And just to be precise the point isn’t to expand their horizons or show them other ways to measure success etc, just what to work on to get rich in 2021 as young people seem very confused with the current landscape.
Thanks.
1. Maintain a public presence, including talking about problems you’re working on, open source contributions, blogging, speaking, social media, etc.
2. In (1) and in all interactions make it clear you have great communication and interpersonal skills. Work really hard at this because if you can help investors, managers, etc understand what you want you can go really far.
3. Have humility and a beginners mindset. If someone is smarter/better than you it’s a chance to learn. If you fail, it’s a chance to learn. Listening is a chance to incorporate perspectives and options into an overall better approach AND it comes with buy-in from who you’re listening to if you truly care about their perspective. Also, of course, if you have skills others need, freely give your knowledge away.
4. Pick a valuable niche. This is where the tech/market skill lies. If you can understand something, and combine it with the soft skills above you can go far. And by “understand” I mean in reality you know enough about a very hard problem both add value AND bring a _lot_ of humility about what you _dont_ yet understand. Or perhaps nobody understands.
What are some good examples of (4) for SWEs? I'm guessing topics like WebRTC, video codec algorithms, compilers?
https://softwaredoug.com/blog/2020/12/22/hack-your-career-wi...
1) How do you transition into consulting for instance how do you market your self and create a personal brand
2) How do you do the research to a pick a niche area and how do you find clients within that niche
I would love to hear your thoughts
5. Focus and Finish: instead of starting new ideas, finish the last one. You feel great and you can then maximize whatever opportunities that accomplishment affords you
6. Relationships over wealth: don’t be an Ebenezer Scrooge giving up life’s fulfilling opportunities and relationships to maximize wealth. Take care of people and usually you are taken care of.
7. Go easy on yourself: the key to doing something long term is self forgiveness, taking breaks, sometimes being a slacker. You can’t rely on grit and discipline alone as solutions to getting things done.
I'm a software developer that can hypothetically bring in an above average salary, but the prospect of making that money doesn't trigger an intrinsic drive to do high-stress low-movement logic problems 10 hours a day for arbitrary advertising companies.
So my recommendation would be to watch a lot of Gary Vaynerchuk videos and then define your worth by how much money you have.
(this is only in jest in so much as it's obviously a way to later find that you live a hollow existence, but if you really think about who in your life has got rich by any other means than pure luck, this is probably them)
There are technologies you think sound boring like Ansible that are a really good thing to learn. Companies like boring technology because it means the workers can spend time working on the product instead of cleaning up messes. I'm glad I learned Linux/vim/git but I wish I had spent a bit of time on deployment automation as well.
I spent way too much time messing around with low level stuff, it doesn't matter as much as you might think. I probably could have completely skipped university if I had given more attention to some of the more abstract ideas (don't try skipping it though, you don't know what you don't know and learning it this way can be painful.)
you don't have to date someone in the same field. you just have to not fall into the monoculture surrounding software. it's tough to break out of, but easier now that WFH is more of an option.
my partner is a nanny, for instance. we met as housemates and fell in love. we're lesbian, though, so I guess that doesn't really address the gender imbalance issue (or maybe makes it 10x worse for me?)
would you be able to point me to this, please?
Investing that yields high reward is not saving.
Making money is more important because as you move up the ladder your earning will grow exponentially. Any ladder probably achieves the same impact (e.g. a director earns 10 more times than a senior engineer).
No amount of saving can get you that much money.
If you can move up the ladder quickly (or even slowly), making money will outpace spending.
Where the heck do you work??
I certainly hope OP is communicating ways to be successful and secure, not how to strive to be in the 1%. For most high school students, "rich" means being able to easily pay their bills, have a decent home, and have plenty of disposable income. Only people who are already quite rich define "rich" as having the luxury of choosing whether or not to buy yachts.
A VP can easily earn $10M to $50M a year. At that level, the compensation varies a lot, but it can be 3x-10x from the director level. Stock compensation is really great.
Facebook, Apple, Twitter, Airbnb, Coinbase, Salesforce (maybe), Oracle (maybe), Square (I could name 10 more) would probably offer similar compensation ladder
> I certainly hope OP is communicating ways to be successful and secure, not how to strive to be in the 1%. For most high school students, "rich" means being able to easily pay their bills, have a decent home, and have plenty of disposable income. Only people who are already quite rich define "rich" as having the luxury of choosing whether or not to buy yachts.
Being born as an average citizen in a developed country would probably put you in the top 1% of the world already. Very likely.
If this is the case, what is the point of the question?
- A comfortable existence (trades pay enough to live on)
- Don't have to live in megacities if you don't want to (trades are needed in cities of all sizes and won't be subject to outsourcing)
- It's actually possible to reach mastery in a trade without the trade fundamentally shifting every 5 years (unlike the tech industry)
- Similarly, most trades have been around for 50-3000 years, so you don't need to worry about whether your job will exist in a few years
- If you teach your children the trade and/or bring them into the business, they won't need to get a bunch of student loans to get a career
- You get to move around and don't need to stare at glowing rectangles all day
- I've always wanted a nice cargo van.
"Rich" to me is more about lifestyle and peace-of-mind than it is about numbers in a bank account.
If what you really care about is just numbers in a bank account, the "easiest" way is to pick a tech niche (Salesforce, blockchain, SEO, eCommerce, etc.), relentlessly promote yourself all over the place, really ride that niche into the ground, and don't get sick of the problem domain after a few years.
