And a lot of people who are as smart and motivated will start their own company but will not get rich because they are not as lucky. Luck play a big part in success
Starting with distant relatives that got into trouble and suddenly found a familial love for them, continuing with various false friends, gold diggers of both sexes and people hustling investment opportunities. Ending with lawyers and doctors who might induce you to undergo procedures that are more expensive, but not necessarily in the best interest for you.
The price for being rich is being on constant alert and distrust against "luck" that isn't really luck, but a veiled threat.
Edit: OK, I get it, not everywhere is Eastern Europe. Countries with old money have systems in place that mitigate this problem. (Although I am not so sure about mafia-heavy countries like Italy.)
You also have access to specialists. You can hire a lawyer, people to help you with research, people to help you present yourself on social media.
In the end, you can extend your day and improve your productivity significantly, resulting in more hours available "to get lucky" effectively. I mean, being lucky when washing dishes does not help a lot, but being lucky when shopping for business opportunities...
What I was speaking about was the simplistic "more of X, more of Y" approach of the OP, though I understand that it was mostly sarcastic in nature.
I would even argue that there is a sweet spot where you have enough money to live comfortably, but not enough to be a promising scam/crime target.
Your friend who owns a house in Chamonix and will let you use it for free during your vacations, your friends CEO of a big company who will give a high level internship to your son, your friends starting a new company and asking you early if you want to invest in it, etc...
When you're rich, you get to swing several times at the ball. When you miss, you fall back to your wealth/family to support you while you save up for your next swing. Then, when you finally hit, as you're running the bases you can boast to everyone about how self-made your success is.
When you're filthy rich, you have infinite at-bats, and basically it doesn't matter how good a baseball player you are, you're going to win.
I'd say that's largely a new-rich problem. People born in rich families generally have the wealth management groomed in. I'm far from being rich, but that's something I'll teach my kids, as I believe one major driving factor in poor families staying poor is lack of education in economy and finance.
That is a possible explanation for why I see this pattern fairly frequently, while other commenters seem to disagree.
Here you see that happening the most with lottery winners, particularly because people playing lotto are generally poor, and most among them financially illiterate.
Top special price of the state lottery is around 500k€, and some stats showed that 90% of the winners lost 50% of that wealth within 2 years, while just putting it in some fund and sitting on that money would easily double their income while keeping their wealth.
On that line, certain wealthy people tend to win the lotto a lot! It's a sign of fraud: they buy the tickets from the winners for a bigger amount than the prize, so they can insta-launder large sums of money. Then the actual winner sits on a slightly larger amount of money that can't be used for anything other than spending it, which financially is a terrible deal. But they all seem happy to do it, because they don't know any better.
- If you don't have to work two jobs to survive, you have the time to pursue other things, and you're more "lucky".
- If you have the ability to not work and can spend a year/two/five working out of a "garage", you're more "lucky" than those who can't.
- If you have the ability to send your kids to an expensive college without you or them going into life-long debt, then those kids can create lasting connections (a.k.a. networking) and be significantly more "lucky" than those who can't.
- If you have the money for good food, leisure, home, travel, medicine, etc., you're significantly more "lucky" than those who have to balance those things, and may not even have access to those things with all the consequences: chronic illnesses, stress etc.
I cannot afford a vacation in Macchu Picchu, but it does not detract from my feeling of being lucky/unlucky. Local vacations in Europe or even in my own country are fine. If anything, Covid era was a good teacher in what really matters.
And the college and networking is begging the question (IDK if I use the expression correctly). I do not doubt that Harvard graduates have it easier in general, but they are probably less prepared for a possible black swan event after which their degree won't have the weight it currently has. Shelling out enormous money for getting connections is a conformist (expensive and lazy) way of building career. I do not find much luck in that.
The question isn't about feeling lucky/unlucky.
It doesn't matter if you can't take a vacation in Macchu Picchu.
- Can you take a vacation any time you want?
- Can you take a vacation for as long as you can?
- Can you afford to take a full year (or more) to work on a passion project? Or on any project? On a startup idea?
See, the more money you have, the more readily your answer will be yes to all the questions above.
> Shelling out enormous money for getting connections is a conformist (expensive and lazy) way of building career. I do not find much luck in that.
You can spend enormous money and have all the connections you need in four years. Or you can work your entire life and still never get those connections.
> but they are probably less prepared for a possible black swan event
Something tells me that Harvard graduates "survive" any and all black swan events significantly better than many others.
Out of your questions: "Can you take a vacation any time you want?" is an interesting case. This depends on your career a lot, not just on net income. Some well-paid careers are notorious for being time-intensive and competitive to the threshold of burning out. You can take a long vacation, but your job might not be there when you return. I opted out of this rat race a long time ago.
"Something tells me that Harvard graduates "survive" any and all black swan events significantly better than many others."
