11 ms·

The Knack for Getting Money

126 points by lionhearted 16y ago

TimothyBurgess 16y ago
The only problem I have with this... is that I've experienced firsthand the other side of this coin. For a few years I was surrounded by a few people who have a knack for getting money... by any means necessary. These people would lie (not little white lies, big ones with negative impacts), manipulate, and straight-up steal from others just to make a few bucks. They had no remorse for the detrimental outcomes they brought upon those they stole from... no compassion whatsoever. When looking for those with a knack for getting money, look for those who earn it... those whose ethics are no less than admirable... unless of course you lack compassion and morals yourself. Those who manipulate and steal without any remorse for others' lives need to be weeded out. They drag the rest of us down and hold us back for their own selfish gain. Some may consider this darwinism - survival of the fittest - but I believe we've made much more progress as a species by working with each other than against. The last conversation I had with these people I spent years with was to try to explain how their line of thinking quite honestly brings suffering to countless people. Prime example, big banks making deals they know will fall through regardless of the impact it has on the economy... look where we are now. The type of people who made the decisions that led to the recent recession, which caused a massive decrease in my father's hours at work, are the same ones who want to perform a shortsale on his house because he has fallen behind on his mortgage. As for the suffering I mentioned, let's just say my father will give up his house over his dead body.
- szany 16y ago
  Beautifully put. The knack should be a means or a by-product, not an end. I think the main thing not to forget is that although making money is what determines a company's survival, that's not what determines its value. Carl Sagan usually puts things in perspective for me :)
- alnayyir 16y ago
  I can summarize this article thusly: A mountebank promoting sociopathic behavior. Charming.
  - lionhearted 16y ago
    Whoever is voting this up, please stop and consider what etiquette level you'd like on the site. There's reasoned and intelligent critiques in this thread, which are good. But this alnayyir goes around and writes really venomous nasty stuff. I already asked him to cut it out after he replied 18 times in a past thread, all really nasty. Do you want the site to have members calling other members nasty names with no other substance? No? Then please vote accordingly. You'll get what you bless.
    - chegra 16y ago
      alnayyir is kinda like an anomaly. I think he says stuff so that you extremely outrage by it or you are ardent supporter of his point. I estimate there are 10x[10 is a guess but there are significantly more] more people with upvote power than downvoting. These two points combine to make it difficult to downvote him to hell. That is why flagging is appropriate, don't just downvote, flag.
      - alnayyir 16y ago
        >alnayyir is kinda like an anomaly Only amongst a sampling of sycophants. You wouldn't believe how much this victory blog bullshit does to discredit this community amongst lay hackers that aren't heavily involved in startups.
        chegra 16y ago
        I don't feed trolls
        deleted 16y ago
        [deleted]
- ehsanul 16y ago
  They had no remorse for the detrimental outcomes they brought upon those they stole from... no compassion whatsoever. Sounds like they were simply psychopaths, hence lacking most emotion. It seems like that emotion/empathy was selected for in our evolutionary history (or perhaps it's just a side-effect of something else, don't know), so I don't think psychopathic behavior could possibly be characterized as darwinism.
  - exit 16y ago
    if the majority are emotional/empathetic, there may emerge a niche for a population of lecherous psychopaths - i.e. bankers. evolution doesn't have to move the entire group in a particular direction.
  - jacques_chester 16y ago
    Both strategies (empathetic and sociopathic) can be selected for; they're relatively stable when combined. The sociopaths need empathetic people to prey on, the empathetic people can tolerate the cost -- up to a point, at which they cooperate to attack the sociopaths. You might fairly characterise civilisation as the arms race between sociopaths and everyone else.
dmg8 16y ago
The problem with hiring a hustler with a "knack for getting money" is that you might be the one he ends up hustling.
- hustlebear-judd 16y ago
  The problem with the word hustle is that it has a few very different connotations. Those who go far have moved beyond street hustling.
  - nedwin 16y ago
    So true. I have this print framed above my desk at work: http://joeyroth.com/charlatan-martyr-hustler/ http://joeyroth.com/charlatan-martyr-hustler/
    - hustlebear-judd 16y ago
      ooh, very cool. I like it!
    - lionhearted 16y ago
      That's absolutely brilliant. Everyone should see this, it explains a tricky concept really fast. Just submitted here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2185510 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2185510 (I think most martyr-types won't like it though...)
adelevie 16y ago
This seems to be channeling Tim Ferris. Forget the quality of your ideas, just change your mindset, and all will be spectacular.
