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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

It's not about working hard. It's about working smart.

> So much opportunity is either created or destroyed by external circumstances that we don't perceive, let alone control

However, doing nothing guarantees failure. Some aspects of working smart:

1. doing the prep work so when opportunity does come your way, you are capable of taking advantage

2. placing yourself in a situation where opportunity can find you

3. learning to recognize opportunity (it often comes disguised as hard work)

4. be willing to take risks

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(apologies for the small tangential rant; it's a topic I care about :)

I have seen this view towards luck a few times — some variant of "make your own luck" or "put yourself in situations where you're more likely to be lucky", and similar.

I don't object to it by itself, but there's a subtlety that is often missed: it only applies to yourself, not other people. Or perhaps more accurately: it only applies to your choice of action, not evaluating others' results.

The reason I have misgivings is because I have seen it used as a cudgel; someone fails, and a person with this mindset is more prone to rationalize it, saying "oh, they didn't try hard enough" or "it was their own fault, they should be smarter about it."

No.

No matter how hard a person tries, they can still fail, and it may not be their fault at all. At least when it's your own self, you have more information to know if you could have done better. When it's directed at others, it's extremely dicey to make those judgements.

Someone more in tune with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune might be more inclined to actually help that person, rather than blaming them for things outside of their control.

It's tricky, because the "try harder next time" whip is useful, to be sure, but it also can be an enemy of empathy.

> they can still fail

Of course. I never wrote otherwise.

Many successful people I know failed multiple times.

> "it was their own fault, they should be smarter about it."

The successful people I know who failed multiple times and eventually succeeded all blamed themselves for the failures, with "I should have been smarter about it".

The great thing about taking responsibility for one's failures is it is empowering - it means you can succeed by learning why one failed and doing it better next time.

You could consider it like airliners. Crashes are not attributed to "bad luck". The cause is always searched for, and once found, it gets fixed. Over time, this has resulted in incredibly safe airliners.

Do you really expect to successfully ride a bike the first time you swing your leg over the seat? Nope. You fall off, get back on, fall off, get back on, fall off, get back on, hey! I'm riding!

What if you're born in a poor country? Just keep trying?

I learnt to ride with extra wheels attached to the side of the bicycle, and as a result, I almost never fell during that learning process.

Translating the analogy back, what you describe is the entrepreneurial fail-until-you-win method. The alternative method of progression is that of apprenticeship or gradual promotion, which in my country is associated with traditionally middle-class professions like finance, medicine and law. In such a conventional career, success is almost guaranteed, as the number of people entering the profession is very close to the number retiring out of it, and the assumption is that, because the endeavour has always been profitable, it will be for you too.

Ideally, the profession as a whole gradually improves under this system, but no individual member of it has to engage in any more than an average level of risk to be personally successful.

Yeah, well, such safe avenues don't lead to making a billion.

And unsafe avenues aren't an option for the majority of people in the US.

Not buying that. America is not a nation of poor people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States

Most of "poor people" in USA would be considered above average in other countries and continents.

So they're financially secure enough for risky speculative investment?

Context matters. If they moved to those other countries and continents, which have lower costs of living, they’d be fine. But: moving costs money and time they don’t have (since they’ve gotta work 3 jobs to put food on the table), those other countries and continents have even less opportunity to build a business, and so on.

It doesn’t really matter that you think “poor people” aren’t really that poor. They are, and risk is much harder to stomach when it means becoming actually homeless. Denying that is sticking your head in the sand.

Well, how about you actually look?

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2023/04/11/58percent-of-americans-a...

60% of Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck.

Living paycheck-to-paycheck is quite often a lifestyle choice showing more lack of planning and of financial skills than poverty.

Feel free to actually show some empirical evidence to support your assumptions.

Said someone who has never grown up in poverty. rolls eyes

Been in both situations; grew up impoverished, now doing well.

Living paycheck to paycheck is never a lifestyle choice; there are choices that come out of that because even poor people don’t want to feel poor, but given the option, not a single one in most cases would prefer to be paycheck to paycheck.

I grew up under the utter misery of communism. Even my illiterate grandmother working the earth knew to always have a valuable or two put aside to bribe the party representatives in case one of us got sick or in trouble.

That doesn't give you a useful perspective on the logistics of poverty in the US. This isn't some kind of qualification based on a misery meter.

I also lived in the US. My roommate with half my salary had a car twice as expensive as mine. He had house payments while I was renting. Restaurants and bar outings while I stayed home reading. No wonder he was always broke on salary day...

