If you're Warren Buffet, of course you'll have a thousand offers and propositions a day and you have to say no to most of them and find that one gem.
If you're regular Joe (and, yes, that most likely includes YOU reading this) you can't afford to shut down most opportunities or you'll never get anywhere.
Doing what Warren Buffett does works very well for Warren Buffett. The odds are good that it won't work for you. "Choose the right things" is pretty vacuous advice.
[1] https://highexistence.com/images/view/illustrated-advice-fro...
It's perhaps especially true for comedy. You can see it when you watch a comic on TV: they're much less funny than in person, because you're not surrounded by a lot of other laughing people. The same routine by the same person can get little more than snickers when done at somebody's open mic night -- unless somebody recognizes that they're famous. Celebrity reinforces itself.
Burnham is very talented and I'm sure he worked like crazy to market his work. But he will also tell you the names of a hundred others who are equally talented and worked equally hard, but you've never heard of them. The market for celebrity is very fickle, heaping huge rewards on a few, but drop off rapidly for people who aren't in the hump of the long tail.
Warren Buffett isn't profiting from celebrity in the same sense, but there's a similar effect where the biggest winners are lucky as well as smart. Their advice often doesn't take that into account, and it's important to measure that in your appetite for risk.
On the other hand, great work doesn't happen by accident. Great businesses are a result of good management. Good products are results of good design. Those don't happen by accident, just like a great program doesn't write itself. You may not be a warren buffet, due to limited opportunities. But, you could leave someone like that penniless and nameless and i'm sure he could leverage his skills and knowledge to be "successful", even if not a mega-billionaire.
Marketing and sales is an important component which is left out (if you care about making money). That's also something you can deliberately work on and improve.
The lottery analogy is quite accurate, yes.
I have no idea the rate of job quitters to successful cartoonists.
Or the rate of successful cartoonists who kept their job (Adams).
I still like to read this insight, but trying to make some axiom or judgement out of it is only useful for demonstrating that I’m not very smart for saying such a thing.
This happens quite a bit.
He wasn’t saying “bet it all and jump off a cliff and hope you’ll land”. He just said “feel free to stake your own path”. The quote you link also includes staking your own path as a homemaker.
The central takeaway from his advice was to try to find meaning and happiness in what you do. It worked out extraordinarily well for Watterson but his advice applies to far more pedestrian cases too.
Anyone with software development skills gets tons of low quality app ideas from friends and family. And tons of other opportunities from recruiters paying below market.
It's hard walking away from a sort-of-ok opportunity when you don't have anything going on, but I've learned there are always more things coming up.
One thing I do agree is that not everyone can say no. For example, if you're a software engineer in a big company, you might not have much say. That's why it's important to get yourself into a position where you have more control on the things you work on. Not easy but you don't need to be Buffet to achieve that.
For a long time I would wind up seeing Becky Quick interview Buffet a few times a year on CNBC, it got cringeworthy when his dementia got worse and he started to leer at her. (Becky Quick is a "babe") Once upon a time he was a genius investor, but he's not what he used to be and they don't have a successor in the works.
For me, I deleted my LinkedIn account recently because it had brought a remarkable number of time-wasters into my life.
Source?
> don't have a successor in the works.
Source?
Anecdotal, but my experience has been that “no” is one of the most useful words in my vocabulary.
But even of the ones I want... There are many places offering to sell me lunch today, and there are several places where I'd be interested in eating lunch. I can only eat one lunch today, though.
So I think we have the same thing, just with much smaller offers.