Fake it till you make it: the wolves of Instagram
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
* A generation of men raised with absent father figures is leading to listless depression.
* Every person has an idealized version of themselves in their head where they are powerful and purposeful.
* Modern middle class culture has no real danger in it, and we have lost our connection to the world of physical violence and dominance.
* Living for the acquisition of more IKEA furniture is a poor life decision.
And so on and so forth. Like most decently thoughtful and provocative film and writing it throws a lot of things at you and makes you think and reconsider your values a little. It has a lot of messages, some contradictory, some confusing or banal, and some intriguing.
Sure there are particulars. But is FC's consuming consumer that much different (metaphorically) from being a battery for the machines?
I don't think so.
Nicely put. I don't really understand how the negative ending of Fight Club is supposed to stop people from identifying with it; it's not as though it shows another happier path people with the same sentiments ought to endorse.
"If you feel this way and commit to it completely, things will go wrong for you" is totally compatible with "many people feel this way", and if the movie wasn't relatable it's not clear to me how it would have anything useful to say.
To quote from the Wikipedia article: "semi-autobiographical book [...] describing the author's experiences as a bond salesman on Wall Street during the late 1980s".
Before reading Liar's Poker I was ignorant about, and extremely hostile to the financial industry, and the book brought about complete change. The book is at best ambivalent about high finance, but clearly also glamourises the industry.
Honestly, they don't try hard not make it look glamorous. This extravaganza is totally part of what makes people watch it.
Another reason might be that many people are simply greedy and the consequences for the main actors weren’t that bad in the end after all. I think the real Belfort made an appearance at the end of the movie and gives speeches nowadays...
There's something extremely surface-level about people's takeaways from film characters. They want a certain level of panache that the characters can muster, but they ignore that even the characters themselves are miserable.
Same with action movies - main character does a lot of damage to everyone around, steal cars, hurt innocent people and we are supposed to ignore that. Happy end involves massive fight in the middle of city that would displace thousands of families. And so on and so forth.
People take the usual expected reading of movies and apply them to these too.
It is possible to make movies differently. I have seen movies that made me feel bad about violence and events and that made it clear that "this is not a cool thing". But the movies mentioned here are not like that - they sort of criticise it but are still made so that we feel happy about them. They show events from the point of view of perpetrator, but not much from point of view of their victims.
Very good game.
There's not a lot of replayability in subverting your own expectations.
Something similar happens with Vic Mackey in The Shield: he starts as a morally grey antihero (if you forget he's a cop killer, of course) but gradually turns into something else. He's selfish, murderous and in the end doesn't really put his friends first, contrary to what he claims. He's a fascinating character, but not someone we should root for! (But we still do!)
It seems like this is an obvious read, right up until I see people mystified by these shows. "Better to be hated than pitied" is a simple enough sentiment, and if it comes alongside direction and certainty than all the better - even the certainty of having no way out.
Most people don't actually do that, thank god, because they have consciences. But it's simple enough to understand "I want to just commit to something, anything, and stop feeling empty" as a principle. Hell, Jim Profit literally slept in a cardboard box every night and people wanted to be him.
*
The reason TV sociopaths are admired is that they are on TV. They have a story.
Do you really admire Tony Soprano? Which part? His loveless marriage to a crazy person? A mistress who is even crazier? His gigantic belly and panic attacks? The fact that no one actually likes him? That his daughter was dating a black guy? ("I wouldn't have a problem with that." Yes you would if you were Tony.) What part do you admire?
The answer you tell yourself is you admire his power, that he can do whatever he wants. No he can't. The whole show was nothing but repeated examples of how limited his options were. The things you think you admire-- having hot sex with the other crazy woman at his psychiatrist's office, eating microwaved Sysco at Italian restaurants, avoiding his wife-- can be done by anyone, you don't need to be Tony to do it. But when you do it.... it just doesn't feel the same. I know.
