> Once we let go of outcomes, we can look inward and focus on the things that truly matter: To become a good person with values, who has character, and is good at what they do. That’s the biggest reward in life. And it’s 100% in your own hands.
As if this wasn't some programmed delusion. There never was a time when people acted normally and then were corrupted by some new thing. Pretending civilization is normal instead of hunting and gathering. pretending being rich and famous is bad is cope. sure tell yourself all those rich people are "poor in spirit" whatever that means.
> We’re no longer driven by values, morals, loyalty, or family, we’re driven by what the media emphasizes.
"we're not driven by [good words], but instead by [emergent collective attention]"
well duh. it was never as you said it was. media is just civilization-level gossip. and people love gossip because its so informative. media isn't an actor, its a mirror.
> pretending being rich and famous is bad is cope. sure tell yourself all those rich people are "poor in spirit" whatever that means.
I don't think that's what the author is saying. Being rich and famous is fine(well, plenty of people would disagree on the famous part https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/bill_murray_411631) , wanting to be rich and famous at the expense of your own mental health, when you're probably not in a position to become so is not, especially when it causes you to disengage with your own desires, rather than engage more fully.
No, media is not a platonic abstraction, it's like 20 companies, tops, with public chains of command. It's not the emergent expression of the collective unconscious.
Not at all. Even if you find the cure to cancer tomorrow and it is 100% effective and dirt cheap, there are always enough people willing to make up conspiracies about it and send you threats.
There's a semi-well known article from Tim Ferriss [1] where he does the math about prevalence of mental illness in the general population and multiplies that by an audience size of (say) 10 million people. You quickly end up with shockingly large amounts of mentally ill people in your audience. Famous people get death threats pretty much daily, and often their family does too.
This doesn't mean that money doesn't have it advantages too of course, but rich and unknown is pretty much always preferable to rich and famous.
Famous vs unknown depends completely on personality type. Some people want to be left alone to do their thing. Others want to build followings and be cult leaders. There's no "better" or "worse" here, just preferences.
>> Person A was born in 1930. Person B was born seventy years later, in 2000. They both start applying the Graham investing strategy at a very early age, let’s say when they were 15 years.
>> Person A becomes Warren Buffett, once the richest man on earth, who experienced one of the biggest booms in value stocks when he was young. Person B loses half of their money because value stocks are out of favor in the 2010s
Buffet started when he was 10, not 15. His net worth is 97.8 billion dollars, 97.5 billion or so of that was earned after he was 50 years old. His success or failure was not due to whether stocks were in or out of favor in his first 5 years of investing.
If you want to be extremely rich, set aside the next 82 years of your life to do nothing but work on that, and you should have a pretty high rate of success.
>> In 1945, as a high school sophomore, Buffett and a friend spent $25 to purchase a used pinball machine, which they placed in the local barber shop. Within months, they owned several machines in three different barber shops across Omaha. They sold the business later in the year for $1,200
That's ~$20k in today's dollars in a few months while still in high school.
>> At 15, Warren made more than $175 monthly delivering Washington Post newspapers
A 15 year old today cannot make ~$3k a month delivering Washington Post newspapers. I think the point still stands what much of wealth gain is lucky opportunity windows, such as being alive during a time where a job like newspaper delivery pays 3k a month.
Yup. When I had a newspaper route in the 1980s, I was getting paid the same per paper delivered as my grandfather was 50 years prior: 2 cents.
It reminds me of how people shit on today's college students without realizing how much college costs have risen. I get the initial "kids these days" reaction, but holy moly, fellow olds, please use Google to update your priors a bit.
There was a time when you could just work a minimum wage part time over the summer and it would pay for college the rest of the year.
Now, you can work minimum wage full time year-round and if you're lucky, you MIGHT cover tuition at a community college if you're still living with your parents and they don't charge rent.
I think you're exaggerating a little bit. It doesn't help whatever point you're trying to make.
Average community college tuition cost[0]: $3,400/yr.
$3400/yr is $70/week in order to pay your tuition without a loan. Your argument is only lucky people making minimum wage for 40 hours/week, who have their rent paid for, can save $70/week?
US minimum wage is $7.25; 40 hours a week would be $14,500 in pre-tax income. Average car ownership, per AAA, costs $10,728. Adding in the $3,400 for tuition leaves an entire $372 for food, clothing, hygiene, entertainment, and medical expenses. Seems reasonable!
