8 ms·

The Art of Money Getting

409 points by dxs 5mo ago

amunozo 5mo ago
The hardest thing is to know what's your best fit. Any advice?
- anonym29 5mo ago
  A lot of pop-psychology doesn't hold up when subject to empirical review, but OCEAN / "Big 5" does, and it's probably a decent starting point. E.g. if you are low in extraversion and agreeableness, you probably wouldn't make a good nurse or waiter, but you might not make a bad lawyer or engineer.
  - whiplash451 5mo ago
    > low in extraversion and agreeableness I don’t know that these are awesome features for an engineer. There’s a big unsaid cost to this in my experience
    - grebc 5mo ago
      Might mean civil engineer.
      - portly 5mo ago
        More like an uncivil engineer
    - deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
    - derektank 5mo ago
      If we’re being honest, highly agreeable, extroverted, conscientious, and non-neurotic people are simply going to be better suited to all forms of employment than the inverse. But, since personality is pretty durable, it’s easier to try and find a career where your weak spots are detriments, but not crippling.
      - rizzom5000 5mo ago
        There is research that suggests highly agreeable people do not do as well e.g. negotiation tactics. What is probably true is that is good to 'appear' agreeable. The same research suggests you are correct about the other 3 traits.
      - anonym29 5mo ago
        A highly agreeable housing inspector isn't going to be better at their job than a disagreeable housing inspector. I want my housing inspector to be harsh, unforgiving, and not grant the benefit of the doubt. A highly extroverted person isn't going to make for a better overnight custodial worker than someone who prefers a more solitary lifestyle. An actor who can tap into the emotional currents of high neuroticism in their work can offer a more sincere and authentic performance than an emotionally flat one. Low conscientiousness correlates with risk taking and can be an asset in roles where over-planning to the detriment of acting can be costly - think firefighters.
      - sporadicism 5mo ago
        I agree with this if what you mean is that employment generally requires conformity, passivity, accepting low autonomy, low creativity, etc. Otherwise, this isn't my experience.
      - roughly 5mo ago
        I'm highly agreeable, and I've had to learn not to be. Knowing when to challenge people - "strategic non-agreeableness" - is extremely valuable. I've also made most of my career off being somewhat neurotic - I've described the core of my job as "finding things to panic about before they happen" (I went on Prozac a while back and caused an incident in the first couple weeks during uptake because my anxiety didn't trigger about something during a deploy). As far as extroversion - friends of mine who are genuine extroverts about went crazy during the pandemic, while I and a few other introvert friends got some of our best work ever done during that period. There's a spectrum - you can't be a misanthrope, but being able to take (and stand) quiet time to focus on a problem is absolutely an asset. With regards to conscientiousness, this often manifests in the workplace as an unwillingness to deviate from the plan when circumstances demand it and a preference for adding process as a kind of panacea for any kind of failure or delay, and at risk of offending the more conscientious among us, I have not found that a recipe for success.
    - ahartmetz 5mo ago
      Low agreeableness can be a positive up to a point. As a technical person, you shouldn't agree to do things that you know will not work. The technical facts have no agreeableness at all and need to be handled as such.
  - amunozo 5mo ago
    Thanks! I'll give it a try.
- doug_durham 5mo ago
  What do you find yourself gravitating to? What part of your job comes easiest? That things are easy to you that other’s find difficult? What do you spend time learning more about even when you don’t have to? Those are directional. For me the first time I started writing code I knew that’s what I’d need to do for a living.
  - amunozo 5mo ago
    Thanks for your comment. I spent the last 5 years doing a PhD in NLP that I defend next month, which is a solitary endeavor. I don't feel particularly good at it, especially given the competitive moment of the field. I am trying to transition to industry but landing a job it's being hard. I think that I am good at being a link between people and maintaining a good atmosphere. I realized that I liked people more than I thought before and that working full time in front of a screen is something I would rather not do the rest of my life. On the contrary, I feel gravitating toward social sciences, economy, culture, governance and stuff that is not very close to my professional/studies expertise.
- adrianwaj 5mo ago
  Turn procrastination into pragmatism. Switch from service-to-self to service-to-others, or vice versa. See your mind as shut gates that can be opened to something already perfect. Make your sub-conscious super-conscious - any tips there? I remember Prince (musician) said he would receive things from God and send them back to source. Cut the strings that make you a puppet??
- lugu 5mo ago
  Ask people who know you well what you are talented for. Oftentimes we don't see it ourselves. As you get good at something, it become easier, and you think of it as a given. On the opposite, we tend to over appreciate what is difficult for us.
  - amunozo 5mo ago
    Thanks! I will, definitely.
- GarnetFloride 5mo ago
  Are you an extrovert or introvert? Look at how you spend your time. Do you have to spend time with people or have to be alone sometimes? What do you do when you have nothing else to do? I know that's really hard these days with all the distractions we have. So maybe what do you watch or read about? What are your interests? But the world changes. I started out as an engineer and that got shipped to China. I pivoted to IT, shipped to India. Pivoted to technical writing and now there's LLMs. I figure things out and share to make it easier for others too. That works in a lot of industries.
  - amunozo 5mo ago
    Due to personal and professional reasons I've spent too much time alone last years. I really noticed that I love being with people and that I cannot stand being all day in front of a computer by myself. I also read a lot about history, economy, culture and geography, but on the contrary my background is in Physics and I am finishing a PhD in NLP in which I don't feel very good.
    - GarnetFloride 5mo ago
      That is useful insight. The concept of the Sunk Cost Fallacy may be useful to you.
- toast0 5mo ago
  Like with many things, finding the best is hard, finding a good enough fit is a lot more attainable and maybe should be the goal. If you work on projects in groups often, you might be able to find what fits you by what things you end doing especially if you do those parts well. Do you read and interpret the directions, do you do the assembly, do you keep the group on task, do you verify the output is acceptable, do you figure out how to proceed when there's a problem, etc. Also, what tasks do people who know you ask you to help with; especially if those people have choices for who to ask and then specifically ask you. Those are things that likely fit you; especially if you get enjoyment out of doing those tasks, beyond the enjoyment you might get from doing any task for someone. Sometimes, you might get asked to do these things for reasons other than you're good at them, or you may be good at them and also hate doing it, etc; so like be aware of that. If you're lucky, what fits you is distinctive and commercially apprechiated. But not everyone has those fits, so it's good to also look for things that fit well enough to pay the bills. You may need to develop other skills to get into a position to use your good fit as well.
  - amunozo 5mo ago
    Thanks for your comment. I spent the last 5 years doing a PhD in NLP that I defend next month, which is a solitary endeavor. I don't feel particularly good at it, especially given the competitive moment of the field. I am trying to transition to industry but landing a job it's being hard. I think that I am good at being a link between people and maintaining a good atmosphere. I realized that I liked people more than I thought before and that working full time in front of a screen is something I would rather not do the rest of my life.
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
- runamuck 5mo ago
  Force yourself to try a lot of things. Look for meetups in different topics you can do in your free time (I hope you have some). Try HAM radio (you can get a career in COMMs), public speaking (executive leadership), group fitness (become a trainer), maker scene (robotics) etc. (Also give me some ideas!)
thm 5mo ago
For a more recent pop-culture version, I'd recommend Felix Dennis https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18749286-how-to-get-rich https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18749286-how-to-get-rich
- Michelangelo11 5mo ago
  What a good book! I was expecting some "follow your dreams and lean into the hustle" pablum, but no. He talks pretty frankly about how the pursuit of extreme wealth, (100s of millions) which he'd succeeded at, isn't worth it even then because a single-digit amount of millions is quite enough to enjoy life, but adds that he expects readers will ignore that part and attempt to get filthy rich anyway. Also, he later became a poet (a very good one, too, if I remember right) and early on in his life tried to be a pop singer. Feels a bit like that whole multi-decade career as founder and owner of a massive publishing empire was an odd detour for him. Very fascinating person, and the book's definitely worth reading.
  - zulux 5mo ago
    I appreciated Felix going over what he had to give up to get where he was. It let me be content with a bit less money and a bit more family.
- jonners00 5mo ago
  I love this book, but its authority is somewhat undermined by the infamous Steve Jobs passage...
  - sporadicism 5mo ago
    How's that? I am not familiar.
    - djeastm 5mo ago
      IIRC, he spends a few pages talking about how Steve Jobs is going to be the ruin of Apple
ChrisMarshallNY 5mo ago
> They take whatever job pays and spend decades fighting upstream. I suspect that this affects a lot of folks in tech. There's a lot of money to be made, so people get into it. They don't really like what they do, so it's always a chore. Their work often shows it, too. I'm retired. I don't have to write software, but I spend more time writing software (for free), than I did, for most of my career. I like the Integrity part, too. That seems to be something that's missing (from most vocations), these days. One of the reasons that I stuck with my last job for so long, was because the people I worked with, and for, had Integrity, and that's pretty important to me.
