Without even looking, his older and wiser colleague replies, “Nonsense. If there had been a twenty-dollar bill lying on the street, someone would have already picked it up by now.”

I don’t lack job offers but they are all freelance and require me to live in an expensive city. I hesitate to depend on freelance work unless I can make what I used to make, maybe 5 years ago. The job offers went up over the years but the rate went down and now full-time positions are exceedingly rare.

I still get some remote work but I am having to reskill for jobs that have very high demand before moving to a city. But I think that saying capitalism makes sure I am rewarded for wanting to make things is misleading.

(1) build up assets fast (or, pay off debts fast) (2) make relationships with people who will see and value your skills which could lead to referrals (the tech world is really small) (3) keep skills up and continue building up portfolio

> But I think that saying capitalism makes sure I am rewarded for wanting to make things is misleading.

I don't disagree, but I think capitalism is better than the alternatives. Capitalism rewards people for making things that are relevant. I'm not saying it is easy, but being relevant is hard work.

My first successful business was about helping self storage owners attract customers. It wasn't super interesting, but I focused on making it work and learned many things that were not comfortable to learn. A core lesson I learned is that the first step is find people that have problems and help them solve it.

There is a value of having an entrepreneurial mindset even if one does not end up as the owner of a business, and one of my concerns is that the mindset of today is "get a job" rather than "help people with problems"

Over time, I have built a career by focusing on other people's problems first to build skills, trust, and knowledge. Now, I am effectively a principal working on really cool distributed system problems.

When I started, I had 20K debt in student loans and was living out of my car. However, my story is a case of Survivorship bias, and a difficult aspect is filtering out what was luck versus was could be applicable advice. I do think the focus on building relationships and helping people with their problems is key.

The first thing to do is build the relationship and seek to understand their problems. The second thing is to look for the missing platform.

If the platform exists, then you can offer management services. An example of this managing Google Ad Words or Facebook Advertising.

If the platform doesn't exist, then it is opportunity to build something.

Usually, you can do both.