13A – Reading Reflection No. 1

1. Andrew Carnegie is a name that can many things to people; Success, brutal boss, philanthropist and many more positive and negative alike. What surprised me the most was the extent to which he did everything better than anyone else in history, constantly doing everything to an extreme that was never seen before and never seen again. I admired his relentless drive to be the best and his unshakable optimism. Even late in life after he retired he continued with is drive well into the great war. What I admired least about him was the way he treated his workers, despite being so kind to the world he did unspeakable horrors to his workers. Even going so far as to use a private security company he founded to keep his workers in line, they were practically a militia. Carnegie faced adversity as he started life very poor and rose from this poverty one of the richest men in the world all thanks to his determination and creativity.
2. Andrew Carnegie from a young age questioned everything, his inquisitive nature and drive for success is what drove him into becoming the extraordinary man he is known for being.
3. I was most confused by his reasoning behind why he believed why he could treat his workers the way he did. While he did give them a job that doesn’t give him the right to become an emperor of their lives. Additionally, his idea that poverty was a choice of those who were too lazy to do well for themselves, didn’t he remember his youth and the people who struggled everyday to make something of themselves.
4. My two questions would be how he thought through each days obstacles to get the most out of his days and wake up the next morning in the best possible footing consistently. Merely because he seemed to so from such an early age until death. My second question would be about how he would do it again in our modern world with a landscape completely different from his own. Just to see how he would think about the world he never got to see and how he would use that famous drive and questioning to make the most of it all.
5. Andrew Carnegie’s opinion of hard work is rather explicit really, whether I agree is an entirely different question. He thought that the poor were only impoverished due to their own laziness. Which I find absurd for such a smart man.  Who himself came from poverty.