes back to The Sons Also Rise, where ruling-class families—even if you have war, communism, forced redistribution, plague, or whatever causes lost fortunes—still come back within three generations no matter how the system is structured.

Someone from a privileged family that holds together versus a person from a privileged family whose family is estranged and falling apart due to divorces, inheritance disputes, and other conflicts—and whose parents don't have time or inclination to be involved—can have just as much low-agency outcome as someone who grew up in a much poorer background.

The hereditary component of this is mixed. The studies I've seen put it at about 40 to 55 percent, which means the other half is environmental. Some of it is heritable, but it's not clustered in any specific demographic or ethnic group. There are high-agency people in all countries.

High-agency people are the ones willing to risk it all and move to a country like the United States. As a result, they are more likely to be successful in the new society. Whereas if you have different selection pressures in other parts of the world that track lower-agency immigrants, they tend to underperform.

Low-agency subpopulations are most vulnerable to economic volatility and downward mobility. They're less willing to adapt and are also the least willing to really assess what they truly want in life and what it takes to pursue it. A classic example is the Rust Belt. The Rust Belt had a lot of lower-agency factory workers, and once cars started being manufactured elsewhere, they never adapted.

Wealth inequality is greatly driven by agency because the traits associated with high personal agency—such as savings behavior, healthy risk tolerance, willingness to plan ahead, and job mobility—are compounding variables that allow individuals or groups to outperform peers who lack those traits.

Cross-cultural differences in how this is expressed reflect local norms, but the gap between high-agency and low-agency people exists across all cultures. Studies on this have been done by universities all over the world—Harvard, Berkeley, top universities in East Asia, and various other academic institutions and think tanks.

The question is why personal agency is not really discussed.

If the solution to most problems is maximizing personal agency, we've seen this in Western philosophy with thinkers like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and the existentialists who advocate for creating your own destiny. But when this high-agency philosophy is pushed into mainstream culture, many low-agency people destabilize their lives and end up with worse outcomes. That may be one reason it isn't emphasized.

People also don't want to admit that high-agency paths are often the ones that lead to the top, because those paths are perceived as too hard or undesirable.

Looking at who ranks highest in agency in American society, the top group is upper-middle-class independent professionals: engineers, physicians, people in finance, small business owners, immigrants with high education levels, and people who grew up in two-parent, high-stability households.

There are also specific ethnic groups with high agency due to selection bias. A common example is the Persian population in Southern California, which is a very high-agency group because it was the high-agency classes who fled Iran during the 1979 revolution and passed those values on to their children and grandchildren.

Mid-level agency people tend to be compliant with institutions, buy into popular narratives, and are often risk-averse. These are typically college-educated middle-class people in corporate America, lower-level government jobs, or tight-knit religious communities that defer personal agency to authority figures.

Low-agency people tend not to make life decisions based on freedom. They have a more deterministic worldview and instinctual reactions. This includes lower-income individuals, affluent people from chaotic households, institutional professional classes, and what Malcolm Collins calls the urban monoculture—people with high incomes but low long-term planning who prioritize short-term consumption.

Many people in bureaucracy or academia follow a scripted path—good grades, degrees, promotions—and assume life will unfold automatically. They are highly credentialed but often lack agency.

Others are terminally online. Excessive social media use blunts personal agency and reinforces narratives that discourage planning and action.

So agency is not purely correlated with income. There are high-agency low-income people, especially among striving immigrant groups, and low-agency high-income people in elite institutions. Middle-class people are spread across the distribution.

If you want to move up, developing personal agency is key. Most people have the potential for it, but environment, adverse childhood conditions, and deferring decisions to culture are what kill agency. Agency can be conditioned.

Some people naturally have high personal agency and may not fully relate to those who need to build it from scratch, but it can be done. People have faced and conquered bigger challenges.

Have you noticed a correlation between new money classes and personal agency? Do you take issue with how society prioritizes high-agency individuals? And if success is driven by agency, how should society respond to those who lack it? I'd like to know your thoughts and what might be missing from this discussion.

 

[whywere]

All my life in personal and business, I have come to one conclusion on money and success. It is not hard work, intelligence or the like, but happen per chance luck.

Being at the right place, right time, right whatever.

Look at folks who start companies. A lot of failures for sure, BUT the ones that make it have a bit of luck in making it.

I have always laughed at the "WOW! look what he or she has done or made" and in the background is everything from getting a helping hand from the parents, to lightning bolt lucky of right circumstances.

This is the reason that, I will definitely not be around, but like in sci-fi shows and movies, money and the like is gone, and a person spends their life in pursuit of doing good for themselves and others.

I wish for all of humanity to evolve to a state of spend time and effort on the betterment of the individual and society in general.

Walter

 

[Dejected 55]

Kind of depends on how you define success. *I* would define success as starting a business that paid everyone more than livable wages worth the work they performed for the company and perhaps a small profit. Most people today define success as that same company increasing profit year over year and gaining more and more marketshare until dominating the market. Being a good profitable company is considered a failure if you aren't growing all the time... which cannot work indefinitely.

