Childhood hardship alone doesn't guarantee success. The speaker argues that behavior runs on reinforcement: rewards make you repeat actions, punishments make you avoid them. As he raised his own standards, he got more rewards for working hard, which pushed him to work even harder.
People suffer during childhood. Some people are successful and some people aren't. Like, there's just as many people, or not even, way more people who have terrible childhoods and then don't do anything out of it. True. And so to point back to a terrible childhood and say, not that I had a terrible childhood, but like to tough times and say that that is why I am here. The why is really difficult and I don't think anyone can answer the question. I just know that I do these things because I've been reinforced for doing them. And so that's like the only rule or law of humanity that I see is that you're either rewarded or punished for doing the things that you've done and you either avoid things you've been punished for in the past and you keep doing things you're rewarded for. And so like, I keep working harder and harder on things because my minimum standard continues to rise, because the more I raise that minimum standard, the better the things that I have are, and the more reinforced I am for working hard on the things that I work on.