The “stop drinking Starbucks” is old and nonsensical. That isn’t why people are poor.

> That isn’t why people are poor

So for you I guess lazy people don't exist? People who refuse to learn, change and adapt? People who just wanna smoke weed, play xbox, jerk off to pornhub and eat Nachos (not necessarily in that order)? People who'd rather make a quick buck doing some border-line illegal "deals" than have a regular honest job? People who would rather play the popularity game in high school than study? People who would rather slack off around the watercooler at work than do what "the boss" asks? People who prefer to coast although their field is changing under them?

It must be nice to live in a world without such people...

Of course they exist. They are a minority, though, and the trope of representing people in poverty as lazy is tired and old, in addition to inaccurate.

Different worlds it is then. In mine, they are the great majority.

I’m not sure what any of that has to do with the topic at hand? My parents also fled communism.

It’s not that poor people don’t want to save and invest; it’s that because cost of living in most places has far outpaced salaries, there literally is no money to save.

Most Americans live under mountains of debt. My mother had thousands and thousands of dollars in credit card bills because she had to, in order to survive and support a family of four. And we lived in the projects in Brooklyn.

She never told me about it until I was in my twenties, because she never wanted to worry me with it, and moreover, she never wanted me to know we were poor. Pride is a real thing.

This assumes one can afford multiple failures. Being born rich buys you a lot of swings of the bat. Otherwise you can't swing big, and opportunities to connect will be fewer--if any.

Rich kids can afford 'responsibility' because they have money to pay for their mistakes. Poor kids don't.

Best way to be prepared for success? Be born to a rich and well connected family.

How did their parents get rich? Was it because the grandparents was rich?

I think in many cases when you trace it back, it comes down to ... luck (:

Which is funny, since now the descendants of some lucky people get the opportunity to take lots of chances and say "look how hard work pays off — I made my own luck!"

Though that's a pretty simplistic take; I feel like hard work really does pay off, broadly speaking, but also luck plays a (much) bigger role than most give it credit.

Luck will never find the person living in his mom's basement playing video games and griping about inequity.

That you cite this as the alternative shows the limits of your perspective.

I think you miss the point. I believe the point is if you don't try then luck won't help you. Or in other words you can't win the lottery if you don't buy a ticket.

I think you missed my point. All of the trying in the world isn't going to replace the luck that's required for most people to succeed-- be it being born white and in a middle-class or better household in a middle-class-or-better town, not being sidled with familial or health obligations, or even being born with a cognitive profile that has workplace utility. Being comfortable enough to live with a parent and be lazy is already a privilege that a giant chunk of the US population doesn't have. Nobody is arguing that people born into opportune circumstances can succeed without doing anything. They just have the opportunity to make that effort turn into significant results when many others don't.

Tickets are expensive, most people cannot afford more than one. Many are born into debt they have little hope of escaping, much less buying tickets.

Those born wealthy can often buy so many tickets it's virtually guaranteed they'll stumble into something that works, at least once.

No one is saying people don't have to at least lift a finger to try. Just that birth luck affords so many other opportunities that the advice of outliers and the born comfortable isn't transferable.

Given the number of possible alternative realities they could have been born into it, I'd strongly suggest luck has already found such people. It's even possible had they not been born into such an easy existence they might have ultimately done better for themselves ("possible", not likely).

I was pointing out the circular logic in these explanations. Saying someone is rich because their parents were rich (ad-infinitum) is like saying someone is lucky because they are lucky. It is not a useful explanation because you can't use this to do anything. In fact if you use this explanation to decide public policy, like say socialism, then the converse is also true, you make everybody poor, then their descendants will be poor. But obviously in our history on average, we've all been getting richer in the long run.

"Entrepreneurs come from families with money"

https://fortune.com/2015/07/17/entrepreneurs-family-money/

Basically none of the rich people I know came from more than middle class parents. A couple came to America with nothing but a suitcase.

Depends on your circle. So probably not a representative sample. If you live in SoCal there's probably some clustering of survivorship bias.

Of all the people rich today -- or ever -- how many started middle or lower class?

How many came to America with nothing and died, barely survived, went to jail, got deported, peaked at lower middle class, etc.?

If I know a lot of plane crash survivors I still would not recommend getting on an unsafe plane. (I actually only know one crash survivor and would not get on a small plane unless it's a life or death emergency.)

