Why You Shouldn't Imitate Bill Gates If You Want To Be Rich (bbc.com) 311
dryriver writes: BBC Capital has an article that debunks the idea of "simply doing what highly successful people have done to get rich," because many of those "outliers" got rich under special circumstances that are not possible to replicate. An excerpt: "Even if you could imitate everything Gates did, you would not be able to replicate his initial good fortune. For example, Gates's upper-class background and private education enabled him to gain extra programming experience when less than 0.01% of his generation then had access to computers. His mother's social connection with IBM's chairman enabled him to gain a contract from the then-leading PC company that was crucial for establishing his software empire. This is important because most customers who used IBM computers were forced to learn how to use Microsoft's software that came along with it. This created an inertia in Microsoft's favor. The next software these customers chose was more likely to be Microsoft's, not because their software was necessarily the best, but because most people were too busy to learn how to use anything else. Microsoft's success and marketshare may differ from the rest by several orders of magnitude but the difference was really enabled by Gate's early fortune, reinforced by a strong success-breeds-success dynamic."
Very simply expressed in xkcd.. (Score:5, Funny)
https://xkcd.com/1827/ [xkcd.com]
Re: (Score:2)
cherry picking to support "privilege" propaganda
Even the summary, actually. We're told the Bill Gates got a lucky break when his mother had contacts with IBM. But then, how did IBM establish such market share that their momentum carried along everybody that was caught up in it? Maybe if you want to be rich, don't emulate Bill Gates, but do emulate Thomas Watson.
Re:Very simply expressed in xkcd.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Gates DID get a lucky break - there's no question about it. However that "break" was to be born into a well-off and well-connected family.
And, honestly... if you can pull that off, it's almost certainly the best way to "become" rich yourself.
Re:Very simply expressed in xkcd.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Gates DID get a lucky break - there's no question about it. However that "break" was to be born into a well-off and well-connected family.
That's not the half of it. He also had the "good fortune" to pick a mother who could persuade the chairman of IBM to cut her son a ridiculously favourable deal.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
The IBM team wanted CPM, but Garry Kidall was flying in his private plane when the IBM people called at his office. He simply did not believe his luck and assumed it was a hoax. The IBM guys went/phoned home "no deal here" Mrs Gates must have been present when the call came in and said "My son has an OS you could use" - not knowing the difference between a Basic interpreter and an OS. why else would the IBM guys have gone a
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Which really isn't the case. Rather, IBM went to Gary Kildall and Digital Research, which had the CP/M operating system, to see if they'd rewrite it for the forthcoming IBM PC. Kildall wasn't around when IBM showed up, so IBM went to Microsoft, who they were already dealing with for languages like BASIC.
That's the short. Here's a more complete story. [pcmag.com]
Re:Very simply expressed in xkcd.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft didn't have an operating system. They had to get it from someone else. IBM basically went to talk with Microsoft because Gates' mother, who used to be a bank manager, did benefit work on weekends with people connected with IBM's management. And Bill Gates' father, one of top lawyers in the area, helped craft their (highly favorable) contract with IBM.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: Thomas Watson, Sr (Score:3)
"...NCR assigned Watson to run the struggling NCR agency in Rochester, New York. As an agent, he got 35% commission and reported directly to Hugh Chalmers, the second-in-command at NCR. In four years Watson made Rochester effectively an NCR monopoly by using the technique of knocking the main competitor, Hallwood, out of business, sometimes resorting to sabotage of the competitor's machines.[6] As a reward he was called to the NCR head office in Dayton, Ohio.[4]
"In 1912, the company was found guilty of viol
Re: (Score:2)
Watson basically came clean out of that because he gave a lot to a local charity when there was some sort of natural disaster. I think he never served his sentence.
Re: (Score:3)
Yes, the article is also cherry-picking. But that doesn't mean studying only the successful business people isn't a great example of survivorship bias. Notice that you picked Andrew Carnegie and Sam Walton instead of Andrew Carnegie's neighbor and Sam Walton's classmate.
Re: (Score:2)
Right, I'm pointing that you used two "survivors" as counter-examples to survivorship bias. To attack this scientifically, you would need to analyze an entire population of people and examine both their qualities and circumstances. You can't criticize someone's anecdotal argument as anecdotal, then counter with another anecdote.
being completely with out (Score:5, Insightful)
scruples didn't hurt. He had little problem with raiding others ideas and pushing them out of the market. Many of the things he did to get on top of the pile would be actionable today.
