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Comment by doggodaddo78 | Hacker News Reader

Here we go again: looking for "success" cargo-cult signals, now with more "science!" to demand "evidence" from every unscientific/ambiguous/difficult-to-measure area and facet of life and reality, rather than improving fundamentals for increasing chances in something that has a good deal of probability involved. Felix Dennis wrote about this for a good chapter or so in his book with the ironic name: "How to Get Rich." I would consider the words of a billionaire to carry slightly-more weight than those of self-help gurus or thin, soundbite blog posts.

Effort / "working-hard" has no value unless it is effectively directed at something.

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That is like listening to advice from Elon Musk, good advice but he always forgets that all the advice is worthless, if your father doesn't have a precious gem mine in Africa .... Bottom line will always be:

"Being born rich, is the only guarantee to succes. Everything else is pure luck."

You are either born rich, or lucky enough to hit the lottery.

I fully agree, but the parent mentions an important word: probability. Combined with your luck, and kept going by grit, you most surely have a recipe for success.

If everyone has 0.01% chance to become a millionaire (chance - that might not happen, or someone does not aspire to be). Then simple probability tells us that a person with grit that does not quit at the first attempt but tries 20 times, has a 0.2% chance.

“I’m a great believer in luck. I find that the harder I work, the more I have of it.” is a relevant quote :)

the point is that the child of a billionaire starts off with a 100% chance of being a millionaire. the rest of us can try for 50x or 100x longer than avg but the odds of getting to that level are still miniscule. and if that's the case it makes the whole endeavor seem rather arbitrary

It is not minuscule. For middle class people, the route to millionaire status is very doable. Live below your means, and regularly invest the difference.

For poor people, the route is to learn a valuable skill, move into the middle class, then apply the above.

That just moves the goal posts by a level, doesn't it? What's the chance you have a low stress upbringing that allows you to work towards such goals? Parents who are supportive and believe in that middle class dream, teachers who don't give up on you when you misbehave, enough comfort to not have to focus on immediate concerns?

You can blame your parents and teachers up until age 18, then it's on you.

Nonsense.

You can't rationally compare the life chances of someone whose parents are billionaires - with access to that network, and the best schooling, and discussions about investing over dinner - with someone born in a shack without a book in the house.

An incredibly tiny number of people will be able to do well from a near-zero start. And most will do it by being aggressively self-serving narcissists.

Everyone else is going to have a much tougher time.

Migrants who walk a thousand miles to get into the US come with nothing, yet they on average do rather well here.

> without a book in the house

Everybody has a supercomputer in their pocket with access to millions of free books.

> Everybody has a supercomputer in their pocket with access to millions of free books.

And which ones should you read?

"Siri, which free books should I read?"

That’s for the person to figure out. If they’re hard working, they’ll sacrifice [some leisure activity] to research which books to read.

A reasonable attitude, but one that you would only arrive at if you were fortunate enough to pick the right books to begin with. Or the right teachers.

That's one of those statements that's useful as an attitude, not so useful as an explanation.

I'm sure people can think of ways your parents influence you after the age of majority.

The point is you have a choice, and you're old enough to know if following your parents' advice is a good idea or not. At 18 it's time to grow up and take responsibility for your life.

Have you never someone who thought they had to please their parents well into adulthood?

On one hand, yes, on paper you are free when you are 18.

On the other hand, you can't be free without some sort of confidence that you'll be ok if you don't do what your parents say. And if your parents are the domineering kind, they'll have made good use of your first 18 years to keep you in their orbit.

Real life is complicated, not everyone has clarity, especially at that age.

It's their choice, not their destiny.

Young people reject their parents all the time. A pervasive issue in parenting is the kids refuse to listen to the parents. Movies about it are quite popular - see "Dirty Dancing", "Saturday Night Fever", on and on and on.

I'm not buying the lack of agency of young people. It's just another excuse for choosing the easy way.

If you are not where you want to be in life, have you done anything today to move towards that goal? If you've done nothing, then choose better. It's your life, not mine. Complaining about not being a billionaire's son is a waste of your life.

If you're in the US, of sound mind and body, and over 18, there's never been a time in history with more opportunity for you. If you refuse to see it, nobody can help you. But just think about all those migrants with nothing walking thousands of miles with the hope of getting into the US.

What do they know that you don't?

I know a fair few of those people, except they didn't walk to the west, they sailed. Basically my parents, and my aunts and uncles.

Like I said elsewhere, it's a good attitude that you can do it, but it's not actually realistic that you can. People learn this the hard way in sports for example. We aren't all going to starting QB, there's only 32 of those jobs.

> "Dirty Dancing", "Saturday Night Fever"

Movies from back before the drawbridge came up.

> Complaining about not being a billionaire's son is a waste of your life.

Well I actually went to school with a billionaire's kid, and I never thought I'd rather have his life. Nor did anyone else.

There's also a fair bit of gap between "oh why am I not a prince" and "everything I'm good at or want to do will cost me a huge amount of debt".

> What do they know that you don't?

People are mistaken about how other countries are all the time. Do you think Western defectors to the communist blocks were never disappointed?

