How to Get Rich (without Getting Lucky)

Discussed at the time:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17203304 (647 points/85 days ago/515 comments)

Why is this on hacker news? It's just full of vague, unactionable statements.

>Seek wealth, not money or status. Wealth is having assets that earn while you sleep. Money is how we transfer time and wealth. Status is your place in the social hierarchy.

Who doesn't want assets that earn while you sleep? No one needs to be told they want that. What they need to be told is how they GET that from an entry level software engineering position in GoogBook.

>If you can't code, write books and blogs, record videos and podcasts.

This comes across very transparently as someone who CAN code, can't write books, blog or record videos but doesn't respect any of those activities.

Do you want my sage advice? Don't denigrate the things you can't do.

Bullshit with a lot of retweets and likes. You need basic education and context to even follow this guide. It must include some premises.

I agree with everything in the Twitter post, except the "without getting lucky" part. You must already have wealth in order to practice any of his suggestions.

Better readability https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1002103360646823936.html

I like a lot of his stuff, but this is some preachy swill. A whole lot of opinions with very little support.

As a rule of thumb, most people who get rich after starting from not being rich do it in real estate. How does this list explain or relate to this empirical fact?

This should be titled "how not to write". It's terribly vague.

>Play iterated games. All the returns in life, whether in wealth, relationships, or knowledge, come from compound interest.

Compound interest and iterated games aren't particularly related. One example of an "Iterated game" is playing prisoner's dillemma repeatedly with the same person.

There are many good resources you can find. But most people don't really think "I want to get rich" and optimise their lives around it. Spreadsheet or a piece of paper with a cashflow and some long term plan would be a good start. How many people do that? I think at least on some subconscious level many people know that's not what they are aiming for. They want to be around interesting people doing something meaningful and in general have fun. Acquiring wealth takes time and you can have much more fun in your 30s than in your 70s. That's regarding HN types. For people with the lowest wage striving to make the ends mee the problem is of course lack of knowledge, time to acquire it, and time to get out of this local minima.

Theoretically, money is a wonderful thing, you give people what they want they give you money. If you have a lot of money then the society owes you a lot. But we have fiat. Money is getting created out of thin air and it's not just bankers who get to be lucky, it leaks through out the society. Those with money influence gov, gov gets unlimited spending, banks happily cooperate with wealthy, and wealthy can afford actual storage of value like real estate or gold apart from their investments.

I don't believe we can fix crazily widening gap without giving people access to some real money. Gold is not very practical. Bitcoin is a great potential candidate and I think people still underestimate how great positive impact it can have on society (but big part of HN seems still butthurt about BTC, so feel free to ignore the last sentence or suggest some other solution)

Lot of very interesting advice, but I think it fails at its stated goal of "How to get rich without getting lucky". Much of the advise is extremely hard to follow and implement. For example, how can someone reliably "arm yourself with specific knowledge" if "specific knowledge is knowledge you cannot be trained for"? This is very hard to pull off, and most people will not succeed at this, even if they work very hard at it.

Here's a much more reliable recipe for getting rich: Study your ass off in school. Do whatever it takes to graduate with a stellar GPA, and letters of recommendation. Attend the best University you can get into, with above credentials. Pick a major with a proven track record of financial success, such as Medicine/Software-Eng/Accounting etc. Get a job at a brand name company. Continue working your ass off to impress your manager and colleagues. Switch companies every 3-5 years, to maximize your compensation.

You're not going to be featured in any newspaper if you follow the above strategy. But you can certainly become a multi-millionaire, even in your late 30s.

Especially the HN cloud should be able to understand that we can create long lasting value out of essentially just time and electricity. It's not only immobilia a well done content website can be a good long term investment as well.

I have the feeling that If you understand these tweets, then you don't need this guide, because you already know what they're about. People who actually need this guide also need a more in depth explanation of each point or at least examples.

The only real take away here is understanding differece between wealth and money. Naval should have stayed away from making “snake oil” assertions that accumulating wealth can be done by anyone without regards to luck by simply following idioms in his tweets.

The idea of passively generating money from wealth (aka capitalism) implicitly requires that someone else is working to generate money for you while you sleep. You cannot have a society where everyone is wealthy and everyone is passively generating all the income they need. So most of the wealth necessarily must be in hands of few and path to wealth is necessarily hard enough and probilistic (hence luck). There is only one scenario I can think of where this won’t be true and that’s when we figure out if we can replace robots as provider for all of our labor needs.

> The most accountable people have singular, public, and risky brands: Oprah, Trump, Kanye, Elon.

Some of those names seems out of place on a list of "the most accountable people."

what is this stupid shit: "The most accountable people have singular, public, and risky brands: Oprah, Trump, Kanye, Elon." you guys are a big cult of worshipping rich people. its so obvious.