97 ms·

It's tough to try so hard and still fail. Gotta pick yourself up and try again. If you are worthy, you will be wealthy.

by mufti_menk 3y ago

bruce343434 3y ago
*If you are lucky
- mufti_menk 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - bruce343434 3y ago
    I think that might be a slightly different definition of "worthy" than most "normal" people accept. Of course, your luck surface area is largely in your own hands if you live in a western civilization. But the fact remains that life is stochastic. Let me know when you make your first billion, btw.
  - Nevermark 3y ago
    That is virtually of a tautology. It doesn't really tell people what to do. Because working really hard by itself, is often not worth much. But knowing what the right thing is involves the luck of having the right mind, experience, resources, life arrangement, physical health, mental health, etc., to both see and be the right person to execute on something not apparent to others. I am not saying people don't need to overcome whatever is holding them back, but people with a lot of enabling context are simply going to do much better statistically than people with much less ideal starting points. And very few people can create a billion dollar company in any situation.
    - mufti_menk 3y ago
      If you don't have enough experience in an area to see the opportunities in an area, get the expertise. Otherwise find them in your area. If they don't exist go elsewhere. You are ALWAYS the problem.
      - mandmandam 3y ago
        > You are ALWAYS the problem. Would you say the same to children born during a (human-caused) famine, or born with defects cause by politically useful wars fifty years ago? Would you say the same to children raised in traumatic households, with chronic self-regulation disorders as a result? Your take isn't just narrow, and wrong, but also incredibly callous. We live in a world where some people have megayachts while 785 million people lack access to basic drinking water services. In the US, the wealthy have world-class healthcare but 530,000 families file for bankruptcy due to medical issues each year (pre-pandemic!). The amount of luck involved in becoming wealthy is immense, and ignoring this most basic fact is both dim and cruel. Perhaps this is a lot of effort to respond to a fourteen-day old account... Still, this demented view on self-determination is bizarrely common even among the "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" set, and has been for hundreds or even thousands of years. I don't know if that's because it's so convenient for the already wealthy, or it's some kind of innate fairness bias, but it's embarrassing (and harmful) for the species that people actually fall for it.
      - eigenket 3y ago
        This is so obviously incorrect that I don't understand how someone can write it. Why did Bill Gates found Microsoft and not someone of the same age from somewhere in the Democratic Republic of the Congo? Obviously the kid from the Congo was the problem, and not that the environment that Gates found himself in was dramatically more condusive to success than growing up in a village in Africa. Perhaps if the guy from the Congo had pulled himself up by his bootstraps harder he would be the billionaire by now?
        mufti_menk 3y ago
        Doesn't need to be a billionaire in USD, if he grinded he could have a penthouse in the Congo. Wealth is relative to your surroundings.
        Nevermark 3y ago
