Hacker News Reader

Comment by icey | Hacker News Reader

I think you should re-read my last two sentences. This is exactly what I said to do.

I think perhaps the emphasis is different. You say that it's just "spend less than you make", and I say that it's primarily "don't sell your hours for a fixed price".

View on HN

No, it's a different philosophy entirely. Making money in a way that does not require you to work is only half the picture. The MAIN and MOST IMPORTANT part of things is that you need to KEEP REINVESTING in things that keep bringing higher returns. Nothing you do keeps bringing in steady income without requiring time. It starts of good but just drifts downwards as time passes. It is imperative to keep changing your investments for higher returns, otherwise you cannot get rich.

I am currently reading 'The Black Swan' and he does a good job of explaining how some fields lend themselves to extremes and others don't and that it is hard for our minds to wrap themselves around this. He explains that if you take the shortest person ever and the tallest person ever - the differences would be a lot but not orders of magnitude greater. Yet, if we were to take this year's best selling book, it would be so many orders of magnitude more than the least selling book. Our minds have a hard time dealing with comparisons that don't have real world equivalents.

What this does is create an opportunity for some industries to have 'winner takes almost all' scenarios. Book publishing and POP music are two examples where the very top people take almost all the rewards. Brain surgeon is not one of these industries - being the very best brain surgeon would still require a (in comparison) a lot more time than the author of the Harry Potter books takes to sell another book.

Most wealth is created by massively scalable business models such as licensing, show biz and mass media. And interestingly not that many fortunes come from Wall Street.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com