But your mother also seems to be the living example of a poor person.

Er... Not quite. That work ethic proved to be quite useful for propelling her from dirt-poor subsistence farmer status (as her parents were) to enjoying certain middle-class comforts. That's why I can sit here and talk to wealthy Californian programmers in good English instead of stacking hay or feeding the chickens. As a control group of sorts, her siblings (and there were a lot of them, since we're talking about a poor family) didn't quite have the same drive, especially in the academic sense, and so they managed to raise themselves somewhere from not quite as high to not at all.

Of course, middle-class in my country is not quite the same as middle-class in the US. The median income here is way below your poverty line.

A lot of poor people with a good work ethic work in a way that's quite taxing but that's not the most effective way to spend their time to get ahead.

Yeah. That's what I warned against in the last paragraph -- I'm not that capable of saying how poor people should improve their motivation, so I described how they usually do.

I don't see where you get the notion that the kind of self-improvement you see on lesswrong is self-improvement for its own sake.

Well, nowhere. Because that's not what I believe. When I mentioned self-improvement for its own sake, I meant "self-improvement for its own sake like I wanted to do in my gap year", not "self-improvement for its own sake like all self-improvement discussed on LW is".