Kids are another example. They're expensive, they're annoying, they ruin your health, they take up your free time, they consume all your resources, and they're inherently needy, selfish, and largely incapable of being grateful. Yet raising kids can be profoundly rewarding and fulfilling, in part because of the hardships, and in part because you're contributing to something bigger than just yourself, which is another crucial ingredient of meaning.
Sitting around on a yacht doing nothing is not so different than moving into your parents' basement and doing nothing, save with better scenery. It's the kind of thing you crave when you're burned out, overworked, and jaded, the same way we crave sleep when we're tired and food when we're hungry. It's a reaction to a state of being. But we only desire sleep until rested and we tire of eating once we're sated.
If you ever get to your tropical yacht vacation you may find that, in much the same way, what you thought was a permanent desire was only a temporary one.
Are you not critical of that "personality type"? What point are you trying to make?
Some might be driven by money, but at a certain level it probably switches to a sense of responsibility, but also, it's intoxicating to be at the top where you don't really have to work in the same way, but get to direct what happens. People enjoy power. People enjoy the secrets of what happens at the top. People enjoy the recognition (within their peer group). etc...
I see a lot of people that say “If I won the lottery I’d….” and then describe something they could definitely do without winning the lottery… which makes me think they still would not actually do so if they won
The sea doesn't care how rich you are, and being a helpless dependent is boring and infantilizing no matter how big your boat - and you don't develop skills without taking risks.
Ultimately, I don't think people are often that conscious of their real goals and motivations. It's easy to say you have no choices in life because of financial and time constraints, but I don't think those are the real reasons most people choose to do or not do things.
Peter: ... Nothing.
Lawrence: Nothing, huh?
Peter: I would relax, I would sit on my ass all day ... I would do nothing.
Lawrence: Well you don’t need a million dollars to do nothing, man.
I'm working part time anyway, because it keeps me busy and interacting with people outside my home, and it gives me access to interesting real world problems that I can't really access as an individual person on the interwebs. Having other people depend on me to get things done provides motivation to keep moving on things that I can't seem to manage on my personal projects.
If I liked the kind of organizational management work a CEO does and I was good at it, I'd probably get roped into being a CEO.
Ultimately he mentions that being CEO is a rare opportunity to play a more infinite game and practice the craft of getting really good at something that doesn't have an end
Listen to Snapchat's founder and CEO Evan Spiegel[0] why he didn't sell to Facebook for $3 billion. He even didn't sell to Google which offered 10x more ($30bn) for Snapchat.
Also remember once you have that much money a lot of things become basically free, both figuratively ($100,000 to a billionaire is nothing) and literally (comped rooms, gifts, etc for basically every event and your company(ies) end up footing the bill for most of your expenses).
There's plenty of people who make $5-50 million in a windfall and are never heard from again.
Just to rant a bit more: the Wordpress situation makes this point even more crazy to me. Mullenweg has about 400m and instead of retiring and enjoying life, he’s arguing with anonymous users on Hacker News. No offense against hacker news but defending my life decisions on HN isn’t exactly the first thing I would do if I could do everything I ever wanted. Like, go buy a plane and take flying lessons, or go scuba diving? Nah, I’d rather justify myself on the internet.
In fact, internet communication is much closer to dark-age "public square" type communication. Bring your soapbox to the square, talk loudly, gather a crowd, and listen to the crowd jeer or clap. We haven't had that since the industrial revolution pre-1800s (i.e. at the earliest 1700s)
For the forseeable future, we are in a situation where people will "feel" that the most authentic communication is intentionally said in-front of the internet bystanders. So a CEO posting an intimate reply to an individual with billions of people able to see the intimate reply is more "authentic" than everything else.
(Much closer to dark-age communication implies that we are closer to "old" methods of communication that disappeared for the last couple of centuries. We used to have industrial revolution-type communication medium, one-direction broadcast medium.)
But for me, if I had that kind of business success I'd cash out and go do something that feels actually important. Go get a PhD and take a crack at curing some obscure disease, or setting up a Dyson swarm around the sun, or making a great work of art, or thinking about how to improve elementary education a la Khan Academy; something like that. Then you get to have a real purpose and work toward something that most people don't just by virtue of the fact that it doesn't pay well enough, and you still get to spend plenty of time on your yacht!
Also it's nice to boss people around, probably for the same reason.
You and lots of people say would do something or other. I submit that it's different when you're actually in that position, as opposed to imagining it. Lots of us imagine we're going to go to the gym for years, and give up after a month or two.
But there's a lot more at play when you are rich enough to not worry about money.