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How to get rich without getting lucky

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Re: How to get rich without getting lucky

#181

Post by morgancmartin »

dnomad wrote: post #125
siberianbear wrote: post #97

I got rich in Silicon Valley from my equity compensation. I bounced around various companies and startups. Two of them were successful and had public offerings. Of those two, one was spectacularly successful. Sure, luck played a role. But my pure grit and tenacity also played a role. Taking on hard bugs and solving them played a role: I solved a lot of hard bugs that others couldn't solve. Spending Saturday afternoon…

Sorry, but it's a bit rich when people who literally won the lottery call for hard work. The reality is you got lucky. There were probably many people who worked harder than you and saved more than you who will never enjoy anything close to your success. And that's okay. All wealth is based on luck or coercion (really, just coercion). This is trivially true if you understand what wealth is: claims on the labor-time o…

Wouldn't you agree that the harder someone works, the greater their chance of becoming rich?

You seem to argue that the OP has absolutely no claim to the wealth that he has worked for and his preferable situation is due entirely to luck. This is of course preposterous and easily disproved, so I'm curious to know what your answer to this question is.

Assuming your answer is, "no, not entirely" then my follow up question would be, do you believe that his situation is due _mostly_ to luck, and only marginally to his hard work? This is a more interesting question and one I would be interested in discussing assuming it's your take on the matter.

Edit: a word

Re: How to get rich without getting lucky

#182

Post by wilsonnb »

siberianbear wrote: post #97

I got rich in Silicon Valley from my equity compensation. I bounced around various companies and startups. Two of them were successful and had public offerings. Of those two, one was spectacularly successful. Sure, luck played a role. But my pure grit and tenacity also played a role. Taking on hard bugs and solving them played a role: I solved a lot of hard bugs that others couldn't solve. Spending Saturday afternoon…

> Having some talent at hiring and managing people helped.

Luck.

> Spending my teenage years writing clever little programs in 6502 assembly language on my Commodore 64 instead of smoking weed and partying helped.

Lucky enough to grow up with access to a computer in a time when that wasn't common.

> Having a strong knack for math and computer science helped.

Luck again.

Re: How to get rich without getting lucky

#183

Post by paulsutter »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #94
hguhghuff wrote: post #85

Is Naval rich? I think the most valuable advice in getting rich is from people who are moderately rich. Advice from people who aren’t rich is stupid. Advice from billionaires seems irrelevant because their circumstances are so exceptional. How did the friend of a friend make $20million ... there’s an interesting question. I could give you advice on how to not get rich.... just make what are in hindsight a constant fl…

My guess: looking at his investment track record, Naval is probably quite rich (8-9 figures) and he spends a lot of his time dealing with other pretty rich people, both successful founders and other rich investors. Just a guess though. Edit: https://angel.co/naval Investor in Uber, Twitter, Postmates, Yammer, and about 60 others. Wouldn’t surprise me if that’s a fraction of the total. Not to mention cofounding AngelL…

Surely at least 10 figures (early investment in Uber has returned 10,000x)

Re: How to get rich without getting lucky

#184

Post by eswat »

jabbaker wrote: post #104
trevyn wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can pay people to coach you and to practice with in a low-stress environment. Interestingly, in this same way, money can also buy happiness, through happiness coaching. :)

I've been interested in finding some kind of approach to practice my social skills in a safe environment, what services offer something like that?

Already mentioned, but Meetup and its kin (Eventbrite, Facebook events) are good gateways into meetups that you’d have enough interest in that the possibility of connecting with someone you’d get along with is high.

Re: How to get rich without getting lucky

#185

Post by Someone1234 »

nojvek wrote: post #165
11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #158

The highest probability for success for the 'everyday person': - Earn as much as you can from your own work. Take a 2nd job, change to a higher paying job, ask for more responsibility and a raise at your current job, go back to school for a more lucrative degree, ... - Spend much less than you earn. Economize, share an apartment, buy an inexpensive car, shop at Trader Joe's and Costco, .... - Learn how to invest. Thi…

Health insurance is a must in US because the entire country systematically doesn’t give a shit about how inefficient it is. I guess some people make fat bucks at the expense of people’s lives. My pay + company benefit == $650/month to Anthem. I still end up paying $5000 for all pre-pregnancy costs out of pocket and the baby isn’t even here yet. In Australia it would be 10% of that, purely because they got their shit…

In the US insurance companies themselves are meant to fight to keep prices down, but right now due to a miscalculation during the creation of Obamacare ("Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act") they're incentivized to INCREASE medical costs...

