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If I had access to their business network, data analysis, and knew in the end it wasn’t my money, society will just bail us out, sure why not make that choice?
by meh99 5y ago
If I had access to their business network, data analysis, and knew in the end it wasn’t my money, society will just bail us out, sure why not make that choice?
You’re making it sound like they had real skin in the game. If it fails they walk away with enough to retire on anyway.
Let’s not make celebrities of the biggest grifters out there, emotionally coloring them in as possessed of magical insights. They’re people playing a game where the deck is stacked in their favor by that sort of fawning.
It’s an unverifiable claim to suggest they were uniquely gifted. Uniquely positioned is not the same thing.
- mitchdoogle 5y agoIt's crazy the kind of hero worship towards anyone who makes a ton of money. When you account for all the smart people hustling trying to make their startup work, you realize it boils down to luck. Which, of course, is not a great comfort to most people since we all want to believe we can achieve anything if we only work hard enough.
- sokoloff 5y agoI think of hard work as being more of a necessary but not sufficient condition for most of these outcomes, so to some extent: "The harder I work, the luckier I get..." You can't control your luck, but you can control how hard you work. Some will read that sentence and conclude that working hard is a fool's errand. Others will read it and conclude the opposite. Neither is entirely wrong.
- craftinator 5y agoIf you really want to be rich, don't work hard; either inherit, or get other people to do hard work. Working hard is easy, hundreds of millions of people do it, the trick is getting the hard workers to give you a percentage of what they earn, and scale that model up.
- sokoloff 5y agoGetting other people to do hard work in a coordinated fashion to create a valuable collective outcome is itself a form of hard work. On that point, we seem to agree.
- stjohnswarts 5y agoLuck doesn't matter a whit if your product is crap. Sure connections and right place, right time matter as well but it's not everything.