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Is there any such “how to get rich” advice that IS actionable? Literally all of it I’ve come across suffers from extreme selection bias, and does not account f

Is there any such “how to get rich” advice that IS actionable? Literally all of it I’ve come across suffers from extreme selection bias, and does not account for (or give credit to) luck.

komali2 7y ago
"Increase surface area" is the only one I can think of. I.e., the "make your own luck" aphorism - the more you open yourself up to opportunities, the more likely you are to get lucky in the first place (finding an opportunity to generate riches). So like, meeting lots of people, talking to lots of people, going out a lot. Not staying in, and if you are staying in, increasing your knowledge-based surface area. Pretty much my go-to advice when I'm mentoring job seekers - the more people see your resume, the sooner you'll get a job, one way or the other. Nobody's gonna hire you if they don't "see" you.
xxhss7ss 7y ago
In theory it should be easy to explain, along with things like how to graduate from a top university, how to socialise in groups and how to date. But they aren't easy to explain because there's so many little things that people just infer along the way. While people are trying to follow cliches they forget things like atmosphere and a hundred other things.
JamesBarney 7y ago
There is one path which is get really good at an in demand skill and figure out how to get paid as much as possible for it, all while spending as little as possible. Basically doing something like becoming a neurosurgeon, or investment bank, etc... This is lower risk, but you're not going to get FU rich. The other one is find a high risk high reward path like founding startups and then keep on rolling the dice. There is real estate as well which is somewhere in the middle. Each path has a lot of specific advice about how to achieve it, but they're all hard and require varing degrees birth luck and blind luck.
- tomhoward 7y ago
  As he points out in his Joe Rogan interview from yesterday, highly-skilled specialists like neurosurgeons often don't do all that well, as their income is pegged to their time spent working, and their lifestyle costs often scale linearly with their income. Of course that changes if you can break out of being an hourly-billing practitioner, and become an entrepreneur, like the dentist I know who built a successful chain of clinics then sold it to a large heath service provider. You're doing a lot of picking holes in his points (much of critique seems to come down to luck being more important than anything else). But consider that this is always going to be easy to do for something like this that is specifically designed to be a set of simple, broadly-applicable rules of thumb. Of course there will be limitless numbers of exceptions or domain-specific variations. The world is infinitely complex. But there are still patterns than can be observed and principles that can be applied that will give people a better chance of a successful outcome than had they not applied those principles, and that's what he's seeking to share here. And he deserves to be listened to, given that he's said he started learning/refining/applying these principles from a young age, and credits them for his own achievements, which are formidable and far from accidental (see the story of how he sued two of the biggest VC firms in Silicon Valley after they tried to screw him out of what he was due for his stake in the first company he helped build). As for luck: nobody, least-of-all Naval, claims that it is immaterial to many people's success or opportunities. But it's also uncontrollable, so you may as well forget about it, and focus on what you can control: making decisions that increase the probability of getting the outcome you want.
  - JamesBarney 7y ago
    My overall critique is it's a lot of fluff. I'm sure Naval is a very smart guy who has a lot of incredibly valuable business experience but he didn't share any of it here. He shared a bunch of not particularly useful self-help advice.
    - tomhoward 7y ago
      By “not particularly useful”, do you mean that if someone were to apply it to the greatest extent possible, it wouldn’t work (on average)? Or just that it’s obvious? I mean, good advice often seems obvious to the point of banality, yet is heeded and properly applied by very few. Paul Graham has said the same thing about his advice to YC-funded founders. He’s joked he could have been replaced with a bot that just repeatedly said “make something people want” and “talk to your users”. It sounds banal, yet so few actually do it, and the ones who have done it are the ones who have succeeded.

Is there any such “how to get rich” advice that IS actionable? Literally all of it I’ve come across suffers from extreme selection bias, and does not account for (or give credit to) luck.

komali2 7y ago

"Increase surface area" is the only one I can think of. I.e., the "make your own luck" aphorism - the more you open yourself up to opportunities, the more likely you are to get lucky in the first place (finding an opportunity to generate riches). So like, meeting lots of people, talking to lots of people, going out a lot. Not staying in, and if you are staying in, increasing your knowledge-based surface area. Pretty much my go-to advice when I'm mentoring job seekers - the more people see your resume, the sooner you'll get a job, one way or the other. Nobody's gonna hire you if they don't "see" you.

xxhss7ss 7y ago

In theory it should be easy to explain, along with things like how to graduate from a top university, how to socialise in groups and how to date. But they aren't easy to explain because there's so many little things that people just infer along the way. While people are trying to follow cliches they forget things like atmosphere and a hundred other things.

JamesBarney 7y ago

There is one path which is get really good at an in demand skill and figure out how to get paid as much as possible for it, all while spending as little as possible. Basically doing something like becoming a neurosurgeon, or investment bank, etc... This is lower risk, but you're not going to get FU rich. The other one is find a high risk high reward path like founding startups and then keep on rolling the dice. There is real estate as well which is somewhere in the middle. Each path has a lot of specific advice about how to achieve it, but they're all hard and require varing degrees birth luck and blind luck.

tomhoward 7y ago
As he points out in his Joe Rogan interview from yesterday, highly-skilled specialists like neurosurgeons often don't do all that well, as their income is pegged to their time spent working, and their lifestyle costs often scale linearly with their income. Of course that changes if you can break out of being an hourly-billing practitioner, and become an entrepreneur, like the dentist I know who built a successful chain of clinics then sold it to a large heath service provider. You're doing a lot of picking holes in his points (much of critique seems to come down to luck being more important than anything else). But consider that this is always going to be easy to do for something like this that is specifically designed to be a set of simple, broadly-applicable rules of thumb. Of course there will be limitless numbers of exceptions or domain-specific variations. The world is infinitely complex. But there are still patterns than can be observed and principles that can be applied that will give people a better chance of a successful outcome than had they not applied those principles, and that's what he's seeking to share here. And he deserves to be listened to, given that he's said he started learning/refining/applying these principles from a young age, and credits them for his own achievements, which are formidable and far from accidental (see the story of how he sued two of the biggest VC firms in Silicon Valley after they tried to screw him out of what he was due for his stake in the first company he helped build). As for luck: nobody, least-of-all Naval, claims that it is immaterial to many people's success or opportunities. But it's also uncontrollable, so you may as well forget about it, and focus on what you can control: making decisions that increase the probability of getting the outcome you want.
- JamesBarney 7y ago
  My overall critique is it's a lot of fluff. I'm sure Naval is a very smart guy who has a lot of incredibly valuable business experience but he didn't share any of it here. He shared a bunch of not particularly useful self-help advice.
  - tomhoward 7y ago
    By “not particularly useful”, do you mean that if someone were to apply it to the greatest extent possible, it wouldn’t work (on average)? Or just that it’s obvious? I mean, good advice often seems obvious to the point of banality, yet is heeded and properly applied by very few. Paul Graham has said the same thing about his advice to YC-funded founders. He’s joked he could have been replaced with a bot that just repeatedly said “make something people want” and “talk to your users”. It sounds banal, yet so few actually do it, and the ones who have done it are the ones who have succeeded.