It shouldn’t be funny to you.
CLEARLY if you didn’t get that job as Goofy, you could’ve been the youngest self-made billionaire instead.
Hope that costume in the hot sun was worth it.
It truly was, the kids were the best. Especially the Make A Wish visits. Heartbreaking and wonderful at the same time. Also we were a bunch of teenagers and 20 somethings that got to play at Disney all day. Sure the heat was miserable but the people were great. Another fun fact. I've signed more autographs than any celebrity.
I also got to play Prince Charming and Prince Eric.
In the summer there were 3 of us per shift. We were 20 mins on 40 mins off. So every 20 minutes the line would stop and short Goofy (me) would get replaced by a 6ft4" Goofy. No one seemed to notice.
I mean it's not Disney I don't think (maybe they bought it though who knows) but as a 32 year old the person I want to hug more than anyone in the world is Kermit the frog. He's just a standup dude and my favorite celebrity. I'd settle for a handshake and thanking him for being a big part of my childhood.
Watch how adults talk about Muppets characters. They talk about them like they're real people.
Well, that’s even more intriguing! Maybe you should write a book about your random experiences. David Sedaris-like. I’ve often thought about it but worried how I would go about getting name recognition. But, if your story is good enough, who knows? Anyway, I appreciate you sharing a bit of your life with me, and wish you all the best!
that makes sense. Im the same height which is already above average so the costume makes you almost 7 feet tall which is enough to amaze the average person
I was a young teen when my friend and I saw Friar Tuck sign an autograph. He wrote Friar F and short circuited. The pen just kept hovering above the paper for a while. He ended up just scratching it out, but to two thirteen year olds that was comedy gold. Thinking back on it, that might have been the first time a kid had asked for Friar Tuck’s autograph.
Lol. There was this kid who came up to me (Tigger) and my buddy (Goofy); I know horrible theming, but it was an impromptu Main St set. He was wearing Mickey Ears that have the person's name on it. He points to it and turns to me in costume and says "Hyuk, BJ!"
I couldn't stop laughing.
Maybe if he got the job in one of his younger years Casey's dad would've had a different schedule and either never met her mom or conceived on a different night creating a different baby than Casey.
When it's written out like this it might seem very weird or even inspiring but I can tell you most college graduates get rejected from hundreds of places. Most jobs will reject like 99% of their applicants, and who knows how many of them will become the next big thing
Yes, I think it’s also worth noting that it’s impossible to become a billionaire through any normal career path regardless of how successful you are at it. Billionaires are people who have struck it extremely lucky in some kind of insane value explosion, basically the business version of the lottery. So a high proportion of them will probably be the high risk-takers that will often have a string of failures behind them (and we don’t hear about the high risk-takers that never make it big).
>basically the business version of the lottery
And 99% of the times you need to be at least a millionaire already, to purchase one of the tickets for this particular lottery.
Yeah, framings like this are silly.
People who strike it big are sometimes talented and are always lucky. And lucky usually includes being lucky enough to be born into at least moderate but usually extreme privilege.
People who are lucky and especially people who are extremely privileged spend a lot of time reimagining their success in flattering ways.
I love it when people think success of these multimillionaires/billionaires is their hard work and stick-to-it-iveness.
Yeah drive/perseverance is important, but luck is far and beyond the greatest factor. Plenty go at it their entire lives and simply so ok.
Having money already surely makes it infinitely easier.
Yeah, I don't mind that the myth delusionally flatters the privileged, I mind that it pacifies the less privileged away from thinking about how the system itself might be worth rejecting.
Not silly, it's just a variation of the American dream illusion to keep everyone busy in their hamster wheel, cuz..you know, you could be a billionaire any second now!!
The paradox of success normally relates to business people who have had a string of successful projects and then fail on their biggest project by repeating their earlier pattern of activity expecting the same success again this time as well. Since these people have been successful in their previous ventures they haven't leant the life lesson of “try, fail, try again fail better” put forward by Samuel Beckett and they may not know how to handle failure. https://youtu.be/KGNkMZtn2A4
I have what those in my field would call a dream job. Of course it took 10 years of personal training non-stop every hour outside of work hours I could find... but more importantly it took willing to put up with 'No' literally hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of times. I've been doing what I'm doing now for about 10 years. I have a folder in my email inbox that goes back to 2005 filled with hundreds and hundreds of rejection emails... and those were the ones that got back to me, that isn't even the ones who just ghosted me.
I had a young guy reach out to me recently asking how I could do what I do and I asked him how many rejections he had so far. He told me he had at least 50 rejections and [I was like...](https://youtu.be/x-H1T7ny2Uw?si=vuVtq43Jpad_UcgP)
I have no issues with this lady but I feel like after the guy who paid all his employees minimum 70k got in trouble, she took his place popping up on my LinkedIn feed all the time.
He was accused of assault and rape. I believe he ended up getting charged with assault but not sure what happened.