Setting aside quickly Googled statistics and the risks of using averages to understand individual situations, plus the wide state-by-state variation in support to community college, let's just take the minimum wage and your $70/week number. Let's also set aside how it's quite hard to get 40 hours per week these days in a lot of jobs because of corporate schedule fuckery that was much less severe when I was punching a McDonald's clock.
That's circa 10 hours per week of pay or 25% of their time. Is that number a lot? I would say yes. I don't know many people who can save 25% of their gross pay. If that's you, congrats.
Just to be clear, I presented it to mock your approach of jumping in with a quickly-googled national average number and acting like it means anything here.
I made maybe $100 a month delivering newspapers in the 1970s. It wasn't practical to make much more because the territories were fixed and there was a long waiting list to get one.
I made about $120 a month delivering newspapers in the 1980s in a terrible, small, rust-belt town. With all the overhead involved, it came out to less than $2 an hour.
Nobody was "lucky" to have a paper delivery route.
If there were more people who wanted to deliver papers for that price than there were delivery routes available, then you were indeed lucky if you had one.
>> much of wealth gain is lucky opportunity windows
He sold gum, he sold Coke bottles, he sold magazines, he worked in a grocery store, he delivered newspapers, he sold golf balls, he sold stamps, he detailed cars, he invested in stock, he invested in land, he went to business school, he worked as an investment salesman, he worked as a stock analyst, he worked as a general partner, then chairman, then CEO at a company.
The lucky opportunity was 82 years to compound returns.
The question is why he wouldn't quit at 50 with a few hundred million and live off of the money instead of spending the next 42 years making more money which he will then give away to someone else to decide what to do with after he dies.
They are not hoarding anything people need (like food or clothing).
They are not even hoarding anything people don't need (like gold or diamonds).
The "money" (they don't hoard cash either) they accumulate is _investment_ which translates into _power_ to change the world.
my daughter is 14, her friend makes $17 hour working at a juice store. She makes about 300/week.
In 1987 I was making about 25/hour doing programming as a senior in high school.
There are always opportunities and those opportunities are not the same in every era.
Kids today are making 100K being influencers opening toys on youtube
Kids today are making 100K playing online poker
Kids today are making $$ writing apps
Kids today are making $$ selling pot
The point is not paper delivery, the point is there is a mindset. I will never be a billionaire because I will stop trying to make money once I have "enough"
There’s no way anyone who was doing delivery of newspapers in the 1940s and making $175 nominal.
Newspapers then cost roughly 5 cents apiece, and in Omaha a route with 100 doors would take 90 minutes. Your monthly gross sales for a seven day route of that size would be $150, and the vast of that would go to purchase papers. You’d probably net $25, and then get $15 in tips.
That’s about the same amount I made on my route in the late 1970s when adjusted for inflation.
"Young Warren attended the DC public school Alice Deal Junior High and he graduated from Woodrow Wilson High School.
Buffett says delivering papers at age 14 instilled the importance of hard work and reliability.
Wartime Washington was short of adult men and for that reason, says Buffett, he was able to get multiple paper routes at the Westchester Apartments, a five-building complex that was home to the city’s elite.
“I also learned,” he says, “that if you did a good job you were going to move up. The very fact that I did a good job in Spring Valley got me the Westchester routes later on.”"
Let's assume for a moment that $0.05 is still a good price for newspapers, and assume that the carrier received 20%, or a penny apiece. Also assume that he delivers every day. That's about 580 papers day. If they're really dense subscribers, I guess you could make a delivery every 10 seconds, so about 95 minutes to deliver that number if you never wait for an elevator, climb stairs, etc.
Certainly was a great opportunity for Warren, but an outlier for paper delivery earnings.
I'm pretty sure that multiple orders of magnitude more people spent their entire lives trying to become extremely rich than the few hundred it worked out for.
There are a great deal more people who think they're trying to become extremely rich, but aren't, than there are people who, for example, think they're trying to become extremely good at violin, but aren't.
It's not a retrospective difference, one good way to spot the poseurs: they aren't violently allergic to spending money in a way that doesn't get them more, or at least make that possible. That's table stakes for trying; I don't have the allergy, but I don't fool myself about it either.
It is sort of tangential to his point, but the Buffett example seems kind of weird to me. Investing is inherently competitive. Surely the strategy that Buffett (or any other large investor) used to get big would now be obsolete?
I agree this was a bad example. Of course people who try and copy the strategy of a very successful person are not going to be as successful themselves, because the people that come later are going to be competing with millions of others doing the same thing. If you want that level of success, you probably have to be ahead of the curve and do something different from what most people are currently doing.
