Ten pitfalls that trap poor people in poverty

Hi again everyone. In this post, I would like to explore a theme that has been talked about a lot on social media because of the success of Squid Game and it is of course a topic I had blogged about in the past before - social mobility. In Squid Game, the contestants compete in a a series of children's game to win a grand prize of 45.6 billion won (roughly US$38.6 million) with deadly consequences if they lose. The central theme of Squid Game is about the poor people who are left behind and invisible in a seemingly rich country - whilst Squid Game is set in South Korea, the theme is universal hence the appeal of the show across so many countries across the world. Thus I am going to explore the concept of being trapped in poverty: some of the characters in Squid Game seem to have all the odds stacked against them and feel like no matter how hard they try, they will not just be poor but be trapped in an endless cycle of debt. I apologize for some references to examples from Squid Game (but these aren't spoilers I assure you) and of course, I think you really ought to watch Squid Game. I did grow up in a poor working class family and I did witness some of my peers attain social mobility whilst others have ended up even poorer than their parents. In this post, I shall identify ten pitfalls that trap working class people in poverty: some of these pitfalls are obvious, whilst others will hopefully give you food for thought. 

Pitfall 1: Accepting defeat before the battle even begins and thus giving up. 

When you go into any kind of battle, you must get as much information as possible about everything that you're dealing with so you could prepare a strategy. But many working class people make the mistake of assuming that things are far worse than they actually are: allow me to give you an example. One of my friends (let's call him Glenn, not his real name) works in retail (ie. a lowly paid working class job). One day I plucked up the courage to ask him a blunt question: you're clearly an intelligent guy, why are you settling for a job like that when you could be achieving so much more? I asked Glenn if he had ever considered working in banking like me and his initial reaction was quite telling, he simply laughed and said, "banking is not for people like me, they'll never accept me in the banking world as I'm too working class." Here's the thing though, Glenn had never applied for a white collar job before, even though there are actually plenty of options open to non-graduates like him. It was based on the assumption that no one in banking would ever consider hiring him that he gave up before he even tried - I told him that he should at least try and if he fails, then fair enough; at least he tried and can walk away with a clear conscience. But to admit defeat before even trying? Now this goes beyond having a bad attitude: Glenn made an assumption based on his personal opinion of people in the banking world, rather than actually ask someone like me for my opinion and evaluate his chances. The opportunity was there for him to procure useful information but he foolishly ignored it, even if I was right there trying to help improve his career prospects. 

To be fair, Glenn isn't a graduate and his working class background meant that he didn't get a good education when he was young; thus there will be some career options that will be closed off to him, but nonetheless there are still other career options which actually don't require a degree. Heck, even I am working in a job today that doesn't require a degree per se - my boss doesn't even know what university I went to or if I even went to university. Mind you, I could probably write a whole blog post about lucrative career paths for non-graduates but the bottom line is that even if you don't have a degree, there are still plenty of good career paths that you could pursue - you really shouldn't condemn yourself to a lowly paid working class jobs just because you don't have a degree.  Admittedly, this may not have been an issue that Glenn has thought about in the past, I did wonder if anyone has ever challenged his career choices (I doubt his working class parents would, given that they are both stuck in dead end lowly paid jobs anyway) but he wasn't even to start a conversation about it. It is hard to start a conversation about the issue when he assumes that it is a forgone conclusion that this is a battle is just not worth fighting, he accepted defeat before even going to war - whereas it would have been far more constructive if he was at least willing to keep an open mind about the issue and simply said, "tell me please, what kind of jobs do you think I could apply for if I no longer want to work in retail then, Alex?" Why would someone like Glenn choose to take a stance of extreme pessimism, when it comes to their own career prospects then? 

Pitfall 2: Don't be defensive, never use the excuse, "it is not my fault". 

