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How to get rich without getting lucky (2018)

nav.al

181–190 of 193 posts

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

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 repe…

The article is really long so I could easily pick advice that I was uninformed social commentary(the first couple), good but not novel(don't spend money), not actionable(8. Give Society What It Doesn’t Know How to Get), or I'm not convinced is right and I don't he think's he done any research on(equity is a better to pursue than money).

I thought "27. Set an Aspirational Hourly Rate" was particularly interesting, somewhat actionable, and I hadn't seen before.

But maybe it would easier if you told me the key insights you gleamed from the article that were novel(somewhat), actionable, and right.

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

#182
post #63

I agree with a lot of his points, and I would do well to embrace them. When he gets into diving people into “makers or takers” that’s an arrogant and ugly way to look at the world. Because “taker” has a perjorative element. People are not one thing. Maybe I’m biased by living in the US but most people I know try to be a positive member of society, even if they lack wealth. Perhaps you could apply the “taker” label to…

Maybe you missed the part where he defines takers. Here's the part : >Then there are people who come along with a sword, or a gun, or taxes, or crony capitalism, or Communism, or what have you. There’s all these different methods to steal.

I know its frowned upon to ask why you are being downvoted, but honestly I would like some feedback on why the comment is being downvoted. The commenter I was replying to, it seemed to me had missed the part and so was forming an opinion on what they think a "taker" is. In the article, you will find that he defines takers the very next paragraph after he uses the word takers. In the Joe Rogan podcast, infact he elaborates on this.

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

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 repe…

The article is really long so I could easily pick advice that I was uninformed social commentary(the first couple), good but not novel(don't spend money), not actionable(8. Give Society What It Doesn’t Know How to Get), or I'm not convinced is right and I don't he think's he done any research on(equity is a better to pursue than money). I thought "27. Set an Aspirational Hourly Rate" was particularly interesting, som…

Thanks for sharing your perspective here.

I think it reveals that each of us has different expectations when reading something like this. I don't read this kind of thing needing/expecting it to be completely right or wrong (I mean, if you already had a settled opinion on that, you wouldn't need to read it/think about it to start with), or "actionable" (which seems to be a euphemism for needing precise instructions, which is never possible with general principles, in which context will greatly influence the optimal application of those principles).

I'll just read something like this and consider whether it aligns with what the writer has done in their own life (this seems to be true), and whether it has led to positive outcomes (this seems to be true), whether other people who have lived by similar principles have achieved comparably good outcomes (this also seems to be true). For what it's worth, it also broadly rings true of my own life, of having spent the earlier part of my adult life not living by these principles and getting bad results, then embracing some of these principles (having come across these ideas from several other people including Nassim Taleb, well before Naval articulated them), and getting much better results.

I don't see anything in here that needs to be strongly agreed with or disagreed with. People can think about them and take them or leave them, given their own situation.

I find it interesting that the root commenter to this subthread, whose comment you strongly endorsed, said they used to "follow that guy religiously" but now see him as "a huge hack... Almost a complete parody of Silicon Valley." That just looks like a pendulum-swing from one unhealthy extreme to another, and places far too much importance on any one individual's perspective. (It's also flawed, given that much of Naval's career has been spent challenging the Silicon Valley establishment, by suing some of its biggest VCs and starting AngelList which democratised things for both smaller investors and founders, and that he is very vocal in expressing points of view that are starkly at odds with the Silicon Valley status quo, most notably, lately, about general AI.)

Part of me thinks it's silly to spend time debating people who see things that way, but another part of me feels it would be such a terrible shame if someone, like myself of 10-15 years ago, who could gain great benefit from reading and thinking about Naval's perspective, were to read these casually dismissive comments and be put off by them.

In response to the objections you raised:

> uninformed social commentary(the first couple)

His positions are debatable, of course, but it's false to say he’s uninformed; he's been deeply researching these topics from a young age.

> not actionable(8. Give Society What It Doesn’t Know How to Get)

It can't be ”actionable”; it's entirely context-dependent. Yet it's true of almost every hugely successful company.

> I'm not convinced is right and I don't he think's he done any research on(equity is a better to pursue than money)

From what he said on Rogan, he's been researching it since he was an early teenager, and applying it since the earliest stages of his career.

And are you asserting that people who focus on salary or hourly-rate income (including all those who aren't lucky enough to have a highly-paid job or skill) are - all else being equal - better off than people who invest in businesses that passively generate income and growth? Can you share stats or examples?

Consider, also, that the position relating to this that you've repeated several times is that it is easier to get rich by getting a job at Google than investing in a successful tech company, but this fails to acknowledge that being able to get a job at Google is highly luck-dependent (relating to location, education, inherent aptitude, job availability among many others), and the entire purpose of Naval's principles - written right into the very title, is to be able to succeed without relying on luck.