Or in fields where we're fighting the universe rather than each other, trying to make progress with your hero's strategy is probably going to be very difficult -- to the extent that there's such a thing as "raw intelligence," Einstein definitely had more of it than I do, so if I was going to look into physics, I'd not want to look at the problems he didn't complete, using his strategy! (of course, this is why fields build up an increasingly advanced framework, after the trailblazers have passed through).
Right. I started a comment picking at the Buffett example before seeing yours. Sure, he's been lucky to preserve his mental capacity into old age, but it's not fair to dismiss his persistence. In particular, Berkshire has one of the few mega-cap business models that's actually possible to replicate on a small-scale: start/buy a cash-flowing business, use the earnings to invest in more, repeat. It's easier if you figure out negative cash conversion cycles before everyone else, but that part isn't necessary to apply the model.
Your post made phrased as if he did the majority of the work after he was 50. Anyone who sees two numbers that are less than 1% different would initially think the same. If you're making a point about exponential growth, feel free to use exponential notation, or talk in deltas.
> You just absolutely refuse to comprehend compound growth.
> set aside the next 82 years of your life to do nothing but work on that, and you should have a pretty high rate of success.
Not if you don't have a decent amount of capital to start with. Don't forget that many people, the majority of people, despite their best effort, can't really raise themselves above a certain basic wage and salary, and therefore can't accumulate anything.
Without capital, there's no compounding effect of capital, and you're not going to be rich.
The flying private example in the first section misses the entire point (or 99% of the point) of flying private. Flying on a set schedule, arranged long in advance, with 30 strangers, from one major airport to another major airport, is not the point of flying private.
Flying on your own schedule, to/from more conveniently located airports, bringing family pets along, having private conversations among the pax, having exactly the catering you wanted, and otherwise having the airplane to yourself is the advantage that makes private jet travel appealing. Just skipping parts of the TSA checks isn't nearly enough.
Isn't that what the author was saying though? These "affordable" private jets were really not providing the perks of a private jet; they were essentially just chartering a standard plane.
He’s saying that because he thinks they want to brag.
But there’s a completely 100% rational reason for doing it that he completely ignores. Given the choice of going to a destination for the same price (or at least “affordable”), would you A) fly commercial B) fly private?
There's also the "to/from more conveniently located airports, bringing family pets along, having private conversations among the pax, having exactly the catering you wanted" perks, apparently. I've not had the pleasure to fly "private" yet so I wouldn't know. :)
Bit what is the difference? Just a hundred fewer people, and the knowledge that you're just polluting for a few extra minutes of boarding time? I don't see any positives, even at the same price per ticket. Also, smaller planes are less stable than larger planes, so there's the smoother ride factor too, right?
Flying direct vs hub and spoke. To Ibiza. Plus a 100 less potential Covid carriers.
Bigger planes can be more comfortable but a large factor is wing loading. Many smaller jets have higher ratios. IMO, the most comfortable airliner in turbulence was the MD-80, which had a tiny wing.
If the choice is between flying on a regular airplane and a regular route vs sharing a small "private" jet with a bunch of randos, the apparent situation described in the article, I'll definitely take A. The major airlines are well-known quantities who are well regulated. Dealing with a small, novel company adds risk, as does the small plane. And I would have strong concerns that the people who are pulled in by a "private jet" fantasy would be the most pain-in-the-ass sort of air traveler.
Not sure. It depends on a bunch of other factors. As the parent notes, flying in a small charter is not flying "private" and if I'm flying commercial, especially international, and money isn't really an object within the general parameters of commercial flight, I have access to the premium airline lounges, very comfortable seating, pretty decent food and service, etc. Not clear that a small not really private plane is an improvement unless it's people I know.
If I'm flying "private" with 30 other randoms, or commercial with 150 other randoms, I would 100% take the commercial option. The airliner is going to be more comfortable than any 30-person private jet and airlines are way better at handling mechanicals and irregular ops than most private operators who are doing the "Part 135 charter, but skirting right up against the Part 121 rules" game.
Hasn't been my experience, there's the occasional first-timer who's posturing for instagram but for the most part people are aware that they're on a commercial flight that for the time being gets to sidestep the nightmare that is the typical terminal.
Exactly. I've flown on plenty of chartered planes before. It wasn't to post on Instagram or brag. In a lot of cases it's simply the most convenient (and even cost effective) way to travel.
I guess it depends on the definition of rich and famous. How rich? How famous?
