I classify the wannabee “successful” as in part deluded and in part collaborators. Primarily I simply define personal success not as in amassing individual wealth, but rather how you contribute to shared collective wealth. If you do that, sure I don’t have issues with a reward.
It is no longer possible for an appreciable percentage of the human species (even in powerhouse economies) to generate high incomes through achievement, hard work or success. The harder you try, the more you will move in to realms of unreasonably cutthroat competition. The more a percentage of people try, the more they will be using implicit aggression to outcompete everyone else for scarce resources. While I respect people who have ambitions and want to be creative, I reject attempts at displacement and I will seek to remove reward monetary incentive for hard work and will seek to penalize people who “are in it only for the money” by voting for high taxes for unreasonable rewards, wages and incomes.
This should all be fixed with a basic income, but I have covered this extensively in the past. We must take steps to make enabling the established elites unprofitable – I welcome people who compete with established “locked up” investment interests, i.e. hackers, crowdsourced projects, empowering projects, microtransactions and microfinancing. We must all stop enable corrupt established investments and use our democratic voice to open them up, if possible deconstruct them.
For now it is a state of emergency. The very rich should not serve as an example,