What people admire about Tony isn't his freedom; that thing you think is freedom is actually the lack of freedom. His story. His identity-- that he has one, an obvious one, a clear one. Tony Soprano is not free, his behavior is completely tethered to what makes sense for his character. He acts exactly like Tony Soprano would act. That's what people want: the limitations of that identity: if I know who I am, I know what I am capable of, I know my strengths and my limits, I know how I'd react to unknown dangers. And I want other people to know this. If other people know who I am, I wouldn't have to keep proving myself. Strike that: I wouldn't have to prove myself in the first place.
*
Translating to the present topic, what makes Jordan Belfort attractive is not his role as "rich stock trader crook" or the cars and yachts that go with it, it's that he has a role and is confident that that is his role, as opposed to, let's say, oscillating between "Maybe I should start day trading" and "Maybe I should write the great American novel" and "Maybe I should write an indie game" but never doing any of them because that would remove the option of doing the other ones.
0: https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/04/why_we_love_sociopat...
A while back I got very interested in Lucian Freud, moreso for the relationships he had with his portrait subjects rather than the portraits themselves. Long story short many of these relationships became romantic (many even led to children), but across both the romantic and non-romantic ones the subjects seemed to find Freud's keen (even selfish) interest in portraying them seductive. He could be demanding, cruel, temperamental, etc. but he was fundamentally a talented painter who was very simple to understand: he wanted to paint you, he was very interested in you, and didn't much care about how this affected you. For the reasons you outline, at least a broad subset of people find this kind of singular character (literally) attractive.
Similarly, I like horror movies a lot. But, it is not nearly the same as video of real person suffering (or realistic portrayal). I don't like those at all. Horrors are made to feel you fake bad and it is similar with most popular movies about sociopaths.
In essence, those that get their 'plan' from the TV/gestalt just need to volunteer more and travel.
I want to be Don Draper because he is handsome, well dressed, and extremely intelligent. That doesn't mean I want to do everything negative he did. Although I wouldn't mind being able to drink at work.
When kids play Batman, one of them has to be The Joker. It could be that they like clowns or the color purple. It doesn't have to mean that the child is murdering cats in the backyard.
One other thing is that he had great talent and competence as a chemist, which was often on full display. Many of the other characters in the show had no clear talents, or if they did, they it was more background or reputation than something clearly shown.
I think any character that shows extreme talent will attract fans, regardless how evil or unhappy they are, because people will divorce the talent from the other attributes and admire it on its own.
I believe it is mostly due to the last scene of these movies where the hero dies in some crazy action scene. Lot of adrenaline, and it looks so "cool" on screen that you can't help thinking "wow this guy was awesome!".
One movie that dealt with that really well was "Goodfellas". During the 2nd part of the movie, the downfall is filmed in a very slow, almost boring manner. And the end is boring as f*ck, specifically to avoid this pitfall of glorifying the "hero".
If you want to know what most people will think of a character in a movie, watch the movie with the sound off.
You got the wrong idea. I don't think anyone idolizes Tony. It's a great movie and Tony is a great character and Scarface tells an interesting story, not because the protagonist made himself rich. Same as Godfather, I like it and I like them not because they are rich, but it was because they made interesting choices. Let's talk about Scarlett in Gone with the wind -- was she rich? Was she poor?
Recently, I listened to Shit Town and it gave me an everlasting impression on me. The main character in the story was a very poor man. I liked him -- not because he is poor either, but because he is interesting.
Who cares about whether the character is rich or poor, the character's background is merely a medium to tell the story. Being very rich or poor or desperate is just a convenient choice to get the story flowing because the characters in such extreme circumstances tend to have interesting experiences and choices.
If you'd like I can provide a short list of rap songs about selling drugs which contain lyrics positively representing scarface/Tony. People idolize him. He's a self made man who took what he wanted. He's betrayed in the end, but plenty of people look at that as the actions of outside actors and not the consequences of his behavior. I'm not going to go into possible alternative analysis for Tony's character/the events of the movie in which he's a heroic figure betrayed by Sosa and the government (which can also be viewed as a bad guy in drug culture), but it's there.
TL;dr- There are people who aspire to be Tony, understanding full well that Heavy Weighs the Crown.
I mean, what does Jay-Z have to say about Montana? Fuck Sosa, this Hova this is real life // This is what the ending of Scarface should feel like. Because he's better than Tony, and he's going to make it all work.
