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Comment by grouchomarx | Hacker News Reader

>“While surrounded by friends in the Bahamas as a newly minted millionaire, Tony felt a sense of melancholy. What’s next? What is happiness? What am I working toward? he wondered.”

can't understand how some of these guys don't have the wherewithal to live in the moment from time to time

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A reason I'm probably not one of these guys is because my first thought on having a hundred million dollars is to retire and buy a home in a place I can stroll down to catch fish in the surf. Not even kidding. If I had enough money to be set for the rest of my life and do that, say no more.

I wouldn't get there ($100 M) because I would have cashed out when whatever I owned was worth $1 Million. It's all sort of a game of chicken and most people, probably correctly, flinch very early.

Knowing what "enough" is is arguably success. Congrats.

Casinos, race tracks, and brokerages are full of saps who had a windfall and wanted to hold on just a little longer instead of walking away...

The same reason it was always spilling to look back at if you had mined bitcoin or kept whatever you mined early or not cashed out when it was cents. The vast majority of people that weren't true believers early would have cashed out in the first few percentages of its rise, because the vast majority of the time the the right thing to do.

Tech billionaires are walking embodiments of survivorship bias. It's like if lotto winners went around espousing their strategies for success.

Edit: whoops, s/confirmation bias/survivorship bias/, but both are kinda true.

Oh, sure. Definitely not a million given my hypothetical goal would be to have enough to buy the home and then retire on the rest of the money, but yeah, once you get past a certain point it just becomes a headache to manage.

The point is that it's always at risk so every day you have to choose between locking it in or losing it.

you can probably do that now. the problem is you'd be surrounded by very rich people, or very poor people.

and it'd be even worse if you were the guy fixing the rich peoples' boats, or whatever.

The parable of the Mexican Fisherman: https://aliabdaal.com/newsletter/the-parable-of-the-mexican-...

I feel that the mindset is part of how you get to be really, really rich. If you are easily satisfied, then you will not have the drive to get to enormous levels of wealth. You need a certain type of personality to continue to roll the dice and grind it out to get to that level. The flip side is that even after you get to the top of the mountain, you're still unsatisfied because that is an innate personality quirk and not a result of any external factors.

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