What really makes the US different is most of us have a second chance, a third chance... to get a good education, or to choose a profession. It took me a few detours to find my calling. In most of the rest of the world, I would have one shot and if failed in that one shot, I might have to get a job in customer service answering phone calls.
Interesting story in WP about Mary Daly, SF Fed reserve president. https://www.washingtonpost.com/busi...b9dec761e73_story.html?utm_term=.978a2abb2574 By the time she was 16, Mary C. Daly was a high school drop out in a small town outside St. Louis who believed her best option in life was to become a bus driver. ... Her journey from high school dropout to central bank leader is, in many ways, a quintessential story of grit and hard work paying off. But Daly believes she wouldn’t be where she is today if it weren’t for Betsy Bane, a mentor who told Daly to get a GED and paid for her first semester at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Bane told her, “Don’t give up just because people say nobody like you has ever done it.”