Looks like chargers were dropped but he still resigned as CEO.
Like I think they meant that that guy was the go-to “inspirational story” all over LinkedIn, but then after he became potentially controversial this lady became the new go-to “inspirational story” there. They aren’t connected IRL at all, it’s just that both were popular on LinkedIn. Does that make sense??
He put out posts and TikTok videos that were the equivalent of patting himself on the back for providing livable wages for all of his employees and calling on other companies to do the same. While that is commendable the frequency and style of the posts kind of came off as an exercise in stroking his own ego and enjoying the sound of his own voice.
When he resigned and subsequently stopped posting she more or less picked up where he left off and started posting similar content.
> Because she "showed up on your LinkedIn feed?"
Both of them do (or did) constantly, according to their comment. Yep.
> Am I missing something?
Nope, you got the gist of it. Their comment made it pretty clear. Not sure what you're confused about here.
This isn’t actually all that impressive if you think about it:
Bombing the LSAT - pretty common for first time test takers
Lost out on Goofy job - I mean that’s gotta be a pretty competitive role as far as gigs with Disney go.
Selling fax machines… I mean that just sounds like a normal job?
i see it more as the story of someone lost in life who finally found their calling. which is.... everyone's story, i suppose. but it's not everyday you wake up and figure out your calling is to make spanx
>Was stuck selling fax machines for a living
Can we stop this nonsense of job-shaming?
It just feeds into the cycle of CEOs getting paid hundreds and thousands of times what regular employees make..
It destroys the middle class and is a direct attack on the foundations of democracy.
And if you think I am overstating that, look at the dystopia of the United States where mailman and shoe salesmen could buy houses and put their kids through college.
And now those kids cannot afford housing let alone buy a house.
Quitting Job shaming is a change you can do now, that will affect things.
Ah the carrot of incomprehensible wealth that the ruling class uses to make you believe that one day, if you work hard enough, and grind enough, and just have a tiny bit of luck, you one day may achieve!
Most of these self made billionaire stories tend to leave out important details, and most of the time that important detail is they had rich parents that funded them, allowing them to fail over and over without ever worrying about finances.
For most regular folks, one failed venture is permanent game over because they only had the funds for that one venture and nothing more.
Even if the scale of the help she got is smaller than most "self made" financial elite, it's still a lot more of a contribution than 99% of people could expect from their parents.
My parents absolutely could not afford to pay my rent for a 2 bed place for months on end while I tried to "figure out my passion." That would bankrupt them.
Just figured that was worth mentioning before anyone starts shouting "her parents didn't even give her THAT much."
You should update her Wikipedia article with the info you have because it's currently sourced off this [Forbes article](https://www.forbes.com/global/2012/0326/billionaires-12-feature-united-states-spanx-sara-blakely-american-booty.html?sh=68da8ef77ea0) that doesn't mention her dad once
Forbes is pretty notorious for basically having hagiographical accounts of billionaires. I mean I don’t know the truth of this lady’s story or the involvement of her dad, but yeah according to Forbes every billionaire is essentially the Count of Monte Cristo rise from nothing
Right, but the point is that he didn't gain his wealth through hard work or genius, but rather by inheritance (for lack of a better term). At best we could argue he got paid for being a companion and caretaker to his fellow prisoner.
Yup. I can't recall specifics but Forbes has been caught fudging their stories and numbers to suit their narratives a *lot* lately. If it's Forbes saying someone is a breakout self made financial elite, odds are they aren't self made and they leave out a ton of vital info to sell the story.
Do you have a source for that? Everything I can find indicates her initial funding came from savings for a prototype and then further financial support from a hosiery mill operator that she pitched the idea to.
I do, but it’s a primary source. Her dad was/is an attorney and did very well for him. Her mom was an artist. They helped her with her legal fees and patents which totalled way more than 5k that she had saved up. That doesn’t take away from the fact that she made the product and built a massively successful business that she recently sold, but saying my parents helped me get going doesn’t make for the same story once you’ve become a billionaire.
I combed through that wiki page and a lot of other news articles and I saw absolutely nothing about her getting investments from other people. Can you point me in the right direction?
Looks like article #5 is the source. That's [this one from Forbes](https://www.forbes.com/global/2012/0326/billionaires-12-feature-united-states-spanx-sara-blakely-american-booty.html). Doesn't have much more detail than the Wikipedia article, though. Single sentence, 15 paragraphs in. Article #10, the other source cited for that paragraph, seems to skip that part of the story entirely. Weird.
She used hustle and sell SPANX from the trunk of her car to boutiques in the north Atlanta suburbs when I was in high school in the early 2000s. I worked at one and wish I quit and followed her 😭
And how is it that I am supposed to care? What has a billionaire done for anyone else besides themselves? Whose going to answer that honestly? It's pretty depressing, considering people like this hoard wealth, while the average person can't afford their fucking groceries anymore. This shouldn't be an inspiring story at all. This should put a sour taste in everyone's mouth about late stage capitalism. The 99.9% praising the 0.1%
Word. You may get down voted for saying that, I hope you don't because you're right.