This seems like something that’s changed in recent decades, as would be predicted of course. Most of the older rich people I know were not from upper class homes. Younger rich people (born after 1990) seem to come predominantly from upper middle class and higher. Anecdotal but I’d wager roughly consistent with national trends.

Nearly 100% of the rich people I know had family money. Living expenses now take up a very different amount of people's income than they did before. The skills you need to get a leg up now are very different than they used to be, even in recent history. Anecdata is useless.

I know several very successful entrepreneurs and I know quite a few people with rich parents. I don't see much of a correlation.

In my perception many of the rich kids lack the drive to work as hard as you need to, to become a successful entrepreneur, instead opting for a safer route. Granted, if you are from a really poor background and live in the US without much of a social safety net, I could see how that could hamper your prospects, but that's hardly a problem where I'm from.

Most people are lazy, rich kids already don't have to work. So if they happen to be driven enough to try they can take on many more risks and start more businesses.

If you're surrounded by entrepreneurs (such as SV) it's not a representative sample. Even being born "middle class" is a narrow slice of humanity today, much less everyone ever born.

As of 2019, to be in the financial top 10%, you needed a HOUSEHOLD income of just over 155k. I think that many around here are so utterly out-of-touch with the lives of most people in the US that they can't even reason about the blocks they have to advancement.

> they can still fail

>> Of course. I never wrote otherwise.

I did not mean to imply that you did (:

You touched on a general topic, and I was speaking to that, more than your specific words.

> successful people ... blamed themselves for the failures

I'm sure that's true. But I'm trying to draw a thin, wiggly line between awareness of room for improvement (usually more on a rational level), and blame/judgement (usually more on an emotional level). The former is great, the latter not so much.

I'd wager that there are also a whole lot of un-successful people who blamed themselves for their failures, even if they could do no better. People who hate themselves. People who are unhappy. My commentary is more directed at those people and those who would care about them, than the ones you mention.

> taking responsibility ... you can succeed by learning

This definitely straddles the wiggly line (: One one side is "taking responsibility," and on the other is "it's your fault."

Certainly one should internalize the lesson. But hopefully not the shame/blame. Perhaps neither you nor your successful acquaintences suffer from this affliction, but in my experience many do.

I realize that some people are lazy and looking for excuses to escape responsibility, so perhaps you see my viewpoint as somehow enabling or encouraging that bad behavior. I just want to point out that there are downsides in the other direction too, if taken to puritanical extremes. And I daresay the "being lazy is bad" side of the argument gets a whole lot more headspace in our culture than the "it's okay, there's nothing wrong with you" side. Hence my attempt to bring some balance.

> You could consider it like airliners ...

> ride a bike the first time ...

The thing about airlines is that they operate in a very carefully crafted environment. Planes stay away from each other, are generally aware of each other (notwithstanding that friggin' biplane without a radio that cut me off on downwind... grr), have high maintenance standards, etc. etc. Real life can be much more dense/messy/fast-moving/full of unknowns, I find. You do not always get the luxury of knowing the variables involved.

But the problem with both of your examples is that they assume you can learn and try again. And that's not always the case.

What if you're a passenger on one of those airliners that crashes? What should you have done better, personally?

Born in a poor country? Sorry, no re-try.

Born with a damaged brain or body? Sorry, no re-try.

Have abusive parents? Maybe a few can pull themselves out (probably mostly by luck or the help of others), but it will have lifelong effects.

You get the idea. And those examples are extreme; there are myriad other "softer" struggles people have, with varying levels of control. Depression comes to mind.

So, in conclusion, my whole long-winded reply is just trying to say: sometimes people (like you) express the "you have nobody to blame but yourself" attitude, with good intentions, directed at the sort of enabled people you were talking about, but it gets applied to other people, with heart-wrenching effects.

> The thing about airlines is that they operate in a very carefully crafted environment.

They do now, as the consequence of many crashes.

> And that's not always the case

I liken this as "humans have two legs" and the riposte is "not all humans have two legs". Notice the requirement to insert a missing word, "all". I hope you'll forgive me, because I am rather testy about this sort of waste of time. If I mean "always" or "all" or "100%" I would use those qualifiers. Those qualifiers exist for a reason.

> Born with a damaged brain or body?

Oh criminy. I shouldn't have to add that if you're mentally deranged none of this applies. In fact, I believe I even wrote somewhere here "of sound mind and body" because I know somebody would pipe up with "not everybody likes ice cream".

You have no idea how much you have going for you that you didn't have to work for.

I do not have any advantages the vast bulk of Americans do not also have.

