I’ve always liked the saying, “If it were easy, everybody would be doing it.” Sadly, the natural response to that is often, “Well, it must be nice to have… [whatever you earned that they resent your having earned].”

A successful person doesn’t just wake up to discover great achievement. Good ideas usually evolve over time and are almost always accompanied by failure and disappointment along the way. Christopher Columbus had a good idea. Unfortunately, almost nobody believed him, and he needed the moral and financial support of others to launch his mission that changed the world. It must have been exhausting and frustrating, and the years that followed were a disappointment as well. It doesn’t take away from the greatness of his idea, but it shows how great ideas don’t always lead to easy street.

There’s a crucial difference between the attitudes of successful people and people who do not succeed. Successful people take failure in stride, using it as data to figure out what’s actually right. Their failures are far less important than the success they expect. Unsuccessful people see failure as unacceptable, so they never take risks. Of course Columbus wanted to prove that Earth was round, but he also wanted to accomplish other things that he could not. If he had realized how hard it would be, he might have given up rather than persisting against unbelievable odds. His life and the lives of everyone else – even today – would probably have been very different.

Success is a combination of good ideas and hard work. For someone who believes in a great idea, working hard is not a burden. In fact, it’s part of the reward! People who are filled with resentment (the “must be nice” crowd from above) don’t understand this. They look at someone who’s successful and they think, “He or she is so lucky.” Luck had nothing to do with it, other than serving as a general term for coincidence and happenstance combined with creativity and the effort required to bring that idea to fruition. The envious person who mutters “must be nice” believes that one person is just as likely as another to achieve fame, fortune, or success. It’s therefore “unfair” when one person accomplishes more than another.

Successful people unintentionally foster envy by saying things like, “I’m very fortunate.” Did your rich relative die and leave you millions? If so, then that’s certainly fortunate. But it’s still up to you to hold on to that fortune or spend it in a way that makes you happy. Inheritances aside, most fortunes have to be created. Envious people evade the fact that most wealth is caused by an idea somebody had for which a lot of people were willing to pay. A by-product of that envy is a sanctimonious disdain for money (though he or she clearly wants money). This disdain is nothing more than resentment toward the productive efforts of others and anyone who benefits from those efforts. Envy is prevalent, destructive and irrational, and it fuels much, if not all of today’s “us against them” social and political policies.

It’s psychologically healthy to value success, its potential and actualization in yourself and others. Healthy thinkers want success to flourish everywhere; the more the merrier. Achievement is not only an end in itself, but also a value to all who benefit from it. It can inspire, comfort and profit those who are not quite so successful. Great success is special, and it’s not the norm. It doesn’t come to everyone, inclduding those who make great efforts. But that’s no reason to resent it.

Michael J. Hurd, Life’s a Beach

People cry, “My body, my choice.” Well, I say, “Your student loan, your payments.”

Transferring student debt (or ANY debt) from those who borrowed to those who did NOT borrow is SLAVERY.

Biden isn’t “forgiving” or “canceling” debt. He’s shifting the burden from those who went to school to those who didn’t. Or to those who went to school and already paid. IT’S WORST THAN TYRANNY. IT’S SHEER EVIL.

Does this mean college is now free?

Why don’t we just make EVERYTHING free and let the government pay UNLIMITED amounts for UNLIMITED goods?

From Breitbart:

Of course, it is not really “debt forgiveness.” It is a debt transfer. The loan payments that will no longer be made by debtors will effectively be picked up by taxpayers. The money borrowed to make up for the lost revenue will need to be paid for in the form of higher taxes or lower spending in the future. The canceled loans migrate from the balance sheets of the borrowers to the collective balance sheet of the U.S. taxpayer, including many who never went to college or have already paid their loans down.

One question is how the Federal Reserve will react. Very likely, it will need to offset the inflationary pressure created by Biden’s scheme with higher interest rates. This very likely means that unemployment will wind up even higher than it otherwise would have and the looming recession will cut deeper and last longer. Part of the cost of relieving ex-college students of their debt will be throwing people out of work and damaging businesses across America.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

If you care about what others think, you become their slave.

A slave blindly follows his master. If the opinion of another person — or others in general — is your master, then you might as well have no mind.

It’s worse than that. If you surrender your mind to the mind of another person, you’re giving up on reason. And rationality. And objective reality. And intelligence. Science, freedom — they both go by the wayside if you don’t think rationally, critically and independently.

It has nothing to do with level of intelligence or degrees. It has everything to do with what makes us human.

When you surrender to what “others think”, you’re giving up on everything that makes human beings — yourself, or others — civilized, decent or credible.

Ironically, the “others” to whom you surrender your views and decisions are doing the exact same thing you’re doing. It’s absurd.

Look at today’s culture. If we can all agree on one thing, it’s that culture is going down the toilet.

Culture goes down the toilet because the spokespersons for a culture — the ones who rise to the top in government, media, sports and the arts — are full of crap.

If you want a barometer of today’s culture, turn on The View. “Full of crap” is a polite term to apply to the creatures who cackle banal obscenities to millions of viewers every day, for what seems like centuries now. Yet this — and so much else — is what passes for culture in a society going down the toilet. As recently as the 1980s, it would have been a satire skit on a “Saturday Night Live” episode. Today, it’s where a lot of people get their news and opinion. It’s too hideous to contemplate for very long!

But crap only rises to the top because most people give up on reason, intelligence, rationality and the one thing that makes them possible: INDEPENDENCE.

Independence is the answer. Millions of us had a once-in-a-century opportunity to practice independence in the last couple of years, when we were told to do things that made no sense. The great majority of us — two-thirds or more — blew it.

A culture, like an individual — since a culture consists of people — must learn from its mistakes. It’s the only way to pick ourselves up, reverse from our destructive course, and become the people we’re capable of being. And NOT who most of us have recently been.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason