*this may end up being a rant more than anything else and it’s just my opinion from my relatively short life.
As a post college graduate I have been trying to find any job that pays a semi living wage, with over 800 job applications on indeed and dropping off resumes and cover letters at various jobs all I’ve managed to get is a job at a vape shop working 10hrs a week and as a result have lost my apartment, 30k in debt and have to move back in with my parents. My girlfriend had the opposite experience, she got a job within a week as a hostess making 2k per week and got a contract as a trainer making an additional 60k per year.
After some deep introspection and reflection I’ve determined 3 key areas in which determine the majority of the success you may have in your early twenties. If you are great at 1/3 of those you will most likely be able to find some type of financial and mental success. If you lack any of the three you will be in for a rough ride. I personally lack all three whereas my girlfriend is great in all three areas, thus the difference in success.
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Confidence & Extroversion
If you are confident and willing to talk to people, you will be able to get into almost any job just because people will like you. Servers and bar tenders can make a bunch of money just based off of their ability to connect with others. -
Experience & Connections
If you had smart parents you made sure you worked the right jobs and they had good connections this can carry you into a high paying career and will way more valuable than a college degree.
3.Profitable Skills
If you lack in the other two areas but you have a skill like personal training, coding, accounting, design etc. you will be able to make a good living.
Being great in one of these three areas will make you have some type of success in this world, being great at all three and continuing to try and improve them in what makes wealthy people into millionaires and billionaires(aside from divorce, inheritance etc).
In my experience you can see the difference in the people who started off being great in one of those 3 areas and the people who greatly lacked in those areas but in the end still became successful. Look at someone in there twenties that became very successful through their own efforts vs someone in there 40s or 50s who finally became successful. The young successful people became great at one or more of those three areas when they were kids and teenagers whereas the older successful people did not, but they realized they were lacking and spent the next 20-30 years becoming great in those areas leading to their late, but eventual success.
Unfortunately if you did not become great when you were young by factors within your control or outside of your control like a bad upbringing or lack of good role models, it’s so much harder to become great in those areas because your brain is already done developing and in a perfect work you wouldn’t still need to develop those skills from the ground up.
Moral of the story, it is possible, it just really sucks. I completely understand not wanting to spend decades fixing things that were broken by others and developing skills you should have already had, I sure as fuck don’t. And it will probably be even more miserable in the moment than where you currently are. But the more I think about it it seems like it’s that or live the rest of my life in medium amounts misery instead of just the next decade or two of the hard work and sacrifice kinda misery and possibly reaching success.