A Fixed Income Is a Sucker Bet

While this is true, I don't think the assumption that most of the people who end up on top somehow deserve their success and those on the bottom deserve their failures is correct. More to the point, a moral system built on this is is cruel, damaging to one's psyche, and a bad way to motivate people to create things. Alain De Botton gives a very eloquent TED talk about this [1], which is much more interesting than this Black Swan pep talk bullshit.

The reality is: in any given attempt at a complicated problem (like most jobs/startups), most failures and successes are for reasons outside of one's control. The world is simply much more complicated than our minds can comprehend. What we can control is how many ways we attempt difficult problems, and this precisely why perseverance plays a much bigger role than intelligence in startup success [2]: because individuals that appear as extraordinarily intelligent don't really understand the world that significantly better than someone of average intelligence. There's a point past which linguistic dialects and the ideas prevalent in one's social circle affect perceived IQ much more than the quality of one's world model. But persistence and effort, on the other hand, scales linearly - if you can iterate over 10 ideas instead of 1, you're 10 times as likely to succeed, no matter what your intelligence.

1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtSE4rglxbY

2. http://www.paulgraham.com/determination.html

Referring to a salaried job as a "fixed income" is such blatant hyperbole that I can't take the rest of his article seriously.

He used to write shareware games / but then turned to doing the self-help stuff. Agreed that the article was pretty poor, but the guy is/was a bit above the 'get rich quick' folks

Most of the time, when you reduce expenses, if you check how much you are "making" per hour, it's less that what you could get from working.

Obviously you could just not buy stuff, but I'm (and probably him too) talking about things like going to a farther store that has cheaper prices. You need to balance how long it takes you to get there, vs how much you will reduce your expenses.

Have you read The Black Swan? It's not a pep talk. It's all about how much of what affects us is out of our control. I suppose one could mope about this, but what Taleb says is to do things that will reward you if the unpredictable happens.

Persistence and effort, on the other hand, scales linearly - if you can iterate over 10 ideas instead of 1, you're 10 times as likely to succeed, no matter what your intelligence.

Incorrect. If you can generate one more idea than anyone else, you may be worth many times what they're worth--because to someone who desperately needs an idea, they're going to pay a huge premium to get the best person for the job. If you're buying market data in order to make high-frequency trades, the company that gets you information 1% faster isn't worth 1% more. It's worth almost infinitely more, since being the second person in the trade doesn't get you any profit.