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“Here's the number I used to win the lottery“ –Entrepreneurs giving advice

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Re: “Here's the number I used to win the lottery“ –Entrepreneurs giving advice

#121
post #102

This is stupid. Any of us who have had at least two “successful” businesses will tell you that this quote is ridiculous. What’s your ideal of being successful? If it’s exiting at a billion, then sorry. But you can use a lot of this entrepreneur advice to find some level of success. The problem is that non-entrepreneur or first timers always try to skip the small stuff. 1. have a good team and hire right. you need jus…

> 7. be lucky

Yes, don't forget to be lucky. And don't forget to rewrite history once your idea is a success. If its a failure, its someone else's fault.

Re: “Here's the number I used to win the lottery“ –Entrepreneurs giving advice

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this is one of the things that drives me nuts about these "inspirational" stories where some millionaire/billionaire talks proudly about how their first business failed, their car was repo'd, bank foreclosed on them, etc... but I've never heard one talk about what they did between that and the successful business. Where did they sleep? How did they afford food?

They do talk about that. Elon Musk cleaned out manure tanks for a while in Canada if I'm not mistaking. There are some interviews where he talks about this (and showering at the gym across the street and sleeping under a desk and having no money) in quite some detail.

He comes from emerald wealth in South Africa for christ sake. Maybe he cleaned manure, but not out of dire need

Re: “Here's the number I used to win the lottery“ –Entrepreneurs giving advice

#124

This is stupid. Any of us who have had at least two “successful” businesses will tell you that this quote is ridiculous. What’s your ideal of being successful? If it’s exiting at a billion, then sorry. But you can use a lot of this entrepreneur advice to find some level of success. The problem is that non-entrepreneur or first timers always try to skip the small stuff. 1. have a good team and hire right. you need jus…

Honestly it just looks to me like the lottery you won is not "having a successful business", but "having the luxury and connections to try and fail 5-7 times with one success" Most people cannot afford to recover from failing once.

My Digital Ocean cost is about $25 plus another $20(?) for mail provider.

If $45 per month is unachievable then what on Earth are you doing with your money?!

Re: “Here's the number I used to win the lottery“ –Entrepreneurs giving advice

#125

This is stupid. Any of us who have had at least two “successful” businesses will tell you that this quote is ridiculous. What’s your ideal of being successful? If it’s exiting at a billion, then sorry. But you can use a lot of this entrepreneur advice to find some level of success. The problem is that non-entrepreneur or first timers always try to skip the small stuff. 1. have a good team and hire right. you need jus…

That there are successful entrepreneurs, or that some of them may give good advice, doesn't mean that he doesn't have a valid point about entrepreneurial advice as a genre.

I think there are three keys to the problem: 1) readers want feel-good success stories, 2) successful people strongly benefit from positive PR, and 3) people often can't usefully talk about why they succeeded.

The first, I think, is pretty obvious. The Hero's Journey long predates modern capitalism, but it very much gets applied. On top of that, add that readers want to feel positive, powerful, smart, enabled. So you can't just tell them, "Sure, you'd like to be rich like this guy, but take it from me, you're fucked from the get-go." There's a good critique of the corporate bio that relates: https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2023/02/11/jeff-john-ro...

The second bit means that business heroes are not going to tell you, here's my secret: be born at least moderately wealthy and well connected. They aren't going to tell you that past a certain levehttps://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/donald-trumps-... of wealth, it's basically impossible to go broke. They're instead going to make themselves seem both extraordinary and extra ordinary. See, e.g.: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/donald-trumps-...

And the third is something I'm sure many here have experienced. I started coding as a child, the son of a software developer. When people ask me how to get started as a developer, the honest answer is: I have no fucking idea. I have little recollection of how I learned, and I have no idea whether the parts that were easy for me would be easy for anybody else. I'll be positive and encouraging and give vague general advice. But if I talked about what worked for me, it would be very much in the vein of "here's the lottery ticket number I used", because my path was so personal.