Most of the time, a "self made" millionaire/billionaire story ends up being "their parents financed their numerous failed ventures until one finally succeeded." There's always some pivotal detail that publications either leave out or heavily downplay, because "their dad gave them money so they could fail over and over" isn't an inspiring story.
Are there stories of lower class people truly hitting it big with no big outside influence? Sure. But they comprise maybe 5% or less of all "rags to riches" stories.
And without fault, every person contained in these stories ends up the same way: some holier than thou social elite that ignores the communities they came from the moment they come into wealth. Nothing is ever contributed back to the places the came from. Money gets hoarded, the rich get richer. Nothing ever funnels back into the economy.
And yet the 99% who live paycheck to paycheck will somehow still praise and worship these people and condemn the skeptics because why? They believe that their diminutive financial stature is only temporary and that if they work hard enough and praise the elite enough, *they too* will become one of those elite.
Don't really care if I get down voted really, but yes, thanks! That's what late stage capitalism especially is. A small fraction of the population hoards the majority of the wealth. It's absolute bullshit. "Well they earned it". If exploiting systems is "warning", then yes, they certainly earned it. There is no such thing as an ethical or good billionaire. 100% of the did enough to exploit. They are unethical people, period.
I support small business and enterprise. No problem. But unregulated wealth is bad for everyone who isn't a billionaire.
>unregulated wealth is bad for everyone who isn't a billionaire.
100%. But that doesn't stop naive people from supporting it anyway, because they just see themselves as potential future elites who will benefit from all the financial loopholes they exploit.
Yeah, they will never get there. The "hustle" culture. It's breaking people, disabling people, driving them to early deaths, to chase a dream they have maybe %0.0001 chance of reaching.
You need to "keep the dream alive", that everybody could become a billionaire. How else would you be able to convince about 60 million US Americans that will never even make a million USD in their lives that a wealth tax for people having more than 100 million USD is against their interests?
Growing up, my dad used to encourage my brother and me to fail," she said. "I didn't realize it at the time, but he was just redefining failure for me. Failure became about not trying, not the outcome."
Wise words to live by.
Honestly most of the time some "family motto" that a rich person says they lived by turn out to not even be real, just something they made up retroactively.
Oh really? Self made? Didn’t need factory workers and sales staff and accountants and supply chain managers? She did all that by herself? Damn, that girl’s got talent; except when it comes to playing Goofy.
I’m not sure “flunking the LSATs” is the metric by which we want to judge being a failure. It’s a notoriously difficult exam that people study for literal years to take
What? Are you thinking of the Bar exam? The LSATs are just SATs with "logic games" (which admittedly are annoying as shit) instead of math. They're the law school entry exam. Some people study harder than others but it doesn't take years--any high schooler could do it.
He must be thinking of the bar exam. I'm a lawyer and don't know anyone that studied for years for the LSAT. I studied for a month before taking it.
Even the bar...usually that's a summer of studying, although if you count all of law school as "bar prep" I guess that's years.
The average Tier 2 law student doesn't invest a thousand hours into LSAT prep, but those hyper-competitive kids aiming for HYS can often spend an entire year practicing to hit 178.
I got into multiple top 10 law schools after studying for a couple weeks. Yes people can bump their scores a bit, but I don’t think anyone who normally scores in the low 160s can get into the mid to high 170s no matter how much they study. Some people’s brains just hit the LSAT in the bullseye and some people’s don’t.
I gotta say - that’s very impressive. I’d never seen it but obviously some people might not have wanted to share that with relative strangers for fear of being labeled “not belonging”. The obvious ironic part of that is that it seems to be an unstated purpose of the LSAT to be *not* learnable to such a dramatic extent. But power to those people. I hope they did something good with it. And truthfully I’d rather have an attorney that can learn difficult and challenging things than someone who can’t (as evidenced by some of the biglaw lawyers I worked with being some - not nearly all but more than a couple - of the most inept and clueless *people* I’ve ever been around).
Edit to add: when I took it a couple decades ago, the courses at the time were advertising that the average point increase from people who took their class was something like 4-6 points (working from memory of course, but it was relatively modest while still feeling worthwhile)
A lot of people I know shot to the 170s just by shoring up their logic games performance. On my diagnostic, I think I got 2-3 questions wrong per LR and RC section but bombed LG. I took a prep class, and this was rather common. Regarding the people who climbed all the way up from far lower, yes, it took a lot of effort. There are many stories on TLS and 7Sage of people dedicating a year or two to LSAT prep.