Median? Probably software. Where I live, a mid-skill software developer makes as much money as a manager in accounting or the owner of a small indie cafe. A software manager in a good (not great) company makes top 10% of income.
High risk, high returns? Software & startups. The risk isn't that bad - in terms of returns/failure ratio, you'd probably make more off a million dollar startup than you would trying to get a job at Netflix. It's just a question of what you enjoy.
What kind of software? In my experience, they all pay as well, unless you do something easy like WordPress or something dumb like Cordova. So just pick something.
Don't like learning new frameworks? Do law. It's the same thing as programming but your frameworks are hundreds of years old.
If you can't hit median, then aim for something you can be the best at. Not top 10%, but best. It can be a mix of skills. Something like busking+omegle+YouTube can pay well.
Or you can go to a boring tech company and save about 50k/year for 10-15 years. This will be enough to achieve financial independence on and it will be possible to retire right when you would be beginning to practice medicine.
This is all only with a bachelors from a state school no extra-curricular or mcat stressing is necessary.
Also Medicine is not 100% and accidentally killing someone can get your license taken away. Done goof and break production you get a talking to and at worst fired but can probably find a new job shortly.
To start with I would probably remind them that to be rich you’ll probably need to do things differently to some extent.
The reason most people aren’t rich isn’t because they’re not smart enough, but because unless you’re lucky enough to be born to a rich family or win the lottery building wealth requires decades of discipline in executing a strategy that will get you there. Most people are not willing to do this but you have to be that person who is. You’ll also find you can’t just copy some playbook. You’re not going to build Amazon because it already exists and you’re not going to invest in TSLA or Bitcoin when it was trading as $20. You need to identify the next big thing before anyone else and have the self belief to stick with it for years while everyone thinks you’re crazy and going to lose everything.
Large amounts of wealth are almost always amassed by finding some method of generating exponential value. It is a common misconception that a good job can make you rich. Linearly trading time for money can give you enough money to have a good life, but rarely will provide a pathway to true wealth.
Building a company or investing in appreciating assets are generally the only two pathways to generate large amounts of wealth. However these both come with high risks and as previously mentioned typically require deferring gratification for years to decades while growing a business or compounding an investment portfolio. And at the end of it all your business could go bankrupt or your investments to zero.
In many cases people don’t want millions of dollars, rather just a good standard of living with job security and money to spend in the present. In this case a good education in a STEM is probably a decent shout, otherwise find something you truly believe will be huge in the future and take your slice early on either by building a business in that niche or investing in one.
I'm not saying we have a housing bubble but I wouldn't bet against it.
Perhaps it's not very exciting but it is reliable.
If I had my time again I might not have gone the startup route but I was lucky so not sad about that. Would I be lucky if I tried again? Perhaps, but probably not.
Staying at FB as an engineer from 2012 to now would easily earn you 10m... assuming career growth. There are probably more than 20 companies that can give you the same deal.
That's a generational wealth if you come from a developing country...
Secondly, find a mentor or mentors who have succeeded in the industry/sector/field you want to get rich in.
Thirdly, Read the 10 roads to riches, by kenneth fisher. To figure out the road you are suited for.
Good luck. If you live in a first world country. You have so many resources and mentors... to become rich.
vinny [at] beessip.com
I don't foresee it stopping being a viable recipe for (Fat)FIRE for at least another decade.
This won't make you fabulously rich, but you're likely to be able to retire fairly early this way.
To further optimize, pick a high-salary field like software development, and a subfield that is in high demand and requires specialized skills (ML/AI, for example). In addition to that subfield, get yourself a bunch of generalized knowledge about the field overall so that you can be enough of a jack-of-all-trades such that people value you outside your niche as well. I talk about software because that's an industry I know, but I'm sure there are others.
After you've amassed some cash, look for privately-held companies that have strong revenue and revenue growth, and look like they're going to go public in the next 1-3 years. Try to get large ISO option grants when you join, and exercise about a year's worth immediately (assuming the company offers early exercise) so you don't owe any taxes in the year of exercise. After you hit the standard 1-year vesting cliff, start looking for another company in a similar situation. Do this three, four, maybe five times.
The downside is that, depending on the option strike price and number of options, you need a decent amount of cash for those option exercises, and the stock you buy isn't immediately liquid. There's some risk to this approach, certainly, but there's also potentially high reward, and you've diversified somewhat by putting your eggs in the baskets of several companies. You can also adjust your risk level by only exercising company options up to some percentage of your net worth that you decide meets your risk tolerance.
As these companies go public, start selling off the stock, and put the proceeds into more-diversified investments. Take the emotion out of it; plan to sell some percent of your total every quarter, such that you've sold it all after 2-4 years. Remember that you will owe taxes on the gains. You can invest the money you need for taxes, but keep those in fairly conservative investments. If you expect those investments to earn you a lower rate of return than the tax underpayment penalty in your jurisdiction, pay estimated taxes quarterly (assuming you're in the US).
If you don't like that optimization path, then a pretty "safe" way to get more money is to be amazing at your job and at climbing the career ladder. VP and C-level folks at medium-to-large public companies will tend to make bank, much of it via equity grants. This takes time, though: at best, you'll make VP in your mid-thirties if you're really good.
Crypto/DeFi