11–20 of 193 posts
Its not very helpful in a specific way. Little business aphorisms. Same dude with a poor argument against UBI from literally an entrepeneural perspective
I used to follow that guy religiously then I realized that he knew how to hack the "attention" system on social media. He is famous for what really is little fluffy sentences that would get retweeted and make him look like a wise man with the ultimate truth about everything. Now I see him as a huge hack. Almost a complete parody of Silicon Valley.
I think that's a much better advice than any I found from a cursory read of the article; at least with my limited experience with friends. Most of my acquaitances doesn't seem sufficiently agressive with salaries -- they're mostly worried about having a job, a "good enough" pay, and that this job doesn't suck too much. That's ripe for exploitation -- if you don't actively demand and seek the best deal, you're going to be paid the minimum you can to just scrape by and definitely won't get wealthy. You don't have to own a business to be relatively wealthy (I'm taking 'wealthy' to be relative because the threshold for wealth is indeed much higher in developed countries).
Also I think being wealthy is completely beside the point; it doesn't make too much sense as an objective. The article tries to make the point for wealth being ethical; but in any case ethical are possible consequences not the accumulation of wealth. Health, general satisfaction (including from making ethical choices) are what really matter. That does necessitate some wealth, but in general any wealth threshold is not necessary nor sufficient for those prime goals.
Those two points may seem contradictory, but it's not because wealth is a non-necessary correlated variable that you should just leave it at the table. Get all you can from your employer without compromising on what matters (and hence obtaining the conveniences and securities of wealth while retaining life satisfaction).
I'm not going to venture into defining life satisfaction, but I do think it's good to ask yourself from time to time. For me it is having decent amounts of free time, being able to help people, having fun socially, producing beautiful/impactful work, etc. -- but it could include whatever you deeply enjoy.
For instance "equity is a better way to get rich than working". Is it, I bet the average googler accumulates more wealth than the average start-up founder.
Or "how much start-up success is based off luck versus founder?"(from what I've read it's more luck, and if you include the birth luck such as intelligence, energy-levels, focus and health it would be almost all luck)
Or is capitalism natural? I'm not an anthropologist but it seems like a lot of early human communities were probably not run capitalistically.
He talks a lot about risk, but a interesting article would be how to reduce the risk of "product market-fit", "having the wrong skills in your startup", "choosing the right niche to develop "specific skills"
I think the most reproducible way to achieve freedom is develop a high paying skill and save your money. Or the most direct route is develop an in-demand skill and a low cost way of living just structure your life so you have freedom.
This guy seems like someone who has done very well and assumes that the cause is because of some system of how he made choices. If that's true he could put his money where his mouth is, teach this life skill, and everyone would be fabulously wealth. And since he believes that all you need is a functioning body and brain he could admin pretty much everyone.
Wealth = freedom to do what you want. For some people with minimal lifestyles in low cost areas of the US (or living internationally) that can be $30K. I think the series does a good job covering principles such as leverage (software, capital, labour) which are rarely taught in school. Most financial planners only talk about cutting costs, not making more money, because they don't know how... this is the opposite.
Once you're wealthy, kind of :) (there are some complications and the fact that often the main limitations of doing what we want are usually not wealth, but not knowing what we'd want the most in the first place, or lacking courage/skill to pursue it)
But there's the process of getting wealthy, which can include self-restriction of freedoms...
Anyone one of his thousand claims could be an interesting article. For instance "equity is a better way to get rich than working". Is it, I bet the average googler accumulates more wealth than the average start-up founder. Or "how much start-up success is based off luck versus founder?"(from what I've read it's more luck, and if you include the birth luck such as intelligence, energy-levels, focus and health it would…
His point more specifically is that if you want to scale above a certain point the only way to achieve it is to own equity of something successful.
your average startup guy doesn't own equity of anything really successful.
I used to follow that guy religiously then I realized that he knew how to hack the "attention" system on social media. He is famous for what really is little fluffy sentences that would get retweeted and make him look like a wise man with the ultimate truth about everything. Now I see him as a huge hack. Almost a complete parody of Silicon Valley.
I think you nailed it with the term "parody" of every piece of self-help advice out there. This post reads like a buzzfeed article "21 ways to get rich". Here's a thousand soundbytes that very aren't actionable or who knows if any of them are right.
And yeah, they definitely look worse when listed off in bulk. You're probably best off picking a small handful that play to your strengths as a person and figuring out how to ruthlessly make habits of them.
The thing is -- cliché doesn't mean easy. Many clichés in both athletics and wealth building are very easy to understand on an intellectual level, but hard (for whatever reason) to put into practice for the required duration to reap the benefit. So there will always be a market for them to be remixed, repackaged, and expounded on ad infinitum[2], since the end results usually remain out of most people's grasp.
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[1] I'm not saying all clichés are universal truths, just that many universal truths have at least one expression as a cliché
[2] I'm reminded of an exchange between two affiliate marketers on Twitter:
Aff-1: "It's 2015 and people still broke"
Aff-2: "It's 2015 and people still fat"
The government doesn't tax rich people because they're evil - they tax rich people to provide food, education, and security for society. Progressive taxes are useful because they help fight poverty and allow the very poor to participate in the market (extreme inequality and the resulting poverty is regarded by most economists as a market failure).
This guy mentions the importance of education, but does he realize that K-12 education is payed for by taxes? Unfortunately, inter-generational wealth mobility in the US is quite low, much lower than in most of Europe, where taxes happen to be much more progressive. You could argue that progressive taxes lead to wealth mobility; they provide the funding for education and other services that give poor folks the means to acquire wealth.