4 ms·

A Millionaire Mindset Never Made Anyone Rich

49 points by tortilla 9y ago

pryelluw 9y ago
Luck is the biggest millionare maker. Yes, preparation and opportunity do matter, but being born into the right circumstances is just plain old luck.
psyc 9y ago
Weird article. Seems to agree there is an effective version of a 'millionaire mindset' and then attacks a strawman version of it that only 'The Secret' types would promote. And even they probably aren't completely wrong.
- CompelTechnic 9y ago
  While I agree that the strawman "hustler's ethic" presented by the article is false, there are mindsets that correlate with wealth. There are numerous sociological studies presenting the high correlation between conscientiousness and income/wealth [1]. It would be very difficult to separate the cause and effect, but in action you are left with a Pascal's wager scenario: Knowing that conscientiousness correlates to wealth, and knowing conscientiousness to be a virtue in and of itself, should you try build a mindset rich in conscientiousness? The conclusion seems obvious to me. It's possible that you can't change your personality enough for it to matter, but that's just another facet of the Pascal's wager. [1]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3498890/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3498890/
  - Analemma_ 9y ago
    I'm curious that you're using Pascal's wager as an argument for believing in something, when almost everyone uses it as an illustrative example of flawed reasoning. Do you also believe in God because of Pascal's wager?
    - psyc 9y ago
      I don't know about every objection to Pascal's Wager, but overall it's quite different. In PW it's the belief itself that might be the key to heaven, and you can't have an authentic belief that you adopted simply because you had an incentive to adopt it. With conscientiousness it doesn't really matter what you believe or how strongly, all you have to do is behave conscientiously and see if it helps.
      - Can_Not 9y ago
        The objection is that you have 5 major world religions to choose from, there could be 1,000 to 1,000,000 minor religions to choose from, the gatekeeper of heaven might be selecting only non-believers who non-believe for the right reason, the gatekeeper of heaven might have an even more arbitrary or unpredictable criteria than laid out by your geographically predetermined choice of religion. The religion could represent actual spiritual phenomenon, but the entities could have lied about who they are or what's to be expected. Not to mention that we could be a random occurrence of life in a universe created for a set of aliens we could never meet. The wager is flawed because you have to consider a near infinite number of evidence-less hypothesis about getting to heaven, which might not exist or might not even have a gatekeeper.
fwdpropaganda 9y ago
> Millionaires don’t waste their mental bandwidth on how much a caramel macchiato costs. This isn't exactly big data, but the few wealthy people I've met (single-digit millionaires) were extremely frugal people.
- personjerry 9y ago
  If you make 150k and frugally save over 20 years or so, you can be a single-digit millionaire. To be a billionaire, you have to play a different ballgame.
  - fwdpropaganda 9y ago
    Are you either a millionaire or a billionaire?
    - personjerry 9y ago
      Don't you think that a millionaire or billionaire giving you their experience and guidance would be subject to survivor bias?
      - HeyLaughingBoy 9y ago
        Perhaps, but it's also likely to be a more useful perspective than from someone on welfare.
      - fwdpropaganda 9y ago
        Sorry, how did you jump from my question to asking a seemingly unrelated question?
    - sidcool 9y ago
      Are there any non YC billionaires on HN? I highly doubt it.
wolco 9y ago
Changing a mindset is the first step to something new.
wgerard 9y ago
This is a bit rambling, but I always find that whole genre of literature ("highly effective habits" style literature) to be really fascinating, mostly because it doesn't totally make sense to me. My thinking has always been that the Gates/Obamas/RBGs of the world didn't overly concern themselves with trying to emulate previously successful people. Not that they didn't take lessons from them, but that it wasn't so overt. No sense of, "if I just imitate these 5 behaviors of Andrew Carnegie I'll be successful". And maybe indeed the problem is that those individuals weren't just trying to be successful for the sake of being successful, which is sometimes the feeling I get from reading articles like the ones mentioned. Obviously, I could be entirely wrong or missing the point of literature like that. And as the article notes, there's some generally beneficial advice in there (living below your means, for example). Still, it seems like if your goal is to become the next Madeleine Albright, you should emulate her by not trying too hard to emulate her!
- CM30 9y ago
  That's because (like many genres of literature that claim to know the secret to becoming rich and successful), the writers really don't know what makes that the case. So they're taking surface level qualities they see in successful people, and assuming that's at least part of the reason for their success. It's just cargo culting really, like those tribes who build airports out of wood because they think that causes supply planes to land.
  - jwdunne 9y ago
    I remember a great comment on HN once about this very subject. They said it's like taking a 1000 people, having them flip a coin and eliminating anyone with tails. Once you're down to ten people, you ask them how they did it, what made them flip so many heads in a row. I think the name of it is called "survivorship bias".
bitxbitxbitcoin 9y ago
A millionaire mindset has definitely made more than one person poor, though!
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
dpweb 9y ago
I suspect IQ plays into it, the ability to think. But, very few people really want to be rich. They fantasize about it but then go about working a job that can never get them rich. It’s probably better that most people’s priorirites are family, friends, etc.. than just grabbing up money. However if the goal is just to get rich, and my kid or something really wanted it, Id say, 1. You have to be prepared to live your life in a way where you take complete responsibility for your actions and results. Most people cannot do this. Its always someone or somethings fault when things dont go well, or attributed to luck. Luck does exist in the world, but your goal is not to be lucky. Your goal is to control what factors you can so bad luck can’t knock you off track. 2. Pick the right job. You have to either be a person who makes money from others’ labor (business) or have some very special talent where you as an individual contributor makes extremely outsized salary. 3. If the goal is millionairre rich, get a moderately high paying job >100k, work for a couple decades, and live like a pauper. You’ll become a millionairre. If the goal is billionaire rich, you need to be on the ground floor of something thats going to be huge in the next 20 years (ie.. the Internet). Starting a business in a mature industry, you have more problems with competition, that is, pricing power, and competing against established players for customers, and also for labor, etc..

