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Comment by vtange | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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)

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