Re:being completely with out (Score:4, Interesting)
scruples didn't hurt. He had little problem with raiding others ideas and pushing them out of the market. Many of the things he did to get on top of the pile would be actionable today.
Google suggests otherwise - industrial-scale copyright infringement? Just ignore it and no one will do anything about it. Global tax evasion? Get the law changed and move on - tax is so "statist", this is the (new) age of the unaccountable corporation. They're not doing exactly the same things Gates did, but they are doing their things in the same style, and that's what actually works.
Re:being completely with out (Score:5, Insightful)
Aka "it's better to ask for forgiveness than for permission".
Re: (Score:2)
Google suggests otherwise
Support the most fashionable presidential candidate and you can be forgiven a LOT.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
A major piece of luck for him was pricing MSDOS at $35 when UCSD Pascal and CPM were $50. He did that because MSDOS was not as good as the other two. The luck came into play because hardly anyone knew what an operating system was so they simply picked the cheapest one. Luck caused his cheaper, inferior product to end up with a huge 'first mover's advanatge'.
Re:being completely with out (Score:4, Insightful)
One of the stories I heard was his contract with IBM allowed him to set the prices of the other OSes.
Which brings us to the real smart/lucky thing Gates did, signed a very good contract that let MS keep control of DOS and perhaps the above.
This was possible for several reasons, coming from a family of lawyers, and IBM, due to the antitrust actions on them, being eager to look like they weren't a monopoly.
Re: (Score:2)
MS-DOS came later, when the PC clones arrived.
Re: (Score:2)
You're right, I have forgotten the details. I have an IBM 5150 sitting on the desk next to me with a 5MB Tallgrass disk in it.
Re:being completely with out (Score:5, Insightful)
He knew what the big thing was, that's why he said the Internet was a fad. It also explains why you had to add third-party patches to Windows 3.11 to get your computer on the Internet.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Thank you, I couldn't remember the name. But yeah, without that third-party software you couldn't connect to the Internet. That's how much Bill Gates knew the future. Not at all.
Re: (Score:2)
You obviously did not live through the heyday of Microsoft's monopoly. Microsoft's OS monopoly may have been the strongest monopoly in the history of man. It was the first monopoly to cover the entire planet.
Step 1 to being like BG has nothing to do with (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Step 1 to being like BG has nothing to do with (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Special circumstances happen all of the time. You just need to recognize when they are happening around you.
Re:Step 1 to being like BG has nothing to do with (Score:5, Funny)
Again, the best chance most people have for "special circumstances" is to jump into the way of a rich person's car.
Re:Step 1 to being like BG has nothing to do with (Score:4, Insightful)
If you've convinced yourself or somebody else has convinced you that you have no chance to make "special circumstances" for yourself, then you've already lost. Enjoy the lower or lower-middle class lifestyle that you've consigned yourself to. Yes luck plays a role. But if you don't at least try, you'll never get anywhere.
Re:Step 1 to being like BG has nothing to do with (Score:4, Insightful)
One of the characteristics of being middle-class is having leisure time. No matter how much money you're making, working 14hours/day, 7 days/week is not middle class, upper or lower.
Re: (Score:2)
Most of that family achieved upper-middle-class status by hard work and initiative. One achieved upper-class status by risking everything they had on something that looked like the Next Big Thing and managing to survive.
Lots of people bet heavily on the Next Big Thing, worked hard, and wound up somewhere from upper-middle-class and bankruptcy.
The lesson is that, if you work hard and show initiative, you can probably get into the upper middle class.
Re: (Score:2)
No, they don't. Otherwise they wouldn't be called "special", would they?
Re: (Score:2)
They occur continuously in the economy but the vast majority of opportunities are not exploited. Usually the reason is that the person in the middle of the circumstance does not realize that they are in the middle of one or they don't take action. You are looking at it through the lens of 'survivor bias'. You only see the opportunities that were captured, not the ones that were missed.