There are definitely people who idolize the Achilles bit, living gloriously and briefly, but I feel like the most common reason people celebrate that is that they get to downplay the messy ending.
>but plenty of people look at that as the actions of outside actors and not the consequences of his behavior.
That's the recipe for a great story/a great movie: The great moment in storytelling is when the viewer/reader starts to see the world as the protagonist sees it. The viewer stopped caring about whether the protagonist was objectively right or wrong/moral or immoral, the viewer starts caring more about whether what they did given the situation make sense or not.
That is - given the situation, could/would you have done the same? The answer for me in the cases of Tony Montana, Scarlett O'Hara, Michael Corleone were a really convincing yes.
It's a horrible movie. Terrible acting, no story, shallow characters, it's almost a parody of the Miami drug scene.
And not everyone knows all the history of symbols.
umm. Andrew Jackson... look up the trail of tears
Al Capone may have murdered a small town- but hey - at least he didn't bow to the man, working 9to5...
It happened with books too: See "Liar’s Poker", by Michael Lewis. He says that he wrote it "so that fewer idealistic college kids would dream of working on Wall Street. ... Somehow that message failed to come across ... They'd read my book as a how-to manual."
http://www.gatsby.ucl.ac.uk/~pel/misc/The-End-of-Wall-Street... https://danwang.co/liars-poker-by-michael-lewis/
Michael Lewis also wrote "Moneyball" and "The Big Short" which were made into films.
I’m increasingly suspicious of the idea that humans are independent and rational, because so much humam behaviour can be explained as uncomplicated animal mimicry.
But first... SPOILER ALERT!
I mean the first time around I had some sympathy for the guy - he was a disappointed and somewhat embittered middle aged man still trying to do his best to support his family, and then he's given this crappy cancer diagnosis. I felt bad for him. Fair to say that by the time he just lets Jesse's girlfriend, Jane, choke to death on her own vomit whilst unconscious I'd entirely lost that and felt nothing but loathing for the character (which isn't to say I didn't enjoy the show, or think he was a great character).
But what I realised on revisiting the show a couple of years later is that Walter White didn't break bad. He was bad from the very beginning. I mean look at the way he interacts with people in the early episodes of season 1: he's largely an asshole. The only thing that changes is that, initially because he's driven to, he becomes much more comfortable with manifesting his assholery overtly.
If you're a huge asshole before you got rich, now you're just a rich asshole. If you're an empathetic, kind person, before you got rich, now you're just a rich, kind person. He also lamented society benefits more from the latter than the former for obvious reasons.
> But what I realised on revisiting the show a couple of years later is that Walter White didn't break bad. He was bad from the very beginning.
Jesse's girlfriend got him hooked on heroin. Jesse was on a downward spiral and would surely die thanks to her continued interference. Walter saw the toxicity of both the drugs and the relationship and did Jesse a cruel but necessary kindness by letting her asphyxiate. It wasn't ethical, it wasn't humane, but it served a greater purpose (even if it was so Walter wouldn't be without an assistant).
He did far worse deeds for less grounded reasons as the series went on; there are better examples to choose from to make a case of villainy. If anything, what changes through the series is his disconnectedness from everything he was fighting for. As he lost his son's respect, his wife, his family, and his friend, his world became significantly more introverted and he was willing to tolerate greater and greater amounts of collateral damage in the interest of his own survival (since he had nothing left to care about but himself until the ending).
that is exactly the issue - for him ends justify the means. That is his main, core, villainy.
>what changes through the series is his disconnectedness from everything he was fighting for.
natural result as evil means hollow out whatever ends he wanted to reach.
It's a great show, and I agree with a lot of what you're saying.
> Jesse's girlfriend got him hooked on heroin. Jesse was on a downward spiral and would surely die thanks to her continued interference.
Jesse was on a downward spiral, yes, but the other two points are less clear. They might be true from Walt's perspective.
> Walter saw the toxicity of both the drugs and the relationship and did Jesse a cruel but necessary kindness by letting her asphyxiate. It wasn't ethical, it wasn't humane, but it served a greater purpose (even if it was so Walter wouldn't be without an assistant).
