Self Made Man / Real Life

• In history and reality, the very idea is heavily mythologized, exaggerated, and in some cases entirely fabricated. It's a common motif in Propaganda Piece and Cult of Personality. There are moments however where this legend does coincide with fact.
  • The vast majority of millionaires, at least in the United States are this. Less than 20% had parents who were wealthy albeit most of them came from stable middle-class families, rather than poor ones. So, less romantic than the ideal, but still notable.
  • At this point, it's worth explaining the page quote. Benjamin Disraeli wanted to go into politics. This was expensive. So he became a bestselling novelist, just to pay for his political career. He ended up as Prime Minister of the UK. Twice. It didn't hurt that he also married a very rich woman. (Happily, he also loved her as a person.)
  • U.S. patriots owe a lot and pay homage to Benjamin Franklin. According to Wikipedia, "he exemplified the emerging American nation. Franklin was foundational in defining the American ethos as a marriage of the practical and democratic values of thrift, hard work, education, community spirit, self-governing institutions, and opposition to authoritarianism both political and religious, with the scientific and tolerant values of the Enlightenment."
  • Abraham Lincoln as per myth (and in real-life) was born in a log cabin, and historically ranks among the lowest-income holders of any US President coming into office. He also did not go to elite educational institutions unlike other Presidents before and after him, being almost entirely self-taught and autodidactic. He worked as a teenager chopping wood and later as a bartender, and studied independently to qualify for his bar exam before building a very successful law practice. By the time he arrived on the political stage, Lincoln was reasonably well-off, married into the wealthy Todd family and had what we would now call "social capital".
  • Harry Truman is in a similar boat, being the last US president without tertiary education, the son of a farmer who did various odd jobs until he got himself elected. After he left office, he subsisted mostly on his small army pension (not helping things was a series of failed business ventures Truman entered into). Notable in that he himself had ensured public servants got generous retirement packages, but at the time, this did not extend to the president. The Former Presidents Act of 1958 was specifically passed so Truman would have a generous retirement, as unlike most previous presidents he was not independently wealthy.
  • Many figures in The French Revolution were this. Maximilien Robespierre, Georges Danton, Louis Antoine de Saint-Just were mostly nobodies with middling careers in law who in the course of the Revolution gradually became famous across France and Europe. Since there was no political career and opportunities before the Revolution, all of them made their careers on their ability at oratory, their education and their dedication and hard work, qualities that made them and other Jacobins promote the idea of meritocracy and insist on people earning their ranks in army and political office.
  • One of the beneficiaries of the above is Napoléon Bonaparte. Napoleon made meritocracy part of his mystique, with the idea of soldiers being promoted Up Through the Ranks and earning their titles via achievements, a myth that he occasionally did live up to. In actual fact, Bonaparte came from a family of minor Corsican nobility, and who on account of mere chance, became a French citizen at birth, and got to study in an elite military institution in France. However, Napoleon faced considerable racism in France for his origins and his accent^note His French sounded like an Italian speaking French (Corsica had been ruled by Genoa for more than 450 years before being annexed by France) and he never lost that accent and would never have received rank and advancement had it not been for the Revolution and the army reforms of 1793; and later the support of wealthy patrons like Paul Barras. Napoleon's achievements were immense and prodigious but it owed a great deal to luck and "a little help from my friends".
  • Toussaint Louverture, the leader and hero of the Haitian Revolution is a bigger example than any of his French contemporaries. He was born into slavery into the Caribbean plantations of Sainte Domingue who on the outbreak of revolution, despite limited education, and zero military training and education, became the military commander and leader of the revolution, defeating many professional armies and becoming an adept politician who could moderate various factions. His downfall came out of underhanded betrayal and low cunning from Napoleon rather than any mistake by Toussaint.
  • Mahatma Gandhi was the son of a middle-class lawyer's family and had very little family connections, and was far more modest in background and bearing than many of the other elite politicians in the anti-colonial movement. And yet he became the Icon of Rebellion for India and the man who made Independence an issue of national struggle, through his strategies and tactics for protest and his writings.
• Many famous artists and writers are this:
  • William Shakespeare was the son of a village alderman in an unremarkable small town who had no university education, no noble connections or military career (unlike other playwrights of his generation). Yet thanks to his incredible talent and genius, and his popular success by the time of his death, he had acquired a reasonable amount of wealth, property in London, a coat-of-arms and a title for his family.
  • Leonardo da Vinci was the illegitimate son of a minor nobleman who would not have inherited much by virtue of being a noble bastard (his surname Leonardo da Vinci signified the village of his origin, Vinci, rather than actual family connections). He apprenticed with the artist Verrocchio who admired his talent and patronized him. By the time of his death, he was renowned across Italy for his talent, genius, and skill and ended his career as an artist-in-residence for the King of France.
  • Charlie Chaplin, poor East-End street kid who became the world's first movie star and became one of the defining figures of the 20th Century.
  • Stanley Kubrick was a self-made autodidact who didn't go to college, worked as a photographer on the streets, taught himself film-making on the cheap, and step-by-step made himself into a world-renowned film-maker without ever working for a great deal of time in Hollywood, without working in other media, or coming from independent wealth.
  • George Lucas was born to an average middle-class home and had no background in arts and cinema, and initially became an anthropology student before going to film school. He went from a lowly college intern on the set of one of Francis Ford Coppola's earliest films, to set film-maker, to second-unit film-maker (on The Godfather), to feature director of a flop (THX 1138), before making his first hit (American Graffiti) and then banking it all on a film that many producers and some of his cast and crew didn't believe in, and which if it had failed, would have entirely finished his career. The result was Star Wars whose mammoth success made him the richest independent film-maker ever, all as a result of his own ideas, conviction, determination, and talent.