On the other hand almost all of the exploited circumstances are non-repeatable. Gates got the PC monopoly, that simply can't
Re: (Score:3)
There's no evidence that Gates recognized special circumstances. He got into software early on, but lots of people did that. I was programming mainframes and my TRS-80 when the IBM PC came out. He completely missed the future of the Internet, and his GUI development followed Apple's. His idea of a tablet was a heavy and expensive portable device running XP. Microsoft made its name initially by producing what was arguably the best BASIC for 8-bit home computers, but there were plenty of other BASICs.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Special circumstances are not uncommon, but valuable special circumstances are rare.
Being able to fit 3 golf balls in your mouth is special, just not something that you can easily capitalize.
Re: (Score:2)
True. I can wiggle my ears independently, which I suspect is rarer than having my level of programming ability, but guess which I can get paid well for?
Re:Step 1 to being like BG has nothing to do with (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually I'd put it this way: most people don't have special circumstances that are as easily recognizable in advance.
For example, Mum being chummy with the chairman of IBM at a time they're launching a product you're interested in is pretty trivially recognizable as a special circumstance.
Risk vs Reward (Score:2)
Once you get to middle class status, which in the US you can do on two college level salaries, you are less willing to "risk it all" to get 10x wealthier.
Re: (Score:2)
By that token then rich people wouldn't want to get richer either. But the reality is human greed is infinite.
Re: (Score:2)
Greed is essentially unlimited. When money becomes irrelevant to your lifestyle, because you can buy anything that's on sale that you want, it serves as a way of keeping score among your peers.
However, wealth, like most other things, comes with diminishing returns. I live a very comfortable life, and it wouldn't be all that much better if I earned five times as much as I do. (Not that I'd refuse it - see first paragraph). Also, humans hate loss more than they love gain.
Also, in the US, success at s
Re:Step 1 to being like BG has nothing to do with (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want to get rich you need to partake in an activity that has the potential to generate a lot of money. I have often heard people complain that they give everything working in a job and can barely keep their heads above water. Get a clue, working in a job makes the company owner rich, not you. You also need to do something that amplifies your actions. For example it is hard for a doctor to get really rich. That's because they are paid per action they perform and there is no way to scale. If you invent a drug you can get really rich since the drug goes into a factory which amplifies your invention. You also need to understand the difference between capital and income. It is far easier to get rich off from capital transactions that it is off from income.
Gates' success is impossible to replicate. He had a "first movers" advantage that is gone now. He was also greatly helped by "network effects". These are also things you need to understand to get really rich.
Re: Step 1 to being like BG has nothing to do with (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
BG's domination of the desktop market is impossible to replicate. That particular 'first mover's advantage' is long gone.
Re: (Score:3)
A recent example of a huge first mover's advantage is Uber. You don't have to have a market the size of Uber's, there are many smaller markets that also will work.
Re: (Score:2)
And Uber isn't really that profitable. As far as I know they are still operating at a loss. Also, there's nothing preventing somebody coming along and taking a piece of the pie. I could install 3 or 4 different ride hailing services on my phone and check the best price from each, and the drivers could also be working for multiple companies at the same time with relative ease.
Compare that to something like Microsoft. It's not so easy to make a competing operating system or office suite because by their na
Re: (Score:2)
You are describing network effects. There are some network effects in ride sharing -- the more drivers on the platform, the faster you will get a ride, but they are nowhere near as strong at the network effects between the operating system and the packaged software market.
Re: (Score:2)
It is wrong for someone to say BG's success is impossible to replicate. It would be more accurate to say there are no actions you can take which will even give you a 1% chance of replicating BG's success. Probably not even a 0.01% chance. There are only a few people living in the US with BG's level of success, and probably hundreds of thousands of people who worked just as hard and just as smart as him.
There are plenty of things you can do to give yourself a good chance of reaching a $10+ million net worth,
Re: (Score:2)
Gates' success is impossible to replicate. He had a "first movers" advantage that is gone now. He was also greatly helped by "network effects". These are also things you need to understand to get really rich.
He also had much less regulation with regards to IP laws - or perhaps the advantage of the IP laws at the time, no one really knew how they applied to technology. And having a rich father that will humor you with a $50k gift/loan to start up a business (not saying it's wrong, but not necessarily available to everyone). And 50k at that time was worth a whole lot more than what 50k is today.
Re: (Score:3)
Don't worry about IP laws, just don't blatantly abuse them like Napster did. There is very little you can do to stop an IP troll from targeting you if they want to. You best defense is to stay off from their radar.