It's impossible to tell how much Walt's letting Jane die / killing Jane had to do with helping Jesse. I think it's clearer Walt killed Jane to keep control over Jesse and to protect himself. And that worked out pretty well, for a while. Jane didn't fear Walt, and she knew too much about him for Walt's comfort and safety. So he let her die / killed her.
> He did far worse deeds for less grounded reasons as the series went on; there are better examples to choose from to make a case of villainy.
This is true. For me, Jane's death caused a major nosedive in sympathy for Walt. Definitely previous things he did were villainous and later things even more so. But there was something about Jane's death. A big step down in his descent.
He slowly gains this confidence and control. He goes from being talked down to and ignored to being powerful (though at massive cost), but there's something appealing to that story of taking control. There's also an element of masculinity tied up in this too - when he stomps on the bully's leg in the clothing store early on. I think it's just being the alpha monkey.
Skyler was pretty controlling and self-righteous, I found her to be a pretty unlikable character. She cheats on Walt primarily to hurt him and she was also hypocritical, breaking the law for Ted when it suited her and helping with the money laundering without taking accountability for anything.
Walt at least (early on) started with the goal of raising money to leave his family - though this obviously mutates pretty quickly.
It's very easy to fall into this mindset and I think a lot of people identified.
the writers of the show did everything in their
power to communicate "This man is a moral monster
and a horror of a human being."
The qualifiers of his moral character only took on darker notes toward the end of the series, near the fifth and sixth season. But remained justifiable, within the context of the fatalistic continuity of the series, where characters are left with limited options, granted the hand they are dealt.
Throughout the rest of the series, Walter White is as laughable as any petulant straight man in a comedic duo (e.g. the Hardy role of Laurel and Hardy, Larry Appleton from Perfect Strangers, the Moe of the 3 stooges), while Jesse Pinkman plays the foil.
As a comedic duo, the two are rendered harmless, and thus, any morality is diffused by the beat of each joke, within the care free scope of a goof. It's all gallows humor, with a wink, shrug and a nod that everyone's hands were tied, so just go with the flow and enjoy the ride.
The dinner scene with her, Heisenberg and Jessie makes up for it though.
That's because nobody starts watching from the later seasons, they start watching from season one. In the beginning, Walter White is an overqualified for his work, struggling to support his family on a meager teacher's salary, and then a cancer diagnosis kicks in. Everybody identifies with him because most of us feel like we struggle with unfulfilling work and with money issues, and then the cancer diagnosis is the cherry on top - how can you judge somebody who's put in that position? Who will leave his wife saddled with debt and put in charge of raising her kids alone?
Breaking Bad reminds us that in human psychology, first impressions have outsize influence over our perceptions of other people. Battered women stay with their husbands because they still see the caring individual their husbands were when they were first dating, and hold onto hope that somewhere, their husband is still that person; if their husbands were originally abusive in the first set of dates they never would have stuck around.
Like Jordan Belfort eventually loses his wife and access to his kid in The Wolf of Wall Street. But that can happen to any Joe on the street anyway, and he didn't get to have drug fueled orgies like Jordan did. Walter White descends into chaos and death in the pursuit of using his singular skills. But before he dies he leaves an enormous amount of money to secure his family's security forever and he get to experience a moment of pure fulfillment, working for himself, achieving at the outermost limits of his abilities. Joe Sixpack can get cancer and leave his family a pile of debt after spending his life working middle management at a life insurance firm, achieving no self-actualization and leaving his family in financial destitution.
These programs think that they are portraying some sort of cautionary tale by saying "Look this person got to have everything, but then they lost it all due to the method with which they acquired it", without realizing that the common man on the street could do everything by the book and above board and still find themselves losing everything and in the same spot as the characters in these shows, and they didn't even get to have fun along the way!
Burning out due to doing something dangerous but fulfilling is much more appealing than losing everything you have due to some health problem...
No one makes movies or TV shows about people who are heroically kind, empathic, or generous.