49 points by tortilla 9y ago

Luck is the biggest millionare maker. Yes, preparation and opportunity do matter, but being born into the right circumstances is just plain old luck.

psyc 9y ago

Weird article. Seems to agree there is an effective version of a 'millionaire mindset' and then attacks a strawman version of it that only 'The Secret' types would promote. And even they probably aren't completely wrong.

CompelTechnic 9y ago
While I agree that the strawman "hustler's ethic" presented by the article is false, there are mindsets that correlate with wealth. There are numerous sociological studies presenting the high correlation between conscientiousness and income/wealth [1]. It would be very difficult to separate the cause and effect, but in action you are left with a Pascal's wager scenario: Knowing that conscientiousness correlates to wealth, and knowing conscientiousness to be a virtue in and of itself, should you try build a mindset rich in conscientiousness? The conclusion seems obvious to me. It's possible that you can't change your personality enough for it to matter, but that's just another facet of the Pascal's wager. [1]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3498890/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3498890/
- Analemma_ 9y ago
  I'm curious that you're using Pascal's wager as an argument for believing in something, when almost everyone uses it as an illustrative example of flawed reasoning. Do you also believe in God because of Pascal's wager?
  - psyc 9y ago
    I don't know about every objection to Pascal's Wager, but overall it's quite different. In PW it's the belief itself that might be the key to heaven, and you can't have an authentic belief that you adopted simply because you had an incentive to adopt it. With conscientiousness it doesn't really matter what you believe or how strongly, all you have to do is behave conscientiously and see if it helps.
    - Can_Not 9y ago
      The objection is that you have 5 major world religions to choose from, there could be 1,000 to 1,000,000 minor religions to choose from, the gatekeeper of heaven might be selecting only non-believers who non-believe for the right reason, the gatekeeper of heaven might have an even more arbitrary or unpredictable criteria than laid out by your geographically predetermined choice of religion. The religion could represent actual spiritual phenomenon, but the entities could have lied about who they are or what's to be expected. Not to mention that we could be a random occurrence of life in a universe created for a set of aliens we could never meet. The wager is flawed because you have to consider a near infinite number of evidence-less hypothesis about getting to heaven, which might not exist or might not even have a gatekeeper.

