Some Are Good At School, Others Are Good At Life

About

Some Are Good At School, Others Are Good At Life, alternatively ending Good In Life, is a quote used in hustle culture memes that contrasts people who are good at school and those who are good at life, implying you don't need school to be successful. The phrase is often used on entrepreneurial and motivational social media pages in image macros using an image to represent each group, most notably a 2019 image macro by the @wealth Instagram page. The phrase and meme are also used ironically to mock hustle culture.

Origin

On November 29th, 2019, entrepreneurial Instagram^[1] page @wealth posted a motivational image macro showing a man in front of a blackboard on the top half captioned "some are good at school" and a luxurious mansion on the bottom captioned "others are good in life," gaining over 20,300 likes in two years (shown below).

Spread

On April 24th, 2020, Medium^[4] writer Ayush R Pandey published a piece using the quote as a title. The article begins with the meme and expands on the idea behind it. The image was reshared and recreated (examples shown below) by numerous entrepreneurial and investment pages over the following years, often with captions encouraging discussion about the idea. It also inspired shitposts. For example, on July 26th, 2020, Instagram^[5] page yuporganic posted a version of the image replacing the bottom image with a pixelated man on a train captioned "others are good at on da train 💯‼️ fr" gaining over 15,000 likes in a year (shown below).

On December 3rd, 2020, Instagram^[2] page _adultgram_ posted a version of the meme using an image of cars on the bottom, gaining over 59,000 likes in 11 months (shown below, left). On December 24th, Facebook^[3] page Sarcasm posted a version using kids throwing hats on top and an image of Selena Gomez helping children in Africa on the bottom, gaining over 16,000 shares and 415,000 reactions in 11 months (shown below, right).

On July 31st, 2021, Instagram^[8] page shitheadsteve posted a version of the meme criticizing BP for the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, gaining over 92,000 likes in four months (shown below).

Related Memes

Chillen At The Structure

On September 9th, 2020, Instagram^[6] user penls_buttler posted an edit of the "Some Are Good At School" meme replacing the lower image with a cropping of the album cover from Kristian Olsson's^[7] album "Genfärd," released in December 2020, showing a shadowy figure with what appears to be rabbit ears standing in front of a shack in the woods. The post gained over 18,500 likes in a year (shown below). The meme received viral spread and inspired numerous variants in late 2021.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References