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I am always amazed by how many people get into this "Beat the system and make tons of money" mindset. If there's anything that has proven itself time and time

• icebraining 9y ago
  Carnegie and Buffett occur to me as counter-examples that you need to devote yourself to a specific field or technology.
  • RIMR 9y ago
    They are the exception, not the rule. Besides, they technically devoted themselves to the field of finance. They didn't just decide one day that they wanted to be billionaires and only work 1 hour per week. They worked their asses off to get where they are today, and the goal wasn't even necessarily to make a fortune...
  • espeed 9y ago
    Buffett's field of study is the finance and economic system. It should be easy to see that one of the things that separates Warren Buffett from the rest of us is that he has a unique perspective of the financial world – he sees all of the dynamics and intricacies of the financial world in a way that few others do. It took years for him to build the mental framework that led to his deep understanding and unique view of the world. And as a result of his devotion to this pursuit and his willingness to immerse himself in it, he developed the structural underpinning for the mental vista that yields the rare and valuable perspective that enables him to see the financial world with the clarity of a composer likely unattained by anyone in history. This is why Goldman Sachs calls him when they need help, like they did in the financial crisis.
    • AznHisoka 9y ago
      I kinda think Buffett's way of investing is obsolete these days. Every single analyst is studying the fundamentals and financials of companies now. Every single analyst has access to the same information he had. It was different decades ago when we didn't have BloomBerg, Thomson Reuters, FactSet, etc. Now everyone does. His advantage now is just that he has boatloads of money to buy companies and turn them around.
      • triviatise 9y ago
        you dont understand his strategy if you think it is out of date. 1) he buys equity in the private markets not in the public markets 2) he has capital to buy entire companies 3) he can evaluate a company based on the people, not based on financials 4) he commits to not meddling in operations. Today's tax structure forces entrepreneurs to sell because of huge tax implications of passing down a privately held company. 5) emotionally he is very strong and he is willing to wait on the sideline for years if necessary. He holds on to huge amounts of cash. Meanwhile shareholders are getting mad that he is not getting the returns and start talking about how he should just pay out the dividends, people start talking about how he has lost his touch or his method is out of date. The market is skyrocketing. Then the crash happens and he buys tons of distressed assets at a discount and he is brilliant again.
        • joosters 9y ago
          People are forced to avoid tax on their profits? Oh the humanity!
          • mlindner 9y ago
            If the sudden taxes kill the company, then certainly. It's in the US's best interest for them to avoid those taxes because if they don't then the US loses out on taxing future profits of that company.
            • FridgeSeal 9y ago
  • rdiddly 9y ago
    You know speaking of Warren Buffett, he came to mind while I was reading the article, as someone who pretty much behaves the exact opposite of this. No ostentatious display by the 3rd-richest person in the world... hmm that's interesting. You'd think it would give pause to the many suckers out there, but apparently they all still think things in the world are exactly how they look. That's why it's not fair to target young people - they haven't learned yet. Challenging myself to find a photo of Warren posing ostentatiously with a car, I found this which cracked me up: http://2il.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/warren-buffett-driving-car.jpg http://2il.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/warren-buffett-dri... He's picking up a BIG MAC for chrissakes. His car is very ordinary-looking and not showy. It's a Caddy though mind you... he's not an animal.
    • cornholio 9y ago
      That's a nice picture. It shows how a real billionaire looks like, as opposed to the get-rich-quick fantasies: https://www.instagram.com/richkidslondon/?hl=en https://www.instagram.com/richkidslondon/?hl=en
      • rdiddly 9y ago
        Oh my god those photos are way sadder than I was prepared for. And they're definitely designed to appeal to poor people, not rich ones. So, they're just another part of the ongoing extraction of wealth from the already-poor. Most of the photos feature cars. Is a car a sign of wealth? If Warren converted his entire net worth to Lamborghinis (say $200,000 each) he'd have about 400,000 of them. A Lamborghini is worth to him, proportionally, about what 25 cents is worth to me. Even if you're "only" Steve Ballmer that car is worth only 75 cents to you in rdiddly dollars. If you were hanging out with actual rich people flaunting your $200K car they'd be like yeah congratulations, you found a quarter, Janice would you call security and have this gentleman removed please? EDIT: They'd be like oh yeah I bought four of those with the interest earned by my cat's litterbox. Janice would you etc.
    • tacon 9y ago
      He was slumming. No Dairy Queen available...
• 8_hours_ago 9y ago
  Nonsense! Anyone can become rich if they just want to! For those who don't buy the OP's argument and want to get rich quick, I'm looking for investors for my ICO. It's like bitcoin but for people who like to eat pizza. \s
  • noir_lord 9y ago
    Pizzacoin - tie the unit price to a 12" stuffed crust from dominos. Minor units are "Slices". I mean dogecoin was a thing.