Yep I took a fully timed practice exam cold with literally no understanding of the rules or conditions other than having answered some LR questions (which is why I took the whole thing) and got a 168 I believe. I’m talking never heard the phrase “necessary but not sufficient” in my life and deciphering it as I took it. I scored low 170s on a real one a few weeks later after 2-3 practice tests to confirm my first score.
I think I could’ve gotten a decent score as an 8th grader. It requires no prior knowledge and almost entirely revolves around a persons natural logical ability.
Its not that difficult dude. Its basically the same kind of shit that you would see on the SAT. I took it years ago as a physics major, I don't even remember why, it might have just been for kicks because someone else was taking it, and I aced it without preparing at all.
For the alone middle aged men like me who didn’t know, Spankx are underwear 🤷♂️
Edit: Spankx are not underwear. They are _[sigh]_ shapewear worn under clothes that replace your undergarments
Not underwear
Fun fact. Casey Anthony’s father would audition every year to be Goofy at Disney World. He never got the job.
Maybe funny story. I was the shortest Goofy ever approved for the role. From 97 to 01
It shouldn’t be funny to you. CLEARLY if you didn’t get that job as Goofy, you could’ve been the youngest self-made billionaire instead. Hope that costume in the hot sun was worth it.
It was the best time of my life. I also got to play Tigger.
What made it the best time for you? Was it like making kids smile or what? And why/how did it end?
It truly was, the kids were the best. Especially the Make A Wish visits. Heartbreaking and wonderful at the same time. Also we were a bunch of teenagers and 20 somethings that got to play at Disney all day. Sure the heat was miserable but the people were great. Another fun fact. I've signed more autographs than any celebrity. I also got to play Prince Charming and Prince Eric.
Kids…stand in line for a character and it’s about 75% Disney Adults and 25% kids. They will trample over a kid to meet a character.
In the summer there were 3 of us per shift. We were 20 mins on 40 mins off. So every 20 minutes the line would stop and short Goofy (me) would get replaced by a 6ft4" Goofy. No one seemed to notice.
I mean it's not Disney I don't think (maybe they bought it though who knows) but as a 32 year old the person I want to hug more than anyone in the world is Kermit the frog. He's just a standup dude and my favorite celebrity. I'd settle for a handshake and thanking him for being a big part of my childhood. Watch how adults talk about Muppets characters. They talk about them like they're real people.
Think that's a relatively new phenomenon compared to the time frame he's talking about
Oh. I had to leave in 2001 after tearing my ACL. However. It did lead me to being on Fear Factor.
Your life sounds interestingly random. What else have you been up to?!
I was a working actor for many years, was just in a movie coming out this week called Not Another Church Movie. And now I sell beds.
Well, that’s even more intriguing! Maybe you should write a book about your random experiences. David Sedaris-like. I’ve often thought about it but worried how I would go about getting name recognition. But, if your story is good enough, who knows? Anyway, I appreciate you sharing a bit of your life with me, and wish you all the best!
Thank you! I actually do want to. If I ever do I'll send you an autographed copy.
Tigger, please.
TTFN!
Hey that's his word
This comment is hilarious
How tall are you? I need to know if I had a shot.
At the time. 5'11 1/2" Goofy was a minimum of 6 ft but they gave you a half inch leeway.
Oh I'm 5' 2" nvm
You would have been a chipmunk!
That's actually kind of dope. I'd have definitely been Alvin or Theodore and enjoyed the hell out of it.
Lolol. Chip or Dale. But close enough haha
I am clearly not a Disney guy hahaha. Either chip, dale, or Quasimodo.
Hahaha. Quasi was about chipmunk height. I was considered Tigger height.
Don’t forget Clarice! If you can be the Rescue Rangers you can be Girl “Dale!”
whats considered short for goofy?
Under 6 ft. But over 5'11". So 5'11 1/2" was the minimum.
damn. How much height did the costume add?
Goofy sees out of his mouth, so almost another foot. To the hat.
that makes sense. Im the same height which is already above average so the costume makes you almost 7 feet tall which is enough to amaze the average person
Baloo or The Beast was even worse. You saw out the chest in Baloo and out the chin in Genie.
Land or world, you could a been my goofy
Land I played Bear in the Big Blue House and opened Playhouse Disney
World. I was probably your Prince Charming.
I was a young teen when my friend and I saw Friar Tuck sign an autograph. He wrote Friar F and short circuited. The pen just kept hovering above the paper for a while. He ended up just scratching it out, but to two thirteen year olds that was comedy gold. Thinking back on it, that might have been the first time a kid had asked for Friar Tuck’s autograph.
Lol. There was this kid who came up to me (Tigger) and my buddy (Goofy); I know horrible theming, but it was an impromptu Main St set. He was wearing Mickey Ears that have the person's name on it. He points to it and turns to me in costume and says "Hyuk, BJ!" I couldn't stop laughing.
Huh. Makes ya wonder. Kinda like if Hitler was a successful artist.