Osiris 16y ago
I think the knack for getting money is probably entirely based on drive and conviction. I think it's a personality trait. Despite having several business ideas, I find that I just don't have the drive to get them going. I want to get those business ideas off the ground, but I have a hard time getting past the planning stages or putting in more than some minimum effort. I usually find myself distracted by ridiculous things like TV or video games. I also tend to talk myself out of things saying I don't have the skills, or the contacts, or don't know how to get started, or don't know enough about the industry. I admire the real entrepreneurs who have the drive to get their businesses going and I wish I had it. Hopefully it's a skill one can learn.
- lionhearted 16y ago
  > I admire the real entrepreneurs who have the drive to get their businesses going and I wish I had it. Hopefully it's a skill one can learn. Pretty sure it's a skill/skillset and can be learned, yeah. I think the key is incremental progress + celebrating even small victories. I've pissed away tons of time on surfing the internet or video games, but improved by looking to scale it down and then celebrating when getting there even a little bit. I was just reading this, it's relevant: http://sivers.org/book/TalentCode http://sivers.org/book/TalentCode Look to do whatever small action gets you a little closer, and then celebrate when you get it done. Then repeat. I find the celebrating to really help, since big changes take a long time and you do suffer a lot of that time - if it's for a far-distant payoff, it's harder to stick with it. You can bring the payoff closer by celebrating every time you do things even a little more correct. Do whatever little step you can do and complete and then celebrate a little. Feel free to email me if I can help at all, or you've got specific questions, or you want to brainstorm a little on good next steps to take and complete.
  - chipsy 16y ago
    I think it's both something you practice and also something you motivate yourself for. I had some entrepreneurial episodes as a kid, which I enjoyed and found some success in once or twice, but somehow forgot about in the teenage years. I started exploring the possibilities again, but I would say that I only got properly shocked into the mindset again after(surprise) getting hustled myself, in a bad way, and wanting to make up for it. Knowing and relearning the "child's reality" is important to success, I think. It gets you past all the blind spots that derail businesses.
Jach 16y ago
Speculation, but I think the tendency toward sociopathic really helps avoid any hang-ups over money. Sure, I'd rather sociopaths get on the Forbes list rather than go out and kill people, but their personality is what I find distasteful, and in any case it's an unnatural brain wiring, that's why I think it's not so easy to just "become a [partial?] sociopath" if you want to rake in money. I tried the Cutco-selling gig for a couple months, and realized almost immediately that I wasn't cut out for it. Sure I could follow the manual (which was golden as far as things-you-need-to-do-to-convert), smile, talk smoothly, answer questions, etc., but inside I think I just fundamentally couldn't shake the feeling that "If these people wanted what I was selling, they'd have gotten it already." (And I think that came out a bit whether I wanted it to or not.) On a high level I know that can be false, but intuitively, that's how I think; I hate ads and when I buy something non-trivial it's usually after personal research, not because of a salesman. Salesmen even make me less likely to buy something especially because I can see through all their rhetoric. I find something really wrong with exploiting the cognitive biases of people even if it's been done for all time, and even if I do it sometimes subconsciously. We should be trying to eliminate those biases, not feeding them. All this said though, you don't have to be a sociopath or a real hustler to see the opportunity of printing out new menus for a quick buck. That's more in line with hacking than with money grabbing, I think. More similar to a college student coming up with pizza money for a weekend than with going after money as a goal in itself.
- nostrademons 16y ago
  That's why it helps to believe in your product. PG once described his approach to selling as "Make your product the best on the market, and then tell the truth."
  - Jach 16y ago
    That's just another trick to make you a more convincing salesman, like smiling. Of course they drill that into your head during the unpaid training for Cutco, and hey, those knives are pretty badass, I still have and use my demo set. It doesn't change the fact that I feel like "Well, if my product really is the best on the market, what do you need me to tell you for? The truth is out there, it doesn't have to come from me." I'm perfectly comfortable with giving a list of facts about my theoretical product and why it's awesome, or making people aware of its existence, what I'm not comfortable with is making a story to get you to want it or pressure you into believing everything I say, and I definitely don't like rhetorical devices used for selling. Yet even PG's advice is product-focused rather than selling-focused; can you distinguish PG's advice from a simple bulleted fact-list? (And how well do you think that alone will sell your product?) If your product isn't the best on the market (or so you think), taking PG's advice would tell you to get back to work while a hustler would go out and sell it anyway. (They don't even necessarily have to lie about anything.) PG's approach echoes the traditional programmer reply of why he doesn't need a marketing team or need to study marketing by saying "My product will speak for itself." Anyway, can you link to an essay or post from PG where he said that? A quick Google search didn't turn up a source.
