Hunger

Hunger is literally the only factor that matters.

I was at NC IDEA's (North Carolina's main entrepreneurial ecosystem tying together all the regional and local communities across the state) annual summit today and heard one of the last speakers on a panel about regional economic development mention that everyone should be investing in immigrant communities. I was happy someone said it out loud. The American dream said that anyone with enough patience, grit, and determination could make it.

In my opinion, patience, grit, tenacity, and all the similar traits are not inherently teachable within a curriculum*. This can devolve into the debate of nature vs. nurture very easily but regardless the best way to learn those specific traits is through lived experience, sometimes ones that you choose and others that you're forced to experience.

An immigrant making it from their home country to the States means they are already in the top percentile of luckiest, smartest, or most well-connected people in their country. Many have suffered through trials and tribulations that most people here never will. They know what it feels like to fail, and if they personally haven't yet they have seen everyone they know weeded out one by one.

All of these factors combine to form someone who truly understands the stakes. Coincidentally, those traits are exactly what the most successful people in the upper echelons of society (those who made their own way there) possess. This shows prominently when the C-suites of all your tech companies are slowly filling with immigrants. If you look at each one's journey, a large majority will end up being the top performers from whatever strata they come from while also carrying along some of the cultural norms of their home, adding flavor to a boring boardroom.

The caveat: You can only have hunger for so long until you starve. Hunger is a powerful starter motor, but it’s always answering a threat: poverty, instability, needing to prove something, not wanting to go back, etc. The people who end with full stomachs are the ones that found a way to turn their hunger into a craft, one that is sustainable and doesn't constantly require them to keep their sympathetic nervous system on high alert.

* I don’t mean hunger is unteachable; I mean it isn’t teachable through advice. It's teachable through stakes. Some people learn hunger through voluntarily choosing hard constraints i.e. inserting them in environments they aren't built for, accepting responsibilities they can't back out of, etc.