- weinzierl 5mo ago
  This is from 1880 and reminds me of something Dostoyevsky had written 14 years before. His quip in The Gambler was even more extreme because he spoke about working hard and saving every penny for generations with the subtext being that it makes everyone miserable.
- UncleOxidant 5mo ago
  > I'm retired. I don't have to write software, but I spend more time writing software (for free), than I did, for most of my career. Same. Claude/Gemini/DeepSeekV4/Qwen3.6 are enabling me to do way more experimentation than I could do on my own. 10X at least. Not getting paid for any of it, but that's OK, getting paid imposes limitations on what you can work on and imposes responsibilities that I don't care to have anymore. There's a certain kind of integrity in that as well.
  - draftsman 5mo ago
    Do you find joy in using LLMs to write software? I tried using Claude/Cursor/CodeX/etc. for personal projects and experimentation, and I found no joy in it. I learned nothing, and when my MVPs were complete, I only had a shallow understanding of how the code that powered them worked.
    - skinfaxi 5mo ago
atoav 5mo ago
Another one I'd like to add is: fuck prestige. Everybody wants to run a Café or a Bar, nobody wants to run a gutter cleaning service. Of the former ones most go out of business within a year. Transfer that to other things as well. Things looking good is not necessarily the same as things working out financially.
- deepfriedbits 5mo ago
  Said another way: "Pride is for the poor."
evantahler 5mo ago
That guy looks nothing like Hugh Jackman
- andrewstuart 5mo ago
  Only Hugh Jackman looks like Hugh Jackman.
Michelangelo11 5mo ago
> Barnum’s first rule: pick the work you’re built for, then aim to be the best at it. Edsger Dijkstra, in one of his letters, giving advice (IIRC) to a PhD student: "Do only what only you can do." Kind of funny to see one of the greatest computer scientists and one of the greatest public entertainers giving the same advice, but I guess that speaks strongly in its favor.
- ahartmetz 5mo ago
  For all non-Dijkstra-level people, I guess that means "Do only what you are particularly good at".
- fellowniusmonk 5mo ago
  I could never do anything, I could talk fancy and bullshit and could come up with all kinds of great ideas as an ideas guy. Nothing useful. So I became a developer and data engineer, and I became really good at it even though, like the protagonist in Gattica (with whom I share other similarities), I had to work twice as hard and spend all my off hours obsessed with it because my nature worked against me. While others with this natural prediliction could spend all their time in type 1 thinking I had to live in type 2. But it was a success, and I found myself becoming an executive at long last on the strength of my technical abilities, and it turns out executives don't actually need to do much of anything and really, outside of maybe some complex CFO roles, executive roles are by far the easiest roles at existing profitable companies. I suspect csuite positions are actually the roles most secretly replaced by Ai already.
  - HPsquared 5mo ago
    Generalist jobs are all about that System 2 thinking. I never developed it, so my general power is limited.
  - theteapot 5mo ago
    > I could talk fancy and bullshit ... I became a developer and data engineer, and I became really good at it That's a formidable combination. > I found myself becoming an executive at long last on the strength of my technical abilities, and it turns out executives don't actually need to do much of anything and really ... You probably think that because talking fancy and bullshitting come naturally to you.
omoikane 5mo ago
Book is available here: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/8581/8581-h/8581-h.htm https://www.gutenberg.org/files/8581/8581-h/8581-h.htm Previous discussion (2023-01-20, 69 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34447945 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34447945
- msla 5mo ago
  More formats here: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8581 https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8581
- dempedempe 5mo ago
  Standard Ebooks has it too: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/p-t-barnum/the-art-of-money-getting https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/p-t-barnum/the-art-of-mone...
n0on3 5mo ago
Oh boy, this did not age well. Most cases of “extremely successful” people I can think of exhibit the opposite of these core principles: have no “knack” whatsoever, except not giving a shit about whatever they pretend to be their focus while only focusing on personal return; they contract clusterfucks of debts, just usually never end up having to repay them personally; very few of them even know what “going all in” means, they usually live easy while exploiting others to actually do anything; they have no integrity whatsoever, and they do not have to, since apparently demonstrating lack of it is no longer cause for being told by everyone to fuck off into oblivion anymore. And yes, yes, of course there are good people out there too that just want (/need) money to get by, but it’s funny to read this and think about those with _lots_ of money
- an0malous 5mo ago
  Yes Jeff Bezos was famously passionate about retail and Marc Benioff would build customer relationship management solutions using paper and glue as a young lad
  - fullStackOasis 5mo ago
    As a counterpoint, there are plenty of people who are passionate about their hobbies and make no money on them at all. I have some doubts that there's a correlation between passion and money-making. Except, perhaps, that it helps to be passionate about money-making in order to be successful at it.
- fullStackOasis 5mo ago
  Indeed. This book strikes me as yet another "guide to making money" which was created in order to make money for the author. It is all just his opinion, without any evidence. One might do the exact opposite, and make money as well.
wiseowise 5mo ago
Nobody is going to seriously discuss moneymaking tips from 1880, right? …right?
- idiotsecant 5mo ago
  Because people now are so wildly different from people 150 years ago? We are exactly the same, with slightly shinier toys.
  - andrepd 5mo ago
    Many things in the world are radically different, and the economy especially is a different beast. The point about avoiding debt for example, is hardly relevant for businesses (even if it's generally good advice for personal debts.
    - goodmythical 5mo ago
      It wasn't true even then. Leverage has been an accelerator for a long time. Precious few of the world's largest businesses were built out of single pocket book.
  - smilespray 5mo ago
    This can't be stated often enough. Society, diet, education and technology changes, but we've biologically had the same makeup for thousands of, if not more, years. Just because they're dead doesn't mean they were idiots. This is the young person's folly. Then again, this attitude may be a substantial cause of what we define as progress. Gray areas are hard to figure out.
  - wiseowise 5mo ago
    I don’t know where to even begin, if you don’t see any difference between 1880 and 2026.
- throw0101a 5mo ago
  Is the advice from The Richest Man in Babylon, published in 1926, out of date? * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Richest_Man_in_Babylon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Richest_Man_in_Babylon Avoiding greed, envy, the hedonic treadmill, etc, will never not be good advice.
photochemsyn 5mo ago
Barnum’s pamphlet was published in 1880, squarely between two major financial panics linked to stock bubbles. 1873 wiped out thousands of businesses and triggered the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, crushed by federal troops. The Panic of 1893 would come a few years later. In both cases, the likes of Rockefeller, Carnegie, Morgan, etc. used the chaos to consolidate monopolies, buying distressed assets at rock-bottom prices. The private rules for the Robber Barons were almost the exact opposite of Barnum’s advice (build skills, avoid debt, work hard, be honest): 1. Control the Vocation of Others: Ensure you own the system in which others work. Vertical and horizontal integration of your businesses is the mechanism by which you ensure all the value created by labor ends up in your pocket. 2. Use Other People's Debt as a Weapon: Strategic debt is your friend, and you can generate corporate debt so vast it becomes a systemic threat. Ensure you have access to pools of capital, so that during a a panic you can buy assets for pennies on the dollar. Inflate the stock price of your holding company far beyond its actual assets, and become a giant creditor. If your debt-financed bet fails, ensure the bag is held by the public. Privatize the gains, socialize the risks. 3. Whatever You Own, Defend With All Your Political Might: You need the ability to shape legislation, control the courts, and deploy state violence to protect your assets and destroy competition. Bribery, lobbying and blackmail are your tools. Those political expenditures are your real insurance policy when your assets are threatened by populist anger or economic chaos, and will also grease expansion into new markets and help you capture foreign resources (oil, bananas, etc.). 4. Control the Definition of Integrity: Never break the law and steal from business partners; instead, change the laws to make your actions legally defensible in court. Claim that the only integrity that matters is the confidence of the capital markets. Stock manipulation, bribery of politicians, and crushing competition with frivolous patent lawsuits are just enterprise, public service, and fairness. Your integrity is your public image as a builder and a captain of industry. Hire biographers and buy newspapers to tell this story. Finally, blame the victim. Tell the destitute it’s their own fault that they hadn’t figured out how to successfully navigate a system designed to strip their wealth from them and hand it over to the monopolists. This same self-help message of ‘individual responsibility for your economic condition’ is constantly pumped out to the American public today by an endless stream of self-help books in the Robber Baron 2.0 era, and for the same reasons.
- 5mo ago
black_13 5mo ago
[dead]
tianqi 5mo ago