        Fine “being a billionaire”can be made relative. But that doesn’t eliminate great disparities within any context. One person will be miserably poor, neglected and abused by their parents, face social challenges due to appearance and speech issues, get cancer, then during remission be shot to death by a local criminal. Another person has a stable childhood in a supportive, healthy and ethical environment. Effortlessly accumulates useful friends and acquaintances in part due to family reputation, height, mesmerizing speech qualities and physical attractiveness. And happens to discover the useful and novel work they love and are meant to do while still in high school. And everything in between. Also, we all think differently in ways we can’t undo. I don’t mean facts or beliefs or learned skill. Nature and early childhood experiences, that none of us were in control of, wired each of us very differently. The kinds of things each of us can do well vary greatly in quantity, quality and variety, and in usefulness within our context. Two randomly selected people in any society are not going to have the same probability of success with the same amount of work. The variance is tremendous. Turning every problem into another version of “work harder”, “do what it takes, “learn what it takes”, might be a good attitude. It might be helpful. But it won’t eliminate the disparity in results regardless of commitment. Life is full of unfairness, accident, important epiphanies that come too late, etc. Stoicism and objectivity about that isn’t defeatism. The ways things happen in the exterior world, and our internal worlds, are inherently chaotic. Small seeming things can lead us to serendipity or ruin in ways we will never be aware of. We are more likely to create greater fairness and opportunity for ourselves and others by recognizing reality, and responding with a will to improve things despite the uncertain returns. Ironically, the very point of Y-Combinator is the recognition that context matters. A lot.
  - EliRivers 3y ago
    Like those people who pick the wrong lottery numbers; all they had to do was pick the right ones, it's really not a lot of effort to move the pen and select the winning numbers.
    - mufti_menk 3y ago
      If the lotto was comparable at all there would be VC funds investing in tickets instead of companies
      - hluska 3y ago
        You don’t understand the point.
      - EliRivers 3y ago
        Relying on VC funds to identify good ideas? That's weak; the problem is your mindset.
PostOnce 3y ago
Plenty of worthy men died broke, and plenty of villains were fabulously wealthy. Smart, hardworking, honest, kind men. There's a degree of luck and circumstance, there's the absence of capital, the time and place in which you live, the legal/social/regulatory environment, etc. Then there are villains who work against your ability to compete. They lobby so you can't open a competing barber shop without onerous licensing. Nevermind ten billion dollar patent portfolios and old boys networks. Fight the good fight, but nothing's guaranteed anywhere.
- bruce343434 3y ago
  The best example I think is Nikola Tesla.
- thrown1212 3y ago
  Women too.
  - PostOnce 3y ago
    There's really no need to do this, or to point out that some of the men (or women, or persons) were black or asian, non-heterosexual, had a physical or intellectual handicaps or any other particular attribute that I didn't specifically enumerate. It sort of implies malice or misogyny on my part, of which there is of course none. I could have said "people", but it's malicious to assume that by not having chosen that word that I somehow myself am a chauvinist. Policing speech in this way is, in my opinion, detrimental to us all and to our ability to communicate our thoughts and have them interpreted charitably, where instead we might have to consider every possible negative interpretation, carefully tiptoe around those, and just perhaps not say anything at all. Imperfect communication is better than none, and malicious interpretation stifles that.
    - alex_lav 3y ago
      This seems like a pretty wild overreaction to pointing out the implicit bias of referring to all people as "men". > Imperfect communication is better than none Staying imperfect forever is laziness.
hef19898 3y ago
Equating worth with wealth seems to be a deeply flawed concept.
shapefrog 3y ago
Weak grindset.