This is a common pitfall and it is a character flaw - allow me to give you an example of this. This was when I was giving my nephew an economics tutorial in preparation for his A level exams, the question we were looking at was dealing with Singapore's economy, so I talked about Lee Kuan Yew's vision for Singapore and how that was instrumental in shaping the kind of policies the government has taken. My nephew got very defensive and came up with all kinds of excuses: this can't possibly be in the syllabus, my teacher never talked about Lee Kuan Yew in the classroom. Lee Kuan Yew was prime minister in a period before he was born so this was more about the history of Singapore rather than economics and he couldn't be expected to know anything about Lee Kuan Yew. You know I never scold my nephew if he doesn't know the answer, I rarely ever get angry when I teach him but when he gets so defensive, it gets me quite angry because that's just poor attitude. He doesn't realize the difference between fault and responsibility - whilst it isn't his fault that he doesn't know anything about Lee Kuan Yew (I have already pointed out that he has truly terrible teachers at his school), it is nonetheless his responsibility to acquire the knowledge he needs to score well in his A level exams. I asked him if he was going to write the sentence, "my teacher never taught me this topic in class, so you have to give me full marks for this section as it is not my fault I don't know the answers." How he should have dealt with the situation was to simply say, "uncle Alex, you know so much about Lee Kuan Yew, could you teach me more about him?" If he had that attitude - that willingness to learn without being defensive, then as both his teacher and as his uncle, I would never get angry with him.

So just like Glenn, my nephew had also missed a vital opportunity to gain useful knowledge but instead, he foolishly ignored that opportunity and just kept on making excuses about why it was unfair to expect him to know anything about Lee Kuan Yew. On one level, this is a result of his very poor social skills - my nephew would start making excuses because he is looking at the matter entirely from his point of view rather than from my point of view or the point of view of the examiner who will eventually be marking his A level exam script. But this is a terrible attitude to adopt because you're essentially putting the responsibility on someone else to take care of the problem instead of taking the initiative to try to solve it yourself. In life, we might find ourselves at a disadvantage due to no fault of our own: in Glenn's case, he had a really tough childhood in a poor working class family and in my nephew's case, he had truly terrible teachers at school. But would making all these excuses and blaming others bring you any closer to solving the problems you're facing? Of course not. So those people who stumble into this pitfall do so because they cannot reconcile themselves with the unfairness of the situation - it wasn't their fault that they were put at a disadvantage in the first place and whilst that might be totally true, this refusal to take any responsibility to fix the situation because it wasn't their fault holds them back from finding any kind of constructive solution. So is this purely a sign of very poor social skills or a lack of emotional maturity to deal with this unfairness? Either way, this pitfall would hold many poor people back and trap them in very bad situations. 

Pitfall 3: Making biased or incomplete comparisons, ie. the massive blind spot

So if you're not going to try to fix all those problems in your life which you can't be blamed for causing then how do you feel better about your awful situation? Well you simply ignore people who are better off whilst focusing on people who are worse off. This is something my working class parents did - they weren't that poor, they were primary school teachers so they were better off than some people in our community but of course, there were plenty of people who were a lot richer such as my uncle (my father's older brother). So what did my father do to deal with the fact that he much poorer than his brother? Well he simply pretended like his rich brother didn't exist, he shoved his own brother into a massive blind spot whilst he focused his energies on gloating over his peers who were poorer than him. Whilst you may think that what my father had done is quite extreme, I did encounter a similar incident from one of my younger readers here. He made the audacious claim that train drivers today in the UK get paid more than most office workers and I had to hold him to account for that claim: after all, the starting salary for a train driver is £24,000 only and that could rise to £65,000 if you have been driving trains for 30 to 40 years. Is that figure higher than what some office workers earn? Well, it is ridiculous to treat all office workers as if they're a monolithic entity. I work in a serviced office in Mayfair where there's a lady at reception downstairs, let's call her Ava (not her real name) - if I need something for my office, I speak to her about it. So for example, I knew my conference call today was going to overrun as it started late but I had a visitor arriving at 2 pm sharp. So I told Ava that if my visitor turns up before I can finish my call, could she sit my visitor down in the waiting area, get him a cup of coffee please and let him know I am on my way? That is the kind of thing that she would help me with. 

Ava is after all, an office worker. She wears a formal outfit and comes to work in an office building, she has a desk and a computer at the reception - the work she does isn't highly skilled and  it would be safe to say that she is paid less than what most train drivers earn. But are all office workers paid the same as her? Clearly not. I'm working with people who are earning a few million pounds a month, to put things in perspective: even if a train driver can earn that maximum of £65,000 a year, it would take them 77 years to earn what my colleague 'Dave' (not his real name) can earn in just one month (which is currently about £5 million). There's simply no comparison to be made, it is not even close. Dave is in a completely different league. So whilst the train driver on £65,000 may earn more than Ava the receptionist in my office building, they are pitifully, pathetically poor compared to some of the people like Dave who work in investment banking. Why did my reader make that audacious claim that train drivers earn more than most office workers then? He clearly only included people like that office receptionist in the cohort of 'office workers' whilst conveniently shoving people like Dave and myself into his blind spot as we do not fit his simplistic narrative. Again, this is a toxic mix of a poor social skills and a character flaw: these people have a hypothesis along the lines of "hey I'm not doing too badly, look I'm actually richer than all these other poor people out there" but this only works if they shove any evidence to the contrary to a massive blind spot the size of an ocean.  Simply ignoring people who are richer and more successful than you stops you from learning their secrets of becoming rich and you are only doing yourself a massive disservice if you fall prey to this pitfall. 