These two doesn't come alone. They come with their own baggage as well. Being rich will make you, and your family targeted, either by criminals, by "friends and families", or by the government. Being famous is tiring. You constantly need to pander with people that you don't know, with papparazis, with friends of friends of friends, people constantly looking to network. Being famous without being rich is even worse. You just get death threats, hate mail, etc without the financial means to fend off those.
I want to be rich enough so that I don't have to worry about the future or I can do any work I want without worrying about money, for example, creating music, working on a hobby, etc.
I want to be famous enough so that the people that I care remember who I was, who I am, and who I will be, even when I am no longer in their lives, and live across the world.
I remember meeting a very famous actor once. I was curious about his life and so I went to check out his Twitter account.
It turned out that every day, in response to everything he tweeted about any topic, he got zero-context Twitter replies including marriage proposals, sexual propositions, requests for him to visit random people in random cities, and requests for money. That's just what strangers were willing to send him in public.
This made me think that maybe being famous isn't very enjoyable.
Or perhaps it's not quite as binary as "either you believe success is all luck or you're arrogant."
There's a lovely book, "The Drunkard's Walk - How Randomness Rules Our Lives" that has a good take on this.
I don't have time to find the passage right now, but the idea is essentially this: even if you work in an endeavour where success is overwhelmingly driven by luck, success still requires: taking a chance to have the opportunity to become lucky, an open mind and preparation to recognize the good luck that has occurred, and the skill to exploit the opportunity that luckiness has brought.
One must make chances for luck to occur, and one must have a prepared mind to take advantage of luck when it does occur.
I wouldn't necessarily read the replier as saying they have succeeded and luck had nothing to do with it (i.e. the binary view).
The problem with a view point of "it's all luck," IMO is this will lead you down the path of learned helplessness and even if you do get lucky you won't be in a position to capitalize because if you thought it came down to a roll of the dice, why would you bother skilling up in the first place?
Nobody is claiming that success is 100% attributable to luck. The claim is that becoming rich and famous is mostly luck-driven (see the quote in OP's comment), which I think is absolutely true.
Believing otherwise leads the rich and famous to think that they are better than everyone else, and the less successful to think that they are inherently inferior, when in reality there is a wide overlap in effort, dedication, and strategy between the two groups. One group was just in the right place at the right time while applying those skills, and the other wasn't.
In other words, not becoming rich and famous is not a personal failing. Sometimes you can try anyone's best and simply not succeed.
I think this is very relevant to many people I’ve known who try to start their own business. A successful business is a reality test.
You can’t profit if your customers all live in your fantasies. If you create products for those imaginary people, no one will buy them and you will fail. That’s why product-market fit is the #1 advice given to entrepreneurs. It recognizes that you will need to leave behind your own ideas of what you should build and who your should build it for, which are probably made out of a lifetime of TV and Social Media bullshit and actually take stock of the real world, the real people in it and what they will pay real money for.
Sadly, quite a few people I know were able to run their fantasy business all the way to the poor house.
Getting rich isn't that hard. Just be born in America or Europe, most careers will afford a comfortable lifestyle. If you want to be richer than that, study engineering or business. Your average businessman does math at the 8th grade level.
Getting famous also isn't that hard. Do something funny or creative and post it on TikTok, it's not that hard to get a video with 1e5 or 1e6 views. Hell, you can post cute videos of your pet and get 1e6 views.
You may be rich compared to someone in the poorest of nations but you can still be struggling to get by while working 3 jobs. Getting an engineering degree is also not that easy and for example in the US you will be jailed by huge dept for the rest of your life.
> you will be jailed by huge dept for the rest of your life.
Even $100k in student debt is not that huge on an engineer's salary. People regularly take on multiples of that debt to buy a house. "rest of your life" is an absurd exaggeration - and I'm saying this as someone who thinks the deck is totally stacked against students today.
Also, you don't need an engineering degree to get a job in tech as long as you're lucky enough to be born in the West to start with. Things like MIT Open Courseware and similar programs have made it possibly to learn everything needed to know in order to get and excel in a tech job for nearly free. There is absolutely no need to be "jailed by huge debt".
Being born in the West is pretty much required though because decks are stacked hard against immigrants.
In the Buffet example, OP left out that once you cross a certain threshold of wealth, it is almost impossible to NOT make more. There are hedge funds, exchanges, shell corporations, ways of diffusing assets across businesses, and other strategies that only people with hundreds of millions can access. Not to mention many laws basically stop applying to you once you achieve a certain level of wealth because the vehicles are so complex it is hard to prosecute.
Which is why I said "buffet-like person." We are talking about different things. I'm talking about the article in the OP at the top of this thread, you're talking about what you wish we were talking about.