I think that's enough from me. No doubt you'll stick with whatever point of view works for you, but when you're writing comments that seek to contradict a piece like this, rather than low-effort dismissals, please try think about how you could do it in a way that is helpful to someone who is looking for pointers on how they can get better results in their life.

By all means, present an alternative point of view, but try and do it with evidence and with useful (even actionable!) alternatives, rather than just negativity.

Thanks for the discussion.

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

#184
post #11

Its not very helpful in a specific way. Little business aphorisms. Same dude with a poor argument against UBI from literally an entrepeneural perspective

How is his argument flawed? And is it intrinsically flawed because he comes from “literally an entrepreneurial perspective”? If so what should the right perspective be?

A perspective grounded in the reality of the gradience of intelligences and inginuity. Posts screams to me of an optimism bias, same dude probably thinks making a startup is hard is a myth created by the shortsighted. Not saying i have a grand perspective but the socioeconomic timeline (to come, is coming is more complex, more nuanced, and we have not yet fathomed the depths to this accelerating future yet. UBI is a reactionary utilitarian policy thats like a big net to compensate. What naval promotes is not even that.

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

#185
>> Today, I would rather be a poor person in a First World country, than be a rich person in Louis the XIV’s France.

This is bullshit and demonstrates a lack of empathy. A poor person today has no spare time at all to enjoy life. Also, the modern medical system in many developed countries is not much better at all than a few centuries ago if you're poor... The only difference is that now the poor person knows ahead of time that they're going to die of cancer because they can't afford treatment... I don't think that's a good thing.

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

#186

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…

I’m not going to dismiss this concern out of hand because I feel like it’s a good faith argument. But perhaps we can think a bit farther outside the box. Now, capital is always going to be required for economic activity to take place. Agreed. But I don’t think that whoever manages the allocation of capital needs to be compensated above and beyond what any other laborer doing an equivalently technical job needs to make. And they should be paid for the labor, not for the leverage they have as owners of capital.

How that is to be accomplished is.. complex. But that’s definitely the goal. But let’s not assume that we need some class of people who have the privilege of being the owners of capital.

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

#187
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How do you know that the people he took money from in his illegal monopoly operation wouldn't have saved more lives?

It's not even about directly taking money - the inefficiences caused by his monopoly slowed down progress for many years, which meant saving fewer lifes that would've been possible if not for MS.

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

#188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I’m not going to dismiss this concern out of hand because I feel like it’s a good faith argument. But perhaps we can think a bit farther outside the box. Now, capital is always going to be required for economic activity to take place. Agreed. But I don’t think that whoever manages the allocation of capital needs to be compensated above and beyond what any other laborer doing an equivalently technical job needs to mak…

Here's a tool that increases productivity. There are three people who need to get paid: the tool maker, the one who buys the tool, and the worker who knows how to use the tool. (The worker should be more productive with the tool, and therefore worth more than the worker who does not know how to use the tool.)

If you're saying that the one who bought the tool and the worker who uses the tool should profit equally from the tool, I might agree with that. (I'm not sure; I'd have to think about it some more, but it's not a clearly wrong position.)

Now here's someone richer than that. He buys two of the tools. If you say he should get as much as the worker for the first tool, and as much as the worker for the second tool, again I might agree. If you say he only gets as much as any one worker, no matter how many tools he buys, I disagree. I even think that you should disagree, for selfish reasons. We need these people to buy the tools for the overall growth of productivity. If we have to bribe them with returns on their investment, so be it. (The alternative is that the rich person only buys one tool, and then stops, because they would get nothing from buying the second tool. That may feel good, in that it doesn't let the rich earn more than anyone else, but it doesn't help grow the economy. And growing the economy is the only way that there's actually more for people, as opposed to simply dividing the existing pie in a different way.)

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

#189

>> Today, I would rather be a poor person in a First World country, than be a rich person in Louis the XIV’s France. This is bullshit and demonstrates a lack of empathy. A poor person today has no spare time at all to enjoy life. Also, the modern medical system in many developed countries is not much better at all than a few centuries ago if you're poor... The only difference is that now the poor person knows ahead o…

Agreed. I'm always surprised when people get away with this kind of blinkered panglossian pap.

There is simply no evidence that as a species we're happier, more secure, etc than generations past. Every advance we enjoy seems to come with a trade-off, as evidenced by the new findings about loneliness/alienation, rich-poor inequality, environmental degradation, what have you.

Even the elephant graph stuff can only talk about a time period that starts centuries after a huge amount of the world came under the yoke of colonialism.

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

#190

>> But then of course Uncle Sam show up, and basically say, “Hey, you know what, you just made a lot money this year. Therefore, you’re rich. Therefore, you’re evil and you’ve got to hand it all over to us.” 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…

> 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).

That's what taxes are for, but I'm not so sure they have to be Progressive to allow for that.

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