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Comment by danenania | Hacker News Reader

This sort of begs the question: if your main drive in life is money, what use is it to you really? It just becomes points in a meaningless game.

Someone driven to change the world or build for the sake of building, on the other hand, is going to make something out of their money, even if they aren't as skilled or single-minded in acquiring it. Money means a lot more when it serves a purpose other than piling on top of itself and buying superfluous stuff.

I'm sure there's a role for people with this approach in most companies, but I tend to avoid them--mostly because they bore me to tears. Someone with ideas and goals that supersede wealth accumulation is a lot more interesting to me, and I'd much prefer to spend my time around such people and scrape by than live in a mansion and listen to a bunch of polo shirt clones yammer on about their real estate investments all day.

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Why play monopoly? Or play Call Of Duty? After you pass a certain income, you realise you don't really need what comes after that. But you're just enjoying the game. You're enjoying the winning.

Games are not meaningless, they are fun. That's why we play them.

I get this, and I have nothing against games, but I guess my response is that striving to accumulate more and more money seems like a shallow and tedious form of competition to me in comparison to all the other 'games' out there to choose from. It's similar to how I'd view someone who spends every waking moment trying to optimize their fantasy football team or something. I think people are free to get their kicks however they see fit if they aren't hurting anyone, but I also think that person would get more from life if they tried to expand their horizons.

But making money is one of the most fun and meaningful games out there. You can make many people happy with the money you have, you can make your life better, you can travel to new places.

If you win your fantasy football league a million times, nothing changes. If you win at the entrepreneurship game 20 times, your life becomes a whole lot better.

"But making money is one of the most fun and meaningful games out there. You can make many people happy with the money you have, you can make your life better, you can travel to new places."

In this case, I'd say that making people happy and travel are the fun and meaningful games. Money helps enable them, sure, but there are plenty of ways to make people happy and travel without much money too, so if these are the things that make you feel good, why not focus on doing them as much as possible instead?

"If you win at the entrepreneurship game 20 times, your life becomes a whole lot better."

Not necessarily. I guess this is the root of the whole discussion. It depends how you measure.

"You find out when you reach the top, you're on the bottom" -Bob Dylan

Excellent point, that's certainly part of it.

Of course, monopoly doesn't actually ruin people.

I've found that for these type of folks it has absolutely NOTHING to do with money. It has everything to do with competition. I don't know Judd Weiss, but I'll promise you that he's intensely competitive. Money is just how he keeps score.

He actually commented, and the substance of his comment was exactly what you're saying here — money is to him what a trophy is to an athlete or a degree is for a student.

Right on. I also think of guys like Warren Buffett or Li Ka-Shing who are insanely competitive and are still putting in crazy hours into their businesses even though they're both in their 80s. They don't live a lavish lifestyle at all and they're not in it for materialism. They're driven by competition and the sport of business, which is what they love.

Well, the great thing about money is that (as long as you don't cheat people) it is not only an excellent barometer of accomplishment, it is extraordinarily useful and even fun.

In a macro sense I believe the pursuit of money is very healthy, contrary to some popular beliefs, it actually encourages a society of people each working very hard to contribute.

In a micro sense I believe this pursuit of money is also very healthy, it gears your mind to focus on a standard of what legitimately is or is not worth doing. It is our goals that give us purpose and serve as a powerful way to bring out our power and productivity. I think it is wrong to condemn that.

Sure there's lots of things very much worth pursuing that money can't buy, but that doesn't make money any less worth pursuing.

I think it makes a lot more sense to pursue 'quality of life', both for yourself and people around you. I agree that pursuit of profits is healthy, but only because it forces us to focus on building systems that both improve quality of life AND are sustainable. Focusing on the numbers instead of the substance of what you build or provide just sets you up for misallocation of your time and energy on many levels, even if it's effective in increasing those numbers.

Man I wish I could upvote this a thousand times. I still don't quite understand people who see nothing but green paper - numbers after a dollar sign - in their future.

I'm not going to lie. My goal right now is definitely to make money. But it isn't my goal in life. That's for sure.

My drive to make money is fueled by my desire to live freely, without financial chains (as my parents and a lot of my family have)... and to have fun and live a good life with those around me. If I have wealth to share and to help makes the lives of others easier, you bet I'm gonna spread it around. I don't have a wife or kids but being able to provide for them when that time comes and give them good lives is my main concern.

Wish I could upvote this a thousand time as well :)

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