I did not. It's impossible to do so after an hour or something. But even if I would have, I'm going by the example being discussed here in the OP, not IRL buffet, you're still trying to steer the discussion toward your preferred topic instead of discussing what we are actually discussing.
Anyway, throwing insults at each other like children is not what this site is about, let's have substantiative discussions like adults and keep this site fun and interesting and not turn it into reddit.
> Ask 100 ten-year-olds what they want to do, and I’d guess 99 of them will say something that’s related to becoming rich or famous: A musician, YouTuber, actor, NBA player, Elon Musk, and so forth.
People actually do ask this question of large numbers of kids regularly. Here's one:
Top three in that survey were doctor, teacher, astronaut. (I have read other surveys where YouTuber was high on the list -- my point here is that there actually are surveys, no need to speculate about their results.)
That wasn't asked of kids, that was asked of adults to recall what they wanted to be when they were kids, which is going to result in different answers. Lego, through Harris polling, ran this poll [1] internationally not that long ago and the results were stereotypical. Respondents were allowed to pick multiple dream careers:
People want to be rich and famous because they toil their entire lives and struggle as a middle class person, while they see bumbling idiots flying around doing what is the easiest job in the world. Every example that we are shown is that the rich and famous do about one month of real work in a whole year. It's a feeling of unfairness, of injustice.
A bit tangential to the main point covered in the post.
>> Becoming rich and famous is mostly a matter of luck.
I am not sure if I agree with this completely.
I recently watched a Netflix movie "Look both ways" with my wife. The movie shows parallel timelines in which the protagonist despite facing different scenarios ends up with a very similar fate in the end. That movie got me thinking if our life's trajectory is based on a few defining moments, or if it is more about the small decisions we make everyday.
For example, if Amazon/Meta didn't work out for Bezos/Mark, where do you think they would end up. My guess is they would still be running some big successful companies, as founders or CEOs or VPs.
> Ask 100 ten-year-olds what they want to do, and I’d guess 99 of them will say something that’s related to becoming rich or famous : A musician, YouTuber, actor, NBA player, Elon Musk, and so forth.
For crying out loud, every generation from the 20th century onwards would have given a similar answer at that age. Heck, I wanted to be a Tony Stark/Bruce Wayne type of person when I was 10. Or a famous writer. I am neither. I'm still quite successful and happy.
Yes modern culture is vapid and shallow. Most things that people are into are vapid and shallow, and always have been. It's the essence of the human condition. That doesn't have much impact on the lives people ultimately go on to lead. Your local environment is far more important.
If it's going to take concentrated effort to get out of, that to me implies that the default is "broken," and while I agree with the sentiment in the article, I don't know how we address it systematically for society. Something draconian like banning social media doesn't sound right.
As I pose the question of how we "fix it," I can't help but question how we know if it's something to be fixed at all. I agree that it's making our lives today harder to bear socially and mentally. But, it could also be a natural part of the evolution of our species, perhaps this is the way to get to the trillion-people across multiple-planets scale? Perhaps we individually suffer, mentally or otherwise a bit more than the previous generation, to allow for the maximum number of humans to succeed at a given time.
I too miss being able to focus and long for the now seemingly serene world of the 90s. I too feel distracted by gadgets, apps, politics. But I'm also intrigued by the idea of a future where there are 100 x Einsteins alive, which may come at the cost of having 10000 x Kardashians.
Somebody from 1930 might posit the average American today is rich (if not famous) based on the average household with private bedrooms, air conditioning and central heat, multiple vehicles, multiple TVs, computers and electronic gadgets, kitchens stocked with food and gadgets, closets full of clothing, etc. Sure people have problems and poverty still exists but at baseline its a pretty comfortable lifestyle.
Mostly bemoaning about not being rich and famous comes down to desiring better (or perceived to be better) versions of items listed above -- or the ability to have "fuck you" money and the fantasy that buying people off will isolate you or solve all your interpersonal problems.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 164 ms ] threadAs if this wasn't some programmed delusion. There never was a time when people acted normally and then were corrupted by some new thing. Pretending civilization is normal instead of hunting and gathering. pretending being rich and famous is bad is cope. sure tell yourself all those rich people are "poor in spirit" whatever that means.
> We’re no longer driven by values, morals, loyalty, or family, we’re driven by what the media emphasizes.
"we're not driven by [good words], but instead by [emergent collective attention]"
well duh. it was never as you said it was. media is just civilization-level gossip. and people love gossip because its so informative. media isn't an actor, its a mirror.
