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Comment by istari | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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).

If your goal is to get rid of a bit of the stigma maybe you should start by not calling it "filthy" rich.

Immoral? No. A bit tasteless and silly, though.

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?

If someone's teaching you how to win tennis matches and isn't reminding you to enjoy the game, you've found an incredibly bad tennis teacher.

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.

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