BTW - you can start a software company for almost nothing now. Back in BG's time PCs were $3,000 inflation adjusted to like $20,000 now. You can get a great PC today for $1000 and you probably already own it. AWS and Google will both let your try the cloud for free for a year. Lack of capital is
Re: (Score:2)
Back around 1980, starting a software company was expanding into a wide-open field, and it was possible to do very well without doing anything else extraordinary. That's no longer the case, and the fact that it's easy to start a software company means that most people can do it if they have a decent idea. In order to make it big, you have to have an idea that's either highly insightful or really lucky.
Re: (Score:2)
Software is in its infancy, it will still be going strong 200 years from now. We have barely scratched the surface of what is possible. Just look at the rise of self-driving cars. A huge revolution will occur when someone figures out how to get AIs to write decent software. So don't give up on your software startup yet, instead focus on the future and don't don't try to rebuild past successes.
Re:Step 1 to being like BG has nothing to do with (Score:5, Insightful)
Starting your own company is a huge piece of it since it gives you the capital piece. Do you know about IRS section 1202 stock? With 1202 stock your first $10M of capital gains is tax free. 1202 stock is Small Business Stock. The federal government and many states do not tax gains from this type of stock since it is a major way jobs are created.
But... this company has to have an amplification effect. That is why it is so easy to make a lot of money in software. The marginal cost of 'amplification' (making another copy) is zero. Zero amplifications costs really lowers the amount of capital you need. It is certainly possible to start a software company while working else where to cover your basic expenses.
Re: (Score:2)
With most people it already starts at not having any special circumstances, at least none that could in any way be used for their benefits. Actually, for most people, "special circumstances" happening usually means that they have to compensate them in some way to keep things going...
Re: (Score:3)
Having innate knowledge of a subject is a special circumstance.
OK, what subject would a kid in some slum have innate knowledge about that is in any way monetizeable?
Having undeniable charisma is a special circumstance
Great, and now for the other 99% of the population?
Being able to identify people that can do the jobs you need done and keeping them together is a special circumstance.
Same answer.
Owning the only lumberyard that didnt blow away in a hurricane is a special circumstance.
Agreed! Too bad it ain't the case for nearly everyone.
None of that has much to do with rich mommies and daddies
No, all of that has to do with being extremely lucky. By that logic, I can play the lottery, too.
With most people it already starts at them not being able to find out what "special ability" they might have. To take one of your examples, finding out that you're good at organizing people and ma
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Again, playing the lottery has higher success rates than that.
This is basically what's wrong in the country today. Until not so long ago, you could actually get to a comfortable life by being productive, working hard, giving something useful to the community. Not rich, mind you, that still took a lot of luck, that special "right place at the right time" kind of luck. But you could actually get somewhere. A single working person in a family of 4 could sustain them. Buy a house, have a car, see your kids grow
Re: (Score:2)
Depends what your definition of "success" is.
Owning a house, a car and being able to sustain your immediate family by yourself is now falling very much into the definition of "successful". 40 years ago it was "standard"; nowadays it's "successful".
Re: (Score:2)
Simply recognizing when a special circumstance hits you in the head is a special circumstance. How many people do you know say -- wow, I thought of that first! But they did nothing with their thoughts.
Re: (Score:2)
...or, rather, they couldn't do anything with that thought.
Lack of capital, connections or skill could have blocked them off.
Re: (Score:2)
Simply saying "Lack of capital, connections or skill could have blocked them off." exhibits a mindset that is not going to make you rich.
"The easiest way to make a small fortune is to start with a large one."
Re: (Score:2)
...unless you live in a hole in Botswana you have education readily available. If you want to know something "innately", just pay attention in school...
WTF are you talking about? That's a big, crowded hole [bbc.co.uk]. 57 million children isn't a huge piece of the population, but it's a hell of a lot more than a "hole in Botswana".
Re: (Score:2)
OK, how do I become charismatic? I do well enough. I have a wife and son I love very much, and I have some very good friends. I'm not inspirational. I can't read people enough to feed them what they want. (There was a time, before I was married, when I would have loved to have women throw their bodies at me.) If I can't learn to be charismatic, then knowing where charisma can get me does me no good.
Since I don't have much charisma, and can't catch the flying bodies and put them to work for me, I do
Survivorship Bias (Score:5, Insightful)
The Misconception: You should focus on the successful if you wish to become successful.
