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I've been reading the Incerto series by Nassim Taleb and he talks quite frequently about nonlinearities and their outsize impact. He mentions how a friend of h

I've been reading the Incerto series by Nassim Taleb and he talks quite frequently about nonlinearities and their outsize impact. He mentions how a friend of his saw how during the Gulf War, everybody had planned for the war to increase the price of oil. So his friend bet against everybody else. Turns out, everybody was stockpiling oil due to the war, and given how short it was, there was an oil glut afterwards. His friend turned $300,000 into $18M. It's difficult to work for a FAANG and become wealthy, as in move between socioeconomic classes. You have to play politics and become fragile in your building of human relationships, which can fall apart much more quickly than your competence as a software engineer (barring a brain aneurysm or a TBI, where you have much more pressing problems). If you bet that the stock market would absolutely tank by end of March, and acted on that impulse financially, you would be wealthy today. Renaissance Technologies rose 39% and is having one of their best years ever. It's not secret, exclusive knowledge. I started taking health precautions two weeks before the crash. I didn't act financially, because I honestly didn't think of it, and because I don't like the principle of shorting the market and betting against my country and my people. My takeaway isn't go on wallstreetbets and attempt to yolo my way through life. My takeaway is people who bet on linearities are much more similar than you think. $300K, $70K, does it really matter? In the grand scheme of things, you're still a peon either way. You're a middle class guy, with little influence on Capitol Hill and less access to PPE and ventilators, high taxes, one primary income stream, and still trade time for money instead of building capital and having money work for you. So if you feel down, keep a good head on your shoulders, don't despair, and consume as much information as you can on a regular basis. If you want to, look for ways to benefit from nonlinearities. And if you do make it, be a humanist and don't forget to give back to the people who raised you and taught you and care for you.

mywittyname 6y ago
> It's difficult to work for a FAANG and become wealthy, as in move between socioeconomic classes You're goal should not necessarily be to move up a social-economic class, but to at least provide your children with more opportunity than you had. Inter-generational wealth accumulation is very important. Most people don't go rags to riches, it's typically families that do so over multiple generations. With poor people focusing on educating their children, who become professionals, who then have kids with the opportunity to make it big. If you look at Bill Gates, he's the son of a judge. Zuckerberg is the son of a dentist. One of the Google founders is the son of a college professor. Even our president came from a wealthy family.

mywittyname 6y ago

> It's difficult to work for a FAANG and become wealthy, as in move between socioeconomic classes You're goal should not necessarily be to move up a social-economic class, but to at least provide your children with more opportunity than you had. Inter-generational wealth accumulation is very important. Most people don't go rags to riches, it's typically families that do so over multiple generations. With poor people focusing on educating their children, who become professionals, who then have kids with the opportunity to make it big. If you look at Bill Gates, he's the son of a judge. Zuckerberg is the son of a dentist. One of the Google founders is the son of a college professor. Even our president came from a wealthy family.