Pitfall 4: Being too defensive - what is wrong with what I do?! 

The next pitfall is when people ask the wrong question: this is when they get defensive about their job. So let's use my father for an example - he spent his entire working life as a primary school teacher. Now it is very important to get very defensive about a career choice like that: what is wrong with being a primary school teacher? Education is important, somebody has to educated the next generation, teachers have to deal with children from troubled families etc - it's not hard to find a list of reasons to support the work that teachers do but the bottom line was that my father still earned a tiny fraction of what his brother earned and it wasn't the right the career choice to lift his family out of poverty. Likewise, in the case of Glenn, the shop he worked at was classified as an 'essential service' during the lockdown so he had to keep going to work everyday whilst most of us were working from home - he had been classed as an 'essential worker'. Of course, during that period, we were all applauding not just people who worked in hospitals but all essential workers who kept society functioning even at the most basic level. Oh yeah, it's easy to find loads of reasons to justify why being a primary school teacher or working in retail is a perfectly respectable job. But this is a pitfall because you're using every excuse to avoid the questions: could I be doing something else that will allow me to earn more money? What kind of career progression will I have doing this job? Am I going to be able to attain any social mobility if I stay on my current career trajectory? Am I going to be trapped in poverty if I keep on doing what I do? Am I going to be satisfied earning this kind of money 5 years from now? Or 10 years from now? And what kind of ambitions and goals do I have for my career? 

This pitfall is a case of avoiding one set of questions you don't like the answers to by answering a different set of questions that you like the answers to. So in my father's case, there's absolutely no career progression - his job remained exactly the same for 40 years and whilst the ministry of education may reward him for his loyalty with a small pay rise each year, he was never going to become rich like his brother who ran in his own business successfully and was in a position to double or even triple his earnings year on year. Confronting the questions with the inconvenient answers that you don't like will lead you to one obvious conclusion: I need to change my job, I am on the road to nowhere, I'm going to remain poor for many years to come if I don't do anything about my situation. Now let's look Glenn for example: whilst he has a dead-end job working in retail, he isn't stressed out, his job isn't difficult. He wakes up in the morning, turns up at work in the shop and his routine is fairly simple - he simply has to follow the instructions his manager gives him. Now contrast this to what I was confronted with yesterday: due to an internal reorganization, I am now taking over the training function for new brokers and so I thought, okay fine, I've sat in on the training sessions before I can do this. Then I was told the next training session we have to host is next Thursday at 10 pm and I was like, wait why 10 pm? At night? Yes, because this is for our brokers in South America and you have to do it not just in Spanish, but South American Spanish. So the thought of taking on a more stressful, demanding job can be quite daunting and scary for someone like Glenn, hence they make every excuse to justify staying in their current job and avoiding those very steep learning curves that would come with change - even if that meant missing out on vital opportunities to earn more money. 

Pitfall 5: "But I am really good at what I do!" 

Allow me to use the case study of an old friend from Singapore whom I shall refer to as Neil (not his real name). Neil has a profession and he is really good at it - he ended up on this career paths because he was following his interests and passions. However, Neil is in the 'gig economy' - that means he doesn't have any kind of financial security, he doesn't have a salary that appears in his bank account every month. Instead, he is self-employed and goes from contract to contract so if he can find enough work, then he is able to earn a decent living but during the pandemic, his work totally dried up because of the restrictions put in place in Singapore and thus Neil went nearly a year and a half without earning any money. He is in his mid-40s, living with his parents in their HDB flat and without them supporting him, Neil would literally be homeless and begging on the streets. But here's the crux of this pitfall: is Neil stupid and uneducated? No actually, he is very highly educated, he was a straight-A student who went to all the top schools before studying at NUS - so he is a graduate with the right kind of skills to do his job well. However, Neil has a massive blind spot: he chooses to ignore the fact that the demand for his expertise is very low: it has been sporadic at best. Such is the basic nature of economics: how much Neil could earn depends far more on the demand for his services rather than how good he is at his job. So even if (let's give him the benefit of the doubt) Neil is absolutely superb at his job, if there is little or no demand for his services, then not only is he going to earn very little, there could be times when he could far long periods of unemployment with zero income and face economic hardship; so this has been the case for Neil during the pandemic. 