danenania 16y ago
This sort of begs the question: if your main drive in life is money, what use is it to you really? It just becomes points in a meaningless game. Someone driven to change the world or build for the sake of building, on the other hand, is going to make something out of their money, even if they aren't as skilled or single-minded in acquiring it. Money means a lot more when it serves a purpose other than piling on top of itself and buying superfluous stuff. I'm sure there's a role for people with this approach in most companies, but I tend to avoid them--mostly because they bore me to tears. Someone with ideas and goals that supersede wealth accumulation is a lot more interesting to me, and I'd much prefer to spend my time around such people and scrape by than live in a mansion and listen to a bunch of polo shirt clones yammer on about their real estate investments all day.
- TimothyBurgess 16y ago
  Man I wish I could upvote this a thousand times. I still don't quite understand people who see nothing but green paper - numbers after a dollar sign - in their future. I'm not going to lie. My goal right now is definitely to make money. But it isn't my goal in life. That's for sure. My drive to make money is fueled by my desire to live freely, without financial chains (as my parents and a lot of my family have)... and to have fun and live a good life with those around me. If I have wealth to share and to help makes the lives of others easier, you bet I'm gonna spread it around. I don't have a wife or kids but being able to provide for them when that time comes and give them good lives is my main concern.
  - danenania 16y ago
    Wish I could upvote this a thousand time as well :)
- enjo 16y ago
  I've found that for these type of folks it has absolutely NOTHING to do with money. It has everything to do with competition. I don't know Judd Weiss, but I'll promise you that he's intensely competitive. Money is just how he keeps score.
calvinfroedge 16y ago
While I agree that getting an idea off the ground takes a lot of what's in this blog post - it's important to draw lines...and I think you develop those lines only with experience. A lot of times the quick buck (even if substantial) hurts you later. Sometimes the quickest way to start building skyscrapers is to learn to weld.
- calvinfroedge 16y ago
  Incidentally, another HackerNews link is exactly what I'm referring to.... http://andrewchenblog.com/2011/02/05/stanford-cs-major-seeks-salesmarketing-monkey/ http://andrewchenblog.com/2011/02/05/stanford-cs-major-seeks...
bootload 16y ago
"... became a millionaire by 24 at which point I bought a large modern house in Bel Air; got ranked among the top 10 Commercial Real Estate agents in California and the top 20 Commercial Real Estate agents in the World at Remax Commercial for 2005 and 2006; ..." Is selling in the real-estate boom cycle a good indication of how to make money?
- sokoloff 16y ago
  Selling in the boom and then stopping and doing something else when the boom busts is, to me, evidence of having a knack for getting money.
geekfactor 16y ago
One thing that jumped out at me here is the 'many irons in the fire' aspect of hustling. This seems to go against the grain of 'focus, focus, focus' to which I think many of us ascribe, or at least aspire. For example, YC is supposed to be about entrepreneurs not ideas... I wonder what YC would look like if accepted teams were told to start pushing on their three best ideas simultaneously?
_corbett 16y ago
I'm surprised about the negativity here, one of the most fun parts about being an entrepreneur is exercising this knack for getting money aspect (I'd say start a non-profit if your business has nothing to do with this, but they have to hustle too). As to it being about money or manipulation, to me it's about seeing or creating opportunities that no one else can then chasing and obtaining them.
ojbyrne 16y ago
This has "survivorship bias" all over it. Why not just write about how lottery winners have a knack for getting money?
sayemm 16y ago
Best book on the knack for getting money is "How to Get Rich" by Felix Dennis, founder of Maxim magazine (worth between $400-900M, that's what he says in the book): http://www.amazon.com/How-Get-Rich-Greatest-Entrepreneurs/dp/1591842719/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1297010573&sr=8-1 http://www.amazon.com/How-Get-Rich-Greatest-Entrepreneurs/dp... Here's a good Inc. article on it too: http://www.inc.com/articles/2008/07/dennis.html http://www.inc.com/articles/2008/07/dennis.html Utter determination, fearlessness, tunnel vision, and hard work are his answers.
nachteilig 16y ago
It's too bad we can't bury this obnoxious and poorly written article. Don't bother with it.
jhaglund 16y ago
"ill make a grand moving snow today" Did 50 Cent really go shovel snow? I thought that was a double entendre (and a joke), "moving snow" being a euphemism for selling cocaine.