One of my thoughts is that it's not easy for people to discover what they're truly good at. The reason is that if you're truly good at something, if you have a real talent for it, then it's easy for you to do it well from the start, so you rarely judge it or realize how good you are. Just as no one thinks they're good at their heartbeat and breathing. Because you have the talent to be good at them from the beginning, so you don't put in much effort to learn them, and therefore you don't realize how difficult they are. I think a real way to discover your strengths is not to reflect on what you do well, but on what makes you most frustrated when you see others doing it. It feels like an experienced driver watching a student drive and getting frustrated: Why can't you do such a simple action correctly? If you find yourself constantly wondering on something: why can't everyone just do this and it's so simple? You can remind yourself that that one might not be simple at all, but rather that you possess a genuine talent for it.
- rogerb 5mo ago
  >>The reason is that if you're truly good at something, if you have a real talent for it, then it's easy for you to do it well from the start, so you rarely judge it or realize how good you are. I've often wondered about this (beyond basic abilities). I'm sure there are exceptional people for whom this is true but in my experience most people start out not being very good at what they later end up being really good at. Would love to know if there's some sort of data / research on this.
  - apothegm 5mo ago
    Most things take learning to master. But most people have more of an aptitude for some things than others and find it comparatively easy to become baseline competent at those things. Like, one of my nephews could dribble a soccer ball almost as soon as he could walk — it was astonishing how good he was at it at 20 months old. At three his ball control skills were as good as his father’s were at 9 or so (a father who was good enough to play in travel leagues in middle school, so no slouch). No, at age 5, of course he can’t compete with adults who play in rec leagues. He doesn’t have the speed, strength, situational awareness, reflexes, or sense of of his options in a given situation. But on the other hand, in isolation, he can almost always get the ball to go where he wants it. He’ll never in his life feel like that’s a skill he had to _learn_. Whereas I’ve never been able to pick up dribbling at all regardless of how many hours of practice they subjected us to in phys ed.
wwarner 5mo ago
I've only ever been good at dancing to punk music, which has only cost me money so far.
- rglover 5mo ago
  Organize underground punk shows. Make a deal with bands to split the door in exchange for hustling a crowd. May require some fun conversations with the police later, but hey. Me and my roommates living room in college [1]. [1] https://youtu.be/WuJ60dAHyc4?si=bLVmWEM9tTgtA1MF https://youtu.be/WuJ60dAHyc4?si=bLVmWEM9tTgtA1MF
- goodmythical 5mo ago
  youtube is calling
sireat 5mo ago
I am paraphrasing but I think it was W. Buffett who said: "Work at the job that you do not hate" In other words, not all vocations that you are great at and talented and want to pursue are valued by current world. I love playing chess way more and actually am reasonably good at it, but programming and teaching are valued more and I like those too. As Jimmy O. Yang's father reportedly said: "Pursuing your dreams is how you become homeless" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GO6ntvIwT2k&t=22s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GO6ntvIwT2k&t=22s At the same time you have to be out there in the world, increase your luck surface - if you sit in your cubicle/room/private chatroom all day you are less likely to make a mark on the world despite your brilliance. Again I forgot which artist said it but that in New York art scene the most successful artists spent most of their working days socializing not painting/sculpting etc.
- kingofmen 5mo ago
  What are those artists successful at? Making art, or marketing it? The New York art scene is a curious example in this context, because it is notoriously all about who you know rather than what you do, and that's not usually considered a good thing.
  - pessimizer 5mo ago
    > What are those artists successful at? Making money in the profession that they enjoy, rather than having to take up one that they enjoy less.
    - rrvsh 5mo ago
      Not everyone views success as making money.
- v9v 5mo ago
  I think Kevin Kelly has taken the opposing side before: https://colossus.com/article/flounder-mode/ https://colossus.com/article/flounder-mode/ (discussed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44455933 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44455933)
- 5mo ago
jdw64 5mo ago
I believe modern capitalism operates quite differently from the methods preached in this book. There are clear limits to relying solely on a labor-intensive mindset without strategic leverage. I didn't have any special talents, outstanding skills, or privileges. In my twenties, I worked 69 hours a week for two straight years. Yet, I only made minimum wage and had nothing to show for it. I didn't develop any meaningful skills, either. Simply putting in the effort didn't guarantee I would get everything. Ironically, it was the choices I made during my downtime—taking a step back, reflecting, and reorganizing my thoughts—that actually allowed me to earn more money. Even then, the working hours were much shorter, around 52 hours a week. That choice was programming. (Though, to be fair, even that is getting tougher now because of LLMs.) My conclusion is that all advice from successful people is heavily packaged. I constantly think about the concept of 'effort.' What exactly is genuine effort? What is deliberate practice? In modern capitalism, the kind of effort that gets rewarded isn't trading time for money; true success lies in building assets that decouple your time from your income. However, even that feels somewhat meaningless to me now. If we constantly assign value to everything and strive only to be the 'best,' I'm always left wondering: does that make me a meaningless person? Looking at it coldly, I am heading into my mid-thirties, and I have only just finished paying off my student loans and the debt I incurred from being scammed. I don't have a fancy degree, nor have I built a globally renowned program. My bank account currently sits at $30, and I'm worried about next month's rent. But because I've survived so many different grinds, I have the confidence that I'll figure out a way to live on somehow. Though, I do feel a bit regretful about not having been married yet. More importantly, though, I feel that the more value we place purely on money, the more the other joys of life fade away. Living life itself is an effort. Pausing to look back is also an effort. The only thing that truly renders the time in our lives meaningless is believing that the 'present me' has nothing left to learn from the 'past me.' Everything I've gone through has definitively helped me in some way. I believe these types of books are ultimately just acts of assigning arbitrary values to sell copies. They manufacture the idea that their specific worldview is the 'correct' one just to collect book royalties and speaking fees. But the way I see it, life is not built on these linear values. Life rests on non-linearity. The more you try to cram life into a linear framework, the more you inevitably lose the non-linear values. Think about how computers represent numbers. Human cognition perceives a continuous, infinite line, but computers represent it as discrete dots (floating-point numbers), right? I believe there is a similar kind of 'precision loss' in life when forced into linearity. Capitalism defines surplus, "meaningless" time as an inefficiency and preaches that we must try our absolute best at all times. But from everything I know, the world simply doesn't work that way. There are only people who desperately want to believe it works that way. Some people waste their time on a stack of paper filled with mere letters. Some waste it making images appear on a computer screen. Others shed tears while watching television. None of these actions make absolute logical sense, and I believe life is precisely the sum total of all these incomprehensible acts. I highly doubt whether it is right to confine the entirety of life into a tiny box called 'success.' I believe the shape of that 'success box' depends entirely on the shape of one's own life. From that perspective, the showman's text doesn't address the complex leverage required in modern society; it simply looks like a tool designed to sell the false illusion of the American Dream.
didgetmaster 5mo ago
Even if you find a vocation that you generally enjoy, it doesn't mean that you will enjoy every part of it. I love to program, but there have been a number of jobs and tasks during my career that I definitely did not like. I think this probably applies to every career. You have to navigate within your available options to balance things that pay well with the ones you enjoy doing. I have a side project that I truly enjoy working on. It is big enough that I have spent years working on it in my spare time. I am still trying to find traction for it in the market. If it ends up making me a lot of money, then great; but if it never makes anything, I have still enjoyed building it.
- dotcoma 5mo ago
  > Even if you find a vocation that you generally enjoy, it doesn't mean that you will enjoy every part of it. Agreed. But I think you would have been worse off had you chosen a career in something you did not like, be it law or finance or fitness training etc.
- arwhatever 5mo ago
  Knew a guy who owned an I.T. consultancy who was fond of (privately) saying, "This job wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the customers and the employees!"
- 1123581321 5mo ago
  That’s a healthy perspective. I’m someone fortunate to work a perfect job for me, and there have still been clients that almost burnt me out of it. It also can be painful to see work in your favorite field be misunderstood or misused.
geosyog 5mo ago
This is a great little book that everyone should read. It's available for free here: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8581 https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8581
- lemonberry 5mo ago
  I was just coming to post this. That site is a treasure.
- Kye 5mo ago
  Also on Standard Ebooks: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/p-t-barnum/the-art-of-money-getting https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/p-t-barnum/the-art-of-mone...
xp84 5mo ago
