Ask HN: If I am so smart, why I am not rich?

> everyone told me that

If you know you're smart enough to start a decent business - don't listen to anyone. Key secret here is that nobody knows what is the right way to business success (not your friends, not warren buffet, not elon musk, nobody).

And also "everyone" is more often than not are dumb and wrong. (few examples: support for hitler, popularity of gaming chairs etc.)

Next thing is that getting make million from 0 is magnitudes harder than make same million from another million (for example your ancestors left you any capital) - it is not a fair game. Being smart is just one of many variables.

Good news is that in the long run, smart usually wins. If you live in free and advanced enough, democratic enough economy - your chances of success grow with time if you're persistent. It's more about endurance, marathon, not how sharp you are at the moment or what cool skills you have.

The probability in GP's comment assumes that everyone has an equal chance of attaining billionaire status, and that the percentage of billionaires in the world remains constant. Given heritability of wealth and access to better education and healthcare, wealthy children have much lower barriers to success. The second assumption may not hold either, as the current overall economic trends seem to favor increasing concentration of wealth.

It'd be interesting to see just how steeply those advantages decrease the odds for the rest of us. I'd be willing to bet that—even in a comparatively wealthy developed country—the true chances for an average person achieving >$1B are orders of magnitude lower than the figure quoted.

This is honestly a bad answer. You can have all of the motivation in the world. But if you don’t know how to create products that people want, market it, have funding for it and not get crushed by a larger company that can throw a team at it, you won’t be successful.

The world is filled with the corpses of dead companies founded by people with “motivation” and “passion”.

The whole idea of if you work really hard you are guaranteed success gives too many people unrealistic hope

Because intelligence != success, nor is it enough to obtain it. You can be in the top 0.01% of the population IQ wise with all As in every subject and a ton of degrees and experience, and not get anywhere close to being a millionaire or billionaire.

What matters a lot more is the combination of a bunch of factors:

1. Your network/background. Someone with a rich and influential family has way better odds than someone from a poorer one.

2. Whether your interests happen to align with a field or industry that's got a lot of potential for success. Being interested in technology/bitcoin/AI/whatever at the right time would get you a lot more money than being interested in journalism or travel.

3. Your mindset and how determined you are to push yourselves to do one thing despite overwhelmingly bad odds. Obviously you're gonna have issues if you get really attached to a bad idea with no chance of it becoming a viable business venture, but I also see a lot of people fail simply because their interests are very temporary/short term.

4. Plain old luck when it comes to your skillset, the timing for launching your idea, etc.

Point being though, there's a huge luck/timing element to it all, with connections and your network being another big factor on top of that. If you don't get those, you can be as skilled and hard working as you like and not get anywhere.

Intelligence doesn’t help either, there are thousand of smart people who tried to start a business and failed.