I don't think Casey Anthony's Dad getting the job as Goofy would have meant she wouldn't have murdered her kid.
But what if hitlers dad got the job as goofy...
Hyuk
My God, this changes *everything*
There would have been *at least* a little fuhrer over the job going to him.
Yes, there’d be heil to pay.
Spanx, I came here for eastern front humor!
Then that kid would have never been taken seriously in politics.
r/brandnewsentence
It’s me, the CIA, stay right where you are.
Maybe if he got the job in one of his younger years Casey's dad would've had a different schedule and either never met her mom or conceived on a different night creating a different baby than Casey.
See, you understood the thought exercise.
This timeline is fucked Dicks out for Harambe
Obviously he would’ve had a half dog baby instead.
AlLeGeDlY
Dang i got the goosebumps reading this
When it's written out like this it might seem very weird or even inspiring but I can tell you most college graduates get rejected from hundreds of places. Most jobs will reject like 99% of their applicants, and who knows how many of them will become the next big thing
Yes, I think it’s also worth noting that it’s impossible to become a billionaire through any normal career path regardless of how successful you are at it. Billionaires are people who have struck it extremely lucky in some kind of insane value explosion, basically the business version of the lottery. So a high proportion of them will probably be the high risk-takers that will often have a string of failures behind them (and we don’t hear about the high risk-takers that never make it big).
> and we don’t hear about the high risk-takers that never make it big This is called survivorship bias
>basically the business version of the lottery And 99% of the times you need to be at least a millionaire already, to purchase one of the tickets for this particular lottery.
Yeah, framings like this are silly. People who strike it big are sometimes talented and are always lucky. And lucky usually includes being lucky enough to be born into at least moderate but usually extreme privilege. People who are lucky and especially people who are extremely privileged spend a lot of time reimagining their success in flattering ways.
I love it when people think success of these multimillionaires/billionaires is their hard work and stick-to-it-iveness. Yeah drive/perseverance is important, but luck is far and beyond the greatest factor. Plenty go at it their entire lives and simply so ok. Having money already surely makes it infinitely easier.
Yeah, I don't mind that the myth delusionally flatters the privileged, I mind that it pacifies the less privileged away from thinking about how the system itself might be worth rejecting.
Far and away*
Not silly, it's just a variation of the American dream illusion to keep everyone busy in their hamster wheel, cuz..you know, you could be a billionaire any second now!!
For sure I bet there were 100’s of people merchant vending shape-wear she just had marketing that resonated.
The paradox of success normally relates to business people who have had a string of successful projects and then fail on their biggest project by repeating their earlier pattern of activity expecting the same success again this time as well. Since these people have been successful in their previous ventures they haven't leant the life lesson of “try, fail, try again fail better” put forward by Samuel Beckett and they may not know how to handle failure. https://youtu.be/KGNkMZtn2A4
I have what those in my field would call a dream job. Of course it took 10 years of personal training non-stop every hour outside of work hours I could find... but more importantly it took willing to put up with 'No' literally hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of times. I've been doing what I'm doing now for about 10 years. I have a folder in my email inbox that goes back to 2005 filled with hundreds and hundreds of rejection emails... and those were the ones that got back to me, that isn't even the ones who just ghosted me. I had a young guy reach out to me recently asking how I could do what I do and I asked him how many rejections he had so far. He told me he had at least 50 rejections and [I was like...](https://youtu.be/x-H1T7ny2Uw?si=vuVtq43Jpad_UcgP)
I have no issues with this lady but I feel like after the guy who paid all his employees minimum 70k got in trouble, she took his place popping up on my LinkedIn feed all the time.
What did that guy do?
He was accused of assault and rape. I believe he ended up getting charged with assault but not sure what happened. Looks like chargers were dropped but he still resigned as CEO.
What in the world does that have to do her? Because she "showed up on your LinkedIn feed?" Am I missing something?
Like I think they meant that that guy was the go-to “inspirational story” all over LinkedIn, but then after he became potentially controversial this lady became the new go-to “inspirational story” there. They aren’t connected IRL at all, it’s just that both were popular on LinkedIn. Does that make sense??
"popular on LinkedIn" is a horrible fate for anyone to meet
Yes. This makes sense.
Sounds like it was just an observation
He put out posts and TikTok videos that were the equivalent of patting himself on the back for providing livable wages for all of his employees and calling on other companies to do the same. While that is commendable the frequency and style of the posts kind of came off as an exercise in stroking his own ego and enjoying the sound of his own voice. When he resigned and subsequently stopped posting she more or less picked up where he left off and started posting similar content.
> Because she "showed up on your LinkedIn feed?" Both of them do (or did) constantly, according to their comment. Yep. > Am I missing something? Nope, you got the gist of it. Their comment made it pretty clear. Not sure what you're confused about here.
Why did he get in trouble?
Yeah what was his name again?