> " 2. Avoid Debt Like the Plague" Does anyone else feel like they overindex on this principle? I have on multiple occasions found myself too conservative to take advantage of the leverage available to me. (Example: doing a refinance in 2020 I could have taken out a 30-year mortgage at the rock-bottom rate, but chose to do 15. This is irrational given that I could have taken all the money I didn't have to pay toward the mortgage and even putting it in completely safe investments, come out ahead (even before considering the mortgage interest deduction). I'm not saying I envy those leveraged up to their necks, but I think growing up in a family that didn't really have any money and did have a lot of the bad kind of debt made it hard for me to feel comfortable owing money even when it would probably be in my best interest (no pun intended).
- Garlef 5mo ago
  Yes. That part should be taken with some caveats. And unless you're born rich, you start your life with debt: You need some form of retirement money for the last 20 something years you might not be able to work anymore. If you buy assets on a loan/mortgage/etc, it's more like you're materializing this debt early.
  - linguae 5mo ago
    Wow, this is very insightful and I haven’t looked at saving for retirement as a type of debt before! Thanks for sharing!
- sowbug 5mo ago
  Yes. I wish my parents had been more nuanced in their advice about debt. Carrying a revolving balance is way different from borrowing to buy a home, for example. I was proud to pay off my mortgage early, but missed out on nearly 20 years of tech-stock growth. That's a chasm rather than a nuance in retrospect, but there isn't a lot of nuance in aphorisms like "Avoid Debt Like the Plague."
- DavidVoid 5mo ago
  Yes. I'm sure it would feel nice to pay off my apartment loan, but the interest rate on that is 2.75%, which is way lower than what I can (reasonably) expect to make on the stock market.
cynicalsecurity 5mo ago
Let the peasants think they are poor because they are lazy and the aristocracy are rich because working their ass off. Yeah, right.
bossyTeacher 5mo ago
>Barnum’s first rule: pick the work you’re built for, then aim to be the best at it. Imagine you are good at programming. Great, now get a programming career. Oops, it's the 19th century and computers aren't a thing. Tough luck.
- userbinator 5mo ago
  Ada Lovelace?
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
folkrav 5mo ago
> 1. Don’t Mistake Your Vocation If one's knack/vocation just objectively doesn't pay a livable wage, what's the alternative? 2. Avoid Debt Like the Plague In a world where home prices are worth decades of pre-tax salary, where less than a third of home purchases are cash, and where most of those are older people with accumulated wealth or previous paid-for property, this more or less equates to saying to young people "do not ever think about owning the place you live in". 3. Whatever You Do, Do It With All Your Might While I agree that success generally is a result of work+opportunity, I have seen it come from the opposite enough times that I have a hard time believing it really is remotely close to be one of the main factors of financial success. 4. Preserve Your Integrity For some reason, I heavily doubt the majority of the true wealth ~hoarders~ holders of this world got there from integrity.
virtyaluk 5mo ago
It’s funny I read this book just this last Thu during my work break. Was it worth it? Not really given I already read most of the classics on personal finances and self-help.
irq-1 5mo ago
Investing will make more money than a career. If it's really money you want, start a business or save capitol.
- andrewstuart 5mo ago
  If you do it right this is true. If by investing you mean gambling then it is by no means certain.
avmich 5mo ago
> List your debts. Create a concrete plan to eliminate them, starting with the smallest. Avoid taking on any new debt this month. This could be surprisingly hard. You can't get income at some point, and you still have obligations, e.g. a family. You have some things which are hard to reduce (e.g. monthly telecom payments) or have significant upfront costs (you can move far enough to reduce rental costs, but the move will only beneficial after months). It's so much easier to take some debt, at least initially. The author doesn't give good advises for how to avoid getting into debt.
- gurjeet 5mo ago
  This advice from P.T. Barnum is strikingly similar to Dave Ramsey's process of debt-elimination, or what he calls "The 7 Baby Steps". https://www.ramseysolutions.com/dave-ramsey-7-baby-steps https://www.ramseysolutions.com/dave-ramsey-7-baby-steps
phtrivier 5mo ago
HN front page : "Avoid debt like plague" Soon on HN front page : "How the richest people on earth used VC money and the lever effect to inflate the valuation of their startup (not even 'built in rust !') to kickstart a 'buy - borrow - die' cycle"
- decimalenough 5mo ago
  Corporate debt != personal debt.
rramadass 5mo ago
This is inspiration and not advice for today's world. Supplement and Complement the above with something like; The Math of Money by J. Zachary Klingensmith - https://psu.pb.unizin.org/mathofmoneywashjeff/ https://psu.pb.unizin.org/mathofmoneywashjeff/
froh 5mo ago
with an unexplained circus trick the article jumps from Barnum's 20 rules to "here are the four core principles" --- why these four? I love project Gutenberg to provide the rest. it's a short pamphlet: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/8581/8581-h/8581-h.htm https://www.gutenberg.org/files/8581/8581-h/8581-h.htm
- tomjuggler 5mo ago
  Thank you for the link - I was just thinking that there were some core principles missing imo and yet there they are in the full text For me "Persevere" is probably the main one, many people in the comments here mention the difficulty of making it in a niche field, one that you love and are good at. Personally I lived in a tent/garage for 5 years before finally becoming successful. Also "Location" resonates. I had to move to a new city when I was starting out due to over saturation in my field at home.
MrDresden 5mo ago
> "Preserve Your Integrity" "Cattle die, and kinsmen die, And so one dies one's self; But a noble name will never die, If good renown one gets." [0] - Hávamál, written ~900-1000 CE [0]: https://www.voluspa.org/havamal76-80.htm https://www.voluspa.org/havamal76-80.htm
globular-toast 5mo ago
The first one is something I've been saying for years. I worked in computational biology for a while and it took me a while to realise, but eventually I noticed I wasn't very good at it. The people who were good at it lived and breathed biology. They would come to the lab on weekends and even the middle of the night to water plants and generally tend to their experiments. Above all, they cared. I was just a computer guy who took a gig. I got by, but I would never be good because it just wasn't me. I realised my real calling is engineering, not science. I like finding and solving problems. Scientists have problems, but, in my experience, the best people were scientists first and engineers second. Now I've settled on engineering I see it from the other side. I work with people who just aren't very good engineers. It's like someone with one leg trying to run races. You're just not going to get very far. You'll always be last. Always struggling to keep up. Find what you're good at and be the best. Don't try to do something you're bad at and be the worst.
- hnthrow0287345 5mo ago
  I just do business apps and websites, and it pays the bills, but none of it is really interesting since a lot of it involves recurring patterns and simply fixing other peoples' past mistakes (and future people will probably fix mine). I give a shit only because doing that means less work and annoyances and not getting fired, but I still only give a shit 8 hours a day, usually less. All this advice runs into time constraints and luck, which means you can get unlucky trying 2, 3, 4, 5, etc. things and you're not good at any of them while you still have bills to pay. It's also an accessibility problem as some careers are gated by degrees (physician) or capital (farming). Doing the sample work (shadowing a physician, hired farm worker) to see if you like it has a risk of not giving a real picture of the actual work. If that happens, you have to rely on tenacity to stick it out. Some people need to be in the deeper parts of the job before their brain kicks on and starts enjoying it (just being a hired laborer at a farm vs. owning and running the farm) because they don't have any 'ownership' when it's just a job. All this to say that the quick advice like the OP is technically right, but it has about the same nuance and considerations of reality as clubbing baby seals.
  - globular-toast 5mo ago
HexPhantom 5mo ago
Some of it is very 19th-century and easy to over-romanticize, but "reputation is the asset" and "debt trades away freedom" have aged pretty well
andrewstuart 5mo ago
Understand compound interest. That’s it - that’s the advice.
amelius 5mo ago
> Debt eats self-respect. Barnum says young people, especially, should avoid it. The moment you owe somebody money, you’ve handed them a piece of your freedom. The whole game is keeping income above outgo. So don't buy a house, I suppose. But this goes against popular financial advice.
- ninalanyon 5mo ago
  Buying a house was one of the best things I ever did. But it worked for me because houses are relatively cheap (compared to income) where I live compared to many other countries and I was well paid and frugal so I paid off the mortgage over less than fifteen years. My children don't have that luxury partly because house prices are higher but also because they were less ambitious and hence earn less. So whether it is good advice depends on your personal circumstances and personality.
- brailsafe 5mo ago
  > So don't buy a house, I suppose. But this goes against popular financial advice. Absolutely don't buy a house. I'm very happy I looked at that decision critically when the first opportunity arose and conventional advice encouraged it. I'd never have left my hometown, and my whole life henceforth would have been in service of debt. Pass. Much happier renting forever with every aspect of life being better. Now I look at prices in places I live and think "Why in the hell would I commit this much money to a tiny shitty condo, people are delusional", but might consider it these days if the price to own vs rent comes into better balance now that I've established a new overall home.
- greyface- 5mo ago
  Pay cash, and don't buy a house before you can afford one.
deleted 5mo ago
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crusty 5mo ago
What number is affiliate marketing on PT's list? Linking to Amazon rather than Project Gutenberg is the art of money getting, 2026 edition.
giwook 5mo ago
> Avoid Debt Like the Plague Not sure if this is still applicable today. afaik the wealthiest borrow extensively (despite not needing to) because of the myriad benefits and tax wizardry they're able to benefit from as a result.

