People seem to consider it immoral to want to get rich too much. People are answering in a defensive way.
Every other post here preaches the importance of true happiness, family, friends, health, etc vs money.
I find this tiring. Imagine going to a website dedicated to the playing of tennis at a professional level, opening a post called "How do I win?", and having people stress the importance of enjoying the game and protecting your long term health versus focusing on the narrow and shortsighted goal of winning.
I for one think there's more than enough hours in the day to both get filthy rich and be a happy, well adjusted human being, as long as you're smart about how you go about it. Ask yourself: does that idea seem offensive?
I think the difference between the way you look at HN and the way I do is that I think this isn't a site that is strictly about 'how to win' in the business world but on how to improve your game in a much more general sense.
It's about skills, not about 'how do I win'. And if enjoying the game makes you practice longer and harder that's a valid way to go about reaching your goals. Neglecting your long term health at the expense of trying to win means that if you don't win in the short term that you will not be able to try again.
The narrow and shortsighted goal is one that you may want to achieve but I almost guarantee you that you're not going to be a winner without improving your game first and without enjoying the game even if you don't win and without protecting your long term health.
There is no 'winning' in this sense in the businessworld, you can set a goal and by achieving that you can make money almost as a by-product. HN is (at least in my perception) partly about achieving those intermediate goals.
If rich to you means having money then you're going to have to achieve that goal in an indirect way (or you'll have to rob a bank).
Really, if your goal (what you call a "win") is to get rich, go into finance. It's far easier to get rich in finance than entrepreneurship. Hell, your whole career path is even planned out for you.
Sure, you can go into entrepreneurship simply with the goal of getting rich, but it's a bit of a silly plan considering how difficult it is to build successful businesses. If you are into entrepreneurship in order to try build something useful and, as a side effect, make some money, then that's a sensible plan.
I'm sorry but your naivety abounds. I have family that have huge houses on acres of land, but make less than me (in my early 20's). Yet here to get that where I live, you literally have to be raking in the money.
The reason so many people have a problem with wanting to get rich is because it is invariably at the expense of all else. This is where the naivety truly is, because those who are rich are there because of all those 'vs money' options. I can't work my job if I'm not healthy, I can't get a promotion if I can't make friends, I wouldn't even have my job if it wasn't for my family, and I wouldn't be happy if it wasn't for all of the above.
You'll never get 'filthy rich' if you don't have people to help you. IIRC Google wouldn't even exist because the founders were friends with their professor, who encouraged them to stick with their method for the PageRank system. AFAIK their university studies appear to have both been paid for by their family.
The idea isn't necessarily offensive in a moral nature for me, it's offensive because it's wholly naive.
Being smart about trying to get rich includes getting the right people to help you. Obviously.
Think about the richest person you personally know. Was it really "at the expense of all else"? Or did they structure their professional and social lives in such a way that they built upon each other over several decades?
I think the correct analogy would be, a bunch of posts asking "How do I win Wimbledon?" And I think people respond negatively because the odds are laughably remote, the pursuit will turn you into a one-dimensional person, and at the end of the day, the payoff isn't that rewarding anyways.
I get the feeling HN has more posts on becoming rich lately and frankly I find it not very relevant for Hackers News. Yes, it's great if your hack/project/application allows you to gain a nice income, but personally I'm more interested in your hack/project/application and the process around it than the possible outcome of being financially independent. If that's your definition of 'rich'.
I'm picturing a lot of guys who sold everything they have to move to SF to become a start up founder / rock star. This is not unlike moving to LA and being a waitress to tread water whilst trying to make it big in Hollywood.
A portion of these guys are probably frustrated, burned out, and lost. The only way to reinvigorate in some eyes is to figure out how rich they need to get before they are happy.
Never chase money because it will outrun you. Money is like girls, it only comes in bounds once you stop giving a shit. Ever wonder why you only get hit on by hot girls when you actually have a girlfriend?
There are stories of teenagers making their first million and they're ideas are super-simple. I wonder if its possible some portion of the HN crowd is trying too hard to get rich by being smart.
It's true. There have been many "Ask HN" posts along the lines of "I just quit my job and am moving to Bay Area tomorrow to work on my idea. Where do I start?"
