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How to get rich without getting lucky (2018)

nav.al

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Re: How to get rich without getting lucky (2018)

#171

Post by kjsbfkjbf »

fallingfrog wrote: post #44

In other words, own productive capital and live off the rent it generates. Personally I think such capital should be owned by the workers at a business so that they don’t have parasitic individuals like the author to support. It’s nice for you if you have a lot of wealth and don’t have to work, but the rest of us pay the price of that, and only a tiny slice of society can ever live that way, for obvious reasons.

The "freedom" the article author is speaking of is the freedom to leech off the labour of others. I agree, it's disgusting. If you are willing and able there should be no free lunch -- and the rich are the ones who leech the most out of society.

Ironic that they criticize those who have worse outcomes for not working hard enough or focusing on the wrong things when it is those poor people who are working the hardest.

Re: How to get rich without getting lucky (2018)

#172

Post by kjsbfkjbf »

cryptica wrote: post #109
0x8BADF00D wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And yes, investing in a useless startup is not real investing; it's consumption; the real purpose of most startups is to bring pleasure to a rich person and their friends when the startup gets acquired, not to serve society. And yet it is the very same startups that have improved your standard of living exponentially where luxuries reserved for the rich like private chauffeur (Uber/Lyft), matchmaking (Tinder/OkCupi…

Except that I don't care about Uber, Tinder, or AirBnb. I would happily pay more for regular Taxi and regular Hotels if only I could afford what I really want; to live in my own house in a place I actually want to live in. Now because of the job market, I am forced to live to a big city where all the rich people have their toy startups and houses are too expensive. As a software engineer, I'm just an entertainer for…

There is a better argument than yours imo.

If we diverted the funding and manpower in Uber into public transportation... what happens? If we provided more affordable housing/tourist accommodations such that people did not _need_ to rent out their places in AirBnB, what happens?

The Tinder problem/solution is a weird one. It's in itself both and harmful and beneficial.

Re: How to get rich without getting lucky (2018)

#173

Post by kjsbfkjbf »

toomanyrichies wrote: post #32
notaboutdave wrote: post #17

How to get rich. What a lame life goal, and a terrible starting point for anyone trying to do good in the world.

That’s debatable at best. Bill Gates has saved countless lives through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which wouldn’t exist if not for the money he made founding MSFT. A quick Google search would reveal many similar examples as well.

https://soundcloud.com/citationsneeded/episode-45-the-not-so... https://soundcloud.com/citationsneeded/episode-46-the-not-so...

I would recommend listening to these podcasts or skimming the show notes. _Especially_ if you're in education you know Bill Gates has done good, but he's also done a LOT of bad.

Re: How to get rich without getting lucky (2018)

#174

Post by sombremesa »

GVIrish wrote: post #27
komali2 wrote: post #25

>We are the only animals in the animal kingdom that cooperate across genetic boundaries. Most animals don’t even cooperate. But when they do, they cooperate only in packs where they co-evolve together, and they share blood, so they have some shared interests. >Humans don’t have that. I can cooperate with you guys. One of you is a Serbian. The other one is a Persian by origin. And I’m Indian by origin. We have very li…

>We are the only animals in the animal kingdom that cooperate across genetic boundaries. Most animals don’t even cooperate. But when they do, they cooperate only in packs where they co-evolve together, and they share blood, so they have some shared interests. I mean, this is outright wrong. There are many species that cooperate with other species for common goals. There's many symbiotic relationships, there's cases o…

Correct, for example, many, many plants can't reproduce at all without certain insects to pollinate them - the survival of their species depends on an organism they share no 'blood' with.

