Your life and career were supposed to have a steady linear timeline. Finish high school, go to college, get your degree, land your first real job, get married, work hard, get noticed, move up steadily, buy a home, start a family, get promoted into management, make more money, and so on until you eventually retired to fish and play golf.
This is the author’s “normal” slow and steady path to life which contrasts with what we talk about most now. The thing we idolize is the 28 year old millionaire (probably a tech person) that has some crazy huge company.
This person is an outlier, so why do we idolize and compare ourselves to that?
The article talks more about why this change has come about. It ends with five things to think about for those that haven’t hit millionaire status before they’re 30.