Because I'm smart _and lazy_. I'm 'rich enough' as it were.
The most successful people are just the luckiest, a new computer model confirms
171–180 of 356 posts
Re: The most successful people are just the luckiest, a new computer model confirms
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
However, 2, 3 and 4 can be reduced to 1. You don't choose your genes or where you are born. Those factors, which are blind luck, determine all of the other lucks for your whole life. In the end, everything is just blind luck, but our egos want to feel like they are in control somehow.
Hustle and preparation allow smaller quantities of blind luck to be turned into success. Otherwise it takes a lot more blind luck to overcome a lack of preparation, and large quantities of blind luck are harder to find. So, yeah, it all boils down to #1. But #s 2-4 determine how much of #1 you need.
Ummmm... Hustle and prep get you absolutely nowhere if you're hustling and prepping for the wrong thing or doing so the wrong way.
Re: The most successful people are just the luckiest, a new computer model confirms
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm being totally serious: The more I learn about riches & fame, the less I want them. I'll be honest: I'm not quite to the point where if someone tried to thrust a million dollars into my hand, I'd say no. (That isn't even necessarily enough to take you out of "middle class" anymore as a one-off payment, honestly.) But I think I'd say no to 10 million and I'm fairly certain I'd say no to 100 million. Or really wish…
It really doesn't force you into anything. You could just throw it into a savings account at your nearest national bank, lose a bit year over year to inflation being higher than the current interest rate, and have a whopper of an emergency fund. That would give you peace of mind if nothing else. If you wanted to be smart you could invest it in any number of ways to not lose wealth to inflation, but that's by no means…
You could also give most of it away to a favorite charity, keeping however much you feel comfortable in owning.
There's a really interesting documentary called "Born Rich", which was made by one of the heirs to the Johnson & Johnson fortune, where he interviewed a lot of his friends who were all also born in to very wealthy families. They all had different ways of dealing with their circumstances, and I remember one of them did reject his family's fortune and tried to live an "ordinary" life.
Re: The most successful people are just the luckiest, a new computer model confirms
#174Re: The most successful people are just the luckiest, a new computer model confirms
#175Rich people got "lucky" but they don't define what luck is to begin with. To quote Naval, there are 4 kinds of luck. 1. Blind luck - Where I just got lucky because something completely out of my control happened 2. Luck from hustling - luck that comes through persistence, hard work, hustle, motion. Which is when you’re running around creating lots of opportunities, you’re generating a lot of energy, you’re doing a lo…
2-4 are great examples of survivorship bias. For every success story with those traits are thousands of failures. If Bill Gates had been born and raised in Ruanda, you wouldn't know his name today. Same IQ, same hustler. But no parents with connections, no upbringing devoid of war and violence. It's just like in sports. Usain Bolt is not the fastest man alive. He is the fastest professional runner. Within a sample se…
> This is why the slogan "Billionaires should not exist" is not without merit.
> Remember: a million seconds is 11.57 days. A billion seconds? 31.71 years.
That was insightful and I am telling you: I am going to use your argument from now on---it was just beautifully simple and clear!
Re: The most successful people are just the luckiest, a new computer model confirms
#176I went to an elite engineering school. My colleagues are all really smart. After 20 years, some are wealthy, some are poor. There is no apparent link between how hard they worked and how rich they became. However you can definitely trace how a few good breaks led to one guy being rich and another not. Did the guys who went to work for Google take any additional risk? Yet, they are now millionaires. How about the entr…
> Did the guys who went to work for Google take any additional risk? Yet, they are now millionaires. They probably are smarter though! If they weren't, they wouldn't get in.
I'm not particularly smart.
I've contracted with Google a couple times, just like >50% of their workforce.
Would I like millions? Sure. Do I have that? No. Would I work myself to death for it? No. Do I believe Google [or whatever FAANG company you want] is The Greatest Everest Of All? I'm smarter than that and you should be as well.
Re: The most successful people are just the luckiest, a new computer model confirms
#177Watch a survival documentary. 10 contestants, many battle-hardened. The conclusion after watching 5 seasons of "Alone" is -- its all luck. The fittest didn't win, it was the person who happened to be dropped off in a relatively safe area, with access to resources, and had some good luck day to day. The people who randomly dropped into areas filled with predators or hazards, they were forced out (despite many being ha…
you watched a survival documentary, not real life
Re: The most successful people are just the luckiest, a new computer model confirms
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You don't choose your genes or where you are born. Those factors, which are blind luck, determine all of the other lucks for your whole life. if you workout and are in the best shape your genes can provide, you will be more lucky when meeting people and more interesting people will be interested on you. That would be 3, not 1. And if you have a good conversation and go out every day, you will also have more chance…
unless, of course, you skipped that critical networking event because you were at the gym. Unlucky.
Gotta pick your horses.
Re: The most successful people are just the luckiest, a new computer model confirms
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess what the OP is trying to say is that throwing a million or more into a savings account, not having to worry, and peace of mind is in itself a class game. Few people have that luxury; I got a chance to be a bit better off and immediately felt much differently and more attuned to class differences than I was before. I now have the luxury of time, choice and pecuniary freedom I did not have, and a lot of my peer…
That comment says "class of games", and you've started writing about "class games" and then "class differences" in your interpretation of the comment. Not saying you did something bad here, but it sounds more like the telephone game than discussing what was written, all because of the omission of the preposition "of."
Aah yes, I misread it; totally my bad, I apologize. Definitely feels like a telephone game now that I read it.
Re: The most successful people are just the luckiest, a new computer model confirms
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
>My kid will someday pay taxes that will finance the retirement of people that didn't bother to have kids. All things considered, that is definitely not a given. Social security for instances is tied to one's lifetime earnings, throw in the correlation between life time earnings and longevity and it smooths out to getting what you put in (roughly). There are also a lot of benefits, both employer funded and tax payer…
> Social security for instances ... And parents likely have lower lifetime earnings than non-parents. So its possible they're not only funding the future of social security, but also getting less for themselves... It would be great if someone had a source if parents are net recipients of benefits beyond the societal benefit of having children.
> So its possible they're not only funding the future of social security, but also getting less for themselves...
Social Security payouts relative to withholdings are strongly progressive, such that the less that you pay into social security, the greater percentage you take out once you start receiving benefits. Absent a difference in mortality (or to a much lesser degree, the age at which you start drawing), the less you contribute, the greater percentage of what you contributed will be paid out to you.