Where I live, the Holocaust and the Communist coup were two notable exceptions. People who had a lot of property to lose often hesitated too long before GTFOut and found the way shut after rationalizing the first warning signs away.
It is possible that the USA is protected enough that something like this will never happen there.
It is. But in the context of the discussion, the question is mostly around access to opportunities. And this access increases with the money you have.
> This depends on your career a lot, not just on net income. Some well-paid careers are notorious for being time-intensive and competitive to the threshold of burning out.
Once again, it means that you may not have enough money to afford having a vacation at any time.
> Where I live, the Holocaust and the Communist coup were two notable exceptions.
Ah, yes. Because these events are so common that Harvard graduates are uniquely unprepared for them. Unlike, you know, common folk.
If my memory serves me right, most rich folks successfully escaped both the Holocaust and the Communist coup. Unlike those who couldn't afford it.
Black swans are by definition uncommon. Being a Loyalist in America of the 1770s was a huge black swan, for example. While their counterparts a little bit to the north in Canada did just fine.
Prague is full of big villas and other real property whose original owners perished with their entire family. There was literally no one left to claim them after the war. Same in Poland or Germany.
People back then did not want to believe that something as barbaric will be done to them, until it was.
I do not think that exact stats exist how many rich and poor survived the Holocaust, but considering the vast amount of abandoned valuable property after the war, including the infamous sleeping accounts of Switzerland, I do not believe that most rich folks escaped successfully.
Surely they had better chances to act in time, yes. If they had the foresight to do so. One of my points is that once you are a part of the conventional elite, you are motivated to try to weather the problems in place, because uprooting yourself and your family is a huge loss.
This
> because uprooting yourself and your family is a huge loss.
Once again: unlike the poor folks which have the foresight and the opportunity to act in time, right?
I am partly influenced by my own personal history. I grew up with a single mother and no child support from a father that lived abroad. We were somewhere in the lowest fourth of the income distribution.
Yet it helped me to be an independent person, paradoxically. I never had to take into account what my neighbors or rich, soon-to-die relatives think about me, what are "suitable" careers for a young man of X years and Y parents, what kind of real property binds my feet from moving anywhere. No one was interested in me and it felt very liberating.
Knowing my colleagues from school who were restrained by all those concerns and had to play a "role" instead of being themselves, I did not envy them the least.
And yes, everything, from having a computer at 10, not at 18 to unconstrained ability to travel would've helped me significantly more than the proverbial "having to pull myself up by bootstraps".
And this has nothing to do with "being independent" or "feeling lucky".
The CEO of a company I worked for came up with the idea for his company while having a year-long sabbatical from the university while traveling around (literally around) the world with his friends.
At university I was often chosing between buying a new T-shirt or (exclusive or) cheap bread.
So no. Luck has very little to do with where you are now. Money does.
And yet I do not believe that if my single parent was richer, I would have been a better programmer or writer. I made some money teaching well-off, but pretty dim youngsters whose parents, even though rich by my standards (which meant middle class, probably), were concerned about their future. Even private tuition only gets you so far.
That said, the fact that I was born with a fairly good brain that could soak up both English and mathematics/programming easily, is by no means my own work. It is precisely random luck, together with the fact that I was born precisely at that period of history when such skills are considered useful and marketable.
This has nothing to do with your belief.
The level you're at now? You could've reached it a decade earlier, had you had money. As could I.
Poor people fail significantly more than rich people. For every one of you or me there will be 100 others who couldn't make it. At a certain level of wealth, however, it does't matter if you're a "better programmer". You will still be able to enjoy life and achieve fulfilment, but at a vastly reduced timescale.
> It is precisely random luck
Yes. There are random chances, such as where you're born. Apart from that the chances of misfortune decrease exponentially with money.
- You're Einstein but born in poverty? Hello, malnourishment, no access to good education, menial jobs until the end of your life.
- You're a regular Joe, but born into well-to-do family? Hello, happy childhood, good education, necessary connections, largely stress-free life of your chosing.
There's 150 000 shades in bteween, of course, but luck has little to do with chance, and has a lot of to do with money.
It does not make any sense, too. Harvard graduates are globalists, who are more likely to allocate their assets globally, which is what saves you from such events.
This might be some of the actual disagreement in this thread.
Feeling lucky and being lucky is not always related. You can feel lucky for having met "the one" in your life or for finding $100 on the street, and none think that luck comes from hard work. The part where many underestimate luck regarding success in business is how much luck is needed on top of hard work, and having the right knowledge, and being at the right place at the right time for any business to be a huge success.
The success stories from business always are about the hard work that was done and not about the incredible amount of luck that also was involved (Thinking fast and slow have a chapter about this)
When you're poor, you're also a constant target of other people. When you're rich, perhaps that single aspect is the same but everything else in your life is so much better that it's kind of disingenuous to ignore it.
source: Me. ~Veteran~ Survivor of 3 failed startups ;)
As opposed to a successful exit. No matter the above, it’s still a successful exit.