Even though I live in the Bay Area, when I read these I always wonder why would someone move from X to an expensive area just to bootstrap their idea. Yes, there are VCs and startup-minded people here. But really, doesn't it make sense to incubate your idea first before betting the farm? Moving to Silicon Valley won't make anyone magically rich -- hard work (and passion) just might.
After studying planet earth for a considerable time the aliens concluded that the way to get rich there is to send lots of white shirts to the laundry.
When a million people try X, a few hundred can get really lucky.
Tell a million people to go to take a grand to Vegas and bet their 1,000$ on 7 on a roulette table. Then have them take their winnings and do the same thing until FU money. Some of them would become millionaires, but collectively they would all be worse off. (They started with 1 billion.)
The secret is to look for things where risk > reward. Unfortunately writing generic web apps is probably not it. But, the obvious cost is simply time which people tend to undervalue, so it's not obvious if the game is rigged or not.
You want a risk greater than the reward? That seems like a losing strategy to me.
What you want is a reward greater than the risk. Of course, everyone wants that. The way to find it is to have some insight into how to make the market more efficient (ex: a new product that solves a pain point), or to find an under-valued asset (ex: a business that is losing money because it is mismanaged).
Of course, municipal bonds also have a reward greater than the risk, but no one gets rich off municipal bonds. So you do want as much risk as you can tolerate, but you want the potential reward to be worth it.
The risk greater than reward scenario is no different than playing the lottery. You may get rich by chance, but on average, you lose.
Sorry, that seemed more clear when I wrote it. I meant (risk -> reward) as in your paid for the risk you take.
You want to be the House charging people because you risk something, not the gamblers paying someone to let them make bets. In the startup world that seems to be VC's who charge people money to invest in startups while sharing the startup's upside.
Risk less than Reward seemed like a poor way to express it.
I'm picturing a lot of guys who sold everything they have to move to SF to become a start up founder / rock star. This is not unlike moving to LA and being a waitress to tread water whilst trying to make it big in Hollywood.
I don't think this comparison is wholly valid because there is only a limited number of people who can be media A-listers at a particular time, and a large number of people who reach the apparently low threshold for at least the possibility of being a rock or movie star. From there it's mostly luck and serendipity.
By contrast, the number of people with the technical skill necessary to be a great hacker appears to be far lower; the returns to that skill far higher, even if the startup fails; and there appear to be a nearly infinite number of desires that people have for products to make their lives better. There are somewhere between 400 and 600 major movies greenlit every year.
HN is somewhat topical in that a topic will get some attention for a while and then fades away again. I've seen this happen with a variety of subjects and it really doesn't mean much.
It'll happen with more hacking related subjects as well, and I think the fascination with the 'being rich' thing is that HN started out as more startup oriented and many people pursue the startup route out of a motivation for financial independence.
Actually the first answer of the page is completely not about money, it's more about the process of business and I think that it's fine on HN (for as much as I understand what HN is )
I get the feeling HN has more posts on becoming rich lately and frankly I find it not very relevant for Hackers News.
There are have been a lot of complaints about posts not being relevant. But this is a community and what is relevant to the community is defined by the community, and here that is expressed in upvotes.
In other words, if an article is posted here and gets a large number of upvotes, it is relevant to the community of HN whether you personally find it relevant to you or not.
It seems the theme is business ownership. Of course, Reddit might be populated more by tech-savvy folks, leading to the talk of startups there. But overall, those who seem to make big sums of money are those who have equity in successful businesses. That includes the people who run used tire shops, electrician companies and fast food franchises as well as Bill Gates and Warren Buffet. Buffet is smart enough to have built a business that buys equity in other businesses (not to mention having the brains to know what equity to buy).
Remember selection bias. There is usually a fair amount of luck involved in becoming rich, and asking rich people how they became that way just tells you how those people became rich, not necessarily how you can become rich yourself. It's a little like asking lottery winners how they picked their numbers (obviously becoming rich legitimately requires real work and isn't totally random, but you get my point).
There may be some bias in the Reddit thread, which is admittedly slanted toward sofware/tech startups, but I also draw on some other sources. The book "The Millionaire Mind," Thomas Stanley looked at a variety of wealthy people and found that many who accumulated wealth did so through their own (often mundane) businesses. Others were those with high-income jobs and enough sense to invest wisely.
