Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Art of Money Getting

kk.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 239 posts

Re: The Art of Money Getting

#161

Post by netcan »

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,…

I think we have so many hangups about this subject that we ended up leaving it unexplored and misunderstood.

Talent, drive, inherent traits interacting with learnable traits, learning curves, etc. What you are good at. What you are good at getting better at.

"Blank slate" is a better ethic. It's sort of the basis for modern public/political moral perspectives. But also for personal ethos... the "growth mindset* is a much better ethos and mentality.

But Otoh... we are who we are. We have the body we have. The genes we have. The childhood development we have. The education and experience we have. The personality we have. Etc.

We don't really have the have the culture of weighing these, and "knowing ourselves" via a mattwr-of-fact, calculating examination.

Re: The Art of Money Getting

#163

Post by decimalenough »

phtrivier wrote: post #154

HN front page : "Avoid debt like plague" Soon on HN front page : "How the richest people on earth used VC money and the lever effect to inflate the valuation of their startup (not even 'built in rust !') to kickstart a 'buy - borrow - die' cycle"

Corporate debt != personal debt.

Re: The Art of Money Getting

#164

Post by dartharva »

Michelangelo11 wrote: post #14

> Barnum’s first rule: pick the work you’re built for, then aim to be the best at it. Edsger Dijkstra, in one of his letters, giving advice (IIRC) to a PhD student: "Do only what only you can do." Kind of funny to see one of the greatest computer scientists and one of the greatest public entertainers giving the same advice, but I guess that speaks strongly in its favor.

This is also the kind of advice that only sounds good on paper. In reality there is no clear marker of what you can and cannot do well unless you empirically experiment with everything which would take several lifetimes.

Modern gurus like Cal Newport advise the opposite, and for good reason.

Re: The Art of Money Getting

#165

Post by KellyCriterion »

galangalalgol wrote: post #42
an0malous wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is conflated by the fact that most people start to enjoy things that give them a lot of money and prestige. Otherwise everyone would be in playing sports and making art, the things kids do before they care about money and prestige

I started programming at 5, making it do what I wanted it to provided dopamine. I never found a sport I enjoyed. I do like painting though. I doubt very many people get into sanitation because they love making toilets clean, but even there I'm sure a few do. Before 2000 I think it was pretty normal for people to select software as a career without considering the compensation as a factor. It wasn't excessively better…

> Before 2000

The salary expectations exploded when the VC/PE-bobos went into the space and started "build-and-sell-high".

Sure there were Billionairs made before tech & internet, but public was not aware of most such transactions.

Re: The Art of Money Getting

#166

Post by jdw64 »

oliculipolicula wrote: post #132
tim-projects wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not like this outside North America. Life is much more balanced.

PP is outside the Americas. It could be more balanced outside this purgatory (linearly, bardo ) we call HN makes me wonder: is 'journey is the goal' just about as linear as 'means are the ends'? Then one can't get nonlinear interpolating between ("balancing") them This, however https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48183167 (Note, same author/brand) It's arguable that more than a handful of world-influencers are being…

[dead]

Re: The Art of Money Getting

#167

Post by matheusmoreira »

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…

> we did bad things to people and made filthy money

I blame society. It systematically rewards sociopathic behavior.

I was raised with integrity and honesty as core values. Every single day I am psychologically assaulted by the fact we not only have all these sociopaths running around but also the fact that they are the ones making it.

It makes me wish I was one of them. Maybe one day I'll finally break and start carelessly exploiting others for my own gain.

Re: The Art of Money Getting

#168

Post by KellyCriterion »

sireat wrote: post #57

I am paraphrasing but I think it was W. Buffett who said: "Work at the job that you do not hate" In other words, not all vocations that you are great at and talented and want to pursue are valued by current world. I love playing chess way more and actually am reasonably good at it, but programming and teaching are valued more and I like those too. As Jimmy O. Yang's father reportedly said: "Pursuing your dreams is ho…

>> In other words, not all vocations that you are great at and talented and want to pursue are valued by current world. Good one! Im so glad I could built my current system with AI, because without it I wouldnt have started because of the amount of work. I went into SWE because I liked programming at home with my school friends but I had no real understanding of the "commercial environment" I would end up - turning out: I'm quite a good developer, but I hate it completely under commercial constraints.

Instead, I switched to Product & Projectmanagement, where Im a AAA-employee with my tech-skills and where I can always stand out because I speak both languages and Im usually very well connected to the tech people (like short ways ie picking the phone and asking for a quick help/advice to get something faster done)

Re: The Art of Money Getting

#169

Post by globular-toast »

The first one is something I've been saying for years. I worked in computational biology for a while and it took me a while to realise, but eventually I noticed I wasn't very good at it. The people who were good at it lived and breathed biology. They would come to the lab on weekends and even the middle of the night to water plants and generally tend to their experiments. Above all, they cared. I was just a computer guy who took a gig. I got by, but I would never be good because it just wasn't me.

I realised my real calling is engineering, not science. I like finding and solving problems. Scientists have problems, but, in my experience, the best people were scientists first and engineers second.

Now I've settled on engineering I see it from the other side. I work with people who just aren't very good engineers. It's like someone with one leg trying to run races. You're just not going to get very far. You'll always be last. Always struggling to keep up. Find what you're good at and be the best. Don't try to do something you're bad at and be the worst.

Post reply on HN