Hacker News Reader

Comment by GeriatricYouth | Hacker News Reader

> I knew I was the only poor person at my tech startup because I was afraid to seek mentorship from anyone above me, convinced that even asking would seem like bothersome begging. I watched the people around me network effortlessly, assured of favors and good words put in. I could only think in terms of what I could offer and how I could survive; they were thinking on the next level where they never had to wonder if they were good enough. They were to the business-class manner born, at least.

This one resonates very strongly with me, not sure if it's a poor-people characteristic though. It's anxiety but it may come out of the "poor person" mindset, I don't know.

From elementary school to uni, I never asked anything any teacher, or had a tutor, because they obviously have better things to do than talking with me. Like, isn't it just being polite?

View on HN

It's definitely not anything to do with being poor. It's a confidence thing and having a will to learn and improve.

Throughout life we always learn from those who are more experienced. Your seniors are there specifically for seeking guidance.

You 100% should have spoken to teachers or tutors throughout school. Their job is to teach you and many of them enjoy sharing their knowledge and seeing someone want to better themsevles by going the extra distance to seek out information outside of the classroom.

Yes, sometimes people do have more important things to do. But no one is going to say "Go away, I don't care, I'm busy". They'll say "can we schedule this for another time?" and then you plan that.

Like, one of the most enjoyable things about my job is teaching other people things that I know and I think they can benefit from. I'll always have time for someone asking me question, it's never a bother. If someone else is blocked on work because they need help then I'll drop what I'm doing to aid them.

> It's definitely not anything to do with being poor. It's a confidence thing and having a will to learn and improve.

Sure, but being poor often means "just do what you're told" in jobs, schools, etc. and definitely can lead to these kind of confidence issues.

> It's anxiety but it may come out of the "poor person" mindset, I don't know.

You make it a habit to not make yourself vulnerable to people who consider themselves "your betters". It's a tough habit to break.

See it in a different way: all of those "mentor" type people, they have valuable knowledge in their heads. They have spent years and years building it up, refining their experiences and intuition etc. etc., you have the opportunity to go and ingest as much of that knowledge as possible at relatively no time expense!

As soon as I realized this, I started obsessively drilling their heads for every little scrap (up until the point they would start being annoyed with me). It's free!

But... they’re literally there to teach you stuff. And they like you better if you show interest.

Why would you not ask the teacher stuff.

Because no-one in life has ever given you _actual_ assistance.

Wow, I didn't consider that. That's pretty sad to think that some one could end up in that situation. That's terrible.

More generally, I've noticed being reluctant to ask others to do things for me even when it's their job is an attitude I have that's hard to shake, and is probably a result of my low-ish social class upbringing. It feels rude or imposing. This extends to hiring people to clean or work on home improvement projects for me—it's hard not to want to help out when someone else is doing stuff for me, even if I'm paying them. I feel bad if I pay someone to mow my lawn. I very much doubt folks who grew up with lots of "help" around feel that way. I expect it'd be damn hard for me to run a business with employees, for similar reasons, at least until I got over the initial discomfort—it makes me feel really bad to pay someone to do something I could do myself, not just because I'm parting with money, but because it makes me feel like a lazy, rude asshole.

IME they mostly didn't know how to teach anything once someone fell off the rails of the curriculum. I quickly learned that, for whatever reason, the "normal" way things were taught didn't work for me. The people whose job it was to navigate it didn't know how to help me. I was fortunate to have parents who, despite not having much money, knew computers would be important and always kept us in a working computer and internet connection.

Even the early web in K-12 and early YouTube in tech school were more helpful because there were ways of teaching out there that worked for me, and I could find them. Math was the hardest because the teachers were mostly people who Just Got Math and didn't know how to help someone who didn't. They would get so into explaining something that they didn't hear me begging them to slow down so I could process it.

I have this issue too. As a youth I had a stutter and insecurity issues, which fell away when I realized my intellect was going to get me the hell away from the hick state I found myself. Through bravado and incredible luck, I managed to get a Harvard education - but while there nearly every single one of these insecurity issues cited in the article had a variation in my experience while attending Harvard. And after Harvard, I am barely and not really a member of the Harvard Network, primarily due to insecurity back then and being afraid to expose myself as not really being a Harvard Guy but some imposter hick.

If Harvard is anything like Oxford and Cambridge in the UK, it's not just that you didn't expose yourself, elite universities have their own stratification, between ones born rich who went to the most elite of private schools _before_ they went to university, where they likely _arrived_ with some connections already, and the ordinary public who got in through work and talent but can have anywhere from that level to absolutely nothing in terms of pre-existing connections and the learned social behaviours to then get them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com