126 points by lionhearted 16y ago

The only problem I have with this... is that I've experienced firsthand the other side of this coin. For a few years I was surrounded by a few people who have a knack for getting money... by any means necessary. These people would lie (not little white lies, big ones with negative impacts), manipulate, and straight-up steal from others just to make a few bucks. They had no remorse for the detrimental outcomes they brought upon those they stole from... no compassion whatsoever. When looking for those with a knack for getting money, look for those who earn it... those whose ethics are no less than admirable... unless of course you lack compassion and morals yourself. Those who manipulate and steal without any remorse for others' lives need to be weeded out. They drag the rest of us down and hold us back for their own selfish gain. Some may consider this darwinism - survival of the fittest - but I believe we've made much more progress as a species by working with each other than against. The last conversation I had with these people I spent years with was to try to explain how their line of thinking quite honestly brings suffering to countless people. Prime example, big banks making deals they know will fall through regardless of the impact it has on the economy... look where we are now. The type of people who made the decisions that led to the recent recession, which caused a massive decrease in my father's hours at work, are the same ones who want to perform a shortsale on his house because he has fallen behind on his mortgage. As for the suffering I mentioned, let's just say my father will give up his house over his dead body.

szany 16y ago
Beautifully put. The knack should be a means or a by-product, not an end. I think the main thing not to forget is that although making money is what determines a company's survival, that's not what determines its value. Carl Sagan usually puts things in perspective for me :)
alnayyir 16y ago
I can summarize this article thusly: A mountebank promoting sociopathic behavior. Charming.
- lionhearted 16y ago
  Whoever is voting this up, please stop and consider what etiquette level you'd like on the site. There's reasoned and intelligent critiques in this thread, which are good. But this alnayyir goes around and writes really venomous nasty stuff. I already asked him to cut it out after he replied 18 times in a past thread, all really nasty. Do you want the site to have members calling other members nasty names with no other substance? No? Then please vote accordingly. You'll get what you bless.
  - chegra 16y ago
    alnayyir is kinda like an anomaly. I think he says stuff so that you extremely outrage by it or you are ardent supporter of his point. I estimate there are 10x[10 is a guess but there are significantly more] more people with upvote power than downvoting. These two points combine to make it difficult to downvote him to hell. That is why flagging is appropriate, don't just downvote, flag.
    - alnayyir 16y ago
      >alnayyir is kinda like an anomaly Only amongst a sampling of sycophants. You wouldn't believe how much this victory blog bullshit does to discredit this community amongst lay hackers that aren't heavily involved in startups.
      - chegra 16y ago
        I don't feed trolls
        deleted 16y ago
        [deleted]
ehsanul 16y ago
They had no remorse for the detrimental outcomes they brought upon those they stole from... no compassion whatsoever. Sounds like they were simply psychopaths, hence lacking most emotion. It seems like that emotion/empathy was selected for in our evolutionary history (or perhaps it's just a side-effect of something else, don't know), so I don't think psychopathic behavior could possibly be characterized as darwinism.
- exit 16y ago
  if the majority are emotional/empathetic, there may emerge a niche for a population of lecherous psychopaths - i.e. bankers. evolution doesn't have to move the entire group in a particular direction.
- jacques_chester 16y ago
  Both strategies (empathetic and sociopathic) can be selected for; they're relatively stable when combined. The sociopaths need empathetic people to prey on, the empathetic people can tolerate the cost -- up to a point, at which they cooperate to attack the sociopaths. You might fairly characterise civilisation as the arms race between sociopaths and everyone else.

dmg8 16y ago

The problem with hiring a hustler with a "knack for getting money" is that you might be the one he ends up hustling.

hustlebear-judd 16y ago
The problem with the word hustle is that it has a few very different connotations. Those who go far have moved beyond street hustling.
- nedwin 16y ago
  So true. I have this print framed above my desk at work: http://joeyroth.com/charlatan-martyr-hustler/ http://joeyroth.com/charlatan-martyr-hustler/
  - hustlebear-judd 16y ago
    ooh, very cool. I like it!
  - lionhearted 16y ago
    That's absolutely brilliant. Everyone should see this, it explains a tricky concept really fast. Just submitted here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2185510 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2185510 (I think most martyr-types won't like it though...)

adelevie 16y ago

This seems to be channeling Tim Ferris. Forget the quality of your ideas, just change your mindset, and all will be spectacular.