"Are Greg and Emily More Employable Than Lakisha And Jamal"

5000 job applications with evenly weighted resumes randomly paired with names more commonly given to white children and names more commonly given to Black children. The "White" applicants were FIFTY PERCENT more likely to get a callback.

https://www.nber.org/papers/w9873

Here's one from Georgetown that follows performance disparity and wealth, with marked differences appearing in kindergarten.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/23780231198317...

Here's an article from the fed discussing a study that shows the average white family has just under 5x more assets than your average Black family, and crucially, that intergenerational wealth doesn't play a big role in that:

https://www.bostonfed.org/news-and-events/news/2023/03/bosto....

There is so much more empirical proof that the US simply is not a meritocracy. You must be deliberately shielding yourself from it or astonishingly naive to think otherwise.

The business I started in the 1980s was mail order and nobody knew my name, color, background, religion, sex, etc.

Today, with the internet, nobody needs to know anything about you for you to run a successful business.

You seem to require that I must be born wealthy. I was born on an Air Force base and spent many years living in base housing. If you're from a military family, you know that ain't wealthy and ain't the path to wealth.

My father grew up in the Depression, and his father apologized profusely to him for asking for a portion of the money my father made collecting scrap so he could buy food. My mother lost everything (and I mean everything) in WW2.

I've posted before about wealthy friends who came to America with a suitcase.

The idea you must be born into wealth in order to be successful in America is simply false. I know too many wealthy people (including Blacks and women) who demonstrate otherwise.

Here's a recipe to move from poverty to the middle class:

1. don't do drugs

2. don't do crimes

3. stay in school

4. learn what the school provides

5. get a loan for college

6. go to college, pick a major that pays well, learn the material rather than cheat

It's a pretty good default strategy. It doesn't take any miracles or unusual effort.

> astonishingly naive to think otherwise

Maybe you should tell that to the millions of poor people attempting to get into the US.

I think I am talking past you in some way; sorry about that.

I am not trying to play word games or pull "gotchas" on your phrasing. I think I have a straightforward underlying message; I hope you can hear it through my imprecise miasma of words.

Maybe you already heard it, but are only replying to the remaining small tidbits you object to; I'm unsure.

In truth, I have a similar frustration, where I feel the fragmentary quotations of mine you reply to do not give justice to the larger context in which they were written. But I don't hold it against you; I know that struggle.

Anyway, one more attempt:

You presented some simple advice ("It's not about working hard. It's about working smart."), and as mentioned I don't disagree with it per se.

But in my life, I have seen that advice used "for evil", if you will. (I do not mean to imply that you intend it that way, of course).

And in particular, I do find that people giving and following that advice are often either willfully or ignorantly (more often the latter) blind to the downsides that can go along with it — vis-a-vis empathy towards others, for instance. Of course, I do not mean to imply that you are blind to it. I don't know you.

So, I hoped to give some voice to that other perspective, is all. I find it to be under-represented, in discussions like these. Hugely so.

----

Re: humans having two legs: I truly am not sure if you are messing with me, or if I really failed to deliver my idea so totally. I swear I don't mind if it's the former, though I feel it is the latter (: Help me improve my communications protocol?

I thought our sequence went something like this:

you: work hard and learn from your mistakes

me: agreed. but also, beware of assigning blame for misfortune

you: here are some examples of how learning from mistakes is useful/empowering [airliners, bikes]

me: yes, and here are some examples of misfortune that's not blame-worthy [unlucky birth, etc.]

you: my examples were not meant to be all-encompassing [humans have two legs]

me: ???

Actually, writing it out maybe makes it more clear. Perhaps you feel I was disagreeing with your initial advice, and trying to counter it somehow. But rather, I am trying to add something to it; draw a bigger circle around everything on the Venn diagram, so to speak. Not cross yours out.

A big caveat is #4 should read "be willing and able to take risks". If you're not living in country with a social safety net or have the resources to self-support failure, risk taking is simply not an option.

Not just #4, all of them

It's much easier to do prep work when you have a social safety net to keep you clothed, housed and fed while you're prepping.

It's much easier to place yourself in a situation where the opportunity can find you if you know that if opportunity doesn't find you, you'll be ok.

It's much easier to take a gamble that a bunch of hard work will lead to a fantastic opportunity if the cost of it not leading to an opportunity is very low.

I've missed at least 4 opportunities to become a billionaire. I bet a lot of readers here can say the same.

What percentage of readers here would you estimate have missed a chance of becoming a billionaire?

