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Comment by cheez | Hacker News Reader

"Money isn't everything" - guy who obviously made more than 2 million USD working at Google for 4 years...

I don't want to say you're wrong, but money isn't everything is easy to say when you have it.

Perhaps it wasn't clear in my comment - I quit right out of the gate instead of staying at Google. I essentially turned the job down.

For reference: 'Quitting' a job means you accepted the job offer and did the job, even very briefly. 'Turning down' a job means you did not accept the offer.

I quit the job after ~2 months, which I'd consider more or less turning it down. Since it was as part of an acquisition, it wasn't a standard job offer which I could accept or decline independent of the acquisition itself.

In his defense, he's really comparing ~$200k to ~$400k, not poverty to $400k. Beyond a certain point, the more money you have, the less extra money matters.

This mentality is what drives people to mediocrity. Not reaching your full potential just hurts yourself, your family and your community in the long run. If you have the capability to learn more, earn more and create great businesses don't sit on the sidelines the world needs more action takers.

You're equating potential with money. I make more people happy doing what I do now than what I would have done at Google. And importantly, I'm a much better father than I would have been were I working 50 hours a week. Me, my family and my community are all much better off with my current situation than we would have been had I taken the job.

>This mentality is what drives people to mediocrity. Not reaching your full potential just hurts yourself.

This mentality is what drives people to misery, greed, depression, stress, strained personal life and ill health.

One's "full potential" is not about making as much money as one could make.

I understand your point. But it doesn't mean we have to live with a hero complex / white man's burden. To consciously step away from earning more, and creating businesses doesn't mean driving oneself to mediocrity if it is to trade off for something they would rather do, appreciate more, and value more. It can be called selfish or hedonistic to do so. We only have one life, I'm not going to live it doing what others want.

There are things in life other than money, and people you can make happy in ways you never could with an extra couple of hundred thousand a year. We're social creatures, by and large - if you're trading away your time spent being part of society for some extra money, unless you're a certain type of person, you're almost definitely making yourself less happy - and if many people do it, they're making everyone else less happy as well as people have less opportunity to socialise and are more pressured into a game of increasing a number.

>This mentality is what drives people to mediocrity.

One reason for someone to think this way: in most western countries income at these levels is taxed at very high rates. Why work more when the government just takes a big chunk of your earnings?

> This mentality is what drives people to mediocrity.

As if excellence were measured in money.

Actually, if you think about it, those who have money are really only people who are qualified to say such a thing.

>I don't want to say you're wrong, but money isn't everything is easy to say when you have it.

Yes, but you can trivially find people who say it even though they don't have the money. And that they have made proven sacrifices for other causes (e.g. left lucrative careers for much less good paying ones that they love more).

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