181–190 of 245 posts
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> It also disregards the type of lottery game that is a part of wealth accumulation. The article does not disregard this - luck and family wealth are the two factors they propose as causative.
In other words, luck and luck. That is, unless you know how to control what family you’re born into.
Implicit is the presumption that the smartest people optimize for wealth, or that the smartest people are good at optimizing for wealth. Outside of Wall Street, "smart" people - academics, doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc. - are just as likely to make bad personal finance decisions and/or to stay in labor (rather than management) positions for most of their careers (leave aside the dual-track IC/management ladder at…
It also disregards the type of lottery game that is a part of wealth accumulation. Of course, it is not all luck but to believe wealth accumulation is a type of purely deterministic meritocratic game without a giant stochastic factor is ridiculous. That might even be the dumbest aspect of our society. Believing the powerball lottery winner is a genius for picking the numbers they picked is obviously stupid. Yet we ba…
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Because few people are objective enough to put aside their deep emotional attachment to the notion that their particular bit of hard work and skill meant nothing without that luck. I’m wealthy now: very wealthy by any standard (mid 7-figure net worth). I came from humble beginnings (nearly homeless frequently as a youth with a single mom), but I am quite intelligent (PhD in physics) and I worked hard. I would have re…
> hard work It is not about working hard. It is about working smart, i.e. working on the right things. You choose those things, it is not luck.
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Not accounting for luck as a factor of success is one of my pet peeves. I'm reading "So good they can't ignore you" and although I'm loving it, it's also guilty of that. Cal Newport tells the story of a Clean Tech VC and how he got the job using a personal connection to VC. But then he dismisses it by saying that "such small breaks are relatively common". Why is it so hard to admit that someone success is partially d…
Luck is the particular details. Not luck is the broad arc of one's career. For example, you're not going to meet a parter sitting in your basement. You meet one by going out and interacting with people. The particular partner you wind up with is luck, but finding someone compatible is not. I.e. the trick is to enable luck to find you . At some point, it becomes inevitable. For another example, stock investing. You ca…
People like stories of people who bet it all on black and win, though, so they think that's the model for success. Really, the way to win is just to not lose.
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Let’s start with you have to grow up in an environment where you can the rules of the game, generally by watching others. If you know how to “hard work” yourself into growing up right, I’d like to know how.
> I’d like to know how 1. stay in school 2. pay attention in school 3. go to college 4. don't do drugs 5. don't do crimes This is a solid ticket for anyone wishing to get into the middle class.
6. Don't have children out of wedlock
That derails a lot of people.
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This is just not true, at least in Australia (and I suspect most other first-world countries, including the US). If anything, it's easier to go from having nothing to a comfortable, middle-class lifestyle than it is to go from middle-class to wealthy.
First-world is not most world. And even those places face welfare state dismantlement since at least the 80s.
I guess people who live in the third world and have mastered English see living proof every day of where their hard work can get them.
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Because few people are objective enough to put aside their deep emotional attachment to the notion that their particular bit of hard work and skill meant nothing without that luck. I’m wealthy now: very wealthy by any standard (mid 7-figure net worth). I came from humble beginnings (nearly homeless frequently as a youth with a single mom), but I am quite intelligent (PhD in physics) and I worked hard. I would have re…
A few mil is very wealthy? I thought it's what every SV code monkey has at 35.
Besides that, one must be incredibly lucky to land a FAANG job. Every applicant knows they have to do the leetcode grind and be up on their highly scalable distributed systems design knowledge. There are hundreds of thousands of wanna be FAANG engineers. To be one chosen out of any given round of hiring is sheer luck. The hard work is also required--but it's no harder than any other applicant worked.
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Because few people are objective enough to put aside their deep emotional attachment to the notion that their particular bit of hard work and skill meant nothing without that luck. I’m wealthy now: very wealthy by any standard (mid 7-figure net worth). I came from humble beginnings (nearly homeless frequently as a youth with a single mom), but I am quite intelligent (PhD in physics) and I worked hard. I would have re…
> hard work It is not about working hard. It is about working smart, i.e. working on the right things. You choose those things, it is not luck.
You're making a distinction without difference. I literally had no idea whether the company I work for was even going to go public, much less how successful (or not) it would have been. There was no skill or intelligence involved in picking it. It was pure luck.
The idea that salary is a measure of self-worth is an unfortunate lie that our modern society perpetuates.
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Many people with your net worth grind it out without any windfalls, the product of consistent hard work and reasonable choices over decades. It was always a possibility. Most people don't require an IPO to achieve that. Luck can accelerate that outcome but it is not necessary in any meaningful sense. It requires significantly greater extremes of wealth before luck plays a more frequent role. I know people well into 8…
I’d be very interested in hearing how a blue collar grinder can get to 8 figures.
Blue collar grinds to wealth are mostly fantasy. There is a large amount of luck involved: friends/family helping build the business, market conditions, location, etc. That hard work is also required doesn't mean luck didn't play a role (and outsized at that).