Keep in mind not everyone knows everything, even after they turn 18.

If you think there's so much opportunity, why is it that people are complaining about the lack of it? Perhaps they've actually tried to search for them and couldn't find any?

Who you are depends on your upbringing, so no, it's never on you.

> it's never on you

People are not robots.

For example, you chose to type your message. The computer did not drag your hapless body over to the computer and force you to type it in.

Yes, they pretty much are. Extremely complicated, organic, robots. But that is not the point. Your choices depend on your personality and abilities, which in turn depend on your upbringing and experiences.

If I followed you around for a day, I could point out all the choices you chose to make and could have chosen to do differently.

And you would be wrong every single time because free will is an illusion.

That aside, people always make the best choices they can – no one chooses to chose badly. You can't blame them for not making a better choice since you can't expect anyone to do something they cannot.

I can't tell you the number of nights I told myself "I should go to bed early" knowing I would get a good nights sleep and do better at work the next day but chose to stay up late playing video games.

I chose to choose badly, I knew better, and I accept the blame (and consequences).

(This also comes into play when I make food/exercise choices btw. I certainly do not make the best choices I can on a daily basis)

No you didn't, you were unable to make the better choice (likely because of limited willpower). No mentally healthy person intentionally makes bad choices, that would be self-harm.

I think the more apt phrase is "I lack the discipline".

I do think there is a level of fooling myself when do choose badly, thinking "It'll be fine, no big deal", when down deep I know it will cause a problem.

Mentally healthy people make bad choices all the time, knowing they will pay for it later, but wanting to enjoy "the now".

> I think the more apt phrase is "I lack the discipline".

OK.

> Mentally healthy people make bad choices all the time, knowing they will pay for it later, but wanting to enjoy "the now".

Of course they do. But they do it although the choice is bad, not because it is.

> Of course they do. But they do it although the choice is bad, not because it is.

Agreed.

I think you’re getting close to arguing that there is no free will and that everything in the universe is therefore luck or randomness. Perhaps one way to look at it is that even if humans philosophically are robots, the ones who sacrifice more (via hard work) deserve different, better outcomes.

This is true. It takes money, knowledge, and connections to make money. It's like a virtuous cycle / differential equation (rate of increase proportional to the amount). A homeless person becoming a billionaire is highly-improbable vs. Steve Job's kids.

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/07/21/luck-hard-work/ is an interesting delve into the origins of that phrase (and an amusing circular reference back to here.)

> if your father doesn't have a precious gem mine in Africa

“This is a pretty awful lie,” Elon tweeted. “I left South Africa by myself when I was 17 with just a backpack & suitcase of books. Worked on my Mom’s cousin’s farm in Saskatchewan & a lumber mill in Vancouver. Went to Queens Univ with scholarship & debt, then same to UPenn/Wharton & Stanford.”

In a follow-up tweet, Elon said his father “didn’t own an emerald mine & I worked my way through college, ending up ~$100k in student debt.”

His mother Maye responded on Twitter in December 2019 in defense of Elon.

“To add to the truth, we went to Boston Chicken in Philadelphia for Thanksgiving because we couldn’t afford a turkey. And we spent three weeks making our rent-controlled apartment livable in Toronto,” Maye tweeted.

https://moguldom.com/278102/fact-check-did-elon-musk-inherit...

Interesting, I had never seen his denial of the emerald mine story or the student debt thing. I wonder what the truth is.

Elon is being very deceptive with that "rebuttal."

Here's two articles on his father and how he got his fortune: https://www.businessinsider.co.za/how-elon-musks-family-came... and https://www.businessinsider.co.za/elon-musk-sells-the-family...

> “We were very wealthy,” says Errol. “We had so much money at times we couldn't even close our safe.”

Elon is cherry picking some true details to paint a misleading picture. I'm sure he did work in that lumber mill, and living with his mom at times of his life might have been a financial struggle. But the basic point, that he started out in business with family financial resources that the overwhelming majority of humans will never have, remains true.

If you pay close attention, Elon does this form of deception by selection quite often. It's one of the things that switched me from cheering him on for tesla, spacex, to now more critical and guarded.

>But the basic point, that he started out in business with family financial resources that the overwhelming majority of humans will never have, remains true.

What does all that matter if you leave home at 17 with access to none of it? I'm not saying that's true, but it's what Elon implied and wasn't covered in your explanation how how his rebuttal is deceptive.

I myself have no doubt that he has his parents to thanks in large part for his success. But I would pin that on genetics rather than direct connections in his case. Personality traits like grit, intelligence, and ruthlessness are quite heritable, correlate with getting rich, and I think people forget about that when getting worked up about rich people's kids succeeding disproportionately.

Well I mean Errol quite literally funded his first company.

But also, Errol had a very successful engineering business. There's no question that was a huge influence and advantage to Elon. He got an informal exposure to engineering at home that would be better than the universities available in some impoverished places.

The evidence for grit is nonexistent. What correlates most strongly with successful entrepreneurship is having upper middle class or better parents. This is because they provide a better education, literal seed funding, and if nothing else, allow someone to take more risk knowing they won't end up homeless.