409 points by dxs 5mo ago

amunozo 5mo ago

The hardest thing is to know what's your best fit. Any advice?

anonym29 5mo ago
A lot of pop-psychology doesn't hold up when subject to empirical review, but OCEAN / "Big 5" does, and it's probably a decent starting point. E.g. if you are low in extraversion and agreeableness, you probably wouldn't make a good nurse or waiter, but you might not make a bad lawyer or engineer.
- whiplash451 5mo ago
  > low in extraversion and agreeableness I don’t know that these are awesome features for an engineer. There’s a big unsaid cost to this in my experience
  - grebc 5mo ago
    Might mean civil engineer.
    - portly 5mo ago
      More like an uncivil engineer
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  - derektank 5mo ago
    If we’re being honest, highly agreeable, extroverted, conscientious, and non-neurotic people are simply going to be better suited to all forms of employment than the inverse. But, since personality is pretty durable, it’s easier to try and find a career where your weak spots are detriments, but not crippling.
    - rizzom5000 5mo ago
      There is research that suggests highly agreeable people do not do as well e.g. negotiation tactics. What is probably true is that is good to 'appear' agreeable. The same research suggests you are correct about the other 3 traits.
    - anonym29 5mo ago
      A highly agreeable housing inspector isn't going to be better at their job than a disagreeable housing inspector. I want my housing inspector to be harsh, unforgiving, and not grant the benefit of the doubt. A highly extroverted person isn't going to make for a better overnight custodial worker than someone who prefers a more solitary lifestyle. An actor who can tap into the emotional currents of high neuroticism in their work can offer a more sincere and authentic performance than an emotionally flat one. Low conscientiousness correlates with risk taking and can be an asset in roles where over-planning to the detriment of acting can be costly - think firefighters.
    - sporadicism 5mo ago
      I agree with this if what you mean is that employment generally requires conformity, passivity, accepting low autonomy, low creativity, etc. Otherwise, this isn't my experience.
    - roughly 5mo ago
      I'm highly agreeable, and I've had to learn not to be. Knowing when to challenge people - "strategic non-agreeableness" - is extremely valuable. I've also made most of my career off being somewhat neurotic - I've described the core of my job as "finding things to panic about before they happen" (I went on Prozac a while back and caused an incident in the first couple weeks during uptake because my anxiety didn't trigger about something during a deploy). As far as extroversion - friends of mine who are genuine extroverts about went crazy during the pandemic, while I and a few other introvert friends got some of our best work ever done during that period. There's a spectrum - you can't be a misanthrope, but being able to take (and stand) quiet time to focus on a problem is absolutely an asset. With regards to conscientiousness, this often manifests in the workplace as an unwillingness to deviate from the plan when circumstances demand it and a preference for adding process as a kind of panacea for any kind of failure or delay, and at risk of offending the more conscientious among us, I have not found that a recipe for success.
  - ahartmetz 5mo ago
    Low agreeableness can be a positive up to a point. As a technical person, you shouldn't agree to do things that you know will not work. The technical facts have no agreeableness at all and need to be handled as such.
- amunozo 5mo ago
  Thanks! I'll give it a try.
doug_durham 5mo ago
What do you find yourself gravitating to? What part of your job comes easiest? That things are easy to you that other’s find difficult? What do you spend time learning more about even when you don’t have to? Those are directional. For me the first time I started writing code I knew that’s what I’d need to do for a living.
- amunozo 5mo ago
  Thanks for your comment. I spent the last 5 years doing a PhD in NLP that I defend next month, which is a solitary endeavor. I don't feel particularly good at it, especially given the competitive moment of the field. I am trying to transition to industry but landing a job it's being hard. I think that I am good at being a link between people and maintaining a good atmosphere. I realized that I liked people more than I thought before and that working full time in front of a screen is something I would rather not do the rest of my life. On the contrary, I feel gravitating toward social sciences, economy, culture, governance and stuff that is not very close to my professional/studies expertise.
adrianwaj 5mo ago
Turn procrastination into pragmatism. Switch from service-to-self to service-to-others, or vice versa. See your mind as shut gates that can be opened to something already perfect. Make your sub-conscious super-conscious - any tips there? I remember Prince (musician) said he would receive things from God and send them back to source. Cut the strings that make you a puppet??
lugu 5mo ago
Ask people who know you well what you are talented for. Oftentimes we don't see it ourselves. As you get good at something, it become easier, and you think of it as a given. On the opposite, we tend to over appreciate what is difficult for us.
- amunozo 5mo ago
  Thanks! I will, definitely.
GarnetFloride 5mo ago
Are you an extrovert or introvert? Look at how you spend your time. Do you have to spend time with people or have to be alone sometimes? What do you do when you have nothing else to do? I know that's really hard these days with all the distractions we have. So maybe what do you watch or read about? What are your interests? But the world changes. I started out as an engineer and that got shipped to China. I pivoted to IT, shipped to India. Pivoted to technical writing and now there's LLMs. I figure things out and share to make it easier for others too. That works in a lot of industries.
- amunozo 5mo ago
  Due to personal and professional reasons I've spent too much time alone last years. I really noticed that I love being with people and that I cannot stand being all day in front of a computer by myself. I also read a lot about history, economy, culture and geography, but on the contrary my background is in Physics and I am finishing a PhD in NLP in which I don't feel very good.
  - GarnetFloride 5mo ago
    That is useful insight. The concept of the Sunk Cost Fallacy may be useful to you.
toast0 5mo ago
Like with many things, finding the best is hard, finding a good enough fit is a lot more attainable and maybe should be the goal. If you work on projects in groups often, you might be able to find what fits you by what things you end doing especially if you do those parts well. Do you read and interpret the directions, do you do the assembly, do you keep the group on task, do you verify the output is acceptable, do you figure out how to proceed when there's a problem, etc. Also, what tasks do people who know you ask you to help with; especially if those people have choices for who to ask and then specifically ask you. Those are things that likely fit you; especially if you get enjoyment out of doing those tasks, beyond the enjoyment you might get from doing any task for someone. Sometimes, you might get asked to do these things for reasons other than you're good at them, or you may be good at them and also hate doing it, etc; so like be aware of that. If you're lucky, what fits you is distinctive and commercially apprechiated. But not everyone has those fits, so it's good to also look for things that fit well enough to pay the bills. You may need to develop other skills to get into a position to use your good fit as well.
- amunozo 5mo ago
  Thanks for your comment. I spent the last 5 years doing a PhD in NLP that I defend next month, which is a solitary endeavor. I don't feel particularly good at it, especially given the competitive moment of the field. I am trying to transition to industry but landing a job it's being hard. I think that I am good at being a link between people and maintaining a good atmosphere. I realized that I liked people more than I thought before and that working full time in front of a screen is something I would rather not do the rest of my life.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
runamuck 5mo ago
Force yourself to try a lot of things. Look for meetups in different topics you can do in your free time (I hope you have some). Try HAM radio (you can get a career in COMMs), public speaking (executive leadership), group fitness (become a trainer), maker scene (robotics) etc. (Also give me some ideas!)

thm 5mo ago

For a more recent pop-culture version, I'd recommend Felix Dennis https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18749286-how-to-get-rich https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18749286-how-to-get-rich

Michelangelo11 5mo ago
What a good book! I was expecting some "follow your dreams and lean into the hustle" pablum, but no. He talks pretty frankly about how the pursuit of extreme wealth, (100s of millions) which he'd succeeded at, isn't worth it even then because a single-digit amount of millions is quite enough to enjoy life, but adds that he expects readers will ignore that part and attempt to get filthy rich anyway. Also, he later became a poet (a very good one, too, if I remember right) and early on in his life tried to be a pop singer. Feels a bit like that whole multi-decade career as founder and owner of a massive publishing empire was an odd detour for him. Very fascinating person, and the book's definitely worth reading.
- zulux 5mo ago
  I appreciated Felix going over what he had to give up to get where he was. It let me be content with a bit less money and a bit more family.
jonners00 5mo ago
I love this book, but its authority is somewhat undermined by the infamous Steve Jobs passage...
- sporadicism 5mo ago
  How's that? I am not familiar.
  - djeastm 5mo ago
    IIRC, he spends a few pages talking about how Steve Jobs is going to be the ruin of Apple

ChrisMarshallNY 5mo ago

> They take whatever job pays and spend decades fighting upstream. I suspect that this affects a lot of folks in tech. There's a lot of money to be made, so people get into it. They don't really like what they do, so it's always a chore. Their work often shows it, too. I'm retired. I don't have to write software, but I spend more time writing software (for free), than I did, for most of my career. I like the Integrity part, too. That seems to be something that's missing (from most vocations), these days. One of the reasons that I stuck with my last job for so long, was because the people I worked with, and for, had Integrity, and that's pretty important to me.