The Truth: When failure becomes invisible, the difference between failure and success may also become invisible.
Survivorship Bias; You Are Not So Smart [youarenotsosmart.com]
Re: Survivorship Bias (Score:2)
Dude, that was a painfully long read but I thank you for it.
Let me see here (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
So it was (1) his mom knowing the chairman at IBM in charge of the PC project, and (2) him
Re:Let me see here (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Let me see here (Score:4, Informative)
Grew up in Silicon Valley at exactly the right time.
Marketed Steve Wozniak's brilliance, repeatedly.
Figured out that how people interact with a machine is as important as the capabilities of the machine itself.
Re: (Score:2)
Why you shouldn't imitate yourself (Score:5, Insightful)
I was very active in startups between 1995 and 2000. Many entrepreneurs made a lot of money, and many lost the money again, because after the trick that earned them the cash, they thought they were pretty smart and wanted to replicate the success by investing in newer startups. Then they found out the hard way it wasn't how smart or special they are that made them successful at first, but that they were at the right place at the right time.
Re: (Score:2)
While what you say is true, there are people who do have a knack, like the father of one my employees who was a wealthy merchant in Karachi before partition. He didn't believe partition was really going to happen, and ended up walking from Karachi to Mumbai with nothing but the clothes on his back. A few years later, he was a wealthy merchant in Mumbai -- although obviously not Gates-level wealthy which always takes some luck.
There's an element here of nothing ventured, nothing gained. If getting rich is
Re: (Score:2)
Got caught up in that myself. Worked for a startup back in the late 90's that was acquired and made a lot of money for the founder and the ground-floor employees (but nothing for me, jumped on that bandwagon too late). Years later, the founder reached out to me, told me he was starting up a new venture, wanted me as employee #1, VP position, stock options, chance to lead the technical direction of the company. I jumped at the opportunity - although by then I was old and jaded enough that I wouldn't norm
Re: (Score:2)
Well... after a couple of years of working nights and weekends and not having much of anything to show for it I started to realize that even a blind squirrel finds a nut every once in a while... lesson learned, I guess.
On the other hand nothing ventured, nothing gained. Working for startup is something you are investing your time in (not money). Some people are more conservative in their time investments, others are more aggressive. Just like any investment, as long as you can sleep at night, you are probably near your risk tolerance level.
William and Robert Gates? (Score:2)
Jokes aside, it's not hard (Score:5, Insightful)
Hard work - Don't discount this. Yes, connections and money make things easier, but it still takes work. A lot of it.
Intelligence - Hardest work on the planet won't always get you further.
Sheer flat out luck - Being the hardest working smart person doesn't help if you get a crippling illness or just at the wrong time. Being born wealthy or with connections is genetic lottery.
You pretty much need a lot of all three to get super wealthy. Two will get you into a decent place and you'll do fine.
Re: (Score:2)
Instead they put it down to being able to overcome the fear of risk and uncertainty.
Re: (Score:2)
No, you don't need "luck" to get rich. You need "luck" only to get super-rich.
Re: (Score:2)
You need the luck to be in a society that allows social mobility. Perhaps the majority of the worlds population doesn't have that luck.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, the majority of the world's population lives in Islamic, progressive, or socialist states; of course, they don't allow social mobility. Which is why we need to keep that crap out of the US.
But here, we're talking about whether American nerds can emulate Bill Gates, not whether some goat herder from the middle of Sudan or Congo can overcome the self-created limitations
Re: (Score:2)
Those three will get you the Nobel prize, not rich.
Getting rich also involves the 'vision' thing. You have to be able to project out into the future and see where things will be, not where they are today. That's how you sort out the good ideas from the bad ones. You also need a firm grasp of economics since at some point your company has to make money.
Re: (Score:2)
To get rich you need three things...
No, you just need one thing. Luck. That's it. It is now an objective fact that you are more likely to be rich by being born to a wealthy family than you are through any amount of intelligence or hard work.Too much wealth is controlled by too few people, and the roadblocks in the way of you becoming one of the wealthy keep getting higher.
Sure, people trot out these rags to riches stories but they are black swans (and most don't even start in rags). Upward mobility is generally a farce, and the "American Dre
Re: (Score:2)
how about (Score:2)
How about being like Steve Jobs? Or like Larry Ellison? Or like Sergey Brin? How about the millions of tech millionaires that came to the US as immigrants, often growing up poor? The real "privilege" that Bill Gates had was that he came from an intact, high IQ, two parent family that valued education and hard work. It probably also helped that he got out of the soul crushing US public education system early.