Dan Price
Robert Paulson
I feel like that's kind of your fault for being on *LinkedIn*....
Tbf he was also VERY prevalent on reddit too. Which is my fault for knowing the reference
For some lines of work it is necessary and/or mandatory to be on LinkedIn.
That minimum 70k thing was always a stunt. He went right back to his normal salary soon after.
What did that guy do?
It's... *not* Goofy time?!
Yeah, they went with someone with some more theme park experience.
He would have *killed* for that job.
Romulus?!
This isn’t actually all that impressive if you think about it: Bombing the LSAT - pretty common for first time test takers Lost out on Goofy job - I mean that’s gotta be a pretty competitive role as far as gigs with Disney go. Selling fax machines… I mean that just sounds like a normal job?
Right lol. “You’ll never believe that Steve Jobs worked at McDonald’s, didn’t land his role as Peter Pan in broadway, and got a C+ in geography!”
I like how that was just like the logical next step... "welp can't be a lawyer, let me try out to be Goofy"
i see it more as the story of someone lost in life who finally found their calling. which is.... everyone's story, i suppose. but it's not everyday you wake up and figure out your calling is to make spanx
>Was stuck selling fax machines for a living Can we stop this nonsense of job-shaming? It just feeds into the cycle of CEOs getting paid hundreds and thousands of times what regular employees make.. It destroys the middle class and is a direct attack on the foundations of democracy. And if you think I am overstating that, look at the dystopia of the United States where mailman and shoe salesmen could buy houses and put their kids through college. And now those kids cannot afford housing let alone buy a house. Quitting Job shaming is a change you can do now, that will affect things.
> and was stuck selling fax machines for a living. Clearly she wasn’t exactly “stuck”, though, was she
Ah the carrot of incomprehensible wealth that the ruling class uses to make you believe that one day, if you work hard enough, and grind enough, and just have a tiny bit of luck, you one day may achieve!
Most of these self made billionaire stories tend to leave out important details, and most of the time that important detail is they had rich parents that funded them, allowing them to fail over and over without ever worrying about finances. For most regular folks, one failed venture is permanent game over because they only had the funds for that one venture and nothing more.
Absolutely spot on! She was living in a 2 bedroom apartment by herself when she founded the company using a ‘loan’ from her parents.
Even if the scale of the help she got is smaller than most "self made" financial elite, it's still a lot more of a contribution than 99% of people could expect from their parents. My parents absolutely could not afford to pay my rent for a 2 bed place for months on end while I tried to "figure out my passion." That would bankrupt them. Just figured that was worth mentioning before anyone starts shouting "her parents didn't even give her THAT much."
She did an episode of How I built this with Guy Raz. Worth a listen if you haven’t heard it.
So how did she build it?
[like this](https://open.spotify.com/episode/5W20EMQbPf6yAnjAi8UBy4)
Wow. Good for her.
Great “How I built this” podcast episode on this
She also spent a month living with David Goggins
I always get him mixed up with Walton Goggins. I keep picturing Boyd Crowder walking into the room.
Stay fuckin hard
I just invented a new kind of fishing rod holder that I’m going to test out this weekend. I’m on my way up!
[удалено]
Dad is a big time lawyer, bank rolled everything.
There it is. Self made indeed.
I mean technically her father made her and that investment paid HELLA dividends, he should get the accolade. Self made, just for him lol
How much was that in dollars?
Industry connections: priceless
At least $20
I can't find an article that supports that he bankrolled everything
You should update her Wikipedia article with the info you have because it's currently sourced off this [Forbes article](https://www.forbes.com/global/2012/0326/billionaires-12-feature-united-states-spanx-sara-blakely-american-booty.html?sh=68da8ef77ea0) that doesn't mention her dad once
Forbes is pretty notorious for basically having hagiographical accounts of billionaires. I mean I don’t know the truth of this lady’s story or the involvement of her dad, but yeah according to Forbes every billionaire is essentially the Count of Monte Cristo rise from nothing
Didn’t the Counte of Monte Cristo come into his wealth just from knowing a guy?!
I guess so but he did come from literally nothing being in a prison for 17 years
Right, but the point is that he didn't gain his wealth through hard work or genius, but rather by inheritance (for lack of a better term). At best we could argue he got paid for being a companion and caretaker to his fellow prisoner.
Yup. I can't recall specifics but Forbes has been caught fudging their stories and numbers to suit their narratives a *lot* lately. If it's Forbes saying someone is a breakout self made financial elite, odds are they aren't self made and they leave out a ton of vital info to sell the story.
Do you have a source for that? Everything I can find indicates her initial funding came from savings for a prototype and then further financial support from a hosiery mill operator that she pitched the idea to.
I do, but it’s a primary source. Her dad was/is an attorney and did very well for him. Her mom was an artist. They helped her with her legal fees and patents which totalled way more than 5k that she had saved up. That doesn’t take away from the fact that she made the product and built a massively successful business that she recently sold, but saying my parents helped me get going doesn’t make for the same story once you’ve become a billionaire.
