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Comment by quellhorst | Hacker News Reader

How about listening to actual rich people, not those who run websites acting as if they know what made someone rich.

In that case, may I recommend The Millionaire Next Door?

http://www.amazon.com/Millionaire-Next-Door-Thomas-Stanley/d...

EDIT: Must say I'm not really sure why I was downmodded; this is an excellent book (a classic really) that provides advice from 'actual rich people'. Maybe it's the get-rich-slowly aspect?

When you get down to 0 or -1 often it's just assholes being arbitrary or pedantic. Don't worry about it. Asking why you were downmodded is a sure way to get dowmodded more though; it annoys people.

On the other hand, saying "I know I'll get downmodded for this, but..." is a sure way to get upmodded:)

I haven't read this, but Nasim Taleb talks about it a lot in Fooled by Randomness. For example, Thomas Stanley, the book's author, states that risk taking is a common characteristic that rich people have. Nasim basically says "Yeah, sure, but what about the masses of people who are poor because of their risk taking?"

I recommend reading Fooled by Randomness first and then, if you're still interested, The Millionaire Next Door.

That's a good point. Lots of the factoids about rich people don't say anything about all the people who used those approaches. So, besides things like common sense and intuition, it is hard to get a statistically accurate idea about the correlation between the methods and their users' success.

And Felix Dennis' How to Get Rich. http://www.amazon.com/How-Get-Rich-Greatest-Entrepreneurs/dp...

btw failure stories may be even more interesting.... generalizing from incomplete data sets (winners only) is dangerous.

Only if you have a scientific mindset. Otherwise it might be just inspiring ;)

A lot of rich people didn't theorize much about how to get rich. They just followed their gut feeling about how to execute, and they did it with confidence. Maybe the confidence makes all the difference.

I think quite a lot of poor people also just followed their gut feeling about how to execute, and did it with confidence. But of course you don't get to hear so much from them, for obvious reasons.

Yeah, maybe. Can't say without reliable data.

What do you do if your gut feeling tells you, with confidence, to study what rich people did before attempting it yourself?

Just saying :)

Unavoidable.

How about this less scientific but more practical approach. Go ahead & listen to W Buffet, Cuban or anyone else because they made it. You have a limited amount of listening you can do.

Then use sense, common or otherwise.

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