Ask HN: If you're so smart how come you're not rich?

Depending on your financial situation, you could Buy an old line company and digitize it.

In the US, If you can get 500k from friends and family, you can buy a $5m company with a strong balance sheet and strong cash flow. It will give you a live Petri dish to test your ideas on how to do things better.

It’s almost as if there isn’t any correlation at all between wealth and intelligence...

This is what I found by Googling around:

If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich? Turns out it’s just chance.

The most successful people are not the most talented, just the luckiest, a new computer model of wealth creation confirms. Taking that into account can maximize return on many kinds of investment.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/03/01/144958/if-youre-...

Assuming "smart" means 90th percentile of intelligence, there are 700 million smart people, way more that rich people. It shows that obviously wealth creation requires much more than intelligence.

Because I'm really not THAT smart, nor are most people (IQ standard distribution).

I think there have been studies and books done about successful people (can't remember the authors). The book basically said that luck is the main influence. There are plenty of smart people who aren't rich and certainly some average people who are. I want to say the experts consider luck to be less than 10% of the success formula.

A lot of people will say “it is just luck” but I think this is just one factor.

The real question is what moves have you made to get rich? Have you started making a product? You cannot ride (perceived) intelligent to riches.

I can feel your pain, feeling of not getting what you deserve is a tough feeling to keep inside.

By identifying ourselves as being smart we are getting into the trap of being hostages of this label. Lot of scenarios in our life require us to make mistakes. Mistake is something a smart person cannot afford and deliberately avoids.

We are awarding ourselves with an achievement award of being smart without actually doing the work (doesn't it feel great to be smart?). Being smart is a capacity to think logically, not something we achieved in life. It is given, but to feel fulfilled we need to do something with it.

By declaring myself smart I set the scale of measurement for myself, and then I suffer when somebody smarter than me is around. Understanding that even my intellect is not something that defines me is a crucial piece of this puzzle. Intellect is one of the MANY tools available to each one of us. Exploring those tools requires some .... testing and learning, and intellect is a very lousy helper here.

And if you really want to focus on the money in your life - look at the people around you. Money come from the relationship with the people around us not from the ideas, thoughts, reasoning. Knowing you strength and focusing on helping people - producing much better outcome long term than focusing on a great idea.

So as you said - time to kick your own ass! ;)

Hope this was useful.

what I learned is that successful people know how to leverage resources to achieve their goals.

smart people focus only on polishing their own skills, but that doesn't scale.

My tip: partner up with someone who wants money, and that you know has the skills to make it, and has the ethics to share profits with you. Steve Wozniak might be an example of someone who did that.

The smart people I know that are not rich because of one of two prime reasons:

1. They are not wealthy because they are not driven to make money. The scientist, the stereotypicial engineer, the altruist. The majority of self-made wealth I have seen is due to a real desire to make money, and work hard at it with little regard to other concerns like how enjoyable or prestigious the work is.

2. They are smart in particular areas, but really let themselves down in others. Maybe they can’t work well with others, maybe they intellectually can’t do sales, maybe they don’t keep motivation to work on a winning thing, maybe they gamble or drink, maybe they have psych issues.

Note that there are plenty of exceptions to the above (gain wealth despite the above, or lose it even with the above).

Finally plenty of smart people just don’t value money that highly - they are smart enough to have different goals in life. My guess is you want money for the social status but that you don’t actually care much about money - if so maybe accept that and choose your own path.

Define rich?

By most metrics I am rich, just not private jet 0.1% rich.

I work at a big tech company and make >200k/yr. I have few financial worries.

At this point I’m not primarily motivated by more money. Sure I’ll take it, but at this point I’d sooner spend my time and energy on other more important things. Family, friends, hobbies, etc. The financial security to focus on those things makes me feel pretty rich.

Am I not smart for being satisfied working for someone else and rarely working more than 40hrs/wk?

The reason you're not rich is probably because you didn't single-mindedly pursue riches. Which is smart, because riches are not intellectually interesting. Some money is necessary for living, but the pursuit of wealth above all else is, frankly, dumb. Don't envy people who are addicted to money; it's a sickness.

Start loving yourself.

Have you ever fell in love to the point where you’d do anything for that person and that person can do no wrong in your eyes?

