What I gathered from this is that the author is making bad career choices and people in her family are prone to making bad choices.
She can't handle a woman laughing at her, so she decides to be a writer like her father. Seems like not growing up and having poor decision-making skills is what's stopping her upward mobility.
Buzzfeed is full of examples of this idea: I should be able to do what I want for a living because I want to do it, and it should make me upwardly mobile.
It's the standard mantra however it's not true. The reason it's not true is that there is a labor market. The labor market can be generalized as being controlled by a few variables. Those variables are significantly in greater control of those with money than those without money.
Upward mobility is possible if and only if you can provide services that are valued highly, and when some labor is valued highly then those with money who have their hands deep in the political economy try to find ways of reducing the cost by for instance lobbying the government to increase the number of people getting educated in those fields, increasing research and development to try to automate those jobs, buying more technology to reduce the cost, increasing immigration and so on.
So yes you can try to get ahead, but it's a fact that the deck is stacked against you. Those with money want to get richer and they know they do it by exploiting people by paying them as little and making as much money from whatever they produce and keep that it in their pockets rather than paying for them anything higher than the market will bear, and even then we find them colluding with each other as in the case of Apple and Google to not compete with each other lest they drive up the cost of employment.
So yes your advice is common fare, but few people get ahead and that's because the people with money always working to keep it that way... and increase the skew.
Even now they are selling the idiot masses the dreams of automation while anyone with any sense knows automation is horrible for upward mobility and a way for those with money to end class war once and for all in their favor. Yet the masses have been seduced to allow it to happen. If they were thinking logically they would be like Luddites and resist it with all that they have disposal.
But then the counter argument is that something might happen that makes the system work after all, for instance minimum income which will then be determined by continued class warfare after this battle is over, which again is on the side of those with capital, or Capitalists.
