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The Art of Money Getting

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Re: The Art of Money Getting

#121

Post by apothegm »

rogerb wrote: post #64
tianqi wrote: post #47

One of my thoughts is that it's not easy for people to discover what they're truly good at. The reason is that if you're truly good at something, if you have a real talent for it, then it's easy for you to do it well from the start, so you rarely judge it or realize how good you are. Just as no one thinks they're good at their heartbeat and breathing. Because you have the talent to be good at them from the beginning,…

>>The reason is that if you're truly good at something, if you have a real talent for it, then it's easy for you to do it well from the start, so you rarely judge it or realize how good you are. I've often wondered about this (beyond basic abilities). I'm sure there are exceptional people for whom this is true but in my experience most people start out not being very good at what they later end up being really good a…

Most things take learning to master. But most people have more of an aptitude for some things than others and find it comparatively easy to become baseline competent at those things.

Like, one of my nephews could dribble a soccer ball almost as soon as he could walk — it was astonishing how good he was at it at 20 months old. At three his ball control skills were as good as his father’s were at 9 or so (a father who was good enough to play in travel leagues in middle school, so no slouch).

No, at age 5, of course he can’t compete with adults who play in rec leagues. He doesn’t have the speed, strength, situational awareness, reflexes, or sense of of his options in a given situation.

But on the other hand, in isolation, he can almost always get the ball to go where he wants it. He’ll never in his life feel like that’s a skill he had to _learn_.

Whereas I’ve never been able to pick up dribbling at all regardless of how many hours of practice they subjected us to in phys ed.

Re: The Art of Money Getting

#122

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

cm11 wrote: post #116
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a difference between "networking," and "having a relationship." I worked for a Japanese company, for a long time, and the Japanese were really big on personal relationships. They weren't necessarily "warm and fuzzy" ones, but they were based on mutual respect and shared interests. I worked with many folks for decades, and we got to know each other well. We didn't always like each other, but we respected and s…

Yes, integrity is important no argument. I also agree it distinguishes "networking" and "having a relationship." I do think it can be faked though and I think we see plenty of that.

> I do think it can be faked though

That's because of the business culture we have here.

One of the more amusing things, while I worked there, was watching Americans thinking they had the Japanese fooled.

Re: The Art of Money Getting

#123

Post by folkrav »

> 1. Don’t Mistake Your Vocation If one's knack/vocation just objectively doesn't pay a livable wage, what's the alternative?

2. Avoid Debt Like the Plague In a world where home prices are worth decades of pre-tax salary, where less than a third of home purchases are cash, and where most of those are older people with accumulated wealth or previous paid-for property, this more or less equates to saying to young people "do not ever think about owning the place you live in".

3. Whatever You Do, Do It With All Your Might While I agree that success generally is a result of work+opportunity, I have seen it come from the opposite enough times that I have a hard time believing it really is remotely close to be one of the main factors of financial success.

4. Preserve Your Integrity For some reason, I heavily doubt the majority of the true wealth ~hoarders~ holders of this world got there from integrity.

Re: The Art of Money Getting

#125

Post by solenoid0937 »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #5

> They take whatever job pays and spend decades fighting upstream. I suspect that this affects a lot of folks in tech. There's a lot of money to be made, so people get into it. They don't really like what they do, so it's always a chore. Their work often shows it, too. I'm retired. I don't have to write software, but I spend more time writing software (for free), than I did, for most of my career. I like the Integrit…

The funny thing is once I started working on what I actually cared about, my performance ratings went from average to amongst the highest in my org, and while I work a lot more now, I get a real sense of accomplishment at the end of day, and I'm a lot happier. (I always thought this was a cliche until I experienced it)

People around you can "smell" your passion and sometimes it energizes your team. It makes people around you give more of a damn.

You really just have to find something you care about. This is especially easy at the big tech companies, but for some reason, most engineers don't even think about it - they get stuck in this miserable loop of stress and hating their work.

Re: The Art of Money Getting

#128

Post by crimsontech »

solenoid0937 wrote: post #125
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #5

> They take whatever job pays and spend decades fighting upstream. I suspect that this affects a lot of folks in tech. There's a lot of money to be made, so people get into it. They don't really like what they do, so it's always a chore. Their work often shows it, too. I'm retired. I don't have to write software, but I spend more time writing software (for free), than I did, for most of my career. I like the Integrit…

The funny thing is once I started working on what I actually cared about, my performance ratings went from average to amongst the highest in my org, and while I work a lot more now, I get a real sense of accomplishment at the end of day, and I'm a lot happier. (I always thought this was a cliche until I experienced it) People around you can "smell" your passion and sometimes it energizes your team. It makes people ar…

Same thing happened to me and I feel very blessed to get paid to do work that I would do for free as a hobby.

> People around you can "smell" your passion and sometimes it energizes your team as well.

When hiring I always look for this, if someone is passionate about the work it often means they will put the effort in to be good at it, and it raises the team in a lot of ways.

Re: The Art of Money Getting

#129

Post by crimsontech »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #39
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #5

> They take whatever job pays and spend decades fighting upstream. I suspect that this affects a lot of folks in tech. There's a lot of money to be made, so people get into it. They don't really like what they do, so it's always a chore. Their work often shows it, too. I'm retired. I don't have to write software, but I spend more time writing software (for free), than I did, for most of my career. I like the Integrit…

> and that's pretty important to me The older I get, the more I realize what a critical component of personal and social relationships it is, and how deeply it reinforces virtually everything good in society. There's never a good reason to forgo it, and never a good reason to accept spending time with people who don't have it. It only leads to trouble. I started my career in ad tech and it was often such abject miser…

Totally agree, I took a very well paying job with a company doing what I enjoy doing, but the attitude of the company was very much to extract as much money from the clients as possible. We had three hour monthly call where everyone would take turns to explain how they had upsold or otherwise made money for the company that month, someone from each call would get a token award for it.

I hated it, and wrote my resignation during one of these meetings without even having a solid plan of what I would do next.

A company can make money and provide a good service and experience for clients at the same time.

Re: The Art of Money Getting

#130

Post by underlipton »

MrDarcy wrote: post #83
neilv wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like you, I've found that working with people of integrity (or some qualities closely related to that) is very important to me. Not in a "new-grad or corporate PR appropriating meaningless platitudes" kind of way. But in a "I have seen multiple times how one untrustworthy person can easily wreck all the work of a team or organization, and make their lives miserable, so averting that is a high priority" kind of way. L…

> But how do you find a respectable one, in a gold rush? Look for those who are trying to serve established respectable professions, ideally have already done so for many years or decades. Accounting, Legal, Healthcare, Journalism (in the ideal sense). Then look at their own mission. Then look at their own work. Do they show their work? Are they open? Do they willingly allow their customers to audit their work produc…

>established respectable professions

>Accounting, Legal, Healthcare, Journalism

In America, in 2026, this is a particularly dark joke.

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