weinzierl 5mo ago
This is from 1880 and reminds me of something Dostoyevsky had written 14 years before. His quip in The Gambler was even more extreme because he spoke about working hard and saving every penny for generations with the subtext being that it makes everyone miserable.
UncleOxidant 5mo ago
> I'm retired. I don't have to write software, but I spend more time writing software (for free), than I did, for most of my career. Same. Claude/Gemini/DeepSeekV4/Qwen3.6 are enabling me to do way more experimentation than I could do on my own. 10X at least. Not getting paid for any of it, but that's OK, getting paid imposes limitations on what you can work on and imposes responsibilities that I don't care to have anymore. There's a certain kind of integrity in that as well.
- draftsman 5mo ago
  Do you find joy in using LLMs to write software? I tried using Claude/Cursor/CodeX/etc. for personal projects and experimentation, and I found no joy in it. I learned nothing, and when my MVPs were complete, I only had a shallow understanding of how the code that powered them worked.
  - skinfaxi 5mo ago

atoav 5mo ago

Another one I'd like to add is: fuck prestige. Everybody wants to run a Café or a Bar, nobody wants to run a gutter cleaning service. Of the former ones most go out of business within a year. Transfer that to other things as well. Things looking good is not necessarily the same as things working out financially.

deepfriedbits 5mo ago
Said another way: "Pride is for the poor."

evantahler 5mo ago

That guy looks nothing like Hugh Jackman

andrewstuart 5mo ago
Only Hugh Jackman looks like Hugh Jackman.

Michelangelo11 5mo ago

> Barnum’s first rule: pick the work you’re built for, then aim to be the best at it. Edsger Dijkstra, in one of his letters, giving advice (IIRC) to a PhD student: "Do only what only you can do." Kind of funny to see one of the greatest computer scientists and one of the greatest public entertainers giving the same advice, but I guess that speaks strongly in its favor.

ahartmetz 5mo ago
For all non-Dijkstra-level people, I guess that means "Do only what you are particularly good at".
fellowniusmonk 5mo ago
I could never do anything, I could talk fancy and bullshit and could come up with all kinds of great ideas as an ideas guy. Nothing useful. So I became a developer and data engineer, and I became really good at it even though, like the protagonist in Gattica (with whom I share other similarities), I had to work twice as hard and spend all my off hours obsessed with it because my nature worked against me. While others with this natural prediliction could spend all their time in type 1 thinking I had to live in type 2. But it was a success, and I found myself becoming an executive at long last on the strength of my technical abilities, and it turns out executives don't actually need to do much of anything and really, outside of maybe some complex CFO roles, executive roles are by far the easiest roles at existing profitable companies. I suspect csuite positions are actually the roles most secretly replaced by Ai already.
- HPsquared 5mo ago
  Generalist jobs are all about that System 2 thinking. I never developed it, so my general power is limited.
- theteapot 5mo ago
  > I could talk fancy and bullshit ... I became a developer and data engineer, and I became really good at it That's a formidable combination. > I found myself becoming an executive at long last on the strength of my technical abilities, and it turns out executives don't actually need to do much of anything and really ... You probably think that because talking fancy and bullshitting come naturally to you.

omoikane 5mo ago

Book is available here: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/8581/8581-h/8581-h.htm https://www.gutenberg.org/files/8581/8581-h/8581-h.htm Previous discussion (2023-01-20, 69 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34447945 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34447945

msla 5mo ago
More formats here: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8581 https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8581
dempedempe 5mo ago
Standard Ebooks has it too: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/p-t-barnum/the-art-of-money-getting https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/p-t-barnum/the-art-of-mone...

n0on3 5mo ago

Oh boy, this did not age well. Most cases of “extremely successful” people I can think of exhibit the opposite of these core principles: have no “knack” whatsoever, except not giving a shit about whatever they pretend to be their focus while only focusing on personal return; they contract clusterfucks of debts, just usually never end up having to repay them personally; very few of them even know what “going all in” means, they usually live easy while exploiting others to actually do anything; they have no integrity whatsoever, and they do not have to, since apparently demonstrating lack of it is no longer cause for being told by everyone to fuck off into oblivion anymore. And yes, yes, of course there are good people out there too that just want (/need) money to get by, but it’s funny to read this and think about those with _lots_ of money

an0malous 5mo ago
Yes Jeff Bezos was famously passionate about retail and Marc Benioff would build customer relationship management solutions using paper and glue as a young lad
- fullStackOasis 5mo ago
  As a counterpoint, there are plenty of people who are passionate about their hobbies and make no money on them at all. I have some doubts that there's a correlation between passion and money-making. Except, perhaps, that it helps to be passionate about money-making in order to be successful at it.
fullStackOasis 5mo ago
Indeed. This book strikes me as yet another "guide to making money" which was created in order to make money for the author. It is all just his opinion, without any evidence. One might do the exact opposite, and make money as well.

wiseowise 5mo ago

Nobody is going to seriously discuss moneymaking tips from 1880, right? …right?

idiotsecant 5mo ago
Because people now are so wildly different from people 150 years ago? We are exactly the same, with slightly shinier toys.
- andrepd 5mo ago
  Many things in the world are radically different, and the economy especially is a different beast. The point about avoiding debt for example, is hardly relevant for businesses (even if it's generally good advice for personal debts.
  - goodmythical 5mo ago
    It wasn't true even then. Leverage has been an accelerator for a long time. Precious few of the world's largest businesses were built out of single pocket book.
- smilespray 5mo ago
  This can't be stated often enough. Society, diet, education and technology changes, but we've biologically had the same makeup for thousands of, if not more, years. Just because they're dead doesn't mean they were idiots. This is the young person's folly. Then again, this attitude may be a substantial cause of what we define as progress. Gray areas are hard to figure out.
- wiseowise 5mo ago
  I don’t know where to even begin, if you don’t see any difference between 1880 and 2026.
throw0101a 5mo ago
Is the advice from The Richest Man in Babylon, published in 1926, out of date? * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Richest_Man_in_Babylon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Richest_Man_in_Babylon Avoiding greed, envy, the hedonic treadmill, etc, will never not be good advice.

photochemsyn 5mo ago

Barnum’s pamphlet was published in 1880, squarely between two major financial panics linked to stock bubbles. 1873 wiped out thousands of businesses and triggered the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, crushed by federal troops. The Panic of 1893 would come a few years later. In both cases, the likes of Rockefeller, Carnegie, Morgan, etc. used the chaos to consolidate monopolies, buying distressed assets at rock-bottom prices. The private rules for the Robber Barons were almost the exact opposite of Barnum’s advice (build skills, avoid debt, work hard, be honest): 1. Control the Vocation of Others: Ensure you own the system in which others work. Vertical and horizontal integration of your businesses is the mechanism by which you ensure all the value created by labor ends up in your pocket. 2. Use Other People's Debt as a Weapon: Strategic debt is your friend, and you can generate corporate debt so vast it becomes a systemic threat. Ensure you have access to pools of capital, so that during a a panic you can buy assets for pennies on the dollar. Inflate the stock price of your holding company far beyond its actual assets, and become a giant creditor. If your debt-financed bet fails, ensure the bag is held by the public. Privatize the gains, socialize the risks. 3. Whatever You Own, Defend With All Your Political Might: You need the ability to shape legislation, control the courts, and deploy state violence to protect your assets and destroy competition. Bribery, lobbying and blackmail are your tools. Those political expenditures are your real insurance policy when your assets are threatened by populist anger or economic chaos, and will also grease expansion into new markets and help you capture foreign resources (oil, bananas, etc.). 4. Control the Definition of Integrity: Never break the law and steal from business partners; instead, change the laws to make your actions legally defensible in court. Claim that the only integrity that matters is the confidence of the capital markets. Stock manipulation, bribery of politicians, and crushing competition with frivolous patent lawsuits are just enterprise, public service, and fairness. Your integrity is your public image as a builder and a captain of industry. Hire biographers and buy newspapers to tell this story. Finally, blame the victim. Tell the destitute it’s their own fault that they hadn’t figured out how to successfully navigate a system designed to strip their wealth from them and hand it over to the monopolists. This same self-help message of ‘individual responsibility for your economic condition’ is constantly pumped out to the American public today by an endless stream of self-help books in the Robber Baron 2.0 era, and for the same reasons.