The Forbes list also seems to contain those who largely built or somehow own (through purchase, birth or connections) business equity.
My personal experience confirms this. Those I know who seem to have legitimate wealth are a junkyard owner, a used tire store owner, an owner of an electrician outfit, an owner of a financial services company, and a couple of doctors who've invested well. Oh, and a retired NFL player who also didn't blow his cash while he played.
There is luck in getting a new business to take off, for sure. I'm not trying to downplay the risks, but I am trying to show that there is a key to how those that made it did so.
One could also have born to Sam Walton or a Hilton or something like that. But keep in mind that those parents made their wealth building businesses.
If someone knows of a better way to do it, or other ways, I'm all ears. Winning the lottery works for so few, that I'm inclined to consider it negligible.
>"The book "The Millionaire Mind," Thomas Stanley looked at a variety of wealthy people and found that..."
I haven't read that book, but it sounds like survivorship bias. Eg, there were likely many others who also owned businesses who failed to accumulate enough wealth to make it into his sample of the 'wealthy'.
Question is, what is the proportion of those business owners to the ones who end up wealthy?
For example, it could just be that getting rich has more to do with living way below your means and saving alot early in your career, giving you money to invest and long enough horizon for that investment to pay off, regardless whether you invest in your own business, the financial markets, your education, etc.
But research like that will never answer the question correctly if it only looks at sample of 'survivors'.
Yes, the survivors are the ones who accumulated wealth. If there are other paths to accumulating wealth, they should have survived as well, but aren't apparent in the sources I've seen so far.
There are many businesses that fail and people who've lost money on equity in businesses. It's by no means a sure-fire way to become wealthy. But from what I've seen it's the main method that makes it to the "wealth" finish line at all.
What other paths have lead to "survivors" on the road to wealth? There may well be paths other than what I've proposed. Feel free to share them with me.
It definitely won't give you a surefire recipe for money, but the human brain is an amazing pattern-matching machine and someone might be able to derive some useful insights from seeing enough examples of "How I became successful."
Not the right question. Human nature works like this: If you think $5mm net worth is enough for you might get $1mm. If the figure is $20mm, you might get to $5mm. If you happen to achieve your goal, the figure will rise. Guaranteed.
If you focus on money exclusively you will be very unhappy. There are other accounts, which don't send monthly statements and don't allow wire deposits. I know plenty of wealthy people that are unhappy because they don't realize this. For some people money is even a poison. A sudden increase in wealth would lead to personal disaster. So you see, nobody is rich, envy is wasted energy.
Lecture over, here's the answer: Land investments, Equity + influence in a business.
If you're healthy and you have people to love and that love you in return and you get to write your own ticket in life then you are rich beyond belief.
If you crave money for its own sake you will never be rich.
Similar to jacquesm, my answer to the question of how I became rich was "I was born in America." Our poor people have access to more than anyone in the history of the world. Our poor people have magic boxes with which they can talk to people anywhere. Our poor people can go to a building where they have free books for anyone, and more magic boxes with which they can look up any piece of information they want, for free. Our poor people can walk into a supermarket and buy fresh fruit year round. (If they have kids, the government will even give them coupons) Our poor people have another magic box that receives 24-hour moving pictures of news, movies, entertainment, and educational programming. Many of our poor people have a metal box that you pour gasoline in and it moves by itself much faster than a horse can gallop. When our poor get sick, they can go to the emergency room and get doctors for free (the rich people's insurance and the rich tax-payers foot the bill).
In a third-world country poor people wonder if they are going to have food today. If they get sick, they die. When they want to travel, they walk. If the crops fail, they starve. They can count on the fingers of one hand the number of suits of clothes they have.
If you have a college degree, statistically, you are richer than 98% of the world.
Everyone has their own version of 'rich'. In my experience the ones that are the richest are the most driven and don't consider themselves rich no matter how much they have. Like my grandparents who had a net worth into the $tens of millions and yet I watched my grandma spend a half hour looking for the cheapest can of food on an aisle at the grocery store - anything to save one or two cents.
