The buzzword “American Dream” is the origin of many dreams in the world, with an endless stream of imitators. Some of the later countries have learned the essence of the dream, while some have learned it as a joke. So, what exactly is the American dream?
Iron Man’s prototype, Elon Musk, owner of the private space company SpaceX, which just completed the first official human commercial flight on November 16, is known to everyone as a South African. His parents divorced when he was 9 years old, and he moved to Canada with his mother. His mother, Mae, who was a model, was very poor and couldn’t help him much.
He came to the U.S. at age 21 to study and started Zip2, an electronic Yellow Pages company in California with his younger brother Kimbal. His mother missed her son, but because of a lack of money, she was only able to save up enough money to visit him once every two months. The brothers were in the most dire of straits, not even having the money to pay for printing materials, so they had to wait for their mother to visit them and pay for them.
As we all know later, Musk has astonished the world with his achievements in the fields of Internet payments, new energy vehicles, and space exploration, and is forever chasing ideas that seem impossible to others. Even those who laughed at his dream of immigrating to Mars may not have dared to laugh until SpaceX’s rapid progress in the past few years.
Imagine if this single parent had stayed in his native South Africa, or Canada, where he first immigrated, could he have achieved what he has today in the United States?
There is one other person I want to talk about. Anyone involved in futures trading knows about a god of program trading, Thomas Peterffy, ranked 26th on the Forbes list of richest Americans with $17.2 billion in 2020.
A Hungarian immigrant, Peterffy was born in a basement in war-torn Budapest in 1944, and after a childhood filled with hunger, hardship and danger, he fled Soviet-torn Hungary in 1965 and arrived in New York City as a refugee, embarking on a legendary journey to Wall Street gold.
When he first arrived in New York City, Peter had no English, only $100 from his father, and the measuring manual and ruler he needed to learn engineering on his own. With hard work, learning and talent, he joined a Wall Street consulting firm in 1969 and pioneered the programmed options trading model, went out on his own in 1977, and in 2007, Interactive Brokers went public on the NASDAQ, becoming one of the largest IPOs on U.S. stock markets. It took him 42 years to turn from a refugee kid to the “father of modern trading” on Wall Street.
Of course, we don’t need to assume that we all know what it would have been like if Peter Pfei had stayed in Hungary. More than 10% of the Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans are immigrants from other countries who started from scratch. Examples include Google co-founder Brin, hedge fund magnate Soros, real estate mogul Olehnikov, and auto parts maker Shahid Khan.
For these typical representatives of the American dream, what the world praises most is not their wealth, but the process by which they went from being penniless to realizing the value of life and even the dream of mankind. This process embodies the amazing creativity of human beings released under the premise of guaranteed freedom. This is the fundamental motivation for human society to keep moving forward, to keep moving up one step after another.
Musk and Jack Ma, two of the most famous Chinese and American talking heads, had a two-horse conversation at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai in August 2019. As a result, the dialogue between the two on artificial intelligence was not at all on point, with Jack Ma talking about his interests and Musk talking about his ideals, which became an awkward exchange of chicken and duck. Jack Ma’s Internet payment, which he is proud of, is actually just following in the footsteps of PayPal.
As one of the richest people in China, Jack Ma, also from the grassroots, has more money than Musk, but why is he not regarded as the representative of the “Chinese dream”? Why is Musk still creating miracle after miracle, while Jack Ma is left with a sigh of “the horse has been convinced”?
Peter Fitzpatrick himself once explained the “American Dream” in this way: “In America, I can enjoy full freedom, and success is measured by a man’s ability and determination. It’s a treasure trove of unlimited opportunity.
His explanation is quite accurate, because many people simply interpret the American dream as a dream of getting rich. But being rich is not the essence of the American Dream.
The concept of the American dream is rooted in the Declaration of Independence, the founding document of the United States of America: “All men are created equal, and have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” During the bloody wars and revolutions of the 19th century on the European continent, the arrival of large numbers of immigrants gave birth to the concept of the American Dream, which was first clearly defined in 1931 by author James Truslow Adams in his historical book, The American Epic .
“The vision of a country where everyone can live a better, richer, and more fulfilling life, where everyone has the opportunity to achieve their goals according to their abilities.
If we use the current Chinese term, it has two meanings: first, “social class mobility”. To put it bluntly, your future status is not determined solely by your family lineage, political position, or chance, but by your individual abilities and struggles; secondly, the rights of individual freedom, knowledge, and wealth are guaranteed by law, and no one can take them away or destroy them.
Without class mobility, Musk and Pettyfer could not have started from scratch; without intellectual property rights and personal wealth protection, their genius creation could not have been sustained. Talent exists in every country, but the soil to ensure that talent can be brought into play is not available everywhere.
Therefore, the American dream is not an American dream, or a dream that can be realized by American talents, but a land called America, which provides unlimited creative possibilities for the talents who do not accept defeat and resign themselves to their fate. You don’t have to be a blood relative of the rich and powerful, or the son of a rich man, or grovel, or go along for the ride; you just have to do your best to create and strive.
If you only want to dream, and do not learn the fundamentals of making your dreams come true, then you will always have the misery of drawing a tiger and not a dog.
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