Do you hate hearing success stories?

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I remember one time when my mom made me watch a video about a guy who went from being depressed to being a motivational speaker, or something along those lines. It just made me angry. People need to drop the notion that showing a miserable person what success looks like will help them. In my experience at least, it's more likely to frustrate them, because it reinforces their belief that they're inferior and a failure. It says "look at all this happiness you could be having if you were different!"

Anyone else feel this way?

i think the intent is to show that it is indeed possible to "rise up" from whatever rut the watcher is in, and there is hope for them because that person managed to do it.

but i understand that often, it backfires. rarely do people take into account just how different our circumstances can be compared to the person in the video, he or she may have advantages we didn't have (and vice versa).

i've also experienced a reinforcement of my feeling of failure when faced with a relatively successful person, but it helps to think less about how he and i are different, and more about how similar we are. if i could talk to that person and find out areas he failed in, or still struggles in and find a common ground, it would help.

i tell myself that happiness and success don't have to be finite resources and another person's well being doesn't prevent mine (or yours).

I find the whole "happy-clappy" side of it very tiresome at times. I don't resent those people for their success per-se, but I wish they'd remember:

- That just because my diagnosis has the same name, I am NOT them, my situation, current options, personal traits etc. are as unique to me as theirs are to them.

- That "room at the top" is limited, it is simply an impossibility for everyone in society, autistic or not, to end up at the top of the pile. If 100% of us strive 100% for success and are all 100% "deserving of success" (whatever that might mean), a handful will rise up by filling "dead men' shoes", and the rest will end up exactly where they started. How would the toilets ever get cleaned otherwise?

- How many times during their progress they got lucky by being in the right place at the right time, or had contact with the right person. If it really was 100% down to their own hard work, good on them, but I suspect that is very rare.

- Access to education, healthcare, peaceful living environment etc. are very patchily shared out, even in the Western democracies. How far you have to climb depends how far up the ladder you are to begin with.

- You do NOT get returns out of everything in proportion to how much effort you put in - the world just doesn't work like that. Just because you can cherry-pick individual cases which look that way (anecdote) doesn't mean there is a general correlation, and even if there were a correlation, it wouldn't prove cause and effect (already being successful no doubt is quite a good motivator.)

- Thinking more positively may ease along certain inter-personal interactions, but it does not objectively change circumstances that are beyond our control, and it won't pay the rent.

- Maybe, just maybe, to actually offer some practical, easy to comprehend, small-steps advice about how they did it, instead of presenting it like a miracle happened (not all are this bad, but it seems very common to me.)

- Shock horror! Some of us don't even fetishise those markers of "success" the same way that most other folks do, and can't even understand why anyone would.

Note that, cynical as most of the above sounds, none of it makes a truly inspiring example impossible. But if you take away any sense of realism and pass over the problems that are in people's faces every day, you may as well just tell them to read "Cinderella" (IMHO, naturally!)

[proofreads post]
Oooh heck, I'm bitter today for some reason!

My precious lil "parents" used to compare me to my sister and other academically smart Chinese children

My sister is a medical doctor

And I have only done minimum wage type work

And I am 34

So I gave up a long time ago

Because if the definition of success is medical doctor. And failure is everything else, then why bother trying


Motivation

It more or less tells me that I am capable of doing anything I want to, and that it just takes time to achieve those goals.
Sorry you feel like this!

Sometimes those stories can be overdone and too simplistic. Formulaic motivational speeches tend to be annoying to me, but I don't dislike hearing genuine success stories. Success to me means overcoming an obstacle and doing something nobody expected. I like Denis Istomin's story for that reason.

Yeah, my mother never really wanted to talk about anything involving autism in the past, even as I was starting to accept myself for being on the spectrum. But as soon as she started seeing these TED talks done by kids with autism and all, suddenly she sees it as a great opportunity for me to collect yet another title for her, because suddenly being an activist looks like a big important thing that successful people do.

I don't measure sucess the way most people do, apparently. If you do what you love and have a little happiness, isn't that enough?

I don't hate success stories, because I am one!

Not at all, I enjoy genuine success stories.

But success stories that are really about the fact that, say, the 16 year old solo pilot flying cross-country was born rich and is flying his-daddy-the-brain-surgeon's plane? That's not success, that's privilege, and it's good to know the difference.

Success to me (from personal experience) is being an unwanted child, having to grow up in a family dominated by an abusive alcoholic father who did his level best to discourage me from ever feeling good about myself, leaving home at the age of 18 with an "I'm gonna show him" attitude, working three jobs to put myself through university, eventually earning an MSEE, enlisting in the Navy and earning an Honorable discharge (which my dad took credit for ... go figure), going on to get married and put my own wife and kids through university, and finally nearing retirement age with a good name and a "privileged" lifestyle that I can pass along to my descendants.

THAT, to me, is success!

Amen!