You think they're terrible. Ascribing to everyone the same moral code and then reasoning why they might ignore it seems like a poor basis for reasoning? To me it's about understanding what metrics really matter to people
It's easy to come up with a few theories as to what sets it apart, but I would love to see a proper analysis of how it tackles the subject matter without glorifying the lifestyle unnecessarily--and what other films should learn from it if they aim to accomplish the same
Jordan Belfort might be doing terrible things (although not as bad as serial murder), but he looks and acts like he loves every minute of it. Bateman doesn't.
You could also compare The Hangover and Leaving Las Vegas. One makes a drug-filled weekend in Vegas look sort of fun, and one does not.
Also all the murdering.
These films of destructive and unhealthy people are usually aspired to because even when the characters hit their rock bottom, they still have more money, power, control, and agency than the average viewer.
hiking
hanging out with friends families
reading
learning
whatever that is not being mind-washing by the popular entertainment
Is a type of nonsensical logical reasoning.
The idea of these characters who are so certain of who and what they are, and are driven by some greater purpose is very alluring, even if the personality is toxic and the purpose immoral.
In the 1980's Burger King was expanding and as part of this came a big advertising campaign centered around a nerdy-looking guy called Herb, who was the only person who hadn't been to a Burger King. If you could spot him in a Burger King restaurant, you could win money. It was a colossal failure, and instead of increasing customer volume, ended up having the opposite effect and decreasing it.
Why? Because the overt message of
"Herb the Nerd" <-> "The only person who hasn't gone to Burger King"
was shortened in people's minds to
"... Nerd" <-> "... Burger King".
It's fascinating: indirect/subtext messaging will beat direct messaging every time.
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/ad_report_card/2004/0...
I wouldn't say that people who idolize these characters have poor judgement or bad morale though. I mean, we shoot people or do illegal street racing in virtual environments for fun all the time, maybe it's just a human nature to entertain the idea of what we could have done if sociatal norms or laws wouldn't stop us.
Idealization of a persona usually doesn't mean wanting to become exactly that person but to have some quality of that person.
Maybe those people who actually do something are simply racionalizing their actions through these fictional characters?
Control over your own life is something that everybody craves and it's clear that these characters have it in abundance, even if it's only for a brief period of time - i.e. to the end of the film. But up until that point, they're seen as individuals who have broken free from their respective shackles.
When someone is narcissistically wounded, they are going to mimic the survival strategies of other high-status narcissists.
That is to say, making a ton of money seems a lot harder than just not being an asshole.
To me, it's just a ridiculous person acting like a teenager and having no intelligence or wisdom whatsoever.
If there's anything that has proven itself time and time again, it's that people who seek immediate wealth, and who fantasize about their "million dollar idea", are absolutely not the kinds of people who become successful and wealthy.
The people who become devoted to a field or a technology - who make the business their passion, and focus on filling a need - these are the people who earn a fortune.
You can't just make money by trying really hard to be rich, unless, of course, your business model is funneling cash off of suckers with a predatory get-rich-quick scheme.
Besides, they technically devoted themselves to the field of finance. They didn't just decide one day that they wanted to be billionaires and only work 1 hour per week.
They worked their asses off to get where they are today, and the goal wasn't even necessarily to make a fortune...
It should be easy to see that one of the things that separates Warren Buffett from the rest of us is that he has a unique perspective of the financial world – he sees all of the dynamics and intricacies of the financial world in a way that few others do.
It took years for him to build the mental framework that led to his deep understanding and unique view of the world. And as a result of his devotion to this pursuit and his willingness to immerse himself in it, he developed the structural underpinning for the mental vista that yields the rare and valuable perspective that enables him to see the financial world with the clarity of a composer likely unattained by anyone in history.
This is why Goldman Sachs calls him when they need help, like they did in the financial crisis.
1) he buys equity in the private markets not in the public markets 2) he has capital to buy entire companies 3) he can evaluate a company based on the people, not based on financials 4) he commits to not meddling in operations. Today's tax structure forces entrepreneurs to sell because of huge tax implications of passing down a privately held company. 5) emotionally he is very strong and he is willing to wait on the sideline for years if necessary.
