Almost-Billionaires (2014)
lackingambition.com
lackingambition.com
It took me a long time to realize that the gamble isn't worth it to me. If my end goal is to be working on the interesting tech ideas full time, I need to make it happen regardless of my financial situation. So that's where I'm at now: consistently taking 1 step every night and weekend. It's much slower than my ideal hypothetical world of riches, but it is more fulfilling because it is real. I'm making actual progress now, as opposed to maybe-future progress.
[1]: https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2020/05/04/do-the-real-thin...
Perhaps reality is more nuanced than that? Like, there may be tasks that appear very similar, but they are actually not cross-trainable?
[1]: https://cxo.industries.
People looking in from the outside scratch their heads. Don't I have hobbies? Passions? I'd do X Y and Z, they often say.
Reminds me of this blog post: https://philip.greenspun.com/materialism/early-retirement/
It's too bad Mike (the lackingambition.com guy) stopped updating his blog.
If financial independence is its own cage, I'm not willing to leave.
I can't say I regret it - perhaps I should have had something else cooking during my working years that doesn't include blogging about FI.
I suspect most people are like me (and not Elon) - without a carrot or stick, a kind of meaninglessness sets in.
Because of this risk, I keep thinking about keeping myself economically relevant. I've been in this Resistance (as Pressfield would call it) limbo for almost two years but here's hoping I do something about it.
If I have so many plans for when I retire early, how come I do none of it now? If that's really what I want, how come I don't spend at least a few minutes on it every week?
I don't have to find a 50h/week activity to replace my work. I don't need any activity that replace my work routine. I can simply take whatever hobby I had while working, and spend at least as much time as when I was working full-time.
I am a software engineer by trade, doing regular web app business line applications. Work in FAANG salary. On the side I play music on weekend (acoustic guitar, electric guitar, bass, and singing). I do martial arts around 3 days a week. I have my outlet of creativity such as building PC for gaming and crypto mining rig, building aquarium/terrarium/vivarium scapes. I read philosophies, religion, economies, etc. I play PC games, I ride my motorcycle for leisures. I think I'm decently good at all those activities, signaled by people who came to me and ask me to build their stuffs or play in their band or compete in their tournament.
I keep jumping and trying to find more things to do. I don't have kids yet, maybe when I do things will going to change.
My hobbies aside, right now I find no motivation on starting a new software project for learning purposes. I feel that I am stagnant now in my software engineering skills.
I used to learn programming languages as a hobby. Those aren't interesting to me anymore. I don't know what to do next. I want to learn deeper like maybe learning how to create a game engine, or compiler, or even going hardware, or try learning electrical engineering or mechanical engineering for DIY hobby projects, but maybe I would get bored and eventually stopped doing those.
I don't know what else to do.
First world problems.
- Compilers
- Game Engines
- Gnarly multithreaded problems
- Using IDA Pro to analyze X86-64 binaries
- Computer systems and networks (e.g. NAND2Tetris)
- Creating your own kernel
- Creating your own database
- Replicating meltdown and spectre. Repkicaring rowhammer attacks
- Web attacks (check out hackthebox.eu)
I did almost all of these during my CS bachelor and master. Other than that, a friend of mine learned a ton at an internship working on LLVM (a few years ago). He now works on low level stuff in the HFT space. So you might want to look there (the game dev space has overlapping problems with the HFT space but for a much lower salary).
Currently I am doing leetcode because I’d love to earn a FAANG salary (HFT is not for me). Leetcode feels most reminiscent to graph theory.
I don't think I wanna do HFT. Not interested in numbers or statistics. I don't wanna do data science/ML as well.
I was just thinking what can I do to spark joy in programming once again. Maybe I need some creative-type of programming work like creating useless toys or tools.
Leetcode is mostly just brute-forcing yourself through problems. I've done around 500 Leetcode problems, its not that hard after you gone past 200 problems, it gets repeated but different style. Yeah a lot of Leetcode problems mostly are just graph problems. I think Leetcode managed to distract me a bit but after a while I got bored as well, after all I already got the FAANG salary, no interest for me doing Leetcode anymore.
It's important to not rush this and just let it happen while keeping the momentum going. Skipping every so often is ok, but don't skip more than 2 periods in a row. Track your progress in a way that's meaningful to you. Your brain is rewiring itself as you do this so the time it takes might vary depending on overall health.
Kids man. Get on that train you wont have to worry about what to do in your spare time.
I think some people will invent challenges for themselves, even arbitrary looking ones, if they are otherwise unchallenged at the time, just to keep themselves engaged.
All kinds of things can pose significant challenges: relationships, learning a new language, travel (um, thanks 2020), a sport, yoga...other stuff that pushes you outside your comfortable zone and where you are in the space where you actually have to think, react, decide again, and where you have limited information and don't know.
I don't think you have to do this, but you can try it if you're looking for that "ah i feel bored, or just too comfortable I wanna do something" kind of vibe.
I think an advantage is you don't have to care: is this right for me? Is this what I want to do (bigpicture)? Just pick something you don't know how to do, and try it, and for some of those things you might end up caring about becoming good at it or overcoming the challenges of it. If you can't even care about finding something challenging or that you don't know, you probably have some sort of mental illness or unresolved emotional issues or inner work you need to face and simply are avoiding that or don't know how to deal with that, and then you need to process that yourself or with some counselling to try to sort that out. But sometimes pushing out of the zone, especially doing something physical like sport or yoga, brings that stuff up anyway. So there's many ways to get forward.