    • bkmartin 9y ago
      I mean dogecoin is a thing.
      • Analemma_ 9y ago
        It still has higher trading volume than Bitcoin Cash apparently, which is freaking hilarious.
        • vidarh 9y ago
          Nowhere near it. Doge has a "market cap" of about $630m, with volume last 24h of $62m. Bitcoin Cash is at $25 billion, with 24h trading volume of about $1.2 billion.
          • Klathmon 9y ago
            To be fair, it's neck and neck with # of transactions per day.
    • __jal 9y ago
      > stuffed crust from dominos I realize people play fast and loose with reality when it comes to *coins, but calling Dominos 'pizza' is fraud.
• iamcasen 9y ago
  One of the most age old ways to get rich is just like you said: write a book titled "I'm really rich! I will teach you my secret!" People eat that shit up!
  • rdiddly 9y ago
    It's so meta. I still remember the "Hey I quit my job and got rich as a blogger who tells you how to quit your job and get rich as a blogger" craze of 2010.
    • kornish 9y ago
      Kind of like rap, too. It's bizarre (and kind of awesome) how many rap and hip-hop lyrics are about being the best at rap and hip-hop.
      • spicytunacone 9y ago
        The connection you made is a reach, but competition is an aspect of the genre. Gun bars and other recurring themes like disses and self-hype are just part of the game. It's built-in.
    • jstarfish 9y ago
      It's still pretty bad with travel blogs. They'll always have at least one mention per article about how you, too, can travel the world and get paid to blog about it, after you drop $300 to join TravelBlogSuccess.
• Balgair 9y ago
  > ... it's that people who seek immediate wealth, and who fantasize about their "million dollar idea", are absolutely not the kinds of people who become successful and wealthy. There is an old saying: Making a million dollars and spending a million dollars are the exact opposite thing.
• tonystubblebine 9y ago
  Kind of tangential, but a self-sabotage concept I find fascinating is called "short term mood repair." That's a phrase that one of the top academics studying procrastination uses to describe one of the most common prompts for procrastination. (Tim Pychyl) In this concept, you have some tiny anxiety about upcoming work that probably never even reaches your conscious thoughts. And the absolute fastest way to make that anxiety go away (i.e. repair it) is to pivot away from the upcoming work. Rationally, this is a terrible idea. But emotionally, it's very functional. Procrastination creates a short term fix to that anxiety. Or, maybe more familiar to people here, this is just another example of System I and System II thinking from Thinking, Fast and Slow. I think there's something similar going on with "Get Rich Quick." The desire to get rich is both rational and emotional. Yes, obviously, it's rational to want to have money. And then also, there's often an emotional anxiety about our place in the world and having money is a fantasy that resolves that anxiety. So, everyone who points out that Get Rich Quick is not an effective strategy for actually getting rich is right. Rationally, you should choose behaviors that lead to steady accumulation of wealth. However, I do think Get Rich Quick does provide a functional, short term, solution to the anxiety that's prompting people to want to get rich. In other words, these people in the article are performing self-care with a "short term mood repair" strategy. Another concept that Dr. Pychyl introduced me to is that MRI scans show that the same parts of our brain light up when we think about strangers and when we think about our future selves. In other words, it's easy to sell our future self short. http://www.procrastination.ca/ http://www.procrastination.ca/
  • jackgolding 8y ago
    very interesting, shame STMR seems to be very academic on this stage (searching only gives papers.)
    • tonystubblebine 8y ago
      I built a series of articles around Tim's work for Medium. The article he wrote to lead off is the most I've ever highlighted an article. https://medium.com/s/the-complete-guide-to-beating-procrastination/how-to-use-psychology-to-solve-the-procrastination-puzzle-6e6a56cdd535 https://medium.com/s/the-complete-guide-to-beating-procrasti...
• gowld 9y ago
  Your comment is hosted on ycombinator.com, an enterprise founded with the specific goal: "Beat the system and make tons of money". The only distinction is the "immediate" part.
  • tlrobinson 9y ago
    Y Combinator's motto is literally "Make something people want."
    • jiveturkey 9y ago
      isn’t there an implied, “in order to generate revenue”?
      • dublinben 9y ago
        If there were, why would they accept non-profits, which they have done so since 2013?[0] [0]https://www.ycombinator.com/nonprofits/ https://www.ycombinator.com/nonprofits/
        • ugh123 9y ago
          I always assumed every YC startup is "non profit" for the first 5 years of life... ;)
        • asdsa5325 9y ago
          > Since some people were confused when we funded Watsi, I’d better clarify that the money we’re putting into the nonprofits will be a charitable donation, rather than an investment in the narrow sense. We won’t have any financial interest in them. For good vibes, tax credits, & marketing
      • tlrobinson 9y ago
        Maybe so, but that's very different than "Beat the system and make tons of money". See some of pg's early essays: http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html http://paulgraham.com/good.html http://paulgraham.com/good.html Entrepreneurship is one of the least zero-sum activities you can participate in.