He holds on to huge amounts of cash. Meanwhile shareholders are getting mad that he is not getting the returns and start talking about how he should just pay out the dividends, people start talking about how he has lost his touch or his method is out of date. The market is skyrocketing. Then the crash happens and he buys tons of distressed assets at a discount and he is brilliant again.
And it doesn't hurt that he can get special deals that most people can't.
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2011/08/no_y...
On the Bank Of America deal.
This isn't an ordinary investment, in which an investor buys common stock. Buffett's $5 billion is buying him 50,000 shares of a special class of so-called "preferred stock," which will pay him a 6 percent dividend, or $300 million a year. Just for the sake of comparison, BofA's common shareholders get a quarterly dividend of one penny a share. That means that if you owned $5 billion of ordinary BofA common stock at its current price of about $8 a share, you'd be getting a paltry $25 million a year in dividends—less than one-tenth of what Buffett will get. (Earlier this year, BofA tried and failed to get permission from the Federal Reserve to increase the dividend.)
BofA can buy back Buffett's investment at any time for a 5 percent premium.
Challenging myself to find a photo of Warren posing ostentatiously with a car, I found this which cracked me up:
http://2il.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/warren-buffett-dri...
He's picking up a BIG MAC for chrissakes. His car is very ordinary-looking and not showy. It's a Caddy though mind you... he's not an animal.
Most of the photos feature cars. Is a car a sign of wealth? If Warren converted his entire net worth to Lamborghinis (say $200,000 each) he'd have about 400,000 of them. A Lamborghini is worth to him, proportionally, about what 25 cents is worth to me. Even if you're "only" Steve Ballmer that car is worth only 75 cents to you in rdiddly dollars. If you were hanging out with actual rich people flaunting your $200K car they'd be like yeah congratulations, you found a quarter, Janice would you call security and have this gentleman removed please?
EDIT: They'd be like oh yeah I bought four of those with the interest earned by my cat's litterbox. Janice would you etc.
\s
Minor units are "Slices".
I mean dogecoin was a thing.
I realize people play fast and loose with reality when it comes to *coins, but calling Dominos 'pizza' is fraud.
But had to trip over a couple articles on rodent droppings to get there...
Supposedly they changed their recipe and now people like it? I'm vegan so I don't eat there.
People eat that shit up!
There is an old saying: Making a million dollars and spending a million dollars are the exact opposite thing.
In this concept, you have some tiny anxiety about upcoming work that probably never even reaches your conscious thoughts. And the absolute fastest way to make that anxiety go away (i.e. repair it) is to pivot away from the upcoming work. Rationally, this is a terrible idea. But emotionally, it's very functional. Procrastination creates a short term fix to that anxiety.
Or, maybe more familiar to people here, this is just another example of System I and System II thinking from Thinking, Fast and Slow.
I think there's something similar going on with "Get Rich Quick."
The desire to get rich is both rational and emotional. Yes, obviously, it's rational to want to have money. And then also, there's often an emotional anxiety about our place in the world and having money is a fantasy that resolves that anxiety.
So, everyone who points out that Get Rich Quick is not an effective strategy for actually getting rich is right. Rationally, you should choose behaviors that lead to steady accumulation of wealth.
However, I do think Get Rich Quick does provide a functional, short term, solution to the anxiety that's prompting people to want to get rich. In other words, these people in the article are performing self-care with a "short term mood repair" strategy.
Another concept that Dr. Pychyl introduced me to is that MRI scans show that the same parts of our brain light up when we think about strangers and when we think about our future selves. In other words, it's easy to sell our future self short.
For good vibes, tax credits, & marketing
See some of pg's early essays:
http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html
http://paulgraham.com/good.html
Entrepreneurship is one of the least zero-sum activities you can participate in.
It's literally on the YC application form.
"He said to ask about a time when they'd hacked something to their advantage—hacked in the sense of beating the system, not breaking into computers. It has become one of the questions we pay most attention to when judging applications."
The part about "make tons of money" isn't there, but I don't think anyone disagrees with that part -- YC recently launched a separate branch to handle nonprofit ventures.
Every entrepreneur envisions profit at the end of the process, but it cannot be the primary goal of your company. Profits come from great products and services, so make a great product or service and the profits follow.
