In this concept, you have some tiny anxiety about upcoming work that probably never even reaches your conscious thoughts. And the absolute fastest way to make that anxiety go away (i.e. repair it) is to pivot away from the upcoming work. Rationally, this is a terrible idea. But emotionally, it's very functional. Procrastination creates a short term fix to that anxiety.

Or, maybe more familiar to people here, this is just another example of System I and System II thinking from Thinking, Fast and Slow.

I think there's something similar going on with "Get Rich Quick."

The desire to get rich is both rational and emotional. Yes, obviously, it's rational to want to have money. And then also, there's often an emotional anxiety about our place in the world and having money is a fantasy that resolves that anxiety.

So, everyone who points out that Get Rich Quick is not an effective strategy for actually getting rich is right. Rationally, you should choose behaviors that lead to steady accumulation of wealth.

However, I do think Get Rich Quick does provide a functional, short term, solution to the anxiety that's prompting people to want to get rich. In other words, these people in the article are performing self-care with a "short term mood repair" strategy.

Another concept that Dr. Pychyl introduced me to is that MRI scans show that the same parts of our brain light up when we think about strangers and when we think about our future selves. In other words, it's easy to sell our future self short.

http://www.procrastination.ca/

See some of pg's early essays:

http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html

http://paulgraham.com/good.html

Entrepreneurship is one of the least zero-sum activities you can participate in.

It's literally on the YC application form.

"He said to ask about a time when they'd hacked something to their advantage—hacked in the sense of beating the system, not breaking into computers. It has become one of the questions we pay most attention to when judging applications."

The part about "make tons of money" isn't there, but I don't think anyone disagrees with that part -- YC recently launched a separate branch to handle nonprofit ventures.

[0]https://www.ycombinator.com/nonprofits/

For good vibes, tax credits, & marketing

Every entrepreneur envisions profit at the end of the process, but it cannot be the primary goal of your company. Profits come from great products and services, so make a great product or service and the profits follow.

You also have to be prepared to work 60+ hour weeks for years, only making enough to get by, and still fail and lose money in the end. A lot of these get-rich-quick schemes claim that there is no work and little risk involved.

A labor-free, low-risk, high-profit career simply doesn't exist. You can pick two of those three things, but not all three.

Replace "absolutely not" with "almost never". It's relevant because that vanishingly small percentage of people who do manage to become wealthy get an absurd amount of attention, which inspires others to mimic them, and so the cycle continues.

\s

Minor units are "Slices".

I mean dogecoin was a thing.

I realize people play fast and loose with reality when it comes to *coins, but calling Dominos 'pizza' is fraud.

But had to trip over a couple articles on rodent droppings to get there...

Supposedly they changed their recipe and now people like it? I'm vegan so I don't eat there.

There is an old saying: Making a million dollars and spending a million dollars are the exact opposite thing.

I am always amazed people think this is the case.

The people who make money from a technology are very seldom the ones who devote their life to it. They are the ones who know just enough about it to be at the right place at the right time.

There is a reason why facebook is written in php.

People eat that shit up!

But, typically, they only work once, or a small number of times, and then then copycats don't attract money anymore.

Caring a lot about specifically making money is, in my opinion, absolutely key to making money, because otherwise you just end up focusing on other things (family, pleasures, ideals, etc.). If I wanted to make money, I'd design a very different thing in a very different way compared to if I wanted to make something me and my circle of friends would find useful. These things are practically disjoint.

> The people who become devoted to a field or a technology - who make the business their passion, and focus on filling a need - these are the people who earn a fortune.

This is a bit mixed up. Like, these are different things.

Devoting yourself to something strikes me as the hard way to make money. For the vast majority of people, this will absolutely not work, simply due to probabilities. It's like devoting yourself to being a professional athlete. Good luck, there are millions of others like you.