Probably nearly all of them over 30 of sound mind and body, that live in America, avoided the lure of alcohol, drugs, and crime, got themselves educated in a useful skill, and avoided the tar pits of victimhood and grievances.

By what avenue?! Inventing a unicorn business and developing the connections to sell it to the people who matter? Buying the right lottery ticket?

> By what avenue?!

Leveraging everything you had and bought MSFT when it went public. Or AMZN. Or Bitcoin. Or Apple. As the value of the stock increased, buy more on margin.

Of course, this is risky. Note I mentioned a willingness to take risks.

Look at the median incomes throughout the us, then look at the living expenses, and honestly consider whether speculative investing would be even remotely feasible, or even a morally defensible financial strategy with other people relying on you? Not being put into a position where other people rely on you— elderly parents, relative's children, etc— is pretty lucky in most socio-economic sections in our country.

11.6% of Americans are below the poverty line, not 50%.

You can start an investment program for $100 at robinhood.com.

Do you know how absurdly low the federal poverty level is compared to actual living expenses, anywhere? Do you honestly think $ > FPL = able to speculatively invest? Lots of basic needs assistance programs start tapering once you hit 133% of the regionally-adjusted federal poverty level and many don't disqualify until you until you hit multiples... And we still have a lot of food insecurity, housing insecurity, and lack of access to medical care among people who don't qualify.

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2023/04/11/58percent-of-americans-a...

58% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. Throwing money into some Robinhood investment when you're living paycheck to paycheck, especially if you're responsible for other people, as many people in lower socio-economic brackets are, is completely irresponsible.

> 58% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck

That's one of the most misleading statistics ever. Lots and lots of people live paycheck to paycheck because they see money they spend money. I know people who live in McMansions with new cars, spiffy threads, and expensive furniture who spend every dime. Every time they get a raise, they ramp up the spending. When I worked at Boeing, payday was every other Thursday. People would leave the building and run to their cars. This is because they'd already spent the money and needed to get the paycheck deposited ASAP.

They're not poor people. What they are are fiscally irresponsible.

A corollary is the percentage of people with less than $500 in the bank. Well, I have less than $500 in the bank. It's not because I'm poor, it's because I put every dime to work for me in investments.

BTW, what do you think of those millions of people dressing up like Barbie and going to see Taylor Swift concerts, spending a thousand bucks and more on travel, tickets, costumes, etc.? Me, it shows Americans are not mired in poverty.

With only $100 you're basically going to have to win the lottery: get the right symbol (most won't be) at an ideal buy time, and sell at an ideal selling point. Be sure not to go bankrupt or homeless while buying those tickets and waiting for that perfect timing.

LOL. Every investment program starts with a first step. AMZN opened at $35 a share. Buying 3 shares would be worth what, today? North of $100,000. Not bad, eh?

Are you suggesting that if 100 times as many people bought those stocks at the right time, we'd have 100 times as many billionaires? What exactly would be generating all that extra wealth?

There are a fixed number of shares. If A buys 100 shares, there are 100 shares fewer available for others to buy.

Until a corporation dilutes the shares by issuing more.

Yes, that was kind of my point. I'm not really seeing how many more people could have possibly become mega-rich just by having bought more of the shares that happened to make the few people that actually did mega-rich, which seemed to be what you were suggesting - apologies if I misinterpreted.

"willingness to take risks" and betting the farm on a tech stock _continuosly_ over 20+ years are two very different things

I happen to know a person who did exactly that, and became very wealthy.

Making lots of money is usually proportional to how much risk you're willing to take.

How many more did the same, but only managed to yield spectacular failure? Such lottery wins are not repeatable, and relying on them is horrible advice.

I pointed out upthread the willingness to take risk. Nothing is guaranteed. But you can tilt the odds very much in your favor.

BTW, AMZN had far, far better odds than any lottery.

"I know a guy" is a useless measure of whether or not something is feasible for most people. There's a lot of useful data out there about this stuff.

I don't name names for privacy reasons, not because I'm making things up.

The Seattle Times reported in the 1990s that there were over 10,000 Microsoft millionaires living in the Seattle area, excluding housing. And that was when a million dollars was real money.

Ten thousand.

There's probably a similar figure for Amazon employees.

Buying the right lottery ticket is the closest chance to this being accurate. If you look at the percentages in social strata and honestly evaluate the logistical and cultural paths most people would have to access billionaire-level opportunity, it's apparent that American meritocracy at the upper echelons is a fucking joke.

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