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Comment by brushfoot | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me obliquely of what Jack Cowin told an MBA class, as quoted in Rafael Badziag's _The Billion Dollar Secret_:

"You guys have a big disadvantage over what I had. When I finished university, I got a job offer of $6,000 a year, and you're going to get a job offer of $150,000. You're going to develop a lifestyle. You're going to join the golf club, you're going to have private school for your kids. You're going to buy a big mortagage. You are going to become a prisoner of that lifestyle. When I made the decision I was going to go into business, I had everything to gain, not much to lose."

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This is just the myth they build for themselves though.

In reality, you have far more to lose when you start out with nothing because if you fail Daddy's not going to pay for you to go back to school and do your plan B. You have no safety net.

Empirically, this bears out as well. Successful entrepreneurs are overwhelmingly from the upper-middle/upper classes.

I like it because it was useful to me in quitting a well-paying job and venturing out on my own. Which was terrifying! Especially when, two weeks after I quit, a competitor announced they were giving away the feature I built my business around for free. It's been a wild ride.

Yeah, the vast majority of wealthy individuals will insist they "pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps" without realizing the original saying was meant to be satire, while willfully ignoring the hilarious amount of help from family, friends, and, yes, the government as well, they received along the way. They also ignore the biggest factor in success: luck.

This is also why 99% of CEO written self-help books are worker drone manuals --- insisting "you could be like me if you worked real hard too!" helps their bottom-line much more than it helps the person who reads those books.

When I was young everyone told me to start saving early because compound interest. Every dollar you don’t spend today will be $30 when you retire!

That is the least interesting reason to start saving early. In fact it’s such a bad reason it probably puts people off the concept. Few enough people actually listen to it that it makes you wonder.

Every dollar you don’t spend at 25 is a dollar off of your expectation of standard of living. Which is a dollar you don’t need at retirement. And saving early means stock market usage early, and stock market losses early. The sooner you learn not to lose your shirt on the stock market the better. And that’s when you have a few thousand to lose on the market instead of later, when it’s tens of thousands.

Those are the reasons you start early, and start small.

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