Just to give you an idea of how ridiculous Neil's stance is, allow me to illustrate this with a hypothetical situation: many of my regular readers will know that I am tutoring my nephew to help him through his A level economics exam. I also happen to be fluent in Welsh - now imagine if I offered Singaporean students private tuition in Welsh, how much money would I be able to make? Now the answer is obvious: nothing at all because there's no demand for that service at all, nobody in Singapore is learning Welsh. However, if I were to offer something that is actually in demand like tuition for A level economics, then sure with my credentials I would at least be able to get some work. What I am explaining here isn't rocket science: I am merely responding to market demand and if I am unable to use my Welsh language skills to earn money, then that's fine. It will be something that I pursue as a hobby, for leisure purposes rather than to try to use it to make money. Likewise, I am a former national champion gymnast who is also a fully qualified gymnastics coach - I am currently volunteering with my alumni's gymnastics club as their coach so they can double the number of gymnasts training. Modesty aside, I know I am a great gymnastics coach with years of experience and plenty of passion about the sport, but I am also very realistic about how little gymnastics coaches get paid so I am once again happy to treat gymnastics as a leisure activity that I do for fun rather than something that I depend on to earn money. I don't want to make the same foolish mistake as Neil, in being totally blind to all the market forces determining how much I could earn.

Pitfall 6: The sunk cost fallacy

Let's stay with Neil for this pitfall - by the way, I am not revealing what Neil's niche area of expertise is as this is by no means a personal attack on him and I am merely using him to illustrate my point. Not only is Neil great at what he does, he has worked really hard to become one of the best experts in his field in Singapore. You could say he is a big fish in a small pond because there just aren't that many people in this niche area within Singapore. Neil has worked really hard to get to where he is today, he has invested a lot of blood, sweat and tears to gain credibility in his niche area of expertise however, this has made him susceptible to the sunk cost fallacy - this is our tendency to follow through with an endeavour because of how much we have invested into it rather than the current costs outweigh the benefits. Thus Neil stubbornly refuses to change paths on his career, even though he has faced financial ruin in the last 18 months. This is a character flaw - Neil is simply too proud to admit that he is broke, his career plans have not worked out, that he may need give up on his dreams and find a job that will at least allow him to earn some money. This unwillingness to admit that he is wrong has trapped Neil in a terrible financial predicament where he is completely dependent on his parents. Likewise, Glenn has told me something quite similar: he said that he is due a promotion after having worked so long in his current role and if he switched careers now, all his hard work would be for nothing. I tried to reason with him, what would that promotion mean? A 2.5% pay rise? What if a change in career would get you a 25% pay rise, wouldn't that be a far more attractive proposition? Would that make you so much richer instantly? Glenn stared at me with that look that said, "Aah I've not thought about it like that before." I rolled my eyes in disbelief, such is the situation with people like him.

The sunk cost fallacy is quite common when it comes to working class people trapping themselves in poverty because they simply create a narrative in their heads that makes complete sense to themselves whilst everyone looking one can only shake their heads and think, "you are so wrong." I encounter this a lot when I talk about degrees and whether it is worth spending 3 to 4 years at a university for a degree - my stance is that you can't get into a good university then better off cutting your losses and seeking alternative training than to waste 3 to 4 years at a university languishing at the wrong end of the league table for a degree not worth the paper it is printed on. Now a lot of people get extremely defensive about their bad decisions regarding their degrees and career choices because they are afraid of people judging them for their bad decisions. They then go out of their way to prove that they had made the right decision in the first place by standing by and defending that bad decision - this reminded me of the time when I was at a Japanese food fair in London with an English friend, let's call him Jake (not his real name). He claimed he loved Japanese food and when we stumbled upon some wasabi ice cream, he said, "I love Japanese ice cream." I tried to warn him not to mistake wasabi ice cream for green tea ice cream because they both look equally green, but wasabi ice cream is an acquired taste! So just to prove his point, Jake bought a wasabi ice cream, took a big bite of it and I could see that he was clearly in agony - it was not what he expected. I said to him, "you don't have to eat it if you don't like it." He then forced a smile and proclaimed, "this ice cream is really delicious!" I rolled my eyes as I watched Jake refuse to admit he was wrong and eat that whole thing. 