Make that person yourself.

Takes practice!

Smarts gets you to be upper middle class.

Taking on a lot of risk, pushing yourself to the limit gets you to be rich.

I started too poor to be too rich, but from a very poor family and no support and background I currently belong to the 5% people making more money in my country, so although I'm not rich as private jet rich, I bootstrapped myself from poverty to a high quality standard of life.

Because I'm not feeling risky enough to try for it...yet. I'm not feeling risky enough because our life is pretty good as it is. Our life is pretty good as is because we don't have to worry about finances, as my job pays incredibly well.

Intelligence isn't the limiting factor to economic success. One can be smart and lazy.

Conscientiousness is the limiting factor to economic success.

One doesn't need to be very smart, just lucky enough to get the opportunities, smart enough to recognize them, and hard enough working to follow through.

The world average median income seems to be about $10,000.

Fear of patents and lawsuits has often prevented me from pursuing an idea. It's difficult to find related work in patents, and anybody can start a lawsuit. Many patents are vague and way too general and can be used against you even if you think they're about something totally unrelated to what you're doing. I've made several attempts to start a business and it's scary exposing yourself to the public in that way. Marketing is also really difficult, you are literally competing with millions of other voices trying to get yours heard. Getting rich also often seems to require a willingness to climb on the backs of other people, to use them to their disadvantage to advantage yourself which I found I didn't want to do. Part of being a climber is pulling other people down, and that seems like a bad way to live. There are exceptions to all these, but many of them are typically encountered when starting a business. To get really rich it seems to me that you either have to inherit, be lucky, or be really mean and dirty.

I used to feel this way as well. Until I realized that my way of living would be no different being multi millionaire vs how much I make now, except with bigger numbers in the screen of my bank account(s).

Making millions takes a lot of hard work. I'd rather work on my hobbies.

Smart doesn't really get you that much. I compare it to height for a basketball player. Realistically, you're not gonna make NBA if you're not over 6' tall, but that's just the buy in. After that, it's just grueling hard work, and everyone else is 6'+ as well.

So, as a first step, count intelligence as nothing more than a (very) rough constraint on what you might possibly accomplish, but nothing more. It covers the ante, but not the hand.

I say it's luck. Marc Andreessen wrote a nice blog on this: https://pmarchive.com/luck_and_the_entrepreneur.html

People think a lot about the luck they can't control but there are plenty of ways to harvest luck.

Smart will let you do harder things with less effort. Smart lets you question yourself and what you're doing wrong.

Motion gives you luck. Meet new people, try new things. Don't just optimize for most income, but use your smartness to move faster and further than everyone else. Build 10,000 prototypes. Try new hobbies. Read bigger and thicker books. Reread the same books you have.

Being prepared gives you more luck. Some of the best discoveries were organized messes. Edison discovered the light bulb experimenting with everything - animal hair, 6000 vegetable growths, and finally got it with tungsten. Smart people tend to give up earlier and be neater.

And the last type of luck just happens to you. A friend just offers you a great job. Your first freelancing contract. Getting a hot date to ask you out first. A friend of mine made music as a full time job and worked on 3D game engines as a hobby, and got a dream job doing music for the game industry. This all seems like luck, because it's an unplanned result, but it's the overflow of hard work.

Smart people are a little obsessed with trying to link results directly to an action. To really succeed, you have to keep putting energy and focus into something, even when progress plateaus.

I mean are you aggressively focused on pointing your intelligence in the direction of accumulating wealth?

If you are and it's not working then you probably aren't as smart as you think you are.

If that's not what you are optimizing for, be that lifestyle, or pursuit of interests, then there is no reason to expect the two to be correlated.

First decide what you want and then commit to achieving it.

If you don’t want to work for a boss, then you have to start your own business or work for yourself.

If you want to make more money then you have to decide how much and change your job to accommodate that.

I think I am smart but I am lazy, and I have this unquenchable thirst for knowledge. I rabbit-hole into things and never completely finish a project that I start. I have so many abandoned GitHub repos that might have panned out if I had put focus and effort into them. So I think my lack of motivation and interest could be a factor in me not getting rich.

But I am happy with my 9-5 job that provides enough to take care of the people I love.

Cause I'm risk-averse and lazy.