Source: trust me bro
But like this time, just trust me, bro.
Who or what is the primary source though?
.....its you dante
Source?
No, [she definitely raised money](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sara_Blakely) (sixth paragraph).
I combed through that wiki page and a lot of other news articles and I saw absolutely nothing about her getting investments from other people. Can you point me in the right direction?
Looks like article #5 is the source. That's [this one from Forbes](https://www.forbes.com/global/2012/0326/billionaires-12-feature-united-states-spanx-sara-blakely-american-booty.html). Doesn't have much more detail than the Wikipedia article, though. Single sentence, 15 paragraphs in. Article #10, the other source cited for that paragraph, seems to skip that part of the story entirely. Weird.
Ah, I see. I was expecting to see a family member or friend gave her money. I didn’t realize you were talking about the owner of the mill. Thank you.
You really discounting her now bc she was helped by the amount of $750?
Moreso because her dad is a lawyer who was able to foot the bills and invest
there’s no source for that, i’m not saying that person doesn’t know her irl but the reality is they could just be making that up
That's the eighth paragraph
She used hustle and sell SPANX from the trunk of her car to boutiques in the north Atlanta suburbs when I was in high school in the early 2000s. I worked at one and wish I quit and followed her 😭
Sarah Blakey also treats her employees extremely well. https://youtu.be/EuEcgP0TZF4?si=Tm15sReeZ8bDSH6Z
Oprah also gives gifts to her audience. Doesn't make Oprah a good person does it?
Ain't no such thing as a "self made billionaire", just someone who seemingly inherited less wealth ultimately
And how is it that I am supposed to care? What has a billionaire done for anyone else besides themselves? Whose going to answer that honestly? It's pretty depressing, considering people like this hoard wealth, while the average person can't afford their fucking groceries anymore. This shouldn't be an inspiring story at all. This should put a sour taste in everyone's mouth about late stage capitalism. The 99.9% praising the 0.1%
Word. You may get down voted for saying that, I hope you don't because you're right. Most of the time, a "self made" millionaire/billionaire story ends up being "their parents financed their numerous failed ventures until one finally succeeded." There's always some pivotal detail that publications either leave out or heavily downplay, because "their dad gave them money so they could fail over and over" isn't an inspiring story. Are there stories of lower class people truly hitting it big with no big outside influence? Sure. But they comprise maybe 5% or less of all "rags to riches" stories. And without fault, every person contained in these stories ends up the same way: some holier than thou social elite that ignores the communities they came from the moment they come into wealth. Nothing is ever contributed back to the places the came from. Money gets hoarded, the rich get richer. Nothing ever funnels back into the economy. And yet the 99% who live paycheck to paycheck will somehow still praise and worship these people and condemn the skeptics because why? They believe that their diminutive financial stature is only temporary and that if they work hard enough and praise the elite enough, *they too* will become one of those elite.
Don't really care if I get down voted really, but yes, thanks! That's what late stage capitalism especially is. A small fraction of the population hoards the majority of the wealth. It's absolute bullshit. "Well they earned it". If exploiting systems is "warning", then yes, they certainly earned it. There is no such thing as an ethical or good billionaire. 100% of the did enough to exploit. They are unethical people, period. I support small business and enterprise. No problem. But unregulated wealth is bad for everyone who isn't a billionaire.
>unregulated wealth is bad for everyone who isn't a billionaire. 100%. But that doesn't stop naive people from supporting it anyway, because they just see themselves as potential future elites who will benefit from all the financial loopholes they exploit.
Yeah, they will never get there. The "hustle" culture. It's breaking people, disabling people, driving them to early deaths, to chase a dream they have maybe %0.0001 chance of reaching.
You need to "keep the dream alive", that everybody could become a billionaire. How else would you be able to convince about 60 million US Americans that will never even make a million USD in their lives that a wealth tax for people having more than 100 million USD is against their interests?
Fuck that dream. I am tired of seeing a few people hoard the wealth. That dream never existed, and never will.
Lol "self-made" billionaire.
Growing up, my dad used to encourage my brother and me to fail," she said. "I didn't realize it at the time, but he was just redefining failure for me. Failure became about not trying, not the outcome." Wise words to live by.
This is eerily similar to that shit Elizabeth Holmes would say about her own family experience.
Honestly most of the time some "family motto" that a rich person says they lived by turn out to not even be real, just something they made up retroactively.
Never heard of Sara Blakely, Spanx or LSAT before this post. You learn something new every day.
Thats not the life story of a self made person. Someone was supporting her while she did all that ridiculous stuff
My mother wore girdles in the 70’s it’s just a reinvention.