Osiris 16y ago

I think the knack for getting money is probably entirely based on drive and conviction. I think it's a personality trait. Despite having several business ideas, I find that I just don't have the drive to get them going. I want to get those business ideas off the ground, but I have a hard time getting past the planning stages or putting in more than some minimum effort. I usually find myself distracted by ridiculous things like TV or video games. I also tend to talk myself out of things saying I don't have the skills, or the contacts, or don't know how to get started, or don't know enough about the industry. I admire the real entrepreneurs who have the drive to get their businesses going and I wish I had it. Hopefully it's a skill one can learn.

lionhearted 16y ago
> I admire the real entrepreneurs who have the drive to get their businesses going and I wish I had it. Hopefully it's a skill one can learn. Pretty sure it's a skill/skillset and can be learned, yeah. I think the key is incremental progress + celebrating even small victories. I've pissed away tons of time on surfing the internet or video games, but improved by looking to scale it down and then celebrating when getting there even a little bit. I was just reading this, it's relevant: http://sivers.org/book/TalentCode http://sivers.org/book/TalentCode Look to do whatever small action gets you a little closer, and then celebrate when you get it done. Then repeat. I find the celebrating to really help, since big changes take a long time and you do suffer a lot of that time - if it's for a far-distant payoff, it's harder to stick with it. You can bring the payoff closer by celebrating every time you do things even a little more correct. Do whatever little step you can do and complete and then celebrate a little. Feel free to email me if I can help at all, or you've got specific questions, or you want to brainstorm a little on good next steps to take and complete.
- chipsy 16y ago
  I think it's both something you practice and also something you motivate yourself for. I had some entrepreneurial episodes as a kid, which I enjoyed and found some success in once or twice, but somehow forgot about in the teenage years. I started exploring the possibilities again, but I would say that I only got properly shocked into the mindset again after(surprise) getting hustled myself, in a bad way, and wanting to make up for it. Knowing and relearning the "child's reality" is important to success, I think. It gets you past all the blind spots that derail businesses.

Jach 16y ago

Speculation, but I think the tendency toward sociopathic really helps avoid any hang-ups over money. Sure, I'd rather sociopaths get on the Forbes list rather than go out and kill people, but their personality is what I find distasteful, and in any case it's an unnatural brain wiring, that's why I think it's not so easy to just "become a [partial?] sociopath" if you want to rake in money. I tried the Cutco-selling gig for a couple months, and realized almost immediately that I wasn't cut out for it. Sure I could follow the manual (which was golden as far as things-you-need-to-do-to-convert), smile, talk smoothly, answer questions, etc., but inside I think I just fundamentally couldn't shake the feeling that "If these people wanted what I was selling, they'd have gotten it already." (And I think that came out a bit whether I wanted it to or not.) On a high level I know that can be false, but intuitively, that's how I think; I hate ads and when I buy something non-trivial it's usually after personal research, not because of a salesman. Salesmen even make me less likely to buy something especially because I can see through all their rhetoric. I find something really wrong with exploiting the cognitive biases of people even if it's been done for all time, and even if I do it sometimes subconsciously. We should be trying to eliminate those biases, not feeding them. All this said though, you don't have to be a sociopath or a real hustler to see the opportunity of printing out new menus for a quick buck. That's more in line with hacking than with money grabbing, I think. More similar to a college student coming up with pizza money for a weekend than with going after money as a goal in itself.

nostrademons 16y ago
That's why it helps to believe in your product. PG once described his approach to selling as "Make your product the best on the market, and then tell the truth."
- Jach 16y ago
  That's just another trick to make you a more convincing salesman, like smiling. Of course they drill that into your head during the unpaid training for Cutco, and hey, those knives are pretty badass, I still have and use my demo set. It doesn't change the fact that I feel like "Well, if my product really is the best on the market, what do you need me to tell you for? The truth is out there, it doesn't have to come from me." I'm perfectly comfortable with giving a list of facts about my theoretical product and why it's awesome, or making people aware of its existence, what I'm not comfortable with is making a story to get you to want it or pressure you into believing everything I say, and I definitely don't like rhetorical devices used for selling. Yet even PG's advice is product-focused rather than selling-focused; can you distinguish PG's advice from a simple bulleted fact-list? (And how well do you think that alone will sell your product?) If your product isn't the best on the market (or so you think), taking PG's advice would tell you to get back to work while a hustler would go out and sell it anyway. (They don't even necessarily have to lie about anything.) PG's approach echoes the traditional programmer reply of why he doesn't need a marketing team or need to study marketing by saying "My product will speak for itself." Anyway, can you link to an essay or post from PG where he said that? A quick Google search didn't turn up a source.

