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

Almost-Billionaires (2014)

lackingambition.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 67 posts

Re: Almost-Billionaires (2014)

#41

Post by graderjs »

xwolfi wrote: post #39
graderjs wrote: post #10

I think that some component of challenge is required to live an interesting life, keep you on your toes, and keep you close to living at your edge. I think some people will invent challenges for themselves, even arbitrary looking ones, if they are otherwise unchallenged at the time, just to keep themselves engaged. All kinds of things can pose significant challenges: relationships, learning a new language, travel (um…

I moved to Hong Kong from France with a passable english and no cantonese. Life is a constant challenge, it's really a fun life to live: the language gap in English can be overcome but not Cantonese, finding a partner in such a different culture is also a lot of fun, you can move flat within the blink of an eye where you need weeks of pre approval in France, so you're always moving around, jobs are so plentiful your…

Yeah, man! There's so many jobs there and so many cool places to live and things to do. I totally agree. I also moved to HK from AU many years ago and found fun in those things. The language was so cool. I guess part of it was I felt AU was too boring and not enough challenge there, I'd already done all the cool stuff, so I may as well try someplace else and HK seemed so exciting and different. It was awesome. The rates I got there were unlike anything I got anywhere else :D But after a while I found it a bit too easy, so I suppose I sought challenge someplace else!!! I'll be back tho -- i think there's a whole other level at HK that I haven't touched yet and I really want to. :D

Re: Almost-Billionaires (2014)

#42

Post by shrimpx »

cko wrote: post #34
mettamage wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has financial independence been worth it?

I've never been a big spender and I likely never will be, so it's not like I sacrificed much in getting to this point. An 80% saving rate for 9 working years while being lucky to invest starting 2011 goes pretty far. If financial independence is its own cage, I'm not willing to leave. I can't say I regret it - perhaps I should have had something else cooking during my working years that doesn't include blogging about…

Are you concerned about events that might cause your wealth to disappear or be drastically reduced? For example my old CPA was forced to come out of retirement and restart his CPA work because his wealth was drastically reduced in the 2008 crisis. It seems you'd have to have extreme trust in your risk mitigation in order to begin to "do nothing," for possibly decades while the skills that made that money atrophy.

Re: Almost-Billionaires (2014)

#43

Post by cko »

shrimpx wrote: post #42
cko wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never been a big spender and I likely never will be, so it's not like I sacrificed much in getting to this point. An 80% saving rate for 9 working years while being lucky to invest starting 2011 goes pretty far. If financial independence is its own cage, I'm not willing to leave. I can't say I regret it - perhaps I should have had something else cooking during my working years that doesn't include blogging about…

Are you concerned about events that might cause your wealth to disappear or be drastically reduced? For example my old CPA was forced to come out of retirement and restart his CPA work because his wealth was drastically reduced in the 2008 crisis. It seems you'd have to have extreme trust in your risk mitigation in order to begin to "do nothing," for possibly decades while the skills that made that money atrophy.

I am definitely risk-averse. For that reason my savings rate is still pretty high despite a much lower income nowadays. So my only risk mitigation is "spend as little as possible without feeling deprived" - but sure, everything can crash all at once.

Because of this risk, I keep thinking about keeping myself economically relevant. I've been in this Resistance (as Pressfield would call it) limbo for almost two years but here's hoping I do something about it.

Re: Almost-Billionaires (2014)

#44

Post by jasfi »

daenz wrote: post #27

For a long time, my plan was to "get rich" and then use my money to work full time on specific interesting tech ideas of mine. The tradeoff of time spent "getting rich", even if it took a decade, was worth it because of the free time I would have afterwards. With this in mind, I tried building various startup ideas and joining startups that could blow up big. Nothing really worked out, and I realized just how difficu…

I'm sorry your startups didn't work out. It sounds like those startups didn't build on your interesting tech ideas (why not?). Did you learn where you went wrong? I'm working on a startup to help people with problems like that, CxO Industries [1].

[1]: https://cxo.industries.

Re: Almost-Billionaires (2014)

#45

Post by runawaybottle »

I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest this is an inverse romanticization of desire (where it elevates the virtue of anti-desire, or anti-ambition).

I’ve heard this argument countless times when people say ‘money doesn’t buy happiness’. That’s always been an inversion to me. Money absolutely buys happiness.

So here in this article you have two incredibly successful men inverting their desires, and romanticizing it as some kind of epiphany.

In other words, a brazen humble brag.

Re: Almost-Billionaires (2014)

#47

Post by activatedgeek »

I suspect, this may be far too common for anyone who lives a "checkpointing" style of life, i.e. once I achieve this, I will pursue this ambition.

I've realized this sort of checkpoint-based planning is not helpful for the long run because naturally, times change, and with that ambitions change. If you haven't already had a taste of making progress towards the said ambition, and it happens to require a distinct set of skills, it becomes quite a mountain to climb.

Re: Almost-Billionaires (2014)

#48

Post by hiq »

cko wrote: post #6

About losing all motivation after financial independence, I've experienced it for myself. I'm not rich but I know how to live simply. What do I do with my time? I spend so many hours consuming random content on the internet nowadays. I feel kind of bad for the girlfriend, who has to listen to me regurgitate the content back to her. People looking in from the outside scratch their heads. Don't I have hobbies? Passions…

Not sure it's losing motivation rather than being confronted to one's wishful thinking.

If I have so many plans for when I retire early, how come I do none of it now? If that's really what I want, how come I don't spend at least a few minutes on it every week?

I don't have to find a 50h/week activity to replace my work. I don't need any activity that replace my work routine. I can simply take whatever hobby I had while working, and spend at least as much time as when I was working full-time.

Re: Almost-Billionaires (2014)

#49

Post by brailsafe »

bserge wrote: post #12
pmoriarty wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be very interesting to hear you elaborate on this, as from the outside it really does look pretty easy.

Doing all the work (at least at first), including convincing people to part with their money for your idea is easy? The latter especially is incredibly stressful unless you're one of those people who don't give a fuck about others, their struggles and their things (I envy that btw).

You're envious of sociopaths?

Re: Almost-Billionaires (2014)

#50

Post by brailsafe »

seibelj wrote: post #30
dcolkitt wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty partial to this vignette by Bryan Caplan[1] about how many headaches and road bumps there are, for even the smallest, simplest business you can think of. " Back in February, I got the idea to create a COVID vaccination t-shirt (now on sale!). Reflecting on my past experience, I figured it would be easy... My thinking: The whole process would be pretty fun, so I’d only need to sell a few dozen shirts to cov…

Also, a successful business tends to immediately create jobs (at least part time, if not full employees) to help it grow. People who denigrate business and the art of making profit - which truly is the art of fulfilling the wants of others - are so truly, intensely naive.

Meh, I think that's an equally overly simplistic view.

Capitalism earns its accolades as well as its criticism because it's fans want it to be this pure embodiment of helping people. But it's obviously responsible for just some of the things that help people. I think its pretty fucked up for example that full neighbourhoods of multi-millionaires if not billionaires exist in my city, while a huge portion of the people working in the jobs virtuously bestowed upon us by them can't simultaneously afford rent and savings or dental work. The dentist comes out fine, but unless you're very well covered by rare dental plans, you might lose all your annual savings with one tooth problem.

Post reply on HN