Re: How to get rich without getting lucky (2018)

#175

Post by JamesBarney »

tomhoward wrote: post #124
JamesBarney wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is one path which is get really good at an in demand skill and figure out how to get paid as much as possible for it, all while spending as little as possible. Basically doing something like becoming a neurosurgeon, or investment bank, etc... This is lower risk, but you're not going to get FU rich. The other one is find a high risk high reward path like founding startups and then keep on rolling the dice. There…

As he points out in his Joe Rogan interview from yesterday, highly-skilled specialists like neurosurgeons often don't do all that well, as their income is pegged to their time spent working, and their lifestyle costs often scale linearly with their income. Of course that changes if you can break out of being an hourly-billing practitioner, and become an entrepreneur, like the dentist I know who built a successful cha…

My overall critique is it's a lot of fluff. I'm sure Naval is a very smart guy who has a lot of incredibly valuable business experience but he didn't share any of it here. He shared a bunch of not particularly useful self-help advice.

Re: How to get rich without getting lucky (2018)

#176

Post by AnimalMuppet »

GuiA wrote: post #84
PopeDotNinja wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's kind of like buying a safe. You can always improve the quality of the safe, but you can't always trust the safe is 100% foolproof. The more you have in the safe, the more you worry there's that one thing you didn't think about that prevents someone from walking away with all the money.

You can put your things in many smaller safes, and spread them around a bit!

"Divide your fortune into seven, or even into eight, for many are the mischances of the world." - Proverbs (in the Bible).

Re: How to get rich without getting lucky (2018)

#177

Post by mikeschmatz »

> What do you think society would look like in 20 years? My guess is what would happen is we would build robots, machines, software and hardware to do everything. We would all be living in massive abundance.

> We would essentially be retired, in the sense that none of us would have to work for any of the basics. We’d even have robotic nurses. We’d have machine driven hospitals. We’d have self-driving cars. We’d have farms that are 100% automated. We’d have clean energy.

Do we really need to run a thought experiment? Haven't some of it already happened to see the results? Doesn't look that rosy as this guy is describing.

Re: How to get rich without getting lucky (2018)

#178

Post by mikeschmatz »

JamesBarney wrote: post #12
warp_factor wrote: post #10

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.

The right term is "entreporn" which what this article really is.

> There’s no actual skill called business. Avoid business schools and magazines.

Proceeds giving a bunch of generic business and life lessons.

Re: How to get rich without getting lucky (2018)

#179

Post by AnimalMuppet »

fallingfrog wrote: post #44

In other words, own productive capital and live off the rent it generates. Personally I think such capital should be owned by the workers at a business so that they don’t have parasitic individuals like the author to support. It’s nice for you if you have a lot of wealth and don’t have to work, but the rest of us pay the price of that, and only a tiny slice of society can ever live that way, for obvious reasons.

Parasitic?

Here's an airline pilot. They're not being paid for the full value they produce, because some of it is going to pay of capital owners. And why should they receive some of the money? Because they put up the 70 million dollars to buy the airplane. The pilot didn't have that kind of money. And why does the plane cost that much? Because there are 150,000 people at Boeing who also want to be paid for the value that they produce.

You seem to want those with capital to invest it in companies for no return. That's... not likely to happen with the humans we have now. If you want the tools, and you or your company don't have the money to buy them yourself, then you have to make it worthwhile for the people who do have the money.

Re: How to get rich without getting lucky (2018)

#180

Post by tomhoward »

JamesBarney wrote: post #175
tomhoward wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As he points out in his Joe Rogan interview from yesterday, highly-skilled specialists like neurosurgeons often don't do all that well, as their income is pegged to their time spent working, and their lifestyle costs often scale linearly with their income. Of course that changes if you can break out of being an hourly-billing practitioner, and become an entrepreneur, like the dentist I know who built a successful cha…

My overall critique is it's a lot of fluff. I'm sure Naval is a very smart guy who has a lot of incredibly valuable business experience but he didn't share any of it here. He shared a bunch of not particularly useful self-help advice.

By “not particularly useful”, do you mean that if someone were to apply it to the greatest extent possible, it wouldn’t work (on average)?

Or just that it’s obvious?

I mean, good advice often seems obvious to the point of banality, yet is heeded and properly applied by very few.

Paul Graham has said the same thing about his advice to YC-funded founders. He’s joked he could have been replaced with a bot that just repeatedly said “make something people want” and “talk to your users”.

It sounds banal, yet so few actually do it, and the ones who have done it are the ones who have succeeded.

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