231–240 of 296 posts
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Getting rich is doing instead of thinking. Smart people tend to overthink to much.
No, unfortunately it's not. I know this from first hand experience. I've been doing my whole life, but the most money I ever made (by a huge margin) came from a stroke of dumb luck.
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I've noticed that a lot of successful people got there by doing things that, on the surface, don't seem to need a lot of brainpower. But, when you get to know them more, you find that they're smart. I think that very often, being smart leads someone to succeed but invisibly, so it's easy for others who don't know the whole story to attribute it to luck.
Being smart helps stack the deck in your favor, but it is neither necessary nor sufficient. Ben Carson and Steve Harvey are both rich, but I wouldn't consider either of them particularly smart.
I don't know much about Harvey, but ironically I found this article http://www.inc.com/jeff-haden/steve-harvey-success-series-ki...
>Spend time with a person who is very successful in some field or pursuit; it doesn't matter what.
After a few minutes you'll probably think, "Wait, this guy isn't any smarter than me."
After a few more minutes you'll probably think, "Hey, I'm actually smarter than he is."
Success doesn't require a high IQ or some special intangible quality that you don't have. Successful people only become "special" after they succeed; before they put in all that time and effort they were just like everyone else.
Spend time with a few successful people and you will realize you are just as capable of achieving great things.
I disagree with some of this, as above.
There's some of each, some lucky and some skilled. But I think skill plays a bigger role in the variance of similarly situated people. Luck in the sense of where you're born, how privileged your family is, etc play a larger role than luck later in life, I think.
I also consider brains a luck factor as well.
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Well... in order for you to wonder at how "biology ruled over your logical processing unit" a lot of people had to sacrifice their freedoms, before you. Don't beat yourself over it, it's such an important thing that it is equal to "being alive". And what you lose as a person, your DNA gains as a living system. DNA is such a chump. I never realized how much work it does. Every protein in our bodies is copied from DNA.…
What if you value your consciousness and the here and now more than the idea of your DNA staying alive well after you're dead? To me, my consciousness is my identity (myself). The body is just a vessel for it, and once it craps out, and takes the consciousness down with it, I couldn't care less about my DNA (a bit of a tautology, but you get the idea).
http://www.lse.ac.uk/InternationalInequalities/Videos-Podcas...
I'm probably decently smart, but I'm not rich at all. In fact I'm quite poor by most people's standards. I'm also really happy and work fewer hours per week than anyone I know. If there's one thing I worry about it's that I should be trying to be rich because I probably have the means to make that happen. I might be making 200k/yr if I worked full time. I might be able to start a successful company if I put my mind t…
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I see money as freedom. My ultimate goal is to save enough so that I don't have to work. Eventually, that will be the case, hopefully not on my deathbed. If the majority of the population thought that way, we'd have an economic collapse though, so forget what I said.
> If the majority of the population thought that way, we'd have an economic collapse though ...or a much better society.
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It depends on what you mean by "rich". If your goal is to be a billionaire, then yes, luck plays a major role. But if you simply want to get to the 99th percentile of income/wealth, that can be achieved in a pretty replicable manner. Study hard in HS -> Go to a good college -> Work your ass off for a good GPA -> go do a MBA/JD/MD/CS degree at an elite university -> get a six figure job and work your ass off. Not much…
There cannot possibly be a reliable process to get you to the 99th percentile, because by definition 99% of people won't get there. Hard work will reliably get you to the 99th percentile only in a world where only 1% of people work hard.
Yes, and that's exactly the world we live in today. Most people don't work hard enough in their teenage-years/20s to become high paying doctors/lawyers/bankers.
Most non-exceptional things depend on character. Extreme intelligence only manifests its value in areas of extreme complexity. When I hire programmers for a job I'm looking for characteristics like consistency, patience, memory, organisation skills, attention to detail, a touch of pendantry and a reasonable analytical mind. I don't actively avoid extremely intelligent people, but given the work at hand I certainly do…
Pedantry, not pendantry.
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I wish more people saw it this way. Philanthropy is the only thing driving me to amass wealth. I used to be ok with being poor and spending a lot of free time on side projects but more and more I'm becoming disgusted with myself and those around me for living selfishly when so many people around the world are in pain.
I found that there are actually relatively few people with the type of experience most of us here at HN have that work in philanthropy. I mean people with IT background, can-do attitude, consider scaling whatever you build to million or billions of people, entrepreneurial and able to pitch well for investments. If I work as a reasonably successful IT entrepreneur (I don't think I am going to be Gates, Brinn or Zucker…
edit: haha I'm dumb, just checked your profile.
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There cannot possibly be a reliable process to get you to the 99th percentile, because by definition 99% of people won't get there. Hard work will reliably get you to the 99th percentile only in a world where only 1% of people work hard.
> "Hard work will reliably get you to the 99th percentile only in a world where only 1% of people work hard." Yes, and that's exactly the world we live in today. Most people don't work hard enough in their teenage-years/20s to become high paying doctors/lawyers/bankers.