"Self made" "Billionaire" Pick one
Billionaire pls
Same. I’ll take one “billionaire” with no Epstein island, a cool nickname, and, oh, also no pickles. Pretty please
Lawyers lie. Goofy is pretend. Spanx is a lie. I see the pattern.
Girls always be eating hot chip and lie.
You gotta find your niche
She learned what she was the best at. Calling other women fat.
I don’t know about that. Sounds like she developed them to control her own body. So she was basically calling herself fat.
[удалено]
I mean, if you want to be pedantic there's no such thing as a self made thousandaire. "We live in a society"
“Who’s goofy now bitches”
There’s no such thing as self-made billionaire.
Good for her but fuck Spanx.
Oh really? Self made? Didn’t need factory workers and sales staff and accountants and supply chain managers? She did all that by herself? Damn, that girl’s got talent; except when it comes to playing Goofy.
I’m not sure “flunking the LSATs” is the metric by which we want to judge being a failure. It’s a notoriously difficult exam that people study for literal years to take
What? Are you thinking of the Bar exam? The LSATs are just SATs with "logic games" (which admittedly are annoying as shit) instead of math. They're the law school entry exam. Some people study harder than others but it doesn't take years--any high schooler could do it.
He must be thinking of the bar exam. I'm a lawyer and don't know anyone that studied for years for the LSAT. I studied for a month before taking it. Even the bar...usually that's a summer of studying, although if you count all of law school as "bar prep" I guess that's years.
The average Tier 2 law student doesn't invest a thousand hours into LSAT prep, but those hyper-competitive kids aiming for HYS can often spend an entire year practicing to hit 178.
r/lsat is almost exclusively people trying to go T-14
I got into multiple top 10 law schools after studying for a couple weeks. Yes people can bump their scores a bit, but I don’t think anyone who normally scores in the low 160s can get into the mid to high 170s no matter how much they study. Some people’s brains just hit the LSAT in the bullseye and some people’s don’t.
I know multiple people who scored high 140s/low 150s on their diagnostic who hit 170s with prep. It’s a very learnable exam.
I gotta say - that’s very impressive. I’d never seen it but obviously some people might not have wanted to share that with relative strangers for fear of being labeled “not belonging”. The obvious ironic part of that is that it seems to be an unstated purpose of the LSAT to be *not* learnable to such a dramatic extent. But power to those people. I hope they did something good with it. And truthfully I’d rather have an attorney that can learn difficult and challenging things than someone who can’t (as evidenced by some of the biglaw lawyers I worked with being some - not nearly all but more than a couple - of the most inept and clueless *people* I’ve ever been around). Edit to add: when I took it a couple decades ago, the courses at the time were advertising that the average point increase from people who took their class was something like 4-6 points (working from memory of course, but it was relatively modest while still feeling worthwhile)
A lot of people I know shot to the 170s just by shoring up their logic games performance. On my diagnostic, I think I got 2-3 questions wrong per LR and RC section but bombed LG. I took a prep class, and this was rather common. Regarding the people who climbed all the way up from far lower, yes, it took a lot of effort. There are many stories on TLS and 7Sage of people dedicating a year or two to LSAT prep.
Yep I took a fully timed practice exam cold with literally no understanding of the rules or conditions other than having answered some LR questions (which is why I took the whole thing) and got a 168 I believe. I’m talking never heard the phrase “necessary but not sufficient” in my life and deciphering it as I took it. I scored low 170s on a real one a few weeks later after 2-3 practice tests to confirm my first score. I think I could’ve gotten a decent score as an 8th grader. It requires no prior knowledge and almost entirely revolves around a persons natural logical ability.
Also you don’t “flunk” because it’s not a pass/fail test (unlike the bar exam).
I don’t know a single person who studied years for the LSAT, and I’ve been an attorney for over a decade
Her "low point" is being gainfully employed in a sales type job millions of people work in.
I feel like most door to door salespeople probably aren’t thrilled about their job and probably aren’t exactly offended by the characterization.
People don’t study years for the LSAT. I studied 2 months and did great on it. You are definitely talking about the bar exam lol
I flunked the MCAT and everyone calls me a failure, lol
Its not that difficult dude. Its basically the same kind of shit that you would see on the SAT. I took it years ago as a physics major, I don't even remember why, it might have just been for kicks because someone else was taking it, and I aced it without preparing at all.
But do you concur?
What did you get on the SAT?
For the alone middle aged men like me who didn’t know, Spankx are underwear 🤷♂️ Edit: Spankx are not underwear. They are _[sigh]_ shapewear worn under clothes that replace your undergarments Not underwear
Not quite. They're shapewear. So they kind of suck everything in and make things look smoother.
How Victorian
Do they go over clothes?
No I get where you're coming from. They are technically speaking a kind of underwear but not really what people think when someone says underwear.
I think I see
Go noles
Self made in the title. Daddy bankrolled it all in the details.
What the fuck is Spanx and why am I intended to care?
I thought y’all hated billionaires