danenania 16y ago

This sort of begs the question: if your main drive in life is money, what use is it to you really? It just becomes points in a meaningless game. Someone driven to change the world or build for the sake of building, on the other hand, is going to make something out of their money, even if they aren't as skilled or single-minded in acquiring it. Money means a lot more when it serves a purpose other than piling on top of itself and buying superfluous stuff. I'm sure there's a role for people with this approach in most companies, but I tend to avoid them--mostly because they bore me to tears. Someone with ideas and goals that supersede wealth accumulation is a lot more interesting to me, and I'd much prefer to spend my time around such people and scrape by than live in a mansion and listen to a bunch of polo shirt clones yammer on about their real estate investments all day.

TimothyBurgess 16y ago
Man I wish I could upvote this a thousand times. I still don't quite understand people who see nothing but green paper - numbers after a dollar sign - in their future. I'm not going to lie. My goal right now is definitely to make money. But it isn't my goal in life. That's for sure. My drive to make money is fueled by my desire to live freely, without financial chains (as my parents and a lot of my family have)... and to have fun and live a good life with those around me. If I have wealth to share and to help makes the lives of others easier, you bet I'm gonna spread it around. I don't have a wife or kids but being able to provide for them when that time comes and give them good lives is my main concern.
- danenania 16y ago
  Wish I could upvote this a thousand time as well :)
enjo 16y ago
I've found that for these type of folks it has absolutely NOTHING to do with money. It has everything to do with competition. I don't know Judd Weiss, but I'll promise you that he's intensely competitive. Money is just how he keeps score.

calvinfroedge 16y ago

While I agree that getting an idea off the ground takes a lot of what's in this blog post - it's important to draw lines...and I think you develop those lines only with experience. A lot of times the quick buck (even if substantial) hurts you later. Sometimes the quickest way to start building skyscrapers is to learn to weld.

calvinfroedge 16y ago
Incidentally, another HackerNews link is exactly what I'm referring to.... http://andrewchenblog.com/2011/02/05/stanford-cs-major-seeks-salesmarketing-monkey/ http://andrewchenblog.com/2011/02/05/stanford-cs-major-seeks...

bootload 16y ago

"... became a millionaire by 24 at which point I bought a large modern house in Bel Air; got ranked among the top 10 Commercial Real Estate agents in California and the top 20 Commercial Real Estate agents in the World at Remax Commercial for 2005 and 2006; ..." Is selling in the real-estate boom cycle a good indication of how to make money?

sokoloff 16y ago
Selling in the boom and then stopping and doing something else when the boom busts is, to me, evidence of having a knack for getting money.

geekfactor 16y ago

One thing that jumped out at me here is the 'many irons in the fire' aspect of hustling. This seems to go against the grain of 'focus, focus, focus' to which I think many of us ascribe, or at least aspire. For example, YC is supposed to be about entrepreneurs not ideas... I wonder what YC would look like if accepted teams were told to start pushing on their three best ideas simultaneously?

_corbett 16y ago

I'm surprised about the negativity here, one of the most fun parts about being an entrepreneur is exercising this knack for getting money aspect (I'd say start a non-profit if your business has nothing to do with this, but they have to hustle too). As to it being about money or manipulation, to me it's about seeing or creating opportunities that no one else can then chasing and obtaining them.

ojbyrne 16y ago

This has "survivorship bias" all over it. Why not just write about how lottery winners have a knack for getting money?

sayemm 16y ago

Best book on the knack for getting money is "How to Get Rich" by Felix Dennis, founder of Maxim magazine (worth between $400-900M, that's what he says in the book): http://www.amazon.com/How-Get-Rich-Greatest-Entrepreneurs/dp/1591842719/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1297010573&sr=8-1 http://www.amazon.com/How-Get-Rich-Greatest-Entrepreneurs/dp... Here's a good Inc. article on it too: http://www.inc.com/articles/2008/07/dennis.html http://www.inc.com/articles/2008/07/dennis.html Utter determination, fearlessness, tunnel vision, and hard work are his answers.

nachteilig 16y ago

It's too bad we can't bury this obnoxious and poorly written article. Don't bother with it.

jhaglund 16y ago

"ill make a grand moving snow today" Did 50 Cent really go shovel snow? I thought that was a double entendre (and a joke), "moving snow" being a euphemism for selling cocaine.