5mo ago

black_13 5mo ago

[dead]

tianqi 5mo ago

One of my thoughts is that it's not easy for people to discover what they're truly good at. The reason is that if you're truly good at something, if you have a real talent for it, then it's easy for you to do it well from the start, so you rarely judge it or realize how good you are. Just as no one thinks they're good at their heartbeat and breathing. Because you have the talent to be good at them from the beginning, so you don't put in much effort to learn them, and therefore you don't realize how difficult they are. I think a real way to discover your strengths is not to reflect on what you do well, but on what makes you most frustrated when you see others doing it. It feels like an experienced driver watching a student drive and getting frustrated: Why can't you do such a simple action correctly? If you find yourself constantly wondering on something: why can't everyone just do this and it's so simple? You can remind yourself that that one might not be simple at all, but rather that you possess a genuine talent for it.

rogerb 5mo ago
>>The reason is that if you're truly good at something, if you have a real talent for it, then it's easy for you to do it well from the start, so you rarely judge it or realize how good you are. I've often wondered about this (beyond basic abilities). I'm sure there are exceptional people for whom this is true but in my experience most people start out not being very good at what they later end up being really good at. Would love to know if there's some sort of data / research on this.
- apothegm 5mo ago
  Most things take learning to master. But most people have more of an aptitude for some things than others and find it comparatively easy to become baseline competent at those things. Like, one of my nephews could dribble a soccer ball almost as soon as he could walk — it was astonishing how good he was at it at 20 months old. At three his ball control skills were as good as his father’s were at 9 or so (a father who was good enough to play in travel leagues in middle school, so no slouch). No, at age 5, of course he can’t compete with adults who play in rec leagues. He doesn’t have the speed, strength, situational awareness, reflexes, or sense of of his options in a given situation. But on the other hand, in isolation, he can almost always get the ball to go where he wants it. He’ll never in his life feel like that’s a skill he had to _learn_. Whereas I’ve never been able to pick up dribbling at all regardless of how many hours of practice they subjected us to in phys ed.

wwarner 5mo ago

I've only ever been good at dancing to punk music, which has only cost me money so far.

rglover 5mo ago
Organize underground punk shows. Make a deal with bands to split the door in exchange for hustling a crowd. May require some fun conversations with the police later, but hey. Me and my roommates living room in college [1]. [1] https://youtu.be/WuJ60dAHyc4?si=bLVmWEM9tTgtA1MF https://youtu.be/WuJ60dAHyc4?si=bLVmWEM9tTgtA1MF
goodmythical 5mo ago
youtube is calling

sireat 5mo ago

I am paraphrasing but I think it was W. Buffett who said: "Work at the job that you do not hate" In other words, not all vocations that you are great at and talented and want to pursue are valued by current world. I love playing chess way more and actually am reasonably good at it, but programming and teaching are valued more and I like those too. As Jimmy O. Yang's father reportedly said: "Pursuing your dreams is how you become homeless" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GO6ntvIwT2k&t=22s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GO6ntvIwT2k&t=22s At the same time you have to be out there in the world, increase your luck surface - if you sit in your cubicle/room/private chatroom all day you are less likely to make a mark on the world despite your brilliance. Again I forgot which artist said it but that in New York art scene the most successful artists spent most of their working days socializing not painting/sculpting etc.

kingofmen 5mo ago
What are those artists successful at? Making art, or marketing it? The New York art scene is a curious example in this context, because it is notoriously all about who you know rather than what you do, and that's not usually considered a good thing.
- pessimizer 5mo ago
  > What are those artists successful at? Making money in the profession that they enjoy, rather than having to take up one that they enjoy less.
  - rrvsh 5mo ago
    Not everyone views success as making money.
v9v 5mo ago
I think Kevin Kelly has taken the opposing side before: https://colossus.com/article/flounder-mode/ https://colossus.com/article/flounder-mode/ (discussed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44455933 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44455933)
5mo ago

jdw64 5mo ago

I believe modern capitalism operates quite differently from the methods preached in this book. There are clear limits to relying solely on a labor-intensive mindset without strategic leverage. I didn't have any special talents, outstanding skills, or privileges. In my twenties, I worked 69 hours a week for two straight years. Yet, I only made minimum wage and had nothing to show for it. I didn't develop any meaningful skills, either. Simply putting in the effort didn't guarantee I would get everything. Ironically, it was the choices I made during my downtime—taking a step back, reflecting, and reorganizing my thoughts—that actually allowed me to earn more money. Even then, the working hours were much shorter, around 52 hours a week. That choice was programming. (Though, to be fair, even that is getting tougher now because of LLMs.) My conclusion is that all advice from successful people is heavily packaged. I constantly think about the concept of 'effort.' What exactly is genuine effort? What is deliberate practice? In modern capitalism, the kind of effort that gets rewarded isn't trading time for money; true success lies in building assets that decouple your time from your income. However, even that feels somewhat meaningless to me now. If we constantly assign value to everything and strive only to be the 'best,' I'm always left wondering: does that make me a meaningless person? Looking at it coldly, I am heading into my mid-thirties, and I have only just finished paying off my student loans and the debt I incurred from being scammed. I don't have a fancy degree, nor have I built a globally renowned program. My bank account currently sits at $30, and I'm worried about next month's rent. But because I've survived so many different grinds, I have the confidence that I'll figure out a way to live on somehow. Though, I do feel a bit regretful about not having been married yet. More importantly, though, I feel that the more value we place purely on money, the more the other joys of life fade away. Living life itself is an effort. Pausing to look back is also an effort. The only thing that truly renders the time in our lives meaningless is believing that the 'present me' has nothing left to learn from the 'past me.' Everything I've gone through has definitively helped me in some way. I believe these types of books are ultimately just acts of assigning arbitrary values to sell copies. They manufacture the idea that their specific worldview is the 'correct' one just to collect book royalties and speaking fees. But the way I see it, life is not built on these linear values. Life rests on non-linearity. The more you try to cram life into a linear framework, the more you inevitably lose the non-linear values. Think about how computers represent numbers. Human cognition perceives a continuous, infinite line, but computers represent it as discrete dots (floating-point numbers), right? I believe there is a similar kind of 'precision loss' in life when forced into linearity. Capitalism defines surplus, "meaningless" time as an inefficiency and preaches that we must try our absolute best at all times. But from everything I know, the world simply doesn't work that way. There are only people who desperately want to believe it works that way. Some people waste their time on a stack of paper filled with mere letters. Some waste it making images appear on a computer screen. Others shed tears while watching television. None of these actions make absolute logical sense, and I believe life is precisely the sum total of all these incomprehensible acts. I highly doubt whether it is right to confine the entirety of life into a tiny box called 'success.' I believe the shape of that 'success box' depends entirely on the shape of one's own life. From that perspective, the showman's text doesn't address the complex leverage required in modern society; it simply looks like a tool designed to sell the false illusion of the American Dream.

didgetmaster 5mo ago

Even if you find a vocation that you generally enjoy, it doesn't mean that you will enjoy every part of it. I love to program, but there have been a number of jobs and tasks during my career that I definitely did not like. I think this probably applies to every career. You have to navigate within your available options to balance things that pay well with the ones you enjoy doing. I have a side project that I truly enjoy working on. It is big enough that I have spent years working on it in my spare time. I am still trying to find traction for it in the market. If it ends up making me a lot of money, then great; but if it never makes anything, I have still enjoyed building it.

dotcoma 5mo ago
> Even if you find a vocation that you generally enjoy, it doesn't mean that you will enjoy every part of it. Agreed. But I think you would have been worse off had you chosen a career in something you did not like, be it law or finance or fitness training etc.
arwhatever 5mo ago
Knew a guy who owned an I.T. consultancy who was fond of (privately) saying, "This job wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the customers and the employees!"
1123581321 5mo ago
That’s a healthy perspective. I’m someone fortunate to work a perfect job for me, and there have still been clients that almost burnt me out of it. It also can be painful to see work in your favorite field be misunderstood or misused.

geosyog 5mo ago

This is a great little book that everyone should read. It's available for free here: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8581 https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8581

lemonberry 5mo ago
I was just coming to post this. That site is a treasure.
Kye 5mo ago
Also on Standard Ebooks: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/p-t-barnum/the-art-of-money-getting https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/p-t-barnum/the-art-of-mone...

xp84 5mo ago

> " 2. Avoid Debt Like the Plague" Does anyone else feel like they overindex on this principle? I have on multiple occasions found myself too conservative to take advantage of the leverage available to me. (Example: doing a refinance in 2020 I could have taken out a 30-year mortgage at the rock-bottom rate, but chose to do 15. This is irrational given that I could have taken all the money I didn't have to pay toward the mortgage and even putting it in completely safe investments, come out ahead (even before considering the mortgage interest deduction). I'm not saying I envy those leveraged up to their necks, but I think growing up in a family that didn't really have any money and did have a lot of the bad kind of debt made it hard for me to feel comfortable owing money even when it would probably be in my best interest (no pun intended).

