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I got rich in Silicon Valley from my equity compensation. I bounced around various companies and startups. Two of them were successful and had public offering

I got rich in Silicon Valley from my equity compensation. I bounced around various companies and startups. Two of them were successful and had public offerings. Of those two, one was spectacularly successful. Sure, luck played a role. But my pure grit and tenacity also played a role. Taking on hard bugs and solving them played a role: I solved a lot of hard bugs that others couldn't solve. Spending Saturday afternoons at the library reading books on topics like software program management and phase locked loops played a role. Having some talent at hiring and managing people helped. Spending my teenage years writing clever little programs in 6502 assembly language on my Commodore 64 instead of smoking weed and partying helped. Having a strong knack for math and computer science helped. Living simply and reinvesting my profits helped. In my 20s, I couldn't understand why people at my same wealth level in Silicon Valley were often driving $100K cars and engaging in other types of ostentatious spending displays. I was constantly surprised by the people making lots of money who didn't really have any clue how money works. Wall Street has its own game to separate you from your wealth, and they'll do it if you don't understand how the Warren Buffets of the world value equities and read balance sheets. You have to get up and out and play the game to win. If you play, you'll lose a lot of games. When you lose, don't lose the lesson. There is a secret message embedded in every failure. Figure out the message, get up and go at it again. Sometimes, you'll suffer a humiliating failure a few more times before you get the lesson. Of course, someone who is too lazy to go play the game will ascribe success to "luck." And the person who just can't "get" the secret messages embedded in their failures will ascribe success to "luck." I've been dirt poor. For a whole year at the university, I slept on a camping pad on the floor because I couldn't even afford a real mattress, much less a bed. I've also been middle class, and now I'm rich. It's clear that being rich is better than being middle class, and being middle class is better than being poor, but being rich has its own problems. Even if you don't advertise your wealth, malicious actors smell it on you and try to separate you from it. Rich people sometimes say things like, "My only real friends are the ones who were my friends before I got rich." I get that mindset completely. Money lubricates a lot of things in life, but it doesn't completely solve very many issues. The one single thing that I appreciate the most about money is that I'm no longer obliged to sell my own time just to survive. I spent my afternoon today, a weekday, taking a walk in the park, meeting a friend for a late lunch, going to the gym and then reading a book. In my previous life, I would have been stuck at work and wouldn't have done any of those things. I read through the list and agreed with every item. Some are very broad, and I'd add some caveats if I were discussing them in detail. The one that made me think the hardest was "Ignore people playing status games. They gain status by attacking people playing wealth creation games." That's true, but sizing people up and figuring out what "game" they're playing is part of being successful.

dnomad 8y ago
Sorry, but it's a bit rich when people who literally won the lottery call for hard work. The reality is you got lucky. There were probably many people who worked harder than you and saved more than you who will never enjoy anything close to your success. And that's okay. All wealth is based on luck or coercion (really, just coercion). This is trivially true if you understand what wealth is: claims on the labor-time of others. Since most people aren't in the habit of freely giving away such claims in order to accumulate such claims you either need a gun or you need to stumble upon something that other people need so much they'll surrender their labor-time -- literally they're time on earth -- for. I say stumble upon because presumably when you were born you didn't "own" much of anything. (And yes, to complete the analysis, the only thing that prevents others from simply seizing whatever it is you've lucked into is somebody else has guns and stops them in return for a cut. It's coercion all the way down.) And that's okay. While capitalism doesn't alter the essential nature of wealth -- it's not magic -- it does strongly incentivize those with wealth to try and accumulate more wealth. Capital demands to be put to work immediately, always, 24/7, to acquire more capital. If you understand this then it should be clear the article is silly and there are and there will always be only three ways to get "rich" (which again, just means to accumulate labor claims). 1. Be lucky. 2. Get some guns, some men, and declare that you are now rich. (This is what people mean when they say sovereigns can "print money" or that sovereigns cannot default. The wealth of sovereigns is structurally inherent. As Keynes might say, a sovereign is wealth, that is, it is labor claims.) 3. Go to work for those who are already wealthy and make their lives better, that is literally make "the rich richer." The article rambles and uses a lot of silly words to say #3. And while the author may mention society understand that whatever you want to do "for society" will require you begging for capital from rich guys like the author. When I explain this to bold young college students who are very hesitant to go to work for the "Man" (in finance or law) it always leaves them very depressed. To lighten the mood a bit I will say this: not all capital is subject to free, anonymous exchange (the logic of the market). This is the key insight of Marx: there are relations that can produce wealth (labor claims) that do not require price signals. Which is just a fancy of way of saying you can actually make yourself quite wealthy without buying/selling anything. (Unless you're one of those insane Randroids who believe when a mother sings to her newborn baby she is somehow profiting from the "exchange.") The interesting thing about what Marxists would call such "non-reified" capital is that it can have tremendous though hard to measure effects and it can operate at global scale eg open source software and many world religions.

dnomad 8y ago

Sorry, but it's a bit rich when people who literally won the lottery call for hard work. The reality is you got lucky. There were probably many people who worked harder than you and saved more than you who will never enjoy anything close to your success. And that's okay. All wealth is based on luck or coercion (really, just coercion). This is trivially true if you understand what wealth is: claims on the labor-time of others. Since most people aren't in the habit of freely giving away such claims in order to accumulate such claims you either need a gun or you need to stumble upon something that other people need so much they'll surrender their labor-time -- literally they're time on earth -- for. I say stumble upon because presumably when you were born you didn't "own" much of anything. (And yes, to complete the analysis, the only thing that prevents others from simply seizing whatever it is you've lucked into is somebody else has guns and stops them in return for a cut. It's coercion all the way down.) And that's okay. While capitalism doesn't alter the essential nature of wealth -- it's not magic -- it does strongly incentivize those with wealth to try and accumulate more wealth. Capital demands to be put to work immediately, always, 24/7, to acquire more capital. If you understand this then it should be clear the article is silly and there are and there will always be only three ways to get "rich" (which again, just means to accumulate labor claims). 1. Be lucky. 2. Get some guns, some men, and declare that you are now rich. (This is what people mean when they say sovereigns can "print money" or that sovereigns cannot default. The wealth of sovereigns is structurally inherent. As Keynes might say, a sovereign is wealth, that is, it is labor claims.) 3. Go to work for those who are already wealthy and make their lives better, that is literally make "the rich richer." The article rambles and uses a lot of silly words to say #3. And while the author may mention society understand that whatever you want to do "for society" will require you begging for capital from rich guys like the author. When I explain this to bold young college students who are very hesitant to go to work for the "Man" (in finance or law) it always leaves them very depressed. To lighten the mood a bit I will say this: not all capital is subject to free, anonymous exchange (the logic of the market). This is the key insight of Marx: there are relations that can produce wealth (labor claims) that do not require price signals. Which is just a fancy of way of saying you can actually make yourself quite wealthy without buying/selling anything. (Unless you're one of those insane Randroids who believe when a mother sings to her newborn baby she is somehow profiting from the "exchange.") The interesting thing about what Marxists would call such "non-reified" capital is that it can have tremendous though hard to measure effects and it can operate at global scale eg open source software and many world religions.