I don't think that's what the author is saying. Being rich and famous is fine(well, plenty of people would disagree on the famous part https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/bill_murray_411631) , wanting to be rich and famous at the expense of your own mental health, when you're probably not in a position to become so is not, especially when it causes you to disengage with your own desires, rather than engage more fully.
No, media is not a platonic abstraction, it's like 20 companies, tops, with public chains of command. It's not the emergent expression of the collective unconscious.
Even financially comfortable and unknown is better than rich and famous.
E.g. if you found the cure to cancer ...
There's a semi-well known article from Tim Ferriss [1] where he does the math about prevalence of mental illness in the general population and multiplies that by an audience size of (say) 10 million people. You quickly end up with shockingly large amounts of mentally ill people in your audience. Famous people get death threats pretty much daily, and often their family does too.
This doesn't mean that money doesn't have it advantages too of course, but rich and unknown is pretty much always preferable to rich and famous.
[1] https://tim.blog/2020/02/02/reasons-to-not-become-famous/
And it's probably 10x worse if you're a woman. And 100x worse if you're gay or bi, and 1000x worse if you're trans.
This is true for the vast majority of people. Our problem is that we allow the bizarre outliers for whom this is not true to run everything.
>> Person A becomes Warren Buffett, once the richest man on earth, who experienced one of the biggest booms in value stocks when he was young. Person B loses half of their money because value stocks are out of favor in the 2010s
Buffet started when he was 10, not 15. His net worth is 97.8 billion dollars, 97.5 billion or so of that was earned after he was 50 years old. His success or failure was not due to whether stocks were in or out of favor in his first 5 years of investing.
If you want to be extremely rich, set aside the next 82 years of your life to do nothing but work on that, and you should have a pretty high rate of success.
To think he started off with a paltry $300 million. How much avocado toast do I need to not eat to get there?
That's ~$20k in today's dollars in a few months while still in high school.
>> At 15, Warren made more than $175 monthly delivering Washington Post newspapers
~$3k a month in today's dollars.
It reminds me of how people shit on today's college students without realizing how much college costs have risen. I get the initial "kids these days" reaction, but holy moly, fellow olds, please use Google to update your priors a bit.
There was a time when you could just work a minimum wage part time over the summer and it would pay for college the rest of the year.
Now, you can work minimum wage full time year-round and if you're lucky, you MIGHT cover tuition at a community college if you're still living with your parents and they don't charge rent.
Average community college tuition cost[0]: $3,400/yr.
$3400/yr is $70/week in order to pay your tuition without a loan. Your argument is only lucky people making minimum wage for 40 hours/week, who have their rent paid for, can save $70/week?
[0] https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-community-college
Setting aside quickly Googled statistics and the risks of using averages to understand individual situations, plus the wide state-by-state variation in support to community college, let's just take the minimum wage and your $70/week number. Let's also set aside how it's quite hard to get 40 hours per week these days in a lot of jobs because of corporate schedule fuckery that was much less severe when I was punching a McDonald's clock.
That's circa 10 hours per week of pay or 25% of their time. Is that number a lot? I would say yes. I don't know many people who can save 25% of their gross pay. If that's you, congrats.
We admit they're in the 0th percentile of earners, but then pretend like their expenses should be the median or mean expenses.
Why would somebody earning essentially the zeroth percentile wages be paying for 50th percentile car ownership?
The other common example is how minimum wage earners can't afford an average 2br rental in any state.
If minimum wage earners are paying for the 50th percentile apartments, who exactly is living in 30th percentile apartments?
Nobody was "lucky" to have a paper delivery route.
He sold gum, he sold Coke bottles, he sold magazines, he worked in a grocery store, he delivered newspapers, he sold golf balls, he sold stamps, he detailed cars, he invested in stock, he invested in land, he went to business school, he worked as an investment salesman, he worked as a stock analyst, he worked as a general partner, then chairman, then CEO at a company.
The lucky opportunity was 82 years to compound returns.
The question is why he wouldn't quit at 50 with a few hundred million and live off of the money instead of spending the next 42 years making more money which he will then give away to someone else to decide what to do with after he dies.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power:_A_New_Social_Analysis
In 1987 I was making about 25/hour doing programming as a senior in high school.
There are always opportunities and those opportunities are not the same in every era.
Kids today are making 100K being influencers opening toys on youtube
Kids today are making 100K playing online poker
Kids today are making $$ writing apps
Kids today are making $$ selling pot
The point is not paper delivery, the point is there is a mindset. I will never be a billionaire because I will stop trying to make money once I have "enough"
This is not 3k a month. This is less than 1/3 of that.
