Fear of patents and lawsuits has often prevented me from pursuing an idea. It's difficult to find related work in patents, and anybody can start a lawsuit. Many patents are vague and way too general and can be used against you even if you think they're about something totally unrelated to what you're doing. I've made several attempts to start a business and it's scary exposing yourself to the public in that way. Marketing is also really difficult, you are literally competing with millions of other voices trying to get yours heard. Getting rich also often seems to require a willingness to climb on the backs of other people, to use them to their disadvantage to advantage yourself which I found I didn't want to do. Part of being a climber is pulling other people down, and that seems like a bad way to live. There are exceptions to all these, but many of them are typically encountered when starting a business. To get really rich it seems to me that you either have to inherit, be lucky, or be really mean and dirty.
Ask HN: If you're so smart how come you're not rich?
31–40 of 89 posts
Re: Ask HN: If you're so smart how come you're not rich?
#32I used to feel this way as well. Until I realized that my way of living would be no different being multi millionaire vs how much I make now, except with bigger numbers in the screen of my bank account(s).
Making millions takes a lot of hard work. I'd rather work on my hobbies.
Re: Ask HN: If you're so smart how come you're not rich?
#33Smart doesn't really get you that much. I compare it to height for a basketball player. Realistically, you're not gonna make NBA if you're not over 6' tall, but that's just the buy in. After that, it's just grueling hard work, and everyone else is 6'+ as well.
So, as a first step, count intelligence as nothing more than a (very) rough constraint on what you might possibly accomplish, but nothing more. It covers the ante, but not the hand.
Re: Ask HN: If you're so smart how come you're not rich?
#34Define rich? By most metrics I am rich, just not private jet 0.1% rich. I work at a big tech company and make >200k/yr. I have few financial worries. At this point I’m not primarily motivated by more money. Sure I’ll take it, but at this point I’d sooner spend my time and energy on other more important things. Family, friends, hobbies, etc. The financial security to focus on those things makes me feel pretty rich. Am…
For me, rich is someone who does not need to work. Someone who can retire at any given moment.
Honestly I never saw the appeal in this.
I call it the Disney princess effect - most of them are rich enough to not work, but they end up lost and drafted into things that are bigger than themselves. They end up working harder than anyone.
Maybe a rich person is someone who has enough that their priority is not personal wealth.
Also under that definition, developing nations are richer than developed nations, as developed nations have earlier retirement ages, shorter working hours, less debt, and more financial security.
Re: Ask HN: If you're so smart how come you're not rich?
#35Define rich? By most metrics I am rich, just not private jet 0.1% rich. I work at a big tech company and make >200k/yr. I have few financial worries. At this point I’m not primarily motivated by more money. Sure I’ll take it, but at this point I’d sooner spend my time and energy on other more important things. Family, friends, hobbies, etc. The financial security to focus on those things makes me feel pretty rich. Am…
For me, rich is someone who does not need to work. Someone who can retire at any given moment.
In that case, a monk, a survivalist, or even a homeless person are rich.
Re: Ask HN: If you're so smart how come you're not rich?
#36Depending on your financial situation, you could Buy an old line company and digitize it. In the US, If you can get 500k from friends and family, you can buy a $5m company with a strong balance sheet and strong cash flow. It will give you a live Petri dish to test your ideas on how to do things better.
> get 500k from friends and family
You do realize this does not apply to 99.9% of the population right?
Re: Ask HN: If you're so smart how come you're not rich?
#37I say it's luck. Marc Andreessen wrote a nice blog on this: https://pmarchive.com/luck_and_the_entrepreneur.html
People think a lot about the luck they can't control but there are plenty of ways to harvest luck.
Smart will let you do harder things with less effort. Smart lets you question yourself and what you're doing wrong.
Motion gives you luck. Meet new people, try new things. Don't just optimize for most income, but use your smartness to move faster and further than everyone else. Build 10,000 prototypes. Try new hobbies. Read bigger and thicker books. Reread the same books you have.
Being prepared gives you more luck. Some of the best discoveries were organized messes. Edison discovered the light bulb experimenting with everything - animal hair, 6000 vegetable growths, and finally got it with tungsten. Smart people tend to give up earlier and be neater.
And the last type of luck just happens to you. A friend just offers you a great job. Your first freelancing contract. Getting a hot date to ask you out first. A friend of mine made music as a full time job and worked on 3D game engines as a hobby, and got a dream job doing music for the game industry. This all seems like luck, because it's an unplanned result, but it's the overflow of hard work.
Smart people are a little obsessed with trying to link results directly to an action. To really succeed, you have to keep putting energy and focus into something, even when progress plateaus.
Re: Ask HN: If you're so smart how come you're not rich?
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do so many people view "retirement" as sitting on your ass doing nothing? It is a weird cultural stereotype, perhaps perpetuated to glorify work culture. This is probably why the term "financial independence" was coined, to break away from this misconception. Retirement/financial independence is not needing the paycheck anymore. It's owning all of your time to use how you want. There are plenty of "retired" peopl…
Yes, "sitting on your ass" was not the best way to describe what I wanted to say. I don't want to use all my time to do only what I want, I also want to make something valuable for other people.
"FIRE" people do something valuable too, totally up to their choice. I think a good example would be like ashton kutcher creating thorn.
Re: Ask HN: If you're so smart how come you're not rich?
#39I mean are you aggressively focused on pointing your intelligence in the direction of accumulating wealth?
If you are and it's not working then you probably aren't as smart as you think you are.
If that's not what you are optimizing for, be that lifestyle, or pursuit of interests, then there is no reason to expect the two to be correlated.
Re: Ask HN: If you're so smart how come you're not rich?
#40Depending on your financial situation, you could Buy an old line company and digitize it. In the US, If you can get 500k from friends and family, you can buy a $5m company with a strong balance sheet and strong cash flow. It will give you a live Petri dish to test your ideas on how to do things better.
How would you go about finding that and financing it?