fwdpropaganda 9y ago

> Millionaires don’t waste their mental bandwidth on how much a caramel macchiato costs. This isn't exactly big data, but the few wealthy people I've met (single-digit millionaires) were extremely frugal people.

personjerry 9y ago
If you make 150k and frugally save over 20 years or so, you can be a single-digit millionaire. To be a billionaire, you have to play a different ballgame.
- fwdpropaganda 9y ago
  Are you either a millionaire or a billionaire?
  - personjerry 9y ago
    Don't you think that a millionaire or billionaire giving you their experience and guidance would be subject to survivor bias?
    - HeyLaughingBoy 9y ago
      Perhaps, but it's also likely to be a more useful perspective than from someone on welfare.
    - fwdpropaganda 9y ago
      Sorry, how did you jump from my question to asking a seemingly unrelated question?
  - sidcool 9y ago
    Are there any non YC billionaires on HN? I highly doubt it.

wolco 9y ago

Changing a mindset is the first step to something new.

wgerard 9y ago

This is a bit rambling, but I always find that whole genre of literature ("highly effective habits" style literature) to be really fascinating, mostly because it doesn't totally make sense to me. My thinking has always been that the Gates/Obamas/RBGs of the world didn't overly concern themselves with trying to emulate previously successful people. Not that they didn't take lessons from them, but that it wasn't so overt. No sense of, "if I just imitate these 5 behaviors of Andrew Carnegie I'll be successful". And maybe indeed the problem is that those individuals weren't just trying to be successful for the sake of being successful, which is sometimes the feeling I get from reading articles like the ones mentioned. Obviously, I could be entirely wrong or missing the point of literature like that. And as the article notes, there's some generally beneficial advice in there (living below your means, for example). Still, it seems like if your goal is to become the next Madeleine Albright, you should emulate her by not trying too hard to emulate her!

CM30 9y ago
That's because (like many genres of literature that claim to know the secret to becoming rich and successful), the writers really don't know what makes that the case. So they're taking surface level qualities they see in successful people, and assuming that's at least part of the reason for their success. It's just cargo culting really, like those tribes who build airports out of wood because they think that causes supply planes to land.
- jwdunne 9y ago
  I remember a great comment on HN once about this very subject. They said it's like taking a 1000 people, having them flip a coin and eliminating anyone with tails. Once you're down to ten people, you ask them how they did it, what made them flip so many heads in a row. I think the name of it is called "survivorship bias".

bitxbitxbitcoin 9y ago

A millionaire mindset has definitely made more than one person poor, though!

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

dpweb 9y ago

I suspect IQ plays into it, the ability to think. But, very few people really want to be rich. They fantasize about it but then go about working a job that can never get them rich. It’s probably better that most people’s priorirites are family, friends, etc.. than just grabbing up money. However if the goal is just to get rich, and my kid or something really wanted it, Id say, 1. You have to be prepared to live your life in a way where you take complete responsibility for your actions and results. Most people cannot do this. Its always someone or somethings fault when things dont go well, or attributed to luck. Luck does exist in the world, but your goal is not to be lucky. Your goal is to control what factors you can so bad luck can’t knock you off track. 2. Pick the right job. You have to either be a person who makes money from others’ labor (business) or have some very special talent where you as an individual contributor makes extremely outsized salary. 3. If the goal is millionairre rich, get a moderately high paying job >100k, work for a couple decades, and live like a pauper. You’ll become a millionairre. If the goal is billionaire rich, you need to be on the ground floor of something thats going to be huge in the next 20 years (ie.. the Internet). Starting a business in a mature industry, you have more problems with competition, that is, pricing power, and competing against established players for customers, and also for labor, etc..