  • A good recent example (one taught in some schools in fact), is Jay-Z; who over the course of 20 years went from being a drug-dealer in Brooklyn to being one of the most successful rappers ever, as well as the CEO of a media empire (including his own record label); with a net worth estimated at around $500m. Famous in that he did not do this alone, however his business partners (who are mostly now at best moderately successful and at worst in prison) have not reached the same heights — so he must've done something right by himself.
• Madame C. J. Walker is considered the first case of a self-made woman in the USA.
• Oprah Winfrey. From humble beginnings as an illegitimate child in rural Mississippi, Oprah became the driving force behind a $2.5 billion media empire and a political kingmaker (she may have delivered as many as one million votes to Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign). Oprah is currently one of the wealthiest women in North America.
• Scientists and mathematicians owe most of their achievements to their remarkable brains and insight.
  • Albert Einstein for instance was born into a family of middle-class businessmen who fell into hard times, and who showed remarkable prodigy in his school and college examinations but struggled to find a post to better support his long-term research. Most famously he worked for two years at the patent office in Switzerland during which he wrote his first prominent papers.
  • Marie Curie was a Polish scientist born when it was part of the Russian Empire, and she had to study underground in the "Flying University" in Poland before coming to Paris and studying physics while being a poor student living in bad housing with no heating. Her passion for science nonetheless allowed her to proceed undaunted, becoming the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, and the only one to win two.
• Invoked with the eldest son of Joko Widodo (7th president of Indonesia), Gibran Rakabuming Raka. Despite his father being the president, Gibran just decided to make his own catering company which enjoyed local success, stating that he'd rather not depend on his father's name and carve his own way to success. A lot who heard of him praised him for his self-sufficient mentality, and Jokowi himself fully approved his son's path of life.
• Barack Obama caused controversy by calling this trope into question — so much so that the Republican slogan for their 2012 National Convention was "We Built It!" This, however, was Quote Mining his full statement about the myth of a Self-Made Man.
  Obama: I hear all this, you know, "Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever." No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own — nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police-forces and fire-forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory — and hire someone to protect against this — because of the work the rest of us did. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea. God bless — keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is, you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.
  • This also emphasized the contrast between Obama, coming up from a modest upbringing by a single mother to be President of the United States, and his opponent, Mitt Romney, a multi-millionaire venture-capital investor whose father was the Governor of Michigan and CEO of American Motors Corporation.
• Alexandria-Ocasio Cortez, the youngest woman in history elected to the US House at 29, was born to a working-class family and worked a number of odd-jobs when she challenged incumbent Joe Crowley in 2018. She mustered $192,000 from small donors against Crowley's $3.4 million and defeated him in the primary in an underdog victory. This was especially shocking given that Joe Crowley was a high-ranking ten term incumbent who was in a position to become the highest ranking House Democrat. In November she easily defeated her Republican opponent and won a seat in the House, and pointed out that she couldn't rent an apartment in Washington DC until after she got her salary, as compared to many other candidates and representatives who get funding from backers, donors, and other pre-political ventures.
• Adolf Hitler proved you don't have to be nice to be self-made. Hitler was born to a lower-middle class family of a low-ranking official. His mother and father died before he turned 18 and he ended up homeless for a while. With no higher education (he applied to an art academy twice, only to be turned down both times) and only military experience gained in World War One as a Gefreiter (a rank somewhere between PFC and Lance Corporal the US Army), he became a prominent political figure and rose to rule Germany. Hitler's lack of previous rank was lampshaded by some of his generals who privately called him "The Bohemian Corporal".
• Likewise with his arch-rival, Joseph Stalin. Stalin was born even poorer, to an alcoholic cobbler in Russian-ruled Georgia whose alcohol shakes cost him his small business. After dropping out of a religious college he joined the upstart Bolsheviks, then maneuvered through the party infighting and cunningly made himself the effective head of a superpower for decades.
• Sean Connery was born in a working class family in Edinburgh, Scotland, dropped out of school at 13, and worked many jobs including as a milkman, a coffin polisher, a lorry driver, a lifeguard, served in the Royal Navy, then worked as an artist's model before entering bodybuilding, which led him to acting and eventually his breakthrough part: Bond, James Bond in Dr. No, and his portrayal of the sophisticated secret agent propelled him into international superstardom.
• Themistocles, an Older Than Feudalism example. Son of a not very conspicuous man and a Thracian woman, making him "an outsider", he rose to prominence in the early years of the Athenian democracy. Preoccupied, even as a child, and preparing him for public life (Plutarch reports that while all the other boys were outside playing, Themistocles was making speeches), his teacher once told him: "My boy, you will be nothing insignificant, but definitely something great, either for good or evil." And, oh boy, how! He is often considered the man most instrumental in achieving the salvation of Greece from the Persian threat.
• Arnold Schwarzenegger was born in rural Austria and started conditioning his physique on a farm. He came to be a world class body builder, A-List movie star and eventually The Governator of California. While an impressive resume and he credits his success to America, he personally argues against this trope because of all the things that needed to go right.
  “This is so important for you to understand. I didn’t make it that far on my own. I mean, to accept that credit or that mantle would discount every single person that has helped me to get here today — that gave me advice, that made an effort, that gave me time, that lifted me when I fell. It gives the wrong impression that we can do it alone. None of us can. The whole concept of self-made man, or woman, is a myth.”