> who make the business their passion, and focus on filling a need

This, to me, IS a "getting rich" mindset, as I don't really understand why anyone would get into it otherwise. Most people I know who really care about technology are often tragically far from any kind of user and therefore can't think about filling a need. People who care a lot about a subject are often filling their own need, but there's no guarantee whatsoever that that need has anything to do with any kind of customer. Quite the opposite, most useful needs are already filled, it's the small niches that an individual might want filled. There are also large chunks of people who like filling a need in a "helpful" sort of way (i.e., writing documentation) who often get no kickback from it at all.

If anything, a person super passionate about something, if they actually want to make money, needs to wheel that around almost completely and care about all sorts of other things, such as marketing and business management, things many people plain find hard to digest.

You need to, specifically, really care about making money for many of these things to not be somewhere between gross and boring to you.

At the heart of it is the fact that these needs that you talk about people filling can be needs people think they have, but don't actually have. "My chakra is out of balance and it's the cause of what is bad in my life. I must buy this raw water."

It should be easy to see that one of the things that separates Warren Buffett from the rest of us is that he has a unique perspective of the financial world – he sees all of the dynamics and intricacies of the financial world in a way that few others do.

It took years for him to build the mental framework that led to his deep understanding and unique view of the world. And as a result of his devotion to this pursuit and his willingness to immerse himself in it, he developed the structural underpinning for the mental vista that yields the rare and valuable perspective that enables him to see the financial world with the clarity of a composer likely unattained by anyone in history.

This is why Goldman Sachs calls him when they need help, like they did in the financial crisis.

1) he buys equity in the private markets not in the public markets 2) he has capital to buy entire companies 3) he can evaluate a company based on the people, not based on financials 4) he commits to not meddling in operations. Today's tax structure forces entrepreneurs to sell because of huge tax implications of passing down a privately held company. 5) emotionally he is very strong and he is willing to wait on the sideline for years if necessary.

He holds on to huge amounts of cash. Meanwhile shareholders are getting mad that he is not getting the returns and start talking about how he should just pay out the dividends, people start talking about how he has lost his touch or his method is out of date. The market is skyrocketing. Then the crash happens and he buys tons of distressed assets at a discount and he is brilliant again.

And it doesn't hurt that he can get special deals that most people can't.

http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2011/08/no_y...

On the Bank Of America deal.

This isn't an ordinary investment, in which an investor buys common stock. Buffett's $5 billion is buying him 50,000 shares of a special class of so-called "preferred stock," which will pay him a 6 percent dividend, or $300 million a year. Just for the sake of comparison, BofA's common shareholders get a quarterly dividend of one penny a share. That means that if you owned $5 billion of ordinary BofA common stock at its current price of about $8 a share, you'd be getting a paltry $25 million a year in dividends—less than one-tenth of what Buffett will get. (Earlier this year, BofA tried and failed to get permission from the Federal Reserve to increase the dividend.)

BofA can buy back Buffett's investment at any time for a 5 percent premium.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect

Challenging myself to find a photo of Warren posing ostentatiously with a car, I found this which cracked me up:

http://2il.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/warren-buffett-dri...

He's picking up a BIG MAC for chrissakes. His car is very ordinary-looking and not showy. It's a Caddy though mind you... he's not an animal.

https://www.instagram.com/richkidslondon/?hl=en

Most of the photos feature cars. Is a car a sign of wealth? If Warren converted his entire net worth to Lamborghinis (say $200,000 each) he'd have about 400,000 of them. A Lamborghini is worth to him, proportionally, about what 25 cents is worth to me. Even if you're "only" Steve Ballmer that car is worth only 75 cents to you in rdiddly dollars. If you were hanging out with actual rich people flaunting your $200K car they'd be like yeah congratulations, you found a quarter, Janice would you call security and have this gentleman removed please?

EDIT: They'd be like oh yeah I bought four of those with the interest earned by my cat's litterbox. Janice would you etc.

Besides, they technically devoted themselves to the field of finance. They didn't just decide one day that they wanted to be billionaires and only work 1 hour per week.

They worked their asses off to get where they are today, and the goal wasn't even necessarily to make a fortune...

More wealthy people make their money this way than you might realize. Rare indeed is the person who became wealthy by actually creating something of value. Much more common is the person who cheated someone (or many someones) out of something. Making money is easy. Doing something decent is hard.