Becoming a millionaire isn't like winning the lottery. For those who achieve it through passion & work, they are self-selectively not the people who will wake up one morning and "go fishing".
Don't kid yourself. Risk is risk. The only inevitability is death. (Remember when that used to be "Death and Taxes." We should go back to when taxes were in that list).
A lottery requires no specific sort of character. Making a million, often, does.
The sort of determined character that isn't going to wake up one morning and "stop doing what made them rich". Because it was never about being rich, it was always about what they were doing.
It's why Jerry Seinfeld, a billionaire, continues to do stand up. He's on stage for netflix, not "fishing".
It sucks that there's not much "justice" in getting hugely rich but the fact remains. All kinds of folks get there. All kinds don't. Some work hard. Some just fail upwards. Don't fall for the cherry picked BS of "which of you sublime charter traits ensured your success" It's crap and it smells bad too.
"Get up early. Strike oil." Doesn't matter what style of person you are.
Don't fall for the leftwing resentiment of hating the rich either.
The reality is that there's huge amounts of social mobility across all wealth brackets, and enmass, those moving in/out of the top 5% do have quite reliable characteristics.
Eg., of the "top 1%" almost everyone in that class is only it in for, on average, 9mo in their entire lifetime. The risk-taking needed to get you there, equally, knocks you out.
The reality of a functioning economy is that a certain kind of "competence" (even if its psychopathic) is selected for. Regardless of the handful of celebrities and strike-it-rich anecdotes you can analyse in tabloid fashion.
The comment i was replying to expressed surprise that a rich person would be doing anything other than wasting time on a holiday: thus they express their (relative) poverty. Very few rich people would find it remarkable they weren't wasting time: that is precisely what they have never done.
That is /exactly/ what I'm disputing. To the point where you can't even generalise about so-called "self-made" rich people.
But beyond that, I'm not left-wing. At all. There's nothing left-wing about being a bit contemptuous of the successful who believe their monetary success is proof of themselves as superior humans. And there are at least some successful people who agree with that. Takes all kinds. Some fail upwards.
I'm not saying anyone deserves anything. I'm not saying anyone is superior.
I'm saying that commonly, amongst people who become millionaires, you find a certain set of characteristics.
In particular, you often find an obsessive interest in something which is greater than their desire to vacation or to spend frivolously: typically their business.
Poorer people misunderstand wealth. To them it is essentially just a series of inexplicable lotteries, "falling up" as you say.
But in functioning societies most people who become wealth don't just "fall up" -- there is a pattern to their personality (including risk tasking, say) which facilitates this movement.
I continue to disagree strongly with this. There are /all/ kinds.
We're now talking past each other. Some are successful for reasons one can attribute to their nature. Some just fail upwards. Really they do. It's actually hard to miss examples of this when you look a little critically. I'm not sure how you've come to the conclusion such people don't exist... Luck is always a huuuge factor, even among the best of us. Anyway, best.
Nice weather, but not much fish. https://eu.oceana.org/en/press-center/press-releases/un-aler...
vapid - offering nothing that is stimulating or challenging.
my problem with JBP is that he presents his ideas as facts but they are nothing more than pseudo science and cherry picking to fit his narrative (e.g. he hasn't really understood the Jungian archetypes and keeps waffling on about it with great confidence). He seems to fit very well into Alan Sokal's definition of the "intellectual imposter". (the irony here is that Sokal himself hasn't understood postmodernism lol)
All Jungian psychology is pseudoscience; hell most psychology is pseudoscience outside of measurable behaviorist or cognitive approaches.
The thing people miss is there are a lot of people out there who haven't been exposed to such ideas.
I do think he got too big too fast and wasn't really ready to be a cultural icon like he became.
I think him and NN Taleb are on similar footing when it comes to the quality of their thought though. Both are interesting, but the well isn't very deep and you'll have to move on to something new before long.
Every single idea he has is conservative orthodoxy of one kind or another. Nobody living in the Western world has been spared exposure to the ideas he is so in love with. He is just good at failing to explaining them while being as un-concise as possible.
If that were the case, he wouldn't have the massive following he does.
His followers follow him because he reinforces existing points of view. Nothing wrong with that, just saying that having such following doesn't imply original ideas.
I recommend the "what is true?" making sense podcast episode (https://samharris.org/podcasts/what-is-true/). It helped me better understand Peterson outside of the spotlight generated by him touching the controversial topics if our society. My opinion on him after that interview is even less flattering: he seemed interested in bending terminology and logic itself for the benefit of crafting a worldview he deems innate to humans, instead of researching our nature though inquiry. The feeling I got was that of an erudite anti-scientist.
In particular, the anecdote about how Peterson wanted to be a preacher.
Where might a person acquire such knowledge? It implies that someone would have had to compile all of JP's ideas, and then compare it against the knowledge of all Westen people. That sounds like quite an undertaking.
Case in point, here we are.
With money and notoriety, he can flex that love of argument all he wants without having to worry about upsetting his masters.
JBP is a rehash of 1990's Heritage Foundation whitepapers. He's a good speaker, but there is no new ground there; Talib at least can hold some water with Black Swan and Fooled By Randomness.
I read his entire Incerto, and it was an absolute slog. Endless chapters just about how he's smarter than other Wall Street guys. Antifragile is probably the best book in the series, but the concept itself could be relegated to an essay -- not a whole book. As far as the article itself is concerned, it's typical doomerism. His entire post-Wall Street career revolves around doom and gloom (his main claim to fame being "black swan" events), so of course it makes sense that, from a Talebian perspective, the world will end by 2035.