Billionaire Sam Zell: "The 1% work harder."

[Hekate]

84. Yep. I was public school all the way until grad school in my 40s...

I went to a private graduate institute and got my MA/PhD, and would not trade my educational experience for anything.

BUT, socially it was my first immersion experience among a class of people who had had money from birth. Lots of money. I cannot even begin to tell you how badly I did not understand their language. I felt unbelievably stupid.

There was only one woman who talked about "class" with me, and for the first 2 years I didn't want to believe her because it rattled my assumptions so much. She saw it very starkly -- she came from a family far poorer than mine (I was the oldest of 4 in a blue collar family; she was the 5th of 16).

And most of my colleagues in grad school were lovely people. I thought I got it -- after all, in my city you don't volunteer for any of a number of social justice issues without eventually rubbing elbows with some extremely well-off people, and I had nothing against them and their art collections.

It was the immersion experience that opened my eyes, just like you. It's another culture, another language, another world, and very different socialization from birth.