I think people become wealthy by being somewhat obsessed with saving money, starting businesses, or cutting costs in all aspects of their lives. Once they've achieved a certain amount of money, no matter how much it is, their brain is hardwired to save, so they will probably never spend it in their lifetime.
I also get a kick out of people responding that they are rich with a net worth of $100K, and also have mortgages, car loans, etc, that they don't count against their savings. This is ridiculous- they brag that they can afford a nice car so they must be rich- no, I'm sorry, you're a poor wage slave who has more debt than savings; you are not rich.
My definition of rich is pretty simple - if you can stop working tomorrow and maintain your present lifestyle - I consider that wealthy. You have the freedom to do what you want with your life. For some people this might be a few million, for some this might be much more.
> If you can stop working tomorrow and maintain your present lifestyle - I consider that wealthy.
Even for most rich people, stopping work would require some adjustments. Tom Wolfe documented this pretty well in Bonfire of the Vanities. A bond trader loses his job and has to live on his savings. He acknowledges that he could still live like a king if he just moved out of his Park Avenue apartment, but "going backwards" is just socially inconceivable. He'd have to quit the club that all his wife's friends are members of, etc. etc.
However, I agree to some extent with your definition of rich. I just note that 'present lifestyle' is also a variable here. This is why adjusting your expectations provides, in a certain sense, the best ROI possible. It costs nothing and you can become fabulously wealthy as a result.
Then I know a lot of people with >$30 million who are not rich, and I know a few with <$1 million who are rich.
That doesn't make your definition wrong, but it does point out that being rich is a matter of personal choices on expenses just as much as income/gross worth.
If you go to West Chester county NY you'll find hundreds of ex-Wall Street guys with foreclosures on their 5 million dollar houses and annual salaries >400k and little to show for it after the crash.
I define it in a different way, and in more practical terms. Being rich in America means not having day-to-day concerns about money. Sure, the rich need to worry about their riches. But not like most of us who are far to close to becoming poor (definition: not enough wherewithal to care for one's self and family).
I suspect majority of the people who are technically "rich" as you put it have either inherited wealth or opportunity in life, and though they cloud it with epic stories of hard work, they started out ahead of the game, and with money to burn.
There are very few "rags to riches" stories these days, and little reward and interest in ideas from normal people. The prospect of gaining financial stability [through even magnificent short term gains] is decreasing daily in the US. just look at foreclosures to see that people who though their lives were successful had the success rug pulled out from under them.
We need to stop supporting mega-companies and bring development and even retail back to the mom&pop era. Your privacy is threatened BECAUSE Google has become a giant company, if small businesses ran individual development projects, they wouldn't have enough time to worry about collecting personal data on every human in the world.
We are turning into a lottery society, and the ideal of being able to be successful is as much a myth as Santa Claus, even with hard work. Net neutrality and measures that mega companies will take to suppress competition will kill the possibilities for common folk to succeed even deeper into the "unobtainable/impossible" category.
"I suspect majority of the people who are technically "rich" as you put it have either inherited wealth or opportunity in life"
If you listen to "The millionaire next door" you will find +80% of the rich in America got their money working hard, are on their fifties, savers, and don't look rich(don't need to spend too much for living).
I could confirm that on Spain. I have known many rich people here, their children... that is another history, dad and mom use to not want their children to work as hard as they did.This is universal.(I have seen parents who had very little money spend on their children enormous quantities of money).
I agree big companies are getting too big, the excuse was the synergies. I don't like it(I consider the government the biggest company of all). They become mammoths that are to sustain at the expense of everyone else(too big to fail).Look at GM, they declare profit of 1,5B$ from the 50B$ they got, GM does money in the financial market with your money, not making cars!!
There's a lot of truth to this, but you'll soon be shouted down by the very people you describe. Successful people--however they got there--only like to attribute it to their own very hard work.
Agreed, so many hide behind the veil of hard work and its a lie, most got to their successful points in life based on the wealth opportunity provided by finances or friends. Society needs to begin to look at and understand wealth in this manner. Dynasties always manage to preserve wealth in the world because of their inner-associations, rules, plans and initiations and they rarely recruit total outsiders.Its no tin-foil hat conspiracy, its reality.