You also have to be prepared to work 60+ hour weeks for years, only making enough to get by, and still fail and lose money in the end. A lot of these get-rich-quick schemes claim that there is no work and little risk involved.
A labor-free, low-risk, high-profit career simply doesn't exist. You can pick two of those three things, but not all three.
Replace "absolutely not" with "almost never". It's relevant because that vanishingly small percentage of people who do manage to become wealthy get an absurd amount of attention, which inspires others to mimic them, and so the cycle continues.
But, typically, they only work once, or a small number of times, and then then copycats don't attract money anymore.
More wealthy people make their money this way than you might realize. Rare indeed is the person who became wealthy by actually creating something of value. Much more common is the person who cheated someone (or many someones) out of something. Making money is easy. Doing something decent is hard.
I am always amazed people think this is the case.
The people who make money from a technology are very seldom the ones who devote their life to it. They are the ones who know just enough about it to be at the right place at the right time.
There is a reason why facebook is written in php.
Caring a lot about specifically making money is, in my opinion, absolutely key to making money, because otherwise you just end up focusing on other things (family, pleasures, ideals, etc.). If I wanted to make money, I'd design a very different thing in a very different way compared to if I wanted to make something me and my circle of friends would find useful. These things are practically disjoint.
> The people who become devoted to a field or a technology - who make the business their passion, and focus on filling a need - these are the people who earn a fortune.
This is a bit mixed up. Like, these are different things.
Devoting yourself to something strikes me as the hard way to make money. For the vast majority of people, this will absolutely not work, simply due to probabilities. It's like devoting yourself to being a professional athlete. Good luck, there are millions of others like you.
> who make the business their passion, and focus on filling a need
This, to me, IS a "getting rich" mindset, as I don't really understand why anyone would get into it otherwise. Most people I know who really care about technology are often tragically far from any kind of user and therefore can't think about filling a need. People who care a lot about a subject are often filling their own need, but there's no guarantee whatsoever that that need has anything to do with any kind of customer. Quite the opposite, most useful needs are already filled, it's the small niches that an individual might want filled. There are also large chunks of people who like filling a need in a "helpful" sort of way (i.e., writing documentation) who often get no kickback from it at all.
If anything, a person super passionate about something, if they actually want to make money, needs to wheel that around almost completely and care about all sorts of other things, such as marketing and business management, things many people plain find hard to digest.
You need to, specifically, really care about making money for many of these things to not be somewhere between gross and boring to you.
At the heart of it is the fact that these needs that you talk about people filling can be needs people think they have, but don't actually have. "My chakra is out of balance and it's the cause of what is bad in my life. I must buy this raw water."
Worked for one the biggest - and most "respectable" player in this "industry".
Between terrible security practices - had to fight for basic stuff that would make any of you grab pitchforks, attempts to get away with as much as they could with regards to regulation and finally the terrible ethics of the system, I didn't last long.
Consider spending a few minutes reading this great article https://www.timesofisrael.com/the-wolves-of-tel-aviv-israels...
Most of the big players might have moved away from binary options, they're still the same morally corrupt drain on society.
What’s with this obsession of not working for someone else? American/British managers in particular are some of the most democratic and “least power distance” bosses out there, especially compared to other countries where there is still a very hierarchical management structure.
The only time I ever hear now seriously about “your boss is horrible time to quit and start your own business!” or “time to escape cubicle nation!” is with someone selling a particular product.
> someone selling a particular product.
You answered your own question.
If you have a specific skillset, and your talents and work ethic are obvious to your managers, you can end being mostly self-managed at your job.
However, if you have no skills and work a job where your raw output is all that matters, managers will breathe down your neck trying to get the most output out of you as possible.
These get-rich-quick schemes prey on those unskilled workers. They promise a world where you have no boss, only work a few hours a week, and make enough money to afford whatever you want.
It preys on people's fantasies, and their lack of understanding of how successful people get where they are.
If you want to escape your cubicle farm and get a job where you don't hate your boss, teach yourself a valuable skill and seek gainful employment using that skill.