Pitfall 7: The fear of change 

When we change a job or a career, we face a steep learning curve - a lot of what we knew before is instantly rendered irrelevant. I faced that very situation when I changed jobs this summer. I had been with my previous company for five years and I knew everything they did inside out. Contrast that to my current situation, I need to do a training session in Spanish next Thursday and I'm so nervous about it because I am not even that confident to do the training session in English - it's not the language barrier that fazes me but rather the fact that they may ask me questions that I don't know the answer to. In the short run, I was jolted out of my comfort zone and I have had to work far harder in the last three months in this new job than I have had in a long time - however, in the long run, I know I am in a much better position to develop my career over the next five to ten years and once I get over this difficult transition period, my life at work would get easier. There was no guarantee that I would succeed in this transition period - yes, there was a possibility that I could have failed and be fired within a few months. Given that I had left my old job on bad terms, there was absolutely no looking back so I had to do whatever I could to make sure I succeeded in my new role. However, if I had not been forced out of my old job, I may have allowed this fear of change to stop me from embracing new opportunities and this is a pitfall that does affect a lot of poorer working class people. You might think some these people are already so poor that they really have little or nothing to lose by trying to embrace change, but you'll be amazed how they still fall prey to this pitfall.

So imagine if you had brought a packed lunch of just a small sandwich to work and a colleague offers to swap his lunch with you, you have no idea what is in the paper bag he is holding and for the same of the argument, you have absolutely no idea what kind of lunch this colleague would normally have. His lunch could be oh so incredibly delicious or that paper bag in his hands might be actually empty. Would you then gamble and take the chance to trade up for a better lunch or would you be risk averse and stick with what you have? Well, the decision making process in this case depends on a number of factors. Firstly, we have to consider how much you like the sandwich you had brought with you for lunch. In episode 2 of Squid Game when the contestants voted to end the game, they returned back to their miserably wretched lives in the outside world but most realized they had absolutely nothing to lose by returning to that deadly game. Secondly, your willingness to trade would depend on your previous experiences when you had to take your chance - have you been lucky in the past? Do you trust your judgment when it comes to making choices like that? Are you more risk averse or are you a gambler? Ironically, despite having little very reason to want to hold on to their current jobs, many poor people in such a situation would hesitate even if they were offered a much better opportunity. This is because they have already fallen prey to the other pitfalls as discussed in this piece and that leaves them with little confidence that they could make this successful transition to a better job. Hence this serious lack of confidence is the main cause of their fear of change - that is why people like that choose to keep their terrible jobs despite being very poor and miserable.

Pitfall 8: Accepting that poverty is the norm and invoking sour grapes.

You'll be amazed how many people don't even see this as a pitfall. Allow me to go back to Neil as an example: as you know, Neil is effectively unemployed and living with his parents in their HDB flat. They are a poor family and I found out that they can't even afford an air-conditioner - all they can afford is an electric fan and the one fan that they have is on the verge of breaking down. I told Neil that he needs to get a job in order to afford an air-conditioner for his parents and his response was, "oh it's okay, they've gotten used to the heat after so many years. Besides, they claim that air-con is bad for health as it will give them rheumatism." That's how some people actually deal with poverty - they simply get used to it because they realize it is far easier to get used to being poor than trying to earn more money to stop being so poor. This is when you would hear rhetoric like, "money can't make you happy, money can't buy you love etc." All this time, they are conveniently ignoring all the many problems caused by the lack of money in their lives. Some people will go to extraordinary lengths to convince themselves that living in poverty is actually better than having money - I remember the amount of hate mail I received when I attacked a Singaporean family with seven children despite the father earning peanuts and the mother being a housewife. One of my haters claimed that the children from rich families may have all the nice things in life but these luxuries would corrupt their minds, turn them into spoilt brats and that's a slippery slope which will turn them hedonistic; whilst the poor kids who have tasted poverty will be far more down to earth and honest people. I thought, now that's a ridiculous assumption to make: you do not wanna be rich as money corrupts your morals. 