Re: “Here's the number I used to win the lottery“ –Entrepreneurs giving advice

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do talk about that. Elon Musk cleaned out manure tanks for a while in Canada if I'm not mistaking. There are some interviews where he talks about this (and showering at the gym across the street and sleeping under a desk and having no money) in quite some detail.

[flagged]

There are lots of people from wealthy backgrounds who'll slum it for a while. There's not usually a reason to doubt that. The thing to keep in mind is that voluntary/temporary poverty is very different from poverty you can't get out of with an embarrassing phone call.

I lived in relative poverty for a while when doing my first business, and while my parents were not particularly wealthy, knowing they provided an escape hatch took a lot of pressure off (living somewhere with a highly functional welfare system provided additional comfort). Things could have crashed and burned at any time, and I'd likely have been better off financially.

Re: “Here's the number I used to win the lottery“ –Entrepreneurs giving advice

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Where did they sleep? Maybe at least one of their parents had a sofa . The trick is to have parents who aren't homeless.

Here's how I fare on that. Each checked box is something I have. [X] "The trick is to have parents", [ ] who are alive, [ ] "who aren't homeless", [ ] who have housing that is safe and functional, [ ] who have room for you not already occupied by other family members in greater need, [ ] who "had a sofa", [ ] or if they're dead, at least left you with enough money as an equivalent

Who live nearby. If you're an immigrant and your parents live another continent, hard to live on their sofa and then get a new visa to come back.

Re: “Here's the number I used to win the lottery“ –Entrepreneurs giving advice

#128
It’s not just a random lottery, but this is not totally wrong.

There is no formula, no one way of doing it. If there was there would be no entrepreneurs. Banks and large companies would just do the “thing” that always works and reliably produce successes over and over again.

All the chaos and trial and error of entrepreneurship exists because every market “hole” is a unique bit of problem domain that can only be filled by a unique solution.

When an entrepreneur tells you how they did it, their advice may not be transferable to anything other than their niche. It’d be like a fish giving advice to a mountain goat.

Re: “Here's the number I used to win the lottery“ –Entrepreneurs giving advice

#129
post #2

Cynical take, but probably popular in today's social media. I don't think it's right to say building a company is only based on random chance. It clearly also involves at least some skill.

Skill, and luck have a geometric relationship. Your ability to "catch" success is the surface area formed by multiplying those together. The more of each you have the more likely you are to succeed.

Skill is reproducible. A successful entrepreneur can tell you what skills they have found useful in their successes. You can look at a bunch of businesses and figure out what skills are necessary. Luck is not reproducible. Far too many entrepreneurs discount their luck or lack the ability to recognize and analyze it.

Re: “Here's the number I used to win the lottery“ –Entrepreneurs giving advice

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do talk about that. Elon Musk cleaned out manure tanks for a while in Canada if I'm not mistaking. There are some interviews where he talks about this (and showering at the gym across the street and sleeping under a desk and having no money) in quite some detail.

Doesn’t he come from a South-African diamond family or something?

If Wikipedia or Snopes are to be believed on the matter (and I really don’t know anymore), this is way overblown. Mines (emerald, not diamond btw) are cheaper than you think. If my dad buys half of a tiny mine in his retirement I’ll start walking around claiming I’m from a mine owning family!

The story of how he even got to own the mine sounds pretty wild:

“According to the story, in the mid-1980s, Errol and a copilot landed their plane near Lake Tanganyika in Zambia, where "a group of Italians" offered them 80,000 pounds in British currency in order to buy the plane.

Standing with the cash in his hand, Errol was made another offer he couldn't refuse: Would he like to buy half an emerald mine for half of his new riches?

"I said, 'Oh, all right'. So I became a half owner of the mine, and we got emeralds for the next six years."”

It proceeds to say he made about $400000 from the mine in total - hardly a billionaire villain level money.

https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/11/17/elon-musk-emerald-min...

I think the null hypothesis that Musk got lucky in the dotcom era is pretty reasonable, lots of people did. I don’t get all the conspiracy theories.

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