Why? The 80/20 Rule ("Medical Loss Ratio" rule).

> The 80/20 Rule generally requires insurance companies to spend at least 80% of the money they take in from premiums on health care costs and quality improvement activities. The other 20% can go to administrative, overhead, and marketing costs.

Meaning insurance company executive wages can only come out of 20% of your premium, so if the CEO wants that pay increase they have to increase overall healthcare expenditure, premiums, and by extension their 20% cut.

While the 80/20 rule was a fantastic idea on paper, it changed insurance company's incentives in such a way so that premium increases are good for them.

You might be thinking "but in a competitive landscape people would just switch!" but there's nothing competitive about health insurance, people cannot even pick their own (their employer does) and most employers only offer two of the larger ones from that state.

Re: How to get rich without getting lucky

#186

Post by erjjones »

If you were to take a random room of people. Reset all of their incomes to square one. In a few years the same people that were rich to start would emerge "rich" again.

Some people are willing to be disciplined and motivated to change. While others talk without the walk.

Re: How to get rich without getting lucky

#187

Post by falcolas »

11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #158

The highest probability for success for the 'everyday person': - Earn as much as you can from your own work. Take a 2nd job, change to a higher paying job, ask for more responsibility and a raise at your current job, go back to school for a more lucrative degree, ... - Spend much less than you earn. Economize, share an apartment, buy an inexpensive car, shop at Trader Joe's and Costco, .... - Learn how to invest. Thi…

Counterpoint: Your chances of dying before "making it big" and retiring are somewhere in the 1-in-10 range. Investing works mostly because of the current trend of artificially propping up the stock market. Any failure in your investment strategy leave you in the same boat as the current boomer retirees who are trying to get back in the workforce.

Not to mention, your life is going to be pretty miserable if you're working two jobs and spending a lot of effort on living frugal. There's just something off-putting about the thought of spending decades living frugally and working yourself to the bone so you can retire and finally have fun.

The exemplar folks who advocate doing this, a'la Mr. Money Mustache, are real pieces of work too. They tend to hide the fact that they went into the process with an inheritance to fund their their nest egg and are working nearly full time in their "retirement" as paid frugal advocates.

Re: How to get rich without getting lucky

#188

Post by k__ »

Someone1234 wrote: post #176
11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #158

The highest probability for success for the 'everyday person': - Earn as much as you can from your own work. Take a 2nd job, change to a higher paying job, ask for more responsibility and a raise at your current job, go back to school for a more lucrative degree, ... - Spend much less than you earn. Economize, share an apartment, buy an inexpensive car, shop at Trader Joe's and Costco, .... - Learn how to invest. Thi…

> shop at Trader Joe's and Costco Huh? Was that trying to say save money at the supermarket? Because those are two stores I don't associate with saving money, they're stores that offer premium products at reasonable prices, but they aren't going to compete with actual discount retailers. It is just really odd examples/usage in that context...

Also, this only helps if you're living in some place where food is expensive.

Re: How to get rich without getting lucky

#189

Post by heegemcgee »

erjjones wrote: post #186

If you were to take a random room of people. Reset all of their incomes to square one. In a few years the same people that were rich to start would emerge "rich" again. Some people are willing to be disciplined and motivated to change. While others talk without the walk.

What makes you so sure? Has a study like this ever been attempted?

Re: How to get rich without getting lucky

#190

Post by gota »

tomhoward wrote: post #170
whatshisface wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is a list of reasons that "enlightened" (i.e. not scrooge) people would want to be rich: - The ability to secure the best medical care for yourself and your family in a country where this takes money to do. - The ability to walk away from abusive employment relationships without a second thought or any stress. - The ability to engage in high-level economic actions, the kind that aren't designed for your failure.…

People seem to be forgetting this one: to better the world by building or investing in new companies that do good things for their customers, employees and society, or by contributing to important non-profit causes.

We're at an the point where we shouldn't ever discuss that without explicitly adding "... minimizing the environmental damage and consumption of natural resources".

"I'll provide X" needs to be immediately though about on the terms that it will cost the planet (and everyone living in it) Y.

This is not exactly what you posted, but related: I'm not an environmental nut, I just think that this 'we create wealth' discourse more often than not ignores the fact that we're actually just borrowing quality of life from people in the future. They get to deal with bad water, worse weather, natural disasters, droughts, terrible air quality, etc. while we 'provide valuable insights to customer relations', 'maintain a pseudonymous decentralized currency' or some other obviously-not-worth-it bullshit

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