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I think here ambition needs to be distinguished from hard-work. For example many Chinese are hardworking but not ambitious, they work very hard for many years to become a civil servant. On the other hand, many in the US believe they can achieve anything. Plus it could be those exceptionally ambitious achieve exceptionally great results, much like the top few companies pull the entire S&P 500 upwards.

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Except that's just not true. The vast majority of Americans don't actually believe "they can achieve anything." The proof is that they never actually try. It's merely rhetoric that we use to punish the most vulnerable. For the vast majority, we either never reach a spot where we're comfortable because of a lack of skills or training or we get there and then lament our luck when things don't go our way with layoffs and technical obsolescence. This is of course discounting MLMs, which aren't real entrepreneurship.

Neither is part-time work. I get a 1099 NEC from a few companies each year for "consulting," which basically means I get a retainer to fix a few things that break on their servers should something go wrong. I'm not an entrepreneur. I'm just getting a few extra checks.

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