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How to Be Successful

blog.samaltman.com

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Re: How to Be Successful

#211

Post by megaman8 »

sama wrote: post #34
aphextron wrote: post #11

1. Be born to a wealthy middle class family and go to an elite school.

The biggest reason I'm excited about basic income is the amount of human potential it will unleash by freeing more people to take risks. Until then, if you aren't born lucky, you have to claw your way up for awhile before you can take big swings. If you are born in extreme poverty, then this is super difficult :( It is obviously an incredible shame and waste that opportunity is so unevenly distributed. But I've witne…

I know there's a lot of people for whom BI would help them do great things: I think this is a small minority that we in HN community are familiar with.

But I grew up in a bad neighborhood, and I know a lot of people, who wouldn't be so benevolent and wouldn't be using those funds in the way you imagine. I personally know people who would leech the system dry before they ever contributed anything meaningful anywhere.

Re: How to Be Successful

#212

Post by FiveSquared »

megaman8 wrote: post #211
sama wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest reason I'm excited about basic income is the amount of human potential it will unleash by freeing more people to take risks. Until then, if you aren't born lucky, you have to claw your way up for awhile before you can take big swings. If you are born in extreme poverty, then this is super difficult :( It is obviously an incredible shame and waste that opportunity is so unevenly distributed. But I've witne…

I know there's a lot of people for whom BI would help them do great things: I think this is a small minority that we in HN community are familiar with. But I grew up in a bad neighborhood, and I know a lot of people, who wouldn't be so benevolent and wouldn't be using those funds in the way you imagine. I personally know people who would leech the system dry before they ever contributed anything meaningful anywhere.

That is the only downside of UBI IMO

Re: How to Be Successful

#213

Post by FiveSquared »

enraged_camel wrote: post #153
ams6110 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no problem if all someone wants out of life is to get high and jack off. I do have somewhat of a problem being forced to pay for it.

Again though, why do you have a problem with other people doing things that make them happy?

Cause I am being bled dry with taxes!

Re: How to Be Successful

#214

Post by seizethecheese »

sgarman wrote: post #210
avip wrote: post #32

This post embodies everything I dislike about success fluff. I look up to people I admire - Tesla, Nick Drake, Mingus, My highschool Chemistry teacher - they meet maybe 0-3 of the list. Creation of value is such a delicate thing, we should not flatten it that way. As a side effect, if we widen our view of success, there will be more place up in the 99.9%...

I think one of the problems with trying to understand how to achieve success is that by referencing the successful we often are dealing with outliers and not rules. I think this is why a lot of people here like seeing startup failure blogs instead of startup success blogs. So much survivorship bias.

I hear this a lot, but I’m not convinced there aren’t enough successful people to learn from. There are probably tens of thousands of “self made” multimillionaires. Surely there are patterns.

Re: How to Be Successful

#215

Post by voiceclonr »

This is a well written piece. However IMHO, one cannot lay down a path for success. Moderate success, yes - but huge success no (which is what this alludes to). Success doesn't refer to a rule book before manifesting. There are lot of great nuggets one could take from the article and apply - but I see them as little breadcrumbs that might lead to success. Even if it did, we have no way to prove or disprove success factors.

Best thing is to take the learnings, enjoy the journey towards potential success and try not to become emotionally invested into the end goal. It's super hard I know.

Re: How to Be Successful

#217

Post by Tade0 »

Supermancho wrote: post #185
Tade0 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wealth is finite at any given moment and it so happens that growth does not affect everyone equally. On top of that developed economies tend to grow slower - we may all be millionaires by early 70s standards with our fast cars and air travel, but I don't think in 50 years we will be millionaires by today's standards - there simply won't be that much growth in the future.

> Wealth is finite at any given moment Investment supposes this is not true because wealth is not an evaluation of liquidity. The hardest thing to realize is that that's poor people thinking and you're already behind if that's how you operate (ie the vast majority of the world, including me).

Investment is a promise, or actually a hope - it only gives a perception of value. It's not actual wealth.

To illustrate my point: can you imagine everyone living off passive income today?

Re: How to Be Successful

#219

Post by thisisweirdok »

ngngngng wrote: post #180
distant_hat wrote: post #70

All such articles should be preceded by huge blink tags with 'Warning: survivorship bias ahead'.

I think 99% of the time bringing up survivorship bias adds nothing to the conversation. If I tell you how I ran a marathon, you could shout "survivorship bias!" But that fact still stands that I hadn't successfully run a marathon before I did those things.

It's not meant to add to the conversation, it's meant to get people to shut up about giving advice on becoming successful.

There's no trick to it, you need to work and get lucky. Emphasis on the getting lucky. We don't need 1,000 thinkpieces from people who are already successful.

Give me an article from a person who can reflect on why they're not successful. That will be more interesting any day of the week.

Re: How to Be Successful

#220

Post by NateEag »

enraged_camel wrote: post #153
ams6110 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no problem if all someone wants out of life is to get high and jack off. I do have somewhat of a problem being forced to pay for it.

Again though, why do you have a problem with other people doing things that make them happy?

He doesn't.

He just feels it's not his responsibility to enable it, and that the government forcing him to is violating his freedom of choice.

At least, that's one of the things that bothers me about it.

Civilized society is all about trading individual freedom for group stability, and perhaps UBI is on balance a good idea.

I'm not sure myself, but I tend to be skeptical of claims that "X will solve society's woes."

Giving people wealth doesn't change them, and it has really fouled up some places - look at what happened to Haiti after the earthquake when all the aid poured in. Local farms largely died out because they couldn't compete with free food, and as a result the country became less self-sustaining and wealthy.

So, yeah, I guess I have similar concerns for UBI.

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