The real reason that you shouldn't try to be like Bill Gates is simply that trying to become a billio
If you just work hard enough you can do it too (Score:5, Informative)
You'll be super rich and successful too, honest. Just listen to all the successful people who believe this...
Sure, hard work is part of it, but as this article points out it is only part of it. Coming from the correct womb and happening to be in the right place at the right time seems to have a lot more to do with it.
There are plenty of people who work their asses off and get no where.
Re: (Score:2)
Correct.
Correct again. But "the right womb" isn't the womb of a millionaire or billionaire woman, it's the womb of a woman in a stable marriage with a good husband, the womb of a woman who values education, and instills the right values in her kids.
Being in the right place at the right time isn't luck,
Just close enough to the truth to be misleading. (Score:5, Insightful)
It is true that there are a lot of people that claim that since monopolists are successful and charge high prices for poor products, you can become successful by charging high prices for a poor product. That generally doesn't work for non-monopolists. On the other hand, the emphasis on Bill G's parents does ignore the fact that IBM offered the same opportunity to Digital Research, which turned them down. And IBM offered a word processor of its own - can't have more advantages than that - and it failed in the marketplace. It also offered an OS - what happened to that? Maybe it was higher quality than Windows, but it was 10 times as expensive and the only print driver it came with was for a single dot-matrix printer.
Re: (Score:2)
Summary (Score:2)
Choose your parents well.
Pfft (Score:2)
I can jump a chair
It's just luck (Score:2)
Yes the thing is most success is simply based on luck and also with how much money your parents give you and their connections. But mostly it is being at the right time at the right place with the right product. For every successful businessman there are million of others who failed, but not necessarly because they where bad but because they just where at the wrong time. If being successfull was only based on how much you where willing to work hard there would millions of Bill Gates running around.
But I WANT to imitate Bill Gates' life! (Score:2)
What about those of us who want to imitate Bill Gates' life?!
I want to start with being born a son of the richest banking family in the state of Washington. After all, being born rich [youtube.com] is a good way to tweak the odds of success in life.
The problem with my plan is Doc forgot the flux capacitor and so the time machine won't work...
Geek Mythology. (Score:3)
Microsoft was selling customized microcomputer BASICs to Fortune 500 clients in the mid seventies. MBASIC was the first product for the micro to reach a million dollars in sales. By 1980, Microsoft was offering a full suite of programming languages for CP/M and was moving into operating systems before being approached by IBM. The notion that Microsoft was am insignificant or invisible player in the industry before the IBM PC is just plain nonsense.
What Gates offered IBM was a serviceable and perhaps more importantly a uniquely affordable 16 Bit CP/M clone + MBASIC, etc., in time for the scheduled launch of the IBM PC. I doubt that the IBM PC team gave a damn how Gates sourced or developed the package so long as it was ready on time.
Re:Education and hard work (Score:5, Insightful)
The most successful ones, though, combined psychopathy with the hard work of others.
Re: (Score:2)
The off-cited 1 in 5 Australian study was badly misreported by the press. It found [reuters.com] 5.76% could be classified as psychopaths, 10.42% were dysfunctional with psychopathic characteristics, and overall 21% showed some psychopathic traits. Crucially, they did not give a comparison for these metrics to the general population. The press added up all these numbers and misrep
Re: (Score:2)
think you have success and filthy rich confused
Re: (Score:2)
I could either mod you up or reply. Hopefully someone else will mod you up. One thing I learned from grad school and watching my fellow classmates fail to complete is that one needed (1) some ability, and (2) grit. If success requires psychopathy like the fellow below brings up, what is the price of your soul? Don't believe in a soul, what is the price of your self-respect? No self-respect, and psychopathy is all you have left, you'd better hope no one gets in a position to treat you the way you have treate
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Imagine Warren Buffett if he were born on an island where hunting skill was valuable. He'd be poor. The best hunter would be the wealthy one. Don't ignore the place you live.
Warren Buffett makes this point often when talking about his good fortune.
He acknowledges how lucky he was to be born into the circumstances he was and also at the time he was..
Re: (Score:2)