What Determines Success: Work Ethic or Privilege?

There's been an endless debate on whether work ethic or privilege is more conducive to success in a person's life.

I argue that coming from a position of privilege will often get someone ahead in life much more likely when comparing to someone from an underprivileged background with a good work ethic.

In this meeting, we will discuss the different views people have on work ethic and privilege. Hope to hear where people are coming from and why they believe in the position they lean towards.

Questions:
1. What does success mean to you?
2. What determines success?
3. How cultures view success differently?
4. Do you believe money can buy happiness?
5. Why do some people look at successful people as product of privilege?
6. Why do other people look at successful people as the result of work ethic?
7. Is homelessness a product of unfortunate circumstances or a product of bad choices and poor mindset?
8. Person from a rich and connected family who doesn't work hard verses person from a poor family with great work ethic, who's more likely to succeed in life and why?
9. Does luck play a role in the pursuit of success?
10. Are unprivileged people locked into their circumstances due to generational poverty?
11. What causes generational poverty?
12. What creates generational wealth?
13. Can you think of historical and modern examples of generational poverty and generational wealth and how they played out?
14. What are the main reasons that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer?
15. Can a strong work ethic overcome the disadvantages of being unprivileged?
16. Is it moral to determine a person's potential solely from their merit?
17. What are the pros and cons a merit based system?
18. What are the pros and cons of a DEI based system?
19. Is fairness in terms of equal opportunity possible? and how to measure equality?
20. Have you ever felt that your work ethic was not enough due to your racial and socioeconomic background?
21. Is America emphasizing too much on individual work ethic over a person's environment?
22. Why are poor people stuck doing menial work and so hard to breakout the cycle to make a leap?
23. Do you believe that people inherently have unequal skills and IQ/EQ or just individually unique?
24. If you placed anyone in a healthy and supportive environment, would they automatically be more likely to succeed compare to their previous unfortunate circumstance?
25. Are you ok with wealth distribution? Why or why not?
26. What are some methods that societies and individuals can do to help people improve their quality of life? (Ex: UBI, Tax the rich, support local small businesses)
27. What's the difference between working hard verses working smart?
28. Do we inherently deserve anything in life?
29. Are either capitalism or socialism better for a more equal and productive society?
30. Is bridging the gap between social class ever possible? If so, how? If not, why?

Guidelines:

• Hand raises are required.
• There will be a 3 minute timer for every person. However, in this group, I do allow a brief back and fourth interjection from others if it's something that's related to the person who was just speaking. This is a way to prevent the group from feeling too "robotic" in style and get your pressing question asked to the speaker and get the answer right away without waiting all the way back to your turn again.
• Be authentic & civil!
• Please refrain from using Ad Hominem (personal) attacks. Instead, please attack the points from others.
• Severe Ad Hominem such as racist behavior will result in being removed from the meeting.

Zoom link will be posted 10 minutes before the meeting.