Eh, I read it as a teenager (as a required for text for my 10th or 11th grade English class), and genuinely hated it. The philosophy is so demonstrably bullshit that it pissed me off. The idea that you can get literally anything you want just by working hard enough and wanting it bad enough is absolutely absurd.
The easiest counterexample of this is conflicting goals in equally working people, and that’s a frankly trivial counterexample that shouldn’t take anyone much time to come up with it. The much more relevant counterexample is that sometimes life isn’t fair and people get fucked over all the time by dumb luck. That was the extent of my thoughts then, and while I was an avid reader, I wasn’t exactly a savant or anything. That message getting spread to a bunch of rich white kids in a private school (myself included) didn’t do much to help my reception of it.
Eh, I read it as a teenager (as a required for text for my 10th or 11th grade English class), and genuinely hated it. The philosophy is so demonstrably bullshit that it pissed me off. The idea that you can get literally anything you want just by working hard enough and wanting it bad enough is absolutely absurd.
The easiest counterexample of this is conflicting goals in equally working people, and that’s a frankly trivial counterexample that shouldn’t take anyone much time to come up with it. The much more relevant counterexample is that sometimes life isn’t fair and people get fucked over all the time by dumb luck. That was the extent of my thoughts then, and while I was an avid reader, I wasn’t exactly a savant or anything. That message getting spread to a bunch of rich white kids in a private school (myself included) didn’t do much to help my reception of it.