Also maybe nothing.
Also, the 15 year old is going to wait 82 years, happily becoming a billionaire or whatever at 97 years young?
Newspapers then cost roughly 5 cents apiece, and in Omaha a route with 100 doors would take 90 minutes. Your monthly gross sales for a seven day route of that size would be $150, and the vast of that would go to purchase papers. You’d probably net $25, and then get $15 in tips.
That’s about the same amount I made on my route in the late 1970s when adjusted for inflation.
"Young Warren attended the DC public school Alice Deal Junior High and he graduated from Woodrow Wilson High School.
Buffett says delivering papers at age 14 instilled the importance of hard work and reliability.
Wartime Washington was short of adult men and for that reason, says Buffett, he was able to get multiple paper routes at the Westchester Apartments, a five-building complex that was home to the city’s elite.
“I also learned,” he says, “that if you did a good job you were going to move up. The very fact that I did a good job in Spring Valley got me the Westchester routes later on.”"
Let's assume for a moment that $0.05 is still a good price for newspapers, and assume that the carrier received 20%, or a penny apiece. Also assume that he delivers every day. That's about 580 papers day. If they're really dense subscribers, I guess you could make a delivery every 10 seconds, so about 95 minutes to deliver that number if you never wait for an elevator, climb stairs, etc.
Certainly was a great opportunity for Warren, but an outlier for paper delivery earnings.
I'm seriously not kidding. I've never had avocado toast (was going to make guac) and I'm thinking that brioche avocado toast would be amazing.
I'm pretty sure that multiple orders of magnitude more people spent their entire lives trying to become extremely rich than the few hundred it worked out for.
It's not a retrospective difference, one good way to spot the poseurs: they aren't violently allergic to spending money in a way that doesn't get them more, or at least make that possible. That's table stakes for trying; I don't have the allergy, but I don't fool myself about it either.
This is quite deceptively phrased. 300M is already more than many of us will earn in a lifetime.
That's on you.
> You just absolutely refuse to comprehend compound growth.
What a bizarre thing to say.
Not if you don't have a decent amount of capital to start with. Don't forget that many people, the majority of people, despite their best effort, can't really raise themselves above a certain basic wage and salary, and therefore can't accumulate anything.
Without capital, there's no compounding effect of capital, and you're not going to be rich.
Flying on your own schedule, to/from more conveniently located airports, bringing family pets along, having private conversations among the pax, having exactly the catering you wanted, and otherwise having the airplane to yourself is the advantage that makes private jet travel appealing. Just skipping parts of the TSA checks isn't nearly enough.
But there’s a completely 100% rational reason for doing it that he completely ignores. Given the choice of going to a destination for the same price (or at least “affordable”), would you A) fly commercial B) fly private?
Bigger planes can be more comfortable but a large factor is wing loading. Many smaller jets have higher ratios. IMO, the most comfortable airliner in turbulence was the MD-80, which had a tiny wing.
https://turbli.com/blog/the-best-planes-to-fly-through-turbu...
These two doesn't come alone. They come with their own baggage as well. Being rich will make you, and your family targeted, either by criminals, by "friends and families", or by the government. Being famous is tiring. You constantly need to pander with people that you don't know, with papparazis, with friends of friends of friends, people constantly looking to network. Being famous without being rich is even worse. You just get death threats, hate mail, etc without the financial means to fend off those.
I want to be rich enough so that I don't have to worry about the future or I can do any work I want without worrying about money, for example, creating music, working on a hobby, etc.
I want to be famous enough so that the people that I care remember who I was, who I am, and who I will be, even when I am no longer in their lives, and live across the world.
It turned out that every day, in response to everything he tweeted about any topic, he got zero-context Twitter replies including marriage proposals, sexual propositions, requests for him to visit random people in random cities, and requests for money. That's just what strangers were willing to send him in public.
This made me think that maybe being famous isn't very enjoyable.
Best of luck with that view.
Buffett himself acknowledges how lucky he was, so clearly seeing the role of luck is not incompatible with success: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/04/warren-buffett-says-the-key-...
You might also look at Richard Wiseman's work on why some people are "luckier" than others. E.g.: http://richardwiseman.com/resources/The_Luck_Factor.pdf
There's a lovely book, "The Drunkard's Walk - How Randomness Rules Our Lives" that has a good take on this.