This kind of mindset is commonly known as 'sour grapes'. For these poor people, part of accepting their poverty as the norm is demonizing rich people - they often go out of their way to seek content on social media that portrays the rich as greedy, selfish and immoral whilst in sharp contrast, they view themselves as hardworking, honest folks who are holding up the pillars of society by doing these terrible jobs that nobody else is willing to do. Quite frankly, I've been poor before, I grew up in a poor working class family in Singapore and it sucks to be poor! I'm not interested in trying to romanticize poverty or view my childhood through rose-tinted lenses about simpler times when we didn't have or want as much stuff. I can roll my eyes and say, "of course being poor sucks, what did you expect?" I do find it sad that Neil's elderly parents have given in to this mindset - they probably realize that their son will never earn enough money to even buy them that air-conditioner, so they convinced themselves that any kind of air-conditioning would make them sick with rheumatism and arthritis. That's complete bullshit of course: the underlying causes of these conditions are complex but they are not caused by the use of air-conditioning, but it is a convenient narrative they are pursuing because they would rather convince themselves that they are a very health-conscious family rather than admit that they are too poor to even afford an air-conditioner. Surely a more rational reaction is to turn this into a motivation to want to work harder, to earn a lot more money to get out of poverty -rather than find ways to convince yourself that it is normal and okay to live in poverty. 

Pitfall 9: Having too many children 

I don't have any issues with people having many children as long as they are in a position to provide for their children. I do have an issue with poor people who go on to have many children despite being too poor to take care of their own children, thus condemning their children to a really difficult childhood. Such parents are irresponsible because they then expect someone else like the government to step in and help provide for their children. If you're poor and struggling to make ends meet, then it doesn't take a genius to explain to you that this is really not a good time to have a baby. I have just seen a BBC report on how the poor in Mauritania are affected by climate change and good grief, this man Sidi Fadoua who had to leave his village to find work in the city - he lived in abject poverty in a little village but yet he had several children (I counted at least four seen in the footage). He barely earned enough  working at the local mine money to feed himself, yet somehow he was convinced that it was a good time to have loads of children? What kind of awful childhood are those children having and how much money could he possibly earn to pay for their education? These children would suffer so much hardship and would be battling against the odds to access social mobility - if Fadoua had delayed starting a family until he managed to find secure employment, then at least he would be able to provide his firstborn with a much better education, thus boosting that child's chances at succeeding in life. But no, he chooses to trap not just himself but the next generation in a vicious cycle of poverty so I find his decision both irresponsible and immoral. 

My reader Amanda once questioned me if such children were seen as a source of labour in these poorer African societies where many people were farmers, so the children could be helping out on the farm, doing various chores as soon as they were old enough to walk around and carry a bucket of water. That would at least indicate some level of logic and planning when it comes to the matter of when to have children and considering the purpose of the children. Sidi Fadoua lived in the desert, he worked at the local salt mine - his family were not involved in agriculture because nothing grows in the hot, dry desert. His wife is a housewife caring for their many young children, so she's not even in a position to work to help contribute to the household income no matter how poor they became. There was totally no economic incentive for them to any have children at all because they would only plunge Fadoua and his wife deeper and deeper into poverty yet somehow they still insist on having many children. I'm not saying that it is impossible for working class kids to escape poverty and attain social mobility - I am one such example but people like me have to triumph against the odds. It's like playing poker: you get the cards you are dealt, it is not impossible to win with a bad hand but it is hard to lose when you have been dealt a good hand. Thus your odds of succeeding in life are already determined before you draw your very first breath at birth - your parents' income and the number of siblings you have will play a major factor in your chances to succeed in life and if you have had a terrible childhood because of your parents' very stupid mistakes, then why would you want to repeat that very same mistake and make the next generation suffer that same terrible fate? 

