211–220 of 245 posts
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And yet you put yourself in a situation where luck could find you. Keep doing things like that, and you'll inevitably get lucky.
There’s very little skill or intelligence involved in that, though.
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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…
Sometimes it might be better to trade the option with higher average damage for one that is more volatile, because you might get lucky at just the right moment.
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Also, "be born in, or be able to get to a country that has enough opportunities."
Choose to move to another country, choose to fix your own country, choose to do nothing but curse the fates.
I feel much less sharp once I passed 30. Hangovers also started to last days. Learning new stuff that requires precision also seems harder - like syntax. Even though I feel like I'm much smarter when it comes to fuzzy processes like judging a good idea or programming language. Dementia runs in my family... But I think I'm too young for that and it's just what happens when you're not 25 anymore.
I'm 35, I have not noticed any drop in my ability to learn new things now compared to even my early 20s.
So Hour for hour and energy for energy has your ability to learn dropped? Or has your ability to get into the learning mode dropped? The outcome might be the same but worth reflecting on.
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Great. Now what about the other ~7.5 billion people out there? It's extremely elitist to say that anyone who wants to succeed should "just" get to America. Even if you wanted to claim that just touching the shores of the USA meant automatic success (and I am not suggesting you are), not everyone literally can do that.
> extremely elitist LOL. First generation immigrants everywhere you look in the US. > not everyone literally can do that There is nothing special about America that every other nation could not do if their citizens wanted it. America was created by immigrants to be what they wanted it to be.
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> extremely elitist LOL. First generation immigrants everywhere you look in the US. > not everyone literally can do that There is nothing special about America that every other nation could not do if their citizens wanted it. America was created by immigrants to be what they wanted it to be.
None of that is relevant. The fact is that other nations simply have not done those things that make America special, for whatever reason. Not everybody has the literal means to be able to just leave their country, and most people certainly don't have the means to improve it. You are again making pronouncements from atop your elitist throne here.
That's right. They chose not to.
> most people certainly don't have the means to improve it
There are many, many historical examples of individuals of no means rising to strongly influence and even command a nation. There are also many examples of citizens toppling their government and replacing it.
You know, like the American Revolution, which revolted against the British that ruled the world at the time.
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Choose to move to another country, choose to fix your own country, choose to do nothing but curse the fates.
I've been reading your replies in this thread, and I'd highly recommend you to just take a moment and reflect on what you've been suggesting to other commenters. Your replies have been ignorant at best and pure nonesense at worst. I'd elaborate but I don't have the time and energy to justify myself, so I understand if you take this with a grain of salt, but I wanted to let you know nonetheless.
On the other hand, I've seen plenty of people who took responsibility for their lives, and thereby improved them dramatically.
If I may assign you some homework:
1. what do you want to accomplish in life?
2. what are you going to do about it?
I know the current popular narrative in the United States is nobody ever actually accomplishes anything. It's always luck, privilege, you didn't build that, etc. I don't buy it. It's all excuses, defeatism, envy and misery. If you want to improve your life, don't buy it, either.
I was once told I was so "lucky" that I had a propensity to work hard. Geez. I laughed at the guy. (Actually, I'm very lazy. My dad said I was never afraid of hard work, I'd lie down right next to it and fall asleep.)
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…
I believe that the sampling to enter the highest strata of top earners is also partly lottery. You get to a well paid engineering role by acing studies. But to transit from low-generational wealth to non-low generational wealth status requires you either to marry, found a company or be at the right position of an up and coming company. All of those are partly lottery - yes, you likely need to be of some talent to ent…
Steve Jobs founded the biggest company in the world financed by selling his Volkswagon. Bezos started in a garage. Dell started in a dorm room.
The last time I founded a company, it cost me $30.
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None of that is relevant. The fact is that other nations simply have not done those things that make America special, for whatever reason. Not everybody has the literal means to be able to just leave their country, and most people certainly don't have the means to improve it. You are again making pronouncements from atop your elitist throne here.
> The fact is that other nations simply have not done those things that make America special That's right. They chose not to. > most people certainly don't have the means to improve it There are many, many historical examples of individuals of no means rising to strongly influence and even command a nation. There are also many examples of citizens toppling their government and replacing it. You know, like the America…
You sound like you subscribe to the "great man" theory of history. That theory is, quite frankly, bunk. No man is an island, and one, single person can't accomplish anything meaningful without the support of others.
You allude to this in another comment, but I do know who you are, and, no, you didn't build that. Everything you accomplished was built on the backs of what people who came before you did, and you got lucky to end up in such a privileged position to be able to even have some of the opportunities you had, much less take advantage of them.
Do you even remember what your argument is? Because I don't.
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So maybe people with a net worth above 2.2 million should be paying a wealth tax instead of an income tax.
Even if they're 70 after working a lifetime?