As a middle aged zoomer I remember a guest speaker in my 3rd grade classroom gave us an inspirational presentation about never giving up on your dreams or whatever and using Taylor as an example of rising to success. She showed us a photo of a little girl before revealing it was Taylor Swift when she was a child, and basically implied she was an ugly duckling who blossomed into beauty, "so you can too" or some shit

[–] vexikron@lemmy.zip 8 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I am a middle aged Millennial, and my version of that growing up was Bill Gates, with the whole started a computer lab in his garage story, as if Gates was not the child of wealthy folks who were well connected to IBM and other computing firms, who got him access to hardware that was not really publically available, funded much of his early business attempts, and more importantly, as if Gates didnt just take already existing open source UNIX code written mostly by professors for the good of the public and for research purposes, make some changes to make it proprietary and incompatible with said UNIX code, and do legal jiu jitsu to claim he owned the code so that he could profit off of other people's work, while pretending to the media and public it was all him