I may have used a rather extreme example in Mauritania but even in richer countries like the UK and Singapore, we still see poor parents having many children when they are totally unable to provide for these children. It costs a lot to educate a child and poor people often turn to the state for help but this is a lottery: in my case, I was lucky to get not just one but three scholarships as I fit the narrative of the kind of hardship case that needed help. I was poor but I was both academically gifted and brilliant at sports. Oh I was a classic example of "the deserving poor". However, what if I was not a straight-A student, what if I had churned out a mix of Bs and Cs at my exams? Well that wouldn't have meant that I was (for want of a better word) plain stupid? But no, stupid students flunk their exams and get Fs, in contrast a student who gets Bs and Cs is probably considered average or even slightly above average compared to the rest of the cohort. Actually students like that could probably achieve the grades they need to get into top universities if their parents could pay for private tuition or send them to expensive private schools where they have a much better student-teacher ratio but of course, if their parents are poor than such expensive options are simply out of the question. The playing field is not level of course, thus the students who tend to do well either have super rich parents who can provide for all their children's educational needs or wiser but poor parents who are willing to channel all their resources into the education of their only child to make darn sure that this child will succeed. I'm an exception to the rule - people like me are supposed to fail in this system and remain as poor as my parents because they were working class parents who had three children.

Pitfall 10: "I am just unlucky, I blame my luck." 

In Squid Game, we saw how the protagonist Seong Gi-Hun was addicted to gambling. In episode 1, the moment he got his hands on some cash, his first instinct was to try to multiply that through gambling. I remember when I was walking through the casinos in Macau, one of the most popular games there was Cee-Lo (otherwise known in Chinese as 三六豹子) - the concept of the game is super simple. There are three dice rolled each round and you simply bet on the outcome - there's no skill involved, it is purely a game of luck. Even if you're some kind of brilliant mathematician with a good understanding of probability, you still have absolutely no influence over the outcome - the outcome of each roll of the dice is totally random. I actually stood there and watched this old Chinese guy lose a lot of money, he then stood up and cursed loudly the fact that he had really terrible luck that day. Why would someone trust a game where the outcome is totally random with real money then? My calculated guess is that if you worked a terrible dead-end job earning peanuts, then you're never going to get rich working in a supermarket when you're barely paid the minimum wage. However, if like me, you are a highly skilled expert and are able to command a very high salary, then you would think twice about playing a game like Cee-Lo. But for a very poor working class person, I can see how playing a game like that might actually be his best bet to make a lot of money in a short space of time if he happens to have a lot of good luck. The problem is when such poor people chalk everything down to luck and forget that they actually have some control over the outcomes.

How much money we earn, how much success we have in our careers should never be something left to chance. I accept that of course, chance plays a huge part - however, when things do go wrong, if you were to merely blame it on bad luck then you're not taking any responsibility for your errors. Taking this stance would mean that you're playing the part of the innocent blameless victim who has done nothing wrong - you've merely suffered a stroke of bad luck. But even if there was an element of bad luck involved, surely one has little to lose if you were to then say at least to yourself, "okay, so where did I go wrong? What can I learn from this failure so as I may avoid making this mistake in the future?" Placing way too much emphasis on luck also distorts the picture when it comes to looking at successful people. I have talked a lot about my colleague 'Dave' (not his real name) who earns an insane amount of money at 23 years old. Is he merely lucky? To some extent, Dave is lucky - he has rich parents, he is naturally intelligent, he has loads of business acumen but to chalk his success up to good luck is somewhat dismissive and ignores all the other things that he has done right in order to become as successful as he is today. Dave didn't simply win the lottery nor was he merely given a big pot of money by his parents - he is rich today as he is earning a lot of money by being absolutely brilliant at his job and to simply dismiss all that as a whole lot of 'good luck' ignores the precious lessons we can learn from someone like that. However, a lot of poor working class people would simply look at Dave and say, "he's so lucky, the reason why I'm not as rich as him because I don't have his kind of luck." You can't wait for good luck to come your way, you have got to make your own luck. You need luck to win the lottery, you need brains to do what Dave does - therein lies the difference.

So there you go, that's it from me on this issue - what do you think? Have you ever met anyone like the characters I had mentioned in this piece like Glenn, Neil and his parents? Are there other pitfalls that I have yet to cover? How many of these pitfalls are you personally guilty of? I must admit, I am guilty of at least half of them, so it's not a death sentence if you have fallen prey to some of these. But that's the thing, life is not like Squid Game - nobody is going to come and shoot you in the head the moment you make a mistake, you're not going to crash through a glass panel on a bridge and plummet to your death the moment you make a poor decision. The key thing is to be able to learn from your mistakes and become a better person - therein lies the difference as to why some poor people are perpetually stuck in poverty for a life time whilst others do manage to attain social mobility. Please leave a comment below and many thanks for reading.