I don't have time to find the passage right now, but the idea is essentially this: even if you work in an endeavour where success is overwhelmingly driven by luck, success still requires: taking a chance to have the opportunity to become lucky, an open mind and preparation to recognize the good luck that has occurred, and the skill to exploit the opportunity that luckiness has brought.
One must make chances for luck to occur, and one must have a prepared mind to take advantage of luck when it does occur.
I wouldn't necessarily read the replier as saying they have succeeded and luck had nothing to do with it (i.e. the binary view).
The problem with a view point of "it's all luck," IMO is this will lead you down the path of learned helplessness and even if you do get lucky you won't be in a position to capitalize because if you thought it came down to a roll of the dice, why would you bother skilling up in the first place?
Believing otherwise leads the rich and famous to think that they are better than everyone else, and the less successful to think that they are inherently inferior, when in reality there is a wide overlap in effort, dedication, and strategy between the two groups. One group was just in the right place at the right time while applying those skills, and the other wasn't.
In other words, not becoming rich and famous is not a personal failing. Sometimes you can try anyone's best and simply not succeed.
You can’t profit if your customers all live in your fantasies. If you create products for those imaginary people, no one will buy them and you will fail. That’s why product-market fit is the #1 advice given to entrepreneurs. It recognizes that you will need to leave behind your own ideas of what you should build and who your should build it for, which are probably made out of a lifetime of TV and Social Media bullshit and actually take stock of the real world, the real people in it and what they will pay real money for.
Sadly, quite a few people I know were able to run their fantasy business all the way to the poor house.
Getting famous also isn't that hard. Do something funny or creative and post it on TikTok, it's not that hard to get a video with 1e5 or 1e6 views. Hell, you can post cute videos of your pet and get 1e6 views.
Even $100k in student debt is not that huge on an engineer's salary. People regularly take on multiples of that debt to buy a house. "rest of your life" is an absurd exaggeration - and I'm saying this as someone who thinks the deck is totally stacked against students today.
Being born in the West is pretty much required though because decks are stacked hard against immigrants.
You edited your post to say "buffet-like person". At least have some integrity.
Anyway, throwing insults at each other like children is not what this site is about, let's have substantiative discussions like adults and keep this site fun and interesting and not turn it into reddit.
People actually do ask this question of large numbers of kids regularly. Here's one:
https://www.approvedcourse.com/when-i-grow-up/
Top three in that survey were doctor, teacher, astronaut. (I have read other surveys where YouTuber was high on the list -- my point here is that there actually are surveys, no need to speculate about their results.)
---
China:
Astronaut - 56%
Teacher - 52%
Musician - 47%
---
US:
Youtuber - 30%
Teacher - 25%
Pro Athlete - 21%
---
[1] - https://www.businessinsider.com/american-kids-youtube-star-a...
Planet Earth is blue and there's nothing I can do...
>> Becoming rich and famous is mostly a matter of luck.
I am not sure if I agree with this completely.
I recently watched a Netflix movie "Look both ways" with my wife. The movie shows parallel timelines in which the protagonist despite facing different scenarios ends up with a very similar fate in the end. That movie got me thinking if our life's trajectory is based on a few defining moments, or if it is more about the small decisions we make everyday.
For example, if Amazon/Meta didn't work out for Bezos/Mark, where do you think they would end up. My guess is they would still be running some big successful companies, as founders or CEOs or VPs.
For crying out loud, every generation from the 20th century onwards would have given a similar answer at that age. Heck, I wanted to be a Tony Stark/Bruce Wayne type of person when I was 10. Or a famous writer. I am neither. I'm still quite successful and happy.
Yes modern culture is vapid and shallow. Most things that people are into are vapid and shallow, and always have been. It's the essence of the human condition. That doesn't have much impact on the lives people ultimately go on to lead. Your local environment is far more important.
As I pose the question of how we "fix it," I can't help but question how we know if it's something to be fixed at all. I agree that it's making our lives today harder to bear socially and mentally. But, it could also be a natural part of the evolution of our species, perhaps this is the way to get to the trillion-people across multiple-planets scale? Perhaps we individually suffer, mentally or otherwise a bit more than the previous generation, to allow for the maximum number of humans to succeed at a given time.
I too miss being able to focus and long for the now seemingly serene world of the 90s. I too feel distracted by gadgets, apps, politics. But I'm also intrigued by the idea of a future where there are 100 x Einsteins alive, which may come at the cost of having 10000 x Kardashians.
Mostly bemoaning about not being rich and famous comes down to desiring better (or perceived to be better) versions of items listed above -- or the ability to have "fuck you" money and the fantasy that buying people off will isolate you or solve all your interpersonal problems.