Forbes Magazine loves its lists and, apparently, we do too. A recent headline for one of their lists caught my eye: Self-Made Billionaires Under 30 Hit Record High. I didn’t bother clicking on the link but the headline troubled me. Does someone at Forbes really believe the individuals on their list are “self-made”? Even more disturbingly, does anyone on that list believe themselves to be “self-made”?

What a lie. What a deep and disturbing lie.

Forbes says that about 67% of billionaires world-wide are self-made, with 33% inheriting their wealth. Of course, data being data, there is always another angle on it. Another data point served up by Google says that about 37% of billionaire wealth is inherited while 60% “is derived from inherited, crony, or monopolistic sources.” Apparently the meaning of the term “self-made” is subject to some interpretation.

But the definition of self-made really doesn’t matter. Even if we define the term as a person who began life in complete poverty and is today a billionaire because they founded a massively successful business, they did not earn their wealth on there own. They did not make it all happen by sheer brilliance, force of will, and heroic effort. Any road they took was marked by many, many, people who helped make it happen and countless moments of fortune.

And the reality doesn’t stop there. Look closely at the story of any great athlete, artist, physician, musician, politician, lawyer, engineer, teacher, or saint, and you’ll find the same thing. Nobody is self-made. Nobody achieves greatness alone. Every single person was born into a set of circumstances over which they had no control, were genetically programmed with specific traits that were not chosen, raised by parents who did or didn’t do many things in their childhood, grew up amid social and cultural dynamics over which they had zero influence, and matured within schools, gyms, churches, and social circles, in which they found themselves.

We are all dealt a hand over which we had absolutely zero influence. Now, one might argue that self-made means the collection of choices an individual makes, the effort he or she sustains, and the determination with which he or she pursues his or her goals. And they would be right. The many people we admire for great achievement put in tremendous time, effort, and sacrifice, to attain whatever height they reached. But even then, it was never alone.

There is a deeply American ethos built around self-sufficiency, freedom, and grit. We’re the don’t tread on me, find a way, can-do, country that has mapped a course through history to the pinnacle of power, wealth, and dynamism. We honor our great with headlines, monuments, and adoration. Power, wealth, and fame, are nearly worshipped in a culture built upon the mystique of picking ourselves up by the bootstraps and making greatness happen by grit and resourcefulness.

We love our cult of the individual, the hero, the superstar, the unicorn. The one who came from nothing to win it all. We love it because, in America, we believe we all have the potential to achieve such greatness. Or at least a slice of it. That has always been the dream and remains so even today.

Many have argued the point of luck versus effort. In Zero to One, Peter Thiel writes that “you are not a lottery ticket.” People don’t just “win” success or achievement, it is earned through grit, determination, and choice. His point is that we have the ability to move with purpose and choose boldness over triviality, not waiting for some random spin of the dial to achieve our dreams. He’s not wrong about choice, purpose, and effort, but there’s more to it.

The American ethos of self determination, of being self-made, is a great strength, but like all strengths, tips into weakness at its extremes. The place where we begin to believe that we are completely self-sufficient. That we did it on our own. We made it happen. We don’t need anyone else.

Look at our founding. Independence couldn’t have happened without the support of France. Neither could keeping it 36 years later. All the way to today as we lead the way in the world upon a pile of debt beyond comprehension. A number so large as to be like the air we breath, we can’t see it even though we’re swimming in it. We want to believe we don’t need anyone else, can go it alone, and control our destiny, but that is simply not true.

We are fascinated by extremes. We can’t get enough of the stories of people operating at human limits. Whether they are feats of physical prowess, performances that enchant us, books and podcasts that enthrall us, scientific discoveries that astound us, projects of such size and cope that amaze us, or those with riches so great that captivate us, we watch with mixed feelings of awe, admiration, and resentment. That is unbelievable, they did or didn’t deserve it, and why not me?

The headlines will continue because we are obsessed with those edges, the people that appear there, and the falls that often accompany those flights to the heights which often accompany those who, like Icarus, flew too close to the sun. But the story of Icarus isn’t really about flying too high – it’s about the hubris of grasping, and the lie of self-sufficiency.

At the heart of those falls is typically the person who started to believe that they were self-sufficient, it was all about them, and that they had reached a point beyond the threat of falling. Isn’t that often what lies at the center of our pursuit for more? When we finally get there, we will be safely self-sufficient. We won’t need anyone nor will they be able to reach us.

As I think about those young, self-made, billionaires on the Forbes list, I hope they don’t believe it. My prayer for them is that they have the humility and self-awareness to know that their success is absolutely not self-made. The truth for most of them is that the greatest tests of their humanity are still ahead. The places where they discover that they don’t have it all figured out, they can’t do it alone, or that perhaps they weren’t chasing the right thing to begin with.

Please, celebrate success. Throw parties. Print headlines. Write books and make movies about the great achievements of great people. There are so many worthy of our admiration. But don’t lie to them, or yourself, about their self-sufficiency or level of control of their destiny. None of us get anywhere alone and whatever amount of control we think we have will never be enough to keep us safe or cocooned from the struggles of life. There is no self-made man and real freedom comes in the humility of admitting that we are not self-sufficient. Then in recognizing that we’re not supposed to be.