The problem with the simplistic "do what you love, love what you do" advice is that it is not reliable or repeatable. I can point to tons of people who love what they do and are still somewhere between solidly middle class and struggling to get by.

Of course it's not repeatable. There's no repeatable way to get rich quick.

I think of it this way: Suppose you don't have exceptional abilities. If you do what is prestigious, what "seems" like it will get you rich, what other people tell you to do -- then you have roughly a 0% chance of getting rich.

If you take a slightly unusual path, enjoy it, and get the flywheel/positive feedback loop going, you have maybe a 1-3% chance of getting rich.

So if you want to increase your chances of getting rich, I would do something that others aren't, and do it to the point past where others would give up, because it's not making them any money.

The thread is over if you want a repeatable way to get rich. There is something analogous to the "no arbitrage" principle for personal income. If there were an easy way to get rich, someone smarter/earlier/luckier than you has already taken it, and they didn't tell you about it until afterward. You have to find your own way.

Depends what you want. There are repeatable ways to get richer.

Probably not repeatable ways to get extremely rich.

Repeatable way to get richer => "normal job" :)

You're right that the "do what you love" advice is crap. However, I think -- and as Chubot points out -- you have to also avoid the same behaviors as others and offer something "rare and valuable" if you desire money. For those people that you can point to, do they offer the latter and do they have a good sense of when to cash in?

This post from Cal Newport elaborates further[1]. I highly recommend his book So Good They Can't Ignore You.

[1]http://calnewport.com/blog/2010/01/23/beyond-passion-the-sci...

I admire these guys, but the probability of getting rich by going into banking or consulting or big law, for example, is quite high compared to almost any other career.

Thiel's premise is not to do things other people aren't doing.

That would have ruled out Google (AltaVista) and Facebook (MySpace).

Thiel's premise is to be the last search engine, the last social network, etc. It's not: don't enter competitive fields; it's: compete, best the competition, and become a monopoly. There's no such thing as avoiding competition, there is no scenario under which Google was going to not have to compete, and have the entire market handed to them. The question is: can you acquire market dominance or not?

His premise is: "What valuable company is nobody building?" [1] That sounds like avoiding competition to me.

If Google had wanted to compete, it would have gone for Yahoo, and become a portal, and tried to maximize user time on the site. The conventional wisdom was that Yahoo was far more worthy of competition than AltaVista. AltaVista wasn't even a company; it was almost shut down by its parent company IIRC. And it didn't make any money. Nobody wanted to compete with AltaVista. Search was viewed as a feature, not a company.

Facebook also avoided competition in its early years by being closed to the public and signing up one college at a time. They formed monopolies on social networks within specific colleges, and leveraged that position to expand to the rest of the world.

The idea is not to compete "head on". Don't just try to do same thing, but better. Do something different. It's hard to imagine what the world was like before Google or Facebook, but they were both doing something radically different early in their lives.

[1] http://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-l...