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Sure, the rich have more advantages than the poor. Always been that way and always will. In our culture there is an immense preoccupation with the unfairness o
by safety1st 4y ago
Sure, the rich have more advantages than the poor. Always been that way and always will.
In our culture there is an immense preoccupation with the unfairness of this but the reality is that if you don't come from wealth and privilege, you need a different playbook. Dwelling on the inequity neuters you. If you want to win you need to figure out what the playbook is and then do the right things.
I found a playbook that worked by reading all the self help and business books I could (preferably from the public library because that was free and I was poor). My playbook ended up being: move to a country with a lower cost of living, and get good enough at freelancing online that I essentially had a safety net and a long-term runway for other pursuits.
I then tried a few different business models, each failed a bit less than the last until I hit a winner which bankrolls about a dozen people on my payroll.
A rich guy wouldn't have had to go through all that but I don't care. It's totally irrelevant to the requirements for success in my reality. Which were build my own baseline from scratch and then fail until I succeeded.
People born into easier paths than mine have sneered at many many elements of what I did over the years (living in a "shithole" country, working with a "shitty" tech stack, taking "shitty" Elance gigs that didn't pay enough, etc. etc.). Other people who were able to tolerate remaining victims of the system tuned out my story and focused on other things, like bitching about politics. I'm worth more than most of the people in both categories now and I feel like this is just the beginning. I haven't had children yet but if I do they will have fewer disadvantages than I did.
There are different and easier playbooks than the one I used. If I was starting again I would probably go into a more conventionally profitable vocation and save for 15 years, studying business and coding on the side, and then start a business.
But either way the point is your playbook if you start poor needs to be different. It's not as easy as the one the rich guys have but that fact is a distraction. You should be too busy figuring out your plan to care.
- jnovek 4y agoClass mobility is generally regarded as a good thing for economies. It increases competition. What you’re saying is that the only way for you to get ahead is by exporting your own lack of class mobility to another nation. This is akin to shipping trash to other shores so we don’t have to deal with the repercussions of landfills in wealthier nations. If that’s considered a sane way to get ahead, home is not economically well.
- bumby 4y ago>* move to a country …* I understand and agree with your overall point, but the fact that this an option underpins a certain amount of privilege.
- ip26 4y agoHow much privilege does it take to move to Guatemala or Pakistan?
- bumby 4y agoI dunno. What if they’re currently living in Bangladesh?
- safety1st 4y agoIt's ironic you should mention Bangladesh because there's a guy on my payroll who lives in Bangladesh and I'm flying him to an international conference soon. It does indeed take more paperwork than usual, it will be a unique opportunity for him and probably not his last with me, he's a great employee.
- bumby 4y agoWorking remotely != moving for geo-arbitrage. If anything, it's the opposite, where the employer is taking advantage of geo-arbitrage.
- ip26 4y agoIn this model, people living in Bangladesh skip the “moving” part. They already live in a low cost locale.
- bumby 4y agoSo they have open doors to be wildly successful entrepreneurs? My point is that the OPs “model” is a strategy for a limited population and not very generalizable. Within those caveats, I have no issue with their suggestion.
- brightball 4y agoThere's no better education than trying and failing.
- kirso 4y agoThis + its really dependent on location and context as you said. If you are outside of US, your chances of liquidity event decrease even further. I think people always divide into two camps here, its either hard work or luck but the truth is somewhere in between. As a normal non-privileged person, I can't afford placing all-in bets. But I can go to a different table with different stakes and different strategy.