For people who have financial independence, what about mastery of our internal world, our thoughts and emotions? If we can feel joy most of the time and get enjoyment from what we do, by looking after ourselves and helping others and living well, I'm not sure what else there is?
Life is a constant challenge, it's really a fun life to live: the language gap in English can be overcome but not Cantonese, finding a partner in such a different culture is also a lot of fun, you can move flat within the blink of an eye where you need weeks of pre approval in France, so you're always moving around, jobs are so plentiful your own boss tells you you should move elsewhere and get a payraise he can't give you - so you double your salary every X years. And now, there's a game to play on politics with China !!!
Honestly, I feel everyday at the center of the world, am always constantly busy and never have enough money. I can't feel like it's normal life like it was before, it's like an adventure book everyday :D
Moreover, when I did overpromise, as an IC I would put in the extra hours to deliver, so my estimates always seemed to my superiors to be 'on time'. But now as a manager, I can't force my team to work extra hours (and I don't wanna be that guy), so I have to take that into account when making promises.
Ultimately, it's the difference between being responsible for myself, and now being responsible for others, not only responsible for the tasks they do, but also for being responsible for communicating the ability to do it to other teams.
Maybe take your flamebait somewhere else?
Ironically enough, this answers my question.
The latter especially is incredibly stressful unless you're one of those people who don't give a fuck about others, their struggles and their things (I envy that btw).
Meanwhile they take millions and shrug when it turns out no one wants their shit app or juicer.
Everyone wants to get in on a good investment. If you’re building a good investment, you’re doing them a favor by letting them invest.
"Back in February, I got the idea to create a COVID vaccination t-shirt (now on sale!). Reflecting on my past experience, I figured it would be easy...
My thinking: The whole process would be pretty fun, so I’d only need to sell a few dozen shirts to cover the cost of the contest and count the project a success. I’m still optimistic, but the process has definitely been much more aggravating than expected. A chronological list of snags...
And selling t-shirts on Zazzle is virtually the lowest-hassle business I can imagine running. Which makes me picture the horrors of creating and managing an actual business.
Indeed, I suspect that anyone who’s ever run an actual business has been rolling their eyes at my self-pity. Twelve little snags? Real entrepreneurs face more challenges every day. Unlike me, they have to coordinate a long list of products, each with their own attendant baggage. Unlike me, they have to manage a physical space. Unlike me, they have to hire and direct employees. And unlike me, they have to cope with a morass of government regulation.
I don’t care if actual businesspeople do roll their eyes at me; their can-do attitude in the face of endless obstacles still fills me with awe. Note further that in this very blog post I’ve already publicly complained more about my business woes than most businesspeople ever will."
Capitalism earns its accolades as well as its criticism because it's fans want it to be this pure embodiment of helping people. But it's obviously responsible for just some of the things that help people. I think its pretty fucked up for example that full neighbourhoods of multi-millionaires if not billionaires exist in my city, while a huge portion of the people working in the jobs virtuously bestowed upon us by them can't simultaneously afford rent and savings or dental work. The dentist comes out fine, but unless you're very well covered by rare dental plans, you might lose all your annual savings with one tooth problem.
Entrepreneur property developers are ready, able and willing to build a tidal wave of housing, but are shackled by NIMBY zoning laws, building codes, and land use restrictions designed to restrict the supply of housing and push up prices for existing home owners.
The high cost of dentistry is entirely a result of extreme restrictions on new dentists put in place by the ADA. Entrepreneurs are ready, able, and willing to train or import from overseas an army of new, cheap dentists. By they can’t because the ADA hasn’t approved opening any new dental schools since 1980 and won’t let Turkish, Thai and Costa Rican dentists practice in the US.
Obama: How did you keep perspective?
Seinfeld: ...I fell in love with the work. And the work was joyful. And difficult . And interesting. And that was my focus.
I was given the freedom to hire the smartest people I could find and take on something challenging.
It paid only room and board for me and my family, plus a small equity share in whatever we created.
I would give anything for that dream to be a reality.
Please, if you’re reading this and you’re a millionaire, have some fun making someone else’s dreams come true?
But then, I wake up!. So moving a bit here and there and hope to find a small numbers of non-millonaires... hard, but possible?
Highly doubt this caused the increase. There was a survey where only about 5% of non-elites (regular people) actually rate these issues as important.
To become top-tier at anything, I believe you need more than just the lust. It take a mix of raw talent, discipline, passion, and drive - at minimum.
(Yes - there are probably numerous examples to disprove this, but I'll bet that the ratio is extremely skewed)
I was a top-tier math competition participant. I gave everything to it for a few years. That's gone, the willingness to sacrifice so much is gone.
Now I have a relationship to take care and my generous paycheck makes my only worry be if my plants are well watered.
On the other hard, "top-tier" might be subjective or useless depending on the hobby. Does someone really want to be considered among the top 10 baristas in the world, or do they just want to know more than all their friends about coffee? Is the goal to beat Eliud Kipchoge or just buy an expensive Iron Man jacket?
I've realized this sort of checkpoint-based planning is not helpful for the long run because naturally, times change, and with that ambitions change. If you haven't already had a taste of making progress towards the said ambition, and it happens to require a distinct set of skills, it becomes quite a mountain to climb.
It'd certainly help those in extreme post- or pre-financial-independence situations find a motivator.
I’ve heard this argument countless times when people say ‘money doesn’t buy happiness’. That’s always been an inversion to me. Money absolutely buys happiness.
So here in this article you have two incredibly successful men inverting their desires, and romanticizing it as some kind of epiphany.
In other words, a brazen humble brag.