• _greim_ 9y ago
  > people who seek immediate wealth, and who fantasize about their "million dollar idea", are absolutely not the kinds of people who become successful and wealthy. Replace "absolutely not" with "almost never". It's relevant because that vanishingly small percentage of people who do manage to become wealthy get an absurd amount of attention, which inspires others to mimic them, and so the cycle continues.
• icantdrive55 9y ago
  "The people who become devoted to a field or a technology - who make the business their passion, and focus on filling a need - these are the people who earn a fortune." Let's not leave out the sympathetic wealthy father. It's always played down, and left out of, "How I made my wad" speeches. I can go through my high school year book, and pick out the wealthy kids. They are all wealthy now, and honestly, would be most likely homeless if not for that family money. Money to risk. That's what the poor/middle class never have--money to risk. And it's more than dad's money. It's less stress in college. Hell, most of the rich kids I grew up with thought college was boring. It's dad's wisdom over money. Dad's connections. Dad's free lawyer. Dad's wisdom. Dad's low interest loans. Loans--that's a laugh.
• skybrian 9y ago
  Does anyone remember the "million dollar homepage" guy? There are certainly legitimate ways to make a good chunk of change using what is basically just a neat marketing idea. But, typically, they only work once, or a small number of times, and then then copycats don't attract money anymore.
  • astura 9y ago
    Million dollar homepage is still online, surprisingly: http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/ http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/
• themagician 9y ago
  > You can't just make money by trying really hard to be rich, unless, of course, your business model is funneling cash off of suckers with a predatory get-rich-quick scheme. More wealthy people make their money this way than you might realize. Rare indeed is the person who became wealthy by actually creating something of value. Much more common is the person who cheated someone (or many someones) out of something. Making money is easy. Doing something decent is hard.
  • mlindner 9y ago
    What a distorted way of looking at things. You don't make money by cheating people out of something. You make money by doing something people want you to do. (Or doing something they didn't know they wanted you to do.)
    • themagician 8y ago
      That's reality. Uber wouldn't be a billion company if they played fair and by the rules. They are a billion company because they found loopholes and exploited them.
• zeth___ 9y ago
  >The people who become devoted to a field or a technology - who make the business their passion, and focus on filling a need - these are the people who earn a fortune. I am always amazed people think this is the case. The people who make money from a technology are very seldom the ones who devote their life to it. They are the ones who know just enough about it to be at the right place at the right time. There is a reason why facebook is written in php.
• abecedarius 9y ago
  I'll speculate that one common way this mindset gets acquired is by encountering enough ways that the system really is rigged, or that the pieties learned as a child seem false. There's not much distance between "the system is rigged" and "I want to be the predator, not the patsy." I'm not defending this way of thinking: I think it's wrong. But to counter something it helps to understand it, not just marvel at it.
• projektir 9y ago
  This doesn't really match my impression at all. Caring a lot about specifically making money is, in my opinion, absolutely key to making money, because otherwise you just end up focusing on other things (family, pleasures, ideals, etc.). If I wanted to make money, I'd design a very different thing in a very different way compared to if I wanted to make something me and my circle of friends would find useful. These things are practically disjoint. > The people who become devoted to a field or a technology - who make the business their passion, and focus on filling a need - these are the people who earn a fortune. This is a bit mixed up. Like, these are different things. Devoting yourself to something strikes me as the hard way to make money. For the vast majority of people, this will absolutely not work, simply due to probabilities. It's like devoting yourself to being a professional athlete. Good luck, there are millions of others like you. > who make the business their passion, and focus on filling a need This, to me, IS a "getting rich" mindset, as I don't really understand why anyone would get into it otherwise. Most people I know who really care about technology are often tragically far from any kind of user and therefore can't think about filling a need. People who care a lot about a subject are often filling their own need, but there's no guarantee whatsoever that that need has anything to do with any kind of customer. Quite the opposite, most useful needs are already filled, it's the small niches that an individual might want filled. There are also large chunks of people who like filling a need in a "helpful" sort of way (i.e., writing documentation) who often get no kickback from it at all. If anything, a person super passionate about something, if they actually want to make money, needs to wheel that around almost completely and care about all sorts of other things, such as marketing and business management, things many people plain find hard to digest. You need to, specifically, really care about making money for many of these things to not be somewhere between gross and boring to you.
• adverbly 8y ago
  To be fair, predatory schemes can take many forms. Bad financial products, pseudo-science products, even a lot of advertising strategies these days use predatory tactics. At the heart of it is the fact that these needs that you talk about people filling can be needs people think they have, but don't actually have. "My chakra is out of balance and it's the cause of what is bad in my life. I must buy this raw water."