Garlef 5mo ago
Yes. That part should be taken with some caveats. And unless you're born rich, you start your life with debt: You need some form of retirement money for the last 20 something years you might not be able to work anymore. If you buy assets on a loan/mortgage/etc, it's more like you're materializing this debt early.
- linguae 5mo ago
  Wow, this is very insightful and I haven’t looked at saving for retirement as a type of debt before! Thanks for sharing!
sowbug 5mo ago
Yes. I wish my parents had been more nuanced in their advice about debt. Carrying a revolving balance is way different from borrowing to buy a home, for example. I was proud to pay off my mortgage early, but missed out on nearly 20 years of tech-stock growth. That's a chasm rather than a nuance in retrospect, but there isn't a lot of nuance in aphorisms like "Avoid Debt Like the Plague."
DavidVoid 5mo ago
Yes. I'm sure it would feel nice to pay off my apartment loan, but the interest rate on that is 2.75%, which is way lower than what I can (reasonably) expect to make on the stock market.

cynicalsecurity 5mo ago

Let the peasants think they are poor because they are lazy and the aristocracy are rich because working their ass off. Yeah, right.

bossyTeacher 5mo ago

>Barnum’s first rule: pick the work you’re built for, then aim to be the best at it. Imagine you are good at programming. Great, now get a programming career. Oops, it's the 19th century and computers aren't a thing. Tough luck.

userbinator 5mo ago
Ada Lovelace?

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

folkrav 5mo ago

> 1. Don’t Mistake Your Vocation If one's knack/vocation just objectively doesn't pay a livable wage, what's the alternative? 2. Avoid Debt Like the Plague In a world where home prices are worth decades of pre-tax salary, where less than a third of home purchases are cash, and where most of those are older people with accumulated wealth or previous paid-for property, this more or less equates to saying to young people "do not ever think about owning the place you live in". 3. Whatever You Do, Do It With All Your Might While I agree that success generally is a result of work+opportunity, I have seen it come from the opposite enough times that I have a hard time believing it really is remotely close to be one of the main factors of financial success. 4. Preserve Your Integrity For some reason, I heavily doubt the majority of the true wealth ~hoarders~ holders of this world got there from integrity.

virtyaluk 5mo ago

It’s funny I read this book just this last Thu during my work break. Was it worth it? Not really given I already read most of the classics on personal finances and self-help.

irq-1 5mo ago

Investing will make more money than a career. If it's really money you want, start a business or save capitol.

andrewstuart 5mo ago
If you do it right this is true. If by investing you mean gambling then it is by no means certain.

avmich 5mo ago

> List your debts. Create a concrete plan to eliminate them, starting with the smallest. Avoid taking on any new debt this month. This could be surprisingly hard. You can't get income at some point, and you still have obligations, e.g. a family. You have some things which are hard to reduce (e.g. monthly telecom payments) or have significant upfront costs (you can move far enough to reduce rental costs, but the move will only beneficial after months). It's so much easier to take some debt, at least initially. The author doesn't give good advises for how to avoid getting into debt.

gurjeet 5mo ago
This advice from P.T. Barnum is strikingly similar to Dave Ramsey's process of debt-elimination, or what he calls "The 7 Baby Steps". https://www.ramseysolutions.com/dave-ramsey-7-baby-steps https://www.ramseysolutions.com/dave-ramsey-7-baby-steps

phtrivier 5mo ago

HN front page : "Avoid debt like plague" Soon on HN front page : "How the richest people on earth used VC money and the lever effect to inflate the valuation of their startup (not even 'built in rust !') to kickstart a 'buy - borrow - die' cycle"

decimalenough 5mo ago
Corporate debt != personal debt.

rramadass 5mo ago

This is inspiration and not advice for today's world. Supplement and Complement the above with something like; The Math of Money by J. Zachary Klingensmith - https://psu.pb.unizin.org/mathofmoneywashjeff/ https://psu.pb.unizin.org/mathofmoneywashjeff/

froh 5mo ago

with an unexplained circus trick the article jumps from Barnum's 20 rules to "here are the four core principles" --- why these four? I love project Gutenberg to provide the rest. it's a short pamphlet: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/8581/8581-h/8581-h.htm https://www.gutenberg.org/files/8581/8581-h/8581-h.htm

tomjuggler 5mo ago
Thank you for the link - I was just thinking that there were some core principles missing imo and yet there they are in the full text For me "Persevere" is probably the main one, many people in the comments here mention the difficulty of making it in a niche field, one that you love and are good at. Personally I lived in a tent/garage for 5 years before finally becoming successful. Also "Location" resonates. I had to move to a new city when I was starting out due to over saturation in my field at home.

MrDresden 5mo ago

> "Preserve Your Integrity" "Cattle die, and kinsmen die, And so one dies one's self; But a noble name will never die, If good renown one gets." [0] - Hávamál, written ~900-1000 CE [0]: https://www.voluspa.org/havamal76-80.htm https://www.voluspa.org/havamal76-80.htm

globular-toast 5mo ago

The first one is something I've been saying for years. I worked in computational biology for a while and it took me a while to realise, but eventually I noticed I wasn't very good at it. The people who were good at it lived and breathed biology. They would come to the lab on weekends and even the middle of the night to water plants and generally tend to their experiments. Above all, they cared. I was just a computer guy who took a gig. I got by, but I would never be good because it just wasn't me. I realised my real calling is engineering, not science. I like finding and solving problems. Scientists have problems, but, in my experience, the best people were scientists first and engineers second. Now I've settled on engineering I see it from the other side. I work with people who just aren't very good engineers. It's like someone with one leg trying to run races. You're just not going to get very far. You'll always be last. Always struggling to keep up. Find what you're good at and be the best. Don't try to do something you're bad at and be the worst.

hnthrow0287345 5mo ago
I just do business apps and websites, and it pays the bills, but none of it is really interesting since a lot of it involves recurring patterns and simply fixing other peoples' past mistakes (and future people will probably fix mine). I give a shit only because doing that means less work and annoyances and not getting fired, but I still only give a shit 8 hours a day, usually less. All this advice runs into time constraints and luck, which means you can get unlucky trying 2, 3, 4, 5, etc. things and you're not good at any of them while you still have bills to pay. It's also an accessibility problem as some careers are gated by degrees (physician) or capital (farming). Doing the sample work (shadowing a physician, hired farm worker) to see if you like it has a risk of not giving a real picture of the actual work. If that happens, you have to rely on tenacity to stick it out. Some people need to be in the deeper parts of the job before their brain kicks on and starts enjoying it (just being a hired laborer at a farm vs. owning and running the farm) because they don't have any 'ownership' when it's just a job. All this to say that the quick advice like the OP is technically right, but it has about the same nuance and considerations of reality as clubbing baby seals.
- globular-toast 5mo ago

HexPhantom 5mo ago

Some of it is very 19th-century and easy to over-romanticize, but "reputation is the asset" and "debt trades away freedom" have aged pretty well

andrewstuart 5mo ago

Understand compound interest. That’s it - that’s the advice.

amelius 5mo ago

> Debt eats self-respect. Barnum says young people, especially, should avoid it. The moment you owe somebody money, you’ve handed them a piece of your freedom. The whole game is keeping income above outgo. So don't buy a house, I suppose. But this goes against popular financial advice.

ninalanyon 5mo ago
Buying a house was one of the best things I ever did. But it worked for me because houses are relatively cheap (compared to income) where I live compared to many other countries and I was well paid and frugal so I paid off the mortgage over less than fifteen years. My children don't have that luxury partly because house prices are higher but also because they were less ambitious and hence earn less. So whether it is good advice depends on your personal circumstances and personality.
brailsafe 5mo ago
> So don't buy a house, I suppose. But this goes against popular financial advice. Absolutely don't buy a house. I'm very happy I looked at that decision critically when the first opportunity arose and conventional advice encouraged it. I'd never have left my hometown, and my whole life henceforth would have been in service of debt. Pass. Much happier renting forever with every aspect of life being better. Now I look at prices in places I live and think "Why in the hell would I commit this much money to a tiny shitty condo, people are delusional", but might consider it these days if the price to own vs rent comes into better balance now that I've established a new overall home.
greyface- 5mo ago
Pay cash, and don't buy a house before you can afford one.

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

crusty 5mo ago

What number is affiliate marketing on PT's list? Linking to Amazon rather than Project Gutenberg is the art of money getting, 2026 edition.

giwook 5mo ago

> Avoid Debt Like the Plague Not sure if this is still applicable today. afaik the wealthiest borrow extensively (despite not needing to) because of the myriad benefits and tax wizardry they're able to benefit from as a result.