It Takes Purpose to Become a Billionaire | Hacker News Reader

It Takes Purpose to Become a Billionaire

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I've spent some time trying to identify common traits in the Forbes list of billionaires and other similar lists of the world's wealthiest.

Best example of survivorship bias I've seen in a long while.

Isn't that the idea though, perhaps their purpose is what allowed them to survive? Hard to wrap my brain around..

Well, it is like this. The larger the initial population, the greater the probability that long streaks of some favourable outcome will appear purely by change.

So if I see a single monkey throw a die that consistently lands on 6, I might be inclined to reason that something special is going on with the die, or the monkey his throwing. But if I let a billion monkeys throw a die repeatedly, the probability of having long streaks of consecutive '6-es' from a random monkey, is virtually 1, by randomness alone.

Monkey's with streaks you then select out of the initial billion, the rest you discard and then you write about how all hot throwing monkeys like bananas.

Do those categories come off as very broad and generic to anyone else. I feel like these categories can be applied to many companies and their founders, most of whom will not become billionaires.

I think people need to get away from this mentality that you deserve to be a billionaire because of your qualities.

Being a billionaire has very little to do with you. It is more a testament to the wealth of your parents, the gender you were born in, the colour of your skin, and luck. I have no doubt many possess wonderful qualities too, but that doesn't set billionaires apart from the rest of the population. It's what makes them a part of it.

Great! Glad we can just discount an extreme attention to detail but also the ability to look past the trees to see the forest. I'm sure that having the knack for seeing an opportunity and jumping at it is pretty much just a blip on the radar. And the ability to convince your friends & coworkers that your dream is do-able and great is second to just shrug luck.

There are some billionaires who inherited their money. There are some who lucked out with investments. Your last statement makes no sense. What sets them apart from the rest of the population definitely does involve their "wonderful qualities".

Sure, luck plays a big role in things. It takes a combination of other things too: hard work, an unwillingness to settle for "meh, good enough", an ability to convince other people (employees, investors) to believe in you and the ability to know your own weaknesses and bring in people to solve those weaknesses. Let's not just lump these all into the "and the rest" category.

I just read a book that I think would be enjoyable for anyone who has either internally or externally debated these things; "Outliers: The Story of Success" by Malcolm Gladwell.

It's easy to credit them with hard work and think they deserve it. The biggest thing I notice is how many thousands (millions) of other people in the world have the exact same traits ("Seeing past the trees", "Ability to convince other people to believe in you", etc) and fail in our world.

Empty platitudes, not particularly well written.

"Make the world more relevant" -- what does that even mean?

"1. Making the world more beautiful."

I think the world was more beautiful before there were billionaires. Nature is being quickly destroyed by humans, and capitalism isn't helping.

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