Your Most Valuable Asset Is Yourself
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Nobody can make time. You can only spend time differently.
Time is your most valuable asset, because once you die you have none left. Make to most of the time you have, because once your time is spent, there's no way of getting it back.
You could be dead tomorrow, having more money in the bank won't make a difference then. Having spent time with you loved ones will make a difference to them, because they will have the memories.
Of course not, unless of course they happen to be assholes. Tell them what you think they need to hear to make a terrible situation as bearable as possible and try to help them have a loving memory of you. Confessing your 'sins' on your deathbed just to ease your conscience without any thoughts of the consequences is an extremely selfish and narcissistic act which does nothing to help your loved ones.
I personally subscribe to the genetic optimization/hill-climbing strategy:
To make sure you don't get stuck in local optima, make sure you're time-to-time riskily choosing what may seem like short-term losses, and injecting a healthy degree of randomness/mutation in your process. Over time, your degree of risk and randomness should slowly decrease. Even so, you may find that a boost of randomness/mutation/risk may be necessary even during later stages of life.
Be irresponsible. Be EXTREMELY irresponsible. Work less. Play more. Struggle less. Enjoy more. Save less. Live more. Comply less. Create more.
You don't "earn" your way to wealth and you don't "save" your way to wealth - the maths just don't work out! You can only ever play your way to wealth.
I myself only accept what works for me. I am pragmatic to the extreme. I know of NO other person who fully agrees with my philosophy on life (my fundamental beliefs are VERY different from what is commonly accepted) - but that's exactly the point - that's what makes 'me' me.
Now I have offered the above guidelines for those who are already inclined to agree. I have no interest in arguing or convincing those who do not.
In my experience, people who say that have a lot of interest in convincing others. It's like, "I don't care what people think or say". It's mostly pre-emptive reply to criticism.
So, no, this is not about "convincing arguments". As with all of existence, this is about making a statement of who you really are and inspiring others. There is intrinsic value in that. I believe in leadership by example. I do not believe in leadership by "convincing arguments".
Good discussions can make you see things differently, take a new perspective that you had not fully considered before. If you only make "life statements" and never cordially exchange points of view, you lose a much useful way of changing your own; you risk keeping yourself in a warm sense of certitude, losing precious feedback from other people's insight.
I guess you've never had to pay rent/mortgage or had to support anyone. In the real world, your advice would get you out on the streets.
If that is true your comment is utterly useless to anyone reading it.
-Said the guy who wrote the Tao Te Ching
This honestly sounds like it's straight from one of the Facebook posts with clouds in the background.
.. which requires a steady enough job to make 25 years of uninterrupted mortgage payments.
In fact, it's not unusual that the entire earnings of a work-life of a mid-class worker do not add up to something that would make a person rich, even if 100% of it is saved.
The other side of the coin is that mid-class life is pretty good, most of the GP advice will lead to poverty much more often that it'll lead to wealth, and the one important piece that is "create more" comes by responsible working.
They get richer than they would by spending them.
Having fun and playing ("irresponsibly"), expressing your true essence, is the only way to create ANY lasting value.
It is also the only way to create any wealth. The OTHER (much more common) way that people get wealthy is by capitalizing on what others have created. Which is fine with me (I'm all for the wonders of capitalism), but I prefer creating my own wealth.
Most people get bored, and will only create something for themselves if they act responsibly after a while. Unless what you call "responsible" is working for other people, instead of the more usual "hey, I don't want to do this right now, but I'm doing because I know it's good for me" meaning.
Also, to say those people aren't creating wealth is very offensive.
If I were in SF i might be jaded enough to believe that "the maths just don't work out!" but where I live, i've been able to pay off my mortgage in about 2.5 years. I'm putting up solar panels so that i can reduce my monthly obligations to basically just a food co-op membership.
These aren't EXTREME or irresponsible, but they are easy, and get me closer to freedom than paying rent because it takes less planning or sleeping in the cold.
It feels like the void is trying to suck my soul out of my body when I try to think this way.
> Tradtiional
Come on, NY Times, seriously? Is this the quality of journalism these days? At least run a spell check on the article before you hit publish.
I'd rather they make spelling errors than factual ones, and I'd rather we focus on teaching kids problem solving rather than memorizing sequences of letters.
Here's a carefully written article:
That said, I appreciate the irony.
I would like to say that this is not always true ('invest in yourself' and expand your bank account in such way).
Basically you must be 'money oriented'.
Looking into my university, there is a whole spectrum of people, who are all invested in them selves more than 99.9% people in my country. But there are professors who have some successful businesses, and also lecturers who are not 'money oriented' and just like academia, and there are some not so lucky people, who maybe had some bad twists in their life, suffered depression, etc., and just live a basic life.
It is probably to find something similar with people who are not so 'invested in themselves'. There some well established folks and not so well..
Step 1: Get a piece of paper.
Step 2: Work your ass off.
Step 3: Never retire.
Pretty sure society has been drilling this into us since preschool, but thanks for the reminder.
Modulo burnout and things like that, of course.
I don't think there's anything unethical about it at all as long as it's not competing with or using information from your employer.
I suppose for side-hustles it may help doing something that's somewhat removed from your day job. Rental property comes to mind. It's fairly rote, it's social, you can put in as much/little elbow grease in it as you like (barring the rare emergency), but it does generate modest income, it's usually more than just a "hobby".
A friend, who doesn't work in finance, is really into the stock market, spends a lot of time on researching companies. That's a kind of side-hustle too I suppose.
In the past I've done a lot of side work much to my full time jobs benefit. Not so much in the last couple of years I've changed around some priorities. It was a bunch of fun though you should give it a try!
Then HR changed the promotion policy. You could only get promoted if you had 6 people under you. My manager immediately hired three more people to "stay" a manager. Then, he encouraged each of us to hire people under us, the wordload was mostly the same, we just created a lot more processes, controls, documentation, PMO, etc. But not enough to consume all the time the now-gigantic team had. While incredibly wasteful for the company and our owner (the US government) we had so much free time we were doing contract gigs during office hours. Two guys had full-on startups in play.
Full time work is a misnomer in common use. If companies wanted to control how I disposed of all my hours, there'd be a much higher price involved.
-MLK, last speech the night before assasination
buried link in the story, seems more interesting than the story itself
Is a concept of "advice purely from a certain standpoint" too complex for HN comments?
s/Asset/Startup/