One common thread these kinds of stories seem to always share: a single, childless person earned an extremely high (and rare) level of income, hoarded it for se

One common thread these kinds of stories seem to always share: a single, childless person earned an extremely high (and rare) level of income, hoarded it for several years, then ‘retired’. The author earned the majority of their net worth in only a few years (five or six) via a high salary and stock options. There’s nothing wrong with that, but for most anyone—American or not—it’s an unrealistic, semi-mythical story that says more about a lopsided economic system than life. And so, the main lesson of such stories (for me) is always “extraordinarily high incomes without significant life encumbrances make it easy to quickly hoard money and compound it”.