Power, authority, and the upstart

Do you ever sometimes feel as if the doors of opportunity are slammed in your face -- that the sometimes obvious and often subtle establishment wishes to control your environment, your agenda, and your perspective on what is right and wrong -- and you just wish they would get it, but of course they can't and when they try to act like you they are most definitely not there?
I sense these vibes in a circumstance I cannot openly describe in this blog-- at least now. Yet, in the strangest of paradoxes, in finding my way around this very real marketing problem, I am also a part of it.
Of course, the qualities I am describing are something of the angst of the young person, the outsider, the poor, the disenfranchised. Struggling to find acceptance socially, or perhaps desperate to survive economically -- control, authority and power seem so far away yet so near -- and everything seems manipulated in a seemingly cruel conspiracy to deny opportunity and fairness.
It is easy for someone who grew up in an upper middle class home in Vancouver, with lots of family love, to say that anyone can easily find the answer to these questions, right under our noses, but most people asking them would say, "Ha, you grew up with a silver spoon." And they would be right.
Trouble is it took me 38 years -- slightly less than half the normal life-span -- to learn this secret of life and success, from guru Brian Tracy. "I am responsible for myself," he taught me to say, over and over, even though he said it wouldn't make much sense at first.
(Today, this affirmation stuff -- part of the move to foster self-esteem in the late 1980s and early 1990s, seems badly out of date -- Tracy doesn't use this stuff any more -- but it worked for me then, and changed my life.)