I think what you're missing is that to be successful you need someone to invest in you and your ideas. Whether it's your parents or a VC that point still remains true. However you still need to put in the work. So advice from Musk is still valuable in a way. Not all his advice though lol. You need to pick and choose what's relevant or applicable to your situation and that i think requires wisdom and discernment.

Now as to the question of what success is...

If you need to pick and choose wisely what advice to follow, then the advice is useless. Might as well pick and choose wisely what to do, directly.

Absolutely conflating apples and oranges. Elon seems to have been luckier by being part of the PayPal Mafia, similar, in a sense, to the w00w00 group. He may have absolutely no idea how or why he got where he did by the choices, beliefs, and circumstances he encountered. Felix Dennis OTOH was a wise, old hippie who had an appreciation for honest introspection.

Compeletley agree.

Elon was lucky to be born in a rich family. Made his first 100k before 18.

Felix was lucky to be born in time to ride that hippie wave.

Just like some people were lucky to throw money on bitcoin in 2010~2015.

Still more should be a credited to chanse and luck.

> Felix was lucky to be born in time to ride that hippie wave.

"In 1969, Dennis wrote a world exclusive for OZ, the first ever review of Led Zeppelin's debut album." - talk about right place, right time. From there, he gets promoted to co-editor, gets hugely famous through a court case, which lets him start his own publishing company, and the rest is history.

(I'd say there was a lot of luck involved but he also seems to have reasonably good judgement and foresight to take advantage of it.)

Dennis didn’t get rich off the Oz trial. In fact, he was pretty penniless for a good two years after the trial, and he did not have the kind of fame that he could capitalize on (the judge in the trial had infamously called him a dim-witted young man). What started his road to vast riches was noticing that Bruce Lee films were popular, and starting a new magazine called Kung Fu Monthly that, even though it was a pretty primitive rag, managed to cash in on the fad.

> "Being born rich, is the only guarantee to succes. Everything else is pure luck."

Well, luck is an important part.

But some people managed to inherit fantastic wealth and be unsuccessful (even in keeping wealth!) anyway.

And to become rich you need luck, but it is not a pure luck!

You need both.

Felix Dennis was "on the dole" (welfare) and wasn't born into riches -- unlike Elon.

Read the book. It's available on LibGen, and is absolutely worth coming back again to -- if you want to be rich.

This is one datapoint. Not indicative of any route to success or making money

This emerald mine story is commonly quoted by Elon Musk’s detractors but it is misinformation and has been explicitly labeled a myth by journalists who investigated it (https://www.insidehook.com/article/history/errol-musk-elon-f...). In terms of hard evidence, it’s not even clear that his father actually owned a mine, or what qualifies as a “mine”, or what its output was, or what his father’s income was from this mine. Most mines are small operations that amount to digging on a bit of land, with varying degrees of profit (or unprofitability), and not some massive corporate operation digging out those giant town-sized holes in the planet.

Musk, his brother, and mother left South Africa and moved to Canada, fleeing his allegedly abusive father. Elon held various odd jobs early on (https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/03/odd-jobs-elon-musk-had-when-...). He also worked his way through college and ended up with lots of student debt (https://marketrealist.com/p/elon-musk-emerald-mine/). That doesn’t match your narrative that he was born into riches and was successful only because of that.

I also know plenty of people who weren’t born rich and became successful via hard work and talent. It is pretty evident that their life priorities, work ethic, and other qualities are very different from the average person. To reduce their lifelong efforts and sacrifices to luck is really just a completely false narrative used by people today to undermine the idea of a meritocracy, since that’s necessary to ethically justify large redistributive policies, by labeling someone’s fortune as “unearned”. It’s the same reason why Musk’s detractors repeatedly reach for this emerald mine story without a shred of evidence.

You are mistaken. Errol absolutely played a pivotal role in Elon's initial success:

https://www.sitebuilderreport.com/origin-stories/elon-musk

> Since Musk and Kimbal weren’t going to get any funding with a mere proof-of-concept, they had to build out the company using their own capital, and there wasn’t much of it. When Zip2 launched, Musk only had $2,000 in the bank. Kimbal had a bit more, having recently sold his share in a College Pro Painters franchise, but most of their startup costs were covered by their father, Errol Musk, who gave them $28,000 to get going.

Elon's "rebuttal" around this point is highly deceptive. Yes, his life with his mom was hard at times. But his dad did in actual fact have a half share in a Zambian emerald mine for 6 years. He was wealthy before that however, due to his engineering company.

So the truth is essentially "both." Did Elon struggle and have to show some grit at times? Yes. Did he get access to initial capital that many people wouldn't? Yes.

>rather than improving fundamentals for increasing chances in something that has a good deal of probability involved

In order to do that you have to figure out which 'something has a good deal of probability involved' in the first place and that is what those pesky demands for evidence attempt to figure out.

Getting born in a wealthy, stable country, preferably into a well-off family, helps a ton.

And how will you tell which of those unmentioned “fundamentals” are the most effective?

Because my answer is with the scientific method, which you apparently don’t want to use here.

Being difficult to measure is no excuse, measuring proton-proton collisions is very hard, but we are quite good at it anyway..

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