But don't ever expect that there's some magic lifehack that let's you stop working and make enough money to afford every luxury you ever wanted. Just because there are some examples of people doing that doesn't mean anything. For every Bitcoin millionaire there are ten Bitcoin bankruptcies.
Yet all people have to do is wave around "This is the next big thing", and gullible people will swarm it in hopes of getting in on the ground floor.
There's big money in FOMO.
Be born rich. Or otherwise get lucky.
Some people are leaders. They push up against the halls of power, and if others hold them back, they will find a way to break free. These are the people who proclaim they will never work for someone else.
Some people are care takers. Some people are healers. Some people are followers. They just want to be told what to do. There's nothing wrong with that!
Society at large is always telling everyone to be a leader, and I think that's the main issue. Few are cut out to be leaders, and it's not always all it's cracked up to be.
People like to think that not having a boss = "I don't answer to anyone".
If you are a leader, you answer to the people who follow you.
Some people choose not to be leaders, not because they are bad at it, but because they don't want that kind of responsibility.
I have an an employer, but I could go do this work for many other companies and freelance/run my own show and potentially make a lot more. I would then have to hire a number of other people to do quite a few of the things that I don't do or do it myself and literally have 0 time plus figure out benefits and may not have consistent pay (at least not guaranteed). This is all assuming it also worked out! I'm enjoying using my skills and getting a fair agreed amount without having to deal with anything else really. Trade offs. No such thing as a free lunch.
Popularity will always be worth money to someone, but the current business practices surrounding it just don’t seem healthy.
So what's the alternative, working 9-5 in retail for minimum wage and after 10 years you are still nowhere?
Unless you are in a highly demanded domain like software, there are few opportunities for young people.
As it stands in the US currently if you don't receive help from your parents or some other rich connection, the average person is winning the lottery if they start a business and succeed. There is nothing between you and homelessness if you don't have the business succeed, and any sort of health problem will nuke what savings you have immediately
What a bizarre false dichotomy. Literal prostitution, retail job, or software development. There are plenty of others out there that are needed that people work in. Become an apprentice, learn a trade, and start business. Work in retail, become a manager, own a location, climb the ranks. Get a finance degree, work at a firm, create a consultancy.
If you mean old style "Jobs", correct. If you mean opportunity to impact the world and get paid for it, nonsense.
There has never been a time that it has been so easy to 1) Reach millions/billions of people (Internet), 2) Raise money (kickstarter, VC/startup culture), 3) learn about something for free (MOOCs), 4) bring a real product to market (Amazon fulfillment) .
The only thing missing is real ideas and the work ethic to use 1-4.
Gary Vaynerchuk is spot on in that there are too many experts and not enough practicioners. Showing others how to make it is how these guys are trying to make it.
You don't actually have to know how to make 30K/month. You just have to have enough people watch your video and sign up to buy your $9.99 ebook. The infomercial is 24/7 now. Kevin Trudeau forever, man! /s
There was a reddit post where a similar "influencer" described the process of faking the purchase. He would go to a showroom and ask to sit in the vehicle and film it. Most of the time, if the salesperson isn't busy they will let you do this. Sometimes even let you start it if they are nice. This influencer would just then record a conversation in another car about buying and taking delivery etc and dub over the video of him in a show room. Pretty straight forward.
Yes, this is incredibly common in the entertainment industry (particularly Hip Hop), and I also saw a lot of people like this when I lived near a wealthier part of LA for a couple years
Color me surprised when a pyramid scheme shows up in this story.
But I also know many coaching programs that sell for $2k, 5k, 10k+/person but aren't perfect. Something that might have worked for them might not work for someone else, especially if they forget to mention important steps. To learn more about the coaching trend look into Clickfunnels and the Art of High Ticket Selling COD Facebook group.
- 30k on insta (since 2014): instagram.com/elijah_oezz
- 3k on YouTube youtube.com/channel/UCk4fZzhD8fStRHITL4sP_LA
- 0 comments on any of his pics
Forex trading is certainly big on SM but this guy does not convert a single visitor.
Helps if you keep in mind that Jeff Bezos could accidentally tip you enough money to live the rest of your life without a job.
While selling those products is regulated in many markets they apparently seem to get around that through obscurity.
sigh.