My version of success has a much lower bar than what I think society has. I've been increasingly realizing the last year or so something about myself. I've never played political games or politics at work. I never cared about promotion and advancement. I was fine as long as I felt I was being paid fairly for the work I did and work wasn't a daily battle to get through. I wasn't chasing fame or fortune. But in the last year or so, I realize even that wasn't really success for me. What I've really always wanted to be was a good boyfriend or husband. Maybe children, maybe not... but definitely in a good partnership loving relationship. That would be success for me. The job "career" or whatever would be the means to an end where I could provide for that partnership. But if I am to be alone, I am a failure to myself and not achieving the one thing that has actual meaning in my life... It seems like a low bar to clear, but I've never been anywhere close to what I would consider my definition of success in life.

 

[noname223]

What is the top personality trait that drives someone to be successful?

My first thought was conscientiousness.

And this is for a society that has a relative amount of social mobility such as the United States of America

I think that's a myth.

A lot of people don't really want the stress or the burden of having to draw their own map in life or to steer their own course. That takes a lot of not only mental cognitive load but also emotional and spiritual cognitive load that a lot of people in our society were not conditioned to bear.

Do you think this happens consciously or unconsciously? I think many people don't even ask themselves these questions.

Mid-level agency people tend to be compliant with institutions, buy into popular narratives, and are often risk-averse. These are typically college-educated middle-class people in corporate America, lower-level government jobs, or tight-knit religious communities that defer personal agency to authority figures.

maybe me.

Personally, I am conscientious to level where it is extremely crippling. And I thought a lot about personal agency in my life. In college I pressured me. The thing is for many in this forum personal agency isn't a benefit. For me the concept does not help me at all. Instead it makes my pain worse. If you have systemic isssues as roots that prevent you from becoming successful in life like a horrible childhood, extremely low resilience, several severe mental health conditions like me. Ruminating about personal agency only gives you pain. It is a net negative. It might stopped me from taking drugs. But that's it. Letting go of it help me to come to peace with myself. At least a little bit.

The roots for failure are in many cases systemic one's and not individualistic. But it isn't black-white. This is just my opinion. And I don't have empirical evidence. But in the US there is an emphasis that success is often a personal story where someone deserved it. Whereas in Europe we look at the background, environment, the genetic lottery and consider it a lot of luck. Which benefit is personal agency if you grow up in Somalia and have to do child labor which no way to climb up in the social hierarchy.

 

[Forever Sleep]

Personally, I think it's determination. There have been rags to riches stories where a person's talent has been recognised and developed. I suppose you could argue they were encouraged to then develop a sense of self agency but- they couldn't have achieved their goal without determination.

Even if a person grows up being told the world is their oyster- they can be whoever they want, if they don't have the determination to follow a dream- they are far less likely to succeed. Because success often requires the input of time and commitment. No matter what you believe.

There's maybe another side to self agency too. Entitlement- people believing they are special and owed. But also, expectation. Some rich, successful parents put huge pressure onto their offspring to follow in their footsteps. Same as someone who hasn't done so well may not have those same expectations on their children. They also may acknowledge they can't give them the education and opportunities their rich counterparts could.

But, neither child will reach their potential without determination. I suppose motivation too. You're more likely to be determined if you feel genuinely motivated to begin with.

There are surely rich drop outs though. Just the same as there are formely poor and 'lower class' self made millionaires. Part of it- I agree is agency. Feeling like we do have at least some control over our destiny.

Do the rich drop outs not have that self agency? Do they simply not realise that dropping out of college and going NEET multiple years damages their chances of success? I doubt they're that stupid!

They presumably quit because they don't have the motivation/ determination to follow their goal now. A person can recognise their own potential and still fail. That's some of the reason people here are feeling like they are. They realise they could have been more, had it not been for something that impeded them- eg. illness etc.

Maybe we'd actually be less depressed if we weren't so taken in by the idea of self agency. If we knew it was always an inevitability we'd not succeed, we wouldn't be blaming ourselves.

But, whether it's because they believe even their best effort would yield inadequate results or whether they don't feel fulfilled by the pursuit of their goals is something else. We can lose motivation/ determination for all sorts of reasons.

I wonder how many people do just stay put though. I imagine most people have gone for multiple jobs during their lives. Are they all in the one they started out in? Even with tuition fees, I imagine most people do go on to further or higher education for example. That surely demonstrates agency- no? That gaining specialist and deeper knowledge may (hopefully) net us a higher paying job in a subject we are (hopefully) interested in. I don't think the middle and lower classes are necessarily a bunch of mindless drones. Not that you're expressing that extreme!

But still, I suppose learned helplessness could well be a factor in the poorer/ 'lower' classes, just as learned entitlement/ confidence/ expectation maybe is in the 'upper' classes.

If you're talking about entrepreneurs though- I imagine wealth also plays a big part there. If you know Daddy will come along and bail you out of any difficulties you get into- that's quite the safety net! Would so many billionnaires take the risks they do if they had to remortgage their house to do it?

For the really big dogs though- I tend to also wonder how many of them have sociopathic traits. A work colleague of my Dad's was cheekily asking their boss on how they got to earn the money they did. He replied because it was his head on the chopping block. If he messed up, they'd all be out of work. Sounds impressive and responsible on the face of it. But then- I wonder- does that cause him to lose sleep? It would me!

Does it bother him to fire people? Reduce their hours? Tell them there's no budget to pay them? Maybe that did all affect him but I've worked for people who seemed almost to enjoy that power! Sacking someone appeared like water off a duck's back to them. Maybe they went home and cried but- I doubt it. Some people don't want those jobs- not because they have no ambition or drive. It's because they know it would break them to have to be that ruthless. So- I think there's that element too. I've known more managers that were ruthless than were kind.