Opportunity in life is just as beneficial as inherited wealth. You can work for years in an industry and never gain upward mobility because of a lack of personal connections that foster your growth and the insider information and support that you get from those sources, such as being fraternity brothers with a CEO, or knowing/mentoring with someone who has deeper political or financial influence since you were a child, or by having a rich mommy and daddy. Its so much about who you know, and how you start.
There have been several people with lots of money who failed by trying to buy their way into high society, without first making friends, we have all witnessed many brilliant meltdowns from Paris Hilton and others who didn't get the memo.
We need to start looking into wealth and financial stability and creating opportunities for the best ideas to succeed, not just the ideas with the best marketing campaigns. Mom and Pop is where we need to go, in terms of our future business and development outlook support to end the threats to net neutrality and shoddy/arbitrarily wrong/and unethical big businesses dominating our social landscape...
"Mom and Pop is where we need to go, in terms of our future business and development outlook support to end the threats to net neutrality and shoddy/arbitrarily wrong/and unethical big businesses dominating our social landscape..."
Many mom and pop shops turn into big businesses. Are we going to also have a law that prevents a business from growing to a certain size?
I also don't think I want a mom and pop store running something like cable. I don't think they would be able to keep up with service calls/support
I said nothing about wealth/opportunity inheritors being lazy. Many work hard and aren't bad people. I was commenting about the dream of success and how its skewed to tell people that they can do whatever they want, and that they can create a start up that will succeed on ideas and marketing alone...
There is much more at work in this society than whats written on paper, especially if you're reading Rich Dad Poor Dad.
You know what? If you are american you got lucky to spend 5x more resources than anyone in the first world, energy, petrol, plastics, TVs, computers, cars, whatever.
If you think about it, that is not fair!! Travel around and look at how other people lives.
And the number will become 10x,20x if you compare yourself to the majority (over the 3000billion people). You are not smarter than them, more educated or culture(the majority of Americans only speak one language, give me a break)... just lucky.
So you are rich!!, today, now. Just because you were born in the right place.
It seems that YOU want them to attribute their wealth(people richer than you) to luck, witch is a enormous fallacy, is not true, they are not lazy bastards like your prejudices want it to be(so YOUR mind could have an excuse for not working).
It is totally ok for someone to be proud of their work.
The data I've seen suggest that the ability to make wealth is passed from generation to generation, but wealth itself usually isn't. Genetics, environment, and upbringing are all more valuable than a trust fund, which shouldn't be a surprise at all.
As for hard work, it is a great way to make money as long as you're smart about what you work on.
The vast majority of the wealthy started off that way, and the higher up the chain they start, the easier it is to move even higher, which is why wealth is becoming increasingly concentrated in our society.
Those tips for joining startups seems to be interesting:
"For your first startup:
You want a place with >10 folks but less than 200. I say this under the theory that you are mostly working there to find challenging work and smart people. A startup with >200 people is too close to becoming a big company (or a failure) soon.
Be very strong in your field, if you are not yet that good practice until you are. Try to work on the hardest projects you can find at your current employer.
You will probably not get rich at your first startup, but you will learn at least 3x more per week than you would at a big company.
Don't obsess too much on how many options etc... - it really doesn't matter - you are mostly going there to do good work, learn and find folks who will make successful startups."
Based on years of research,observations and trials, the most effective, legitimate and simply way i have identified to becoming wealthy is rather simply, straight forward and with little risk to your existing routine. And it is no other than leveraging. leveraging is the age old proven strategy of gaining wealth that has been and is still in practice from over 2,000 years ago. Even Jesus used leveraging to execute his successful ministry. Leveraging when understood and properly engaged can make you wealthy in no time. And I mean in as little as a few years
Every other post here preaches the importance of true happiness, family, friends, health, etc vs money.
I find this tiring. Imagine going to a website dedicated to the playing of tennis at a professional level, opening a post called "How do I win?", and having people stress the importance of enjoying the game and protecting your long term health versus focusing on the narrow and shortsighted goal of winning.
I for one think there's more than enough hours in the day to both get filthy rich and be a happy, well adjusted human being, as long as you're smart about how you go about it. Ask yourself: does that idea seem offensive?