It's tough to try so hard and still fail. Gotta pick yourself up and try again. If you are worthy, you will be wealthy.

bruce343434 3y ago

*If you are lucky

mufti_menk 3y ago
[flagged]
- bruce343434 3y ago
  I think that might be a slightly different definition of "worthy" than most "normal" people accept. Of course, your luck surface area is largely in your own hands if you live in a western civilization. But the fact remains that life is stochastic. Let me know when you make your first billion, btw.
- Nevermark 3y ago
  That is virtually of a tautology. It doesn't really tell people what to do. Because working really hard by itself, is often not worth much. But knowing what the right thing is involves the luck of having the right mind, experience, resources, life arrangement, physical health, mental health, etc., to both see and be the right person to execute on something not apparent to others. I am not saying people don't need to overcome whatever is holding them back, but people with a lot of enabling context are simply going to do much better statistically than people with much less ideal starting points. And very few people can create a billion dollar company in any situation.
  - mufti_menk 3y ago
    If you don't have enough experience in an area to see the opportunities in an area, get the expertise. Otherwise find them in your area. If they don't exist go elsewhere. You are ALWAYS the problem.
    - mandmandam 3y ago
      > You are ALWAYS the problem. Would you say the same to children born during a (human-caused) famine, or born with defects cause by politically useful wars fifty years ago? Would you say the same to children raised in traumatic households, with chronic self-regulation disorders as a result? Your take isn't just narrow, and wrong, but also incredibly callous. We live in a world where some people have megayachts while 785 million people lack access to basic drinking water services. In the US, the wealthy have world-class healthcare but 530,000 families file for bankruptcy due to medical issues each year (pre-pandemic!). The amount of luck involved in becoming wealthy is immense, and ignoring this most basic fact is both dim and cruel. Perhaps this is a lot of effort to respond to a fourteen-day old account... Still, this demented view on self-determination is bizarrely common even among the "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" set, and has been for hundreds or even thousands of years. I don't know if that's because it's so convenient for the already wealthy, or it's some kind of innate fairness bias, but it's embarrassing (and harmful) for the species that people actually fall for it.
    - eigenket 3y ago
      This is so obviously incorrect that I don't understand how someone can write it. Why did Bill Gates found Microsoft and not someone of the same age from somewhere in the Democratic Republic of the Congo? Obviously the kid from the Congo was the problem, and not that the environment that Gates found himself in was dramatically more condusive to success than growing up in a village in Africa. Perhaps if the guy from the Congo had pulled himself up by his bootstraps harder he would be the billionaire by now?
      - mufti_menk 3y ago
        Doesn't need to be a billionaire in USD, if he grinded he could have a penthouse in the Congo. Wealth is relative to your surroundings.
        Nevermark 3y ago
        Fine “being a billionaire”can be made relative. But that doesn’t eliminate great disparities within any context. One person will be miserably poor, neglected and abused by their parents, face social challenges due to appearance and speech issues, get cancer, then during remission be shot to death by a local criminal. Another person has a stable childhood in a supportive, healthy and ethical environment. Effortlessly accumulates useful friends and acquaintances in part due to family reputation, height, mesmerizing speech qualities and physical attractiveness. And happens to discover the useful and novel work they love and are meant to do while still in high school. And everything in between. Also, we all think differently in ways we can’t undo. I don’t mean facts or beliefs or learned skill. Nature and early childhood experiences, that none of us were in control of, wired each of us very differently. The kinds of things each of us can do well vary greatly in quantity, quality and variety, and in usefulness within our context. Two randomly selected people in any society are not going to have the same probability of success with the same amount of work. The variance is tremendous. Turning every problem into another version of “work harder”, “do what it takes, “learn what it takes”, might be a good attitude. It might be helpful. But it won’t eliminate the disparity in results regardless of commitment. Life is full of unfairness, accident, important epiphanies that come too late, etc. Stoicism and objectivity about that isn’t defeatism. The ways things happen in the exterior world, and our internal worlds, are inherently chaotic. Small seeming things can lead us to serendipity or ruin in ways we will never be aware of. We are more likely to create greater fairness and opportunity for ourselves and others by recognizing reality, and responding with a will to improve things despite the uncertain returns. Ironically, the very point of Y-Combinator is the recognition that context matters. A lot.
- EliRivers 3y ago
  Like those people who pick the wrong lottery numbers; all they had to do was pick the right ones, it's really not a lot of effort to move the pen and select the winning numbers.
  - mufti_menk 3y ago
    If the lotto was comparable at all there would be VC funds investing in tickets instead of companies
    - hluska 3y ago
      You don’t understand the point.
    - EliRivers 3y ago
      Relying on VC funds to identify good ideas? That's weak; the problem is your mindset.

PostOnce 3y ago

Plenty of worthy men died broke, and plenty of villains were fabulously wealthy. Smart, hardworking, honest, kind men. There's a degree of luck and circumstance, there's the absence of capital, the time and place in which you live, the legal/social/regulatory environment, etc. Then there are villains who work against your ability to compete. They lobby so you can't open a competing barber shop without onerous licensing. Nevermind ten billion dollar patent portfolios and old boys networks. Fight the good fight, but nothing's guaranteed anywhere.

bruce343434 3y ago
The best example I think is Nikola Tesla.
thrown1212 3y ago
Women too.
- PostOnce 3y ago
  There's really no need to do this, or to point out that some of the men (or women, or persons) were black or asian, non-heterosexual, had a physical or intellectual handicaps or any other particular attribute that I didn't specifically enumerate. It sort of implies malice or misogyny on my part, of which there is of course none. I could have said "people", but it's malicious to assume that by not having chosen that word that I somehow myself am a chauvinist. Policing speech in this way is, in my opinion, detrimental to us all and to our ability to communicate our thoughts and have them interpreted charitably, where instead we might have to consider every possible negative interpretation, carefully tiptoe around those, and just perhaps not say anything at all. Imperfect communication is better than none, and malicious interpretation stifles that.
  - alex_lav 3y ago
    This seems like a pretty wild overreaction to pointing out the implicit bias of referring to all people as "men". > Imperfect communication is better than none Staying imperfect forever is laziness.

hef19898 3y ago

Equating worth with wealth seems to be a deeply flawed concept.

shapefrog 3y ago

Weak grindset.