Apple's Tim Cook: If You Work Only for Money, You Will Never Be Happy – Fortune | Hacker News Reader

Apple's Tim Cook: If You Work Only for Money, You Will Never Be Happy – Fortune

fortune.com

11 pointsrbanffy12 comments

It shows a deep lack of understanding or empathy when one the wealthiest people of the world says something like that.

Especially when a large portion of americans don't even have enough money to be healthy ...

It's what I originally thought when reading the title, but go into the article and see that's not actually what he said:

    The millionaire tech boss, known for his comfortable yet 
    measured speaking style, warned that being driven by 
    money “will wear out fast, or you’ll never make enough 
    and you will never be happy,” reports CNBC.

He doesn't say "don't care about money", he says don't make the accumulation of wealth your only/main driving force in life.

I might be violating the rules of discourse here but I feel like your comment really didn't contribute to the discussion. Tim Cook is a skilled leader who is quite down-to-earth and, IMO, understand the struggles that normal Americans go through. His point was simply that if your utility function optimizes only for income, you're making a mistake. He believes (partially as a result of his time at Apple) that working only for money is a mistake. He's not saying "you shouldn't worry about money ever".

By what basis are you making these claims?

Maslow's Hierarchy in action - Tim Cook is at a higher section of the pyramid than most Americans. He's probably at a stage where he's looking to achieve things he cannot achieve purely with money. Hence the "money isn't everything" argument.

Yeah... I was once in the middle of an argument between two people I know: the first person has in a way managed to make money "meaningless" but only by moving to the middle of nowhere and living on the moral equivalent of peanuts that he has been able to make with a business he has scraped together, but has recently gotten involved in a new company (as an "employee" of the second person) where he was being paid less than all the other people (who had come in to the company earlier, FWIW) and his opportunity cost is "I might be stuck not making much money forever on a product I don't even have much control over", and a second person (a "co-founder" in this new company) for whom money is also "meaningless" as he has so many millions of dollars that he got from trading cryptocurrencies that his opportunity cost from working on projects instead of actively managing investments is supposedly itself millions of dollars... money he is happy to go without because he believes so much in the team and the vision for the product. The person who lived on peanuts wanted to be making as much money as everyone else, and the person whom I will claim literally couldn't understand why anyone would ever care about money was extremely upset that the first person wasn't sufficiently devoted to the vision of the product (which again, the first person only even had limited control over from his position... this is despite having designed a good amount of the technology). It was a brutal argument. The first person quit. A couple weeks later, in the aftermath of what happened and after some time to process what was going on there, I quit (as one of the "co-founders").

Maslow’s heirarchy (at least as people generally understand it) has been discredited.

1 - https://www.td.org/Publications/Blogs/Science-of-Learning-Bl... 2 - http://tonyahn.com/2012/02/2012-needs-hierarchy-update/

I think “money isn’t everything” is a perfectly decent message for young people graduating from a university in a rich western country with a fair education system.

It’s not like these students are in desperate debt (http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/14562911.Scottish_student...: the average debt of Scottish graduates in 2014/15 was £10,500), or have to pay back those debts soon (http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-40353399: For example, someone earning £21,000 a year would pay back £24 a month)

I expect to see many negative comments here, but I'll add that one of the most profound books I've read is Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (https://www.amazon.com/Flow-Psychology-Experience-Perennial-...). In it, he observes that it's also possible to create positive flow-like states even in tedious jobs; it's also helpful to try and re-conceptualize even mundane jobs as being part of and important to a greater whole.

I don't think he'd argue that doing such things is always possible, all the time, but I think he might argue that we should try to move in those directions, even when our lives and feelings sometimes feel like something out of Dilbert or Houellebecq's Whatever.

What does he work for then?

IF he really gave a damn about people he should e.g. make sure working conditions improve at their plants.

If there is nothing about you and the current iteration of the economy that is mutually attractive, then you will have to work for money, and you will be unhappy, possibly worse so from lack of sufficient money.

It's good to be Tim Cook.

This is one interesting point about universal basic income: when the lack of sufficient money is no longer a possibility, what will you work for?

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