When I hear that sentence, I often want to ask what exactly “myself” means. That the person did not inherit a company? That nobody gave them their initial capital? That they made the decisions themselves and worked far more than others ever saw? All of that may be true. But between those facts and the claim that nobody helped them, there are sometimes several people whose names disappeared from the story as soon as the business started doing well.
Someone leaves a secure job and decides to try working for themselves. In the first few months, there is not enough income, costs are rising, and results are slow to arrive. Yet they manage to keep going. Years later, they will talk about how they endured a period when they earned almost nothing. They will speak of persistence, faith in their idea, and a willingness to give up security. They may leave out one perfectly ordinary fact: during that time, the bills were paid from their wife's salary.
That salary never went into the company. It was not recorded as an investment, did not buy equipment, and did not appear in the business plan. But it bought food, paid the electricity bill, and made it possible for the attempt to continue for another month. While he was thinking about how much more he could invest in the business, someone else was calculating how much had to be left for everyday life. Later, it is easy to remember the initial capital and forget the money that kept us from having to give up before that capital began producing results.
Perhaps someone else's beginning looked different. Their parents let them use an apartment, so they did not pay rent for years. A family member looked after the children while they studied and worked. A friend recommended them for their first serious job, at a time when they had little to show beyond knowledge and a willingness to try. None of that did the work for them. They still had to learn, work, make mistakes, and live up to the trust placed in them. Even so, they were given something we often stop counting later: the time and opportunity to try.
That matters to me because we find it easiest to recognise help when it has a clear monetary value. If someone transfers money to us, we know they have helped. We are much less likely to remember an expense we never had because someone else took it on. The apartment where we paid no rent eventually becomes simply the place we started from. The parent who picked up the child every day becomes part of the family routine. A partner's salary becomes something the household simply relied on. Our own work, meanwhile, remains clearly defined, visible, and remembered as the main reason for everything that followed.
I understand why people remember their own effort most vividly. They know how many nights they stayed awake, how much rejection they endured, and how often they were unsure they would succeed. Nobody else could make their decisions for them. But they do not always know what someone else gave up to make those decisions possible in the first place. Perhaps their partner postponed a career change because the family could not afford to lose both incomes. Perhaps their parents spent part of the savings they had set aside for something of their own. Their help may have been given with love, without complaint, and without any expectation of being mentioned one day. That does not make it any less significant.
I would particularly question the way we later talk about risk. A person says they put everything on the line. Perhaps they really did put a great deal at stake. But if others would also have borne the consequences of a possible failure, then the risk was not theirs alone. Someone agreed to spend shared savings. Someone accepted uncertainty, extra work, or years in which most everyday responsibilities fell to them. Success later acquires a single face, while the attempt involved a much wider circle of people.
I do not think this means we should diminish anyone's achievement. Some people have received enormous help and accomplished nothing. Others have achieved a great deal with very little support. Starting circumstances do not explain everything, just as effort alone does not explain every success. That is precisely why the whole story is worth telling. A person can be exceptionally capable and also acknowledge that someone made something possible for them that they could not have managed alone at the time. Those two facts can stand side by side without doing any harm to their dignity.
The problem begins when we start offering a shortened version of our own journey to others as a formula. “I took the risk. You can too.” “You just have to make the decision.” “A steady salary is holding you back.” Such statements sound simple until we ask what the person we are speaking to will live on if their attempt brings in nothing for the first six months. Is there another income in the household? Do they have somewhere to live? Is there someone who can take on some of their responsibilities while they try?
Some people do not lack courage. They lack the money to get through a month when the business will not yet generate an income. They may understand the opportunity in front of them very well, but they also understand what will happen to their family if things do not go as planned. When we leave the help we received out of our story, it becomes easy to interpret their caution as weakness. We begin presenting our own ability to take a risk as a character trait that others have yet to develop.
That is why I would like stories of success to include more ordinary, precise statements. Someone could say they were able to study because they did not also have to pay for an apartment. They could acknowledge that they kept the business going because the family lived on another income for several months. They could mention the person who gave them their first opportunity before they had the results they now use to demonstrate their worth. Such details are far more useful to the listener than the claim that everything depends on how badly you want something.
There is also something much more personal about this. The people who helped us may never ask to be mentioned. They may sit beside us while we talk about how we began and say nothing about the part they remember well. Their silence does not mean they did not hear the words “nobody ever gave me anything.” They can be proud of us and still feel that we have removed something of theirs from our own past.
People have every right to be proud of what they have built. They have every right to talk about their work, knowledge, and the decisions that changed their lives. But when they say they built everything themselves, it is worth remembering the period when they could not yet pay for everything they needed to keep going on their own. It is worth considering who was there then, what they took on, and how much their contribution mattered before it became clear that the attempt would succeed.
If the story of our success is honest, we should be able to tell it without discomfort in front of the people who know how we lived before we succeeded.
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