this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2023
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I mean the super rich generally did a lot of things on their way there. The wake up call is usually around the things they do and people they exploit, not equating the difference to dumb luck.
Millionaires often worked for their money. Billionaires often worked for their first millions too. Problem is, difference between a billion and a million is about a billion.
On the other side of the argument, the amount of people that work harder and smarter than any given billionaire and have nothing is simply staggering. If it wasn’t down to luck, they’d all be billionaires.
So yeah, it is dumb luck. Randomness is not uniform, and someone ends up being close to the time and place of a local spike.
I would say that willingness to exploit other, be selfish and have low ethic also play a big role.
Except life is much more complicated than that.
Working hard and being smart doesn't equal to having lots of money.
Luck also doesn't equal having lots of money. How many "lucky" people have won the jack pot? And lost it all in a manner of months/years?
Not saying luck doesn't play a part maybe even a huge part but it just seems silly to attribute someone's success to luck.
Please reflect on the fact that until you joined the discussion, we didn’t talk about equating success to luck.
Afterwards, you will likely notice that your jackpot argument reinforces mine.
Please lets not be condescending here. I will rephrase, instead of success I will say wealth. I used the two interchangeably as many people judge your success based on your wealth.
Didn't you say this here.
Wealth itself is a stronger predictor for future wealth than individual performance.
That quote of mine doesn’t talk about success, nor wealth itself for that matter. You’re ignoring everything in the message to argue against a statement that was never made in the first place.
I agree with that.
Yes just saying it's only luck is just wrong.
Even the rich (not the super billionaire rich), yes they had luck but there is definitely more. Like I work as a freelancer in software development. Lots of people I have worked with are smarter and more talented than I am, but I still make more money. Because they never took the risk of going freelance and keep working for a company that takes halve the money a client pays.
Some people just don't like to take risks
These super rich people usually took big risks, worked for almost free for a while until it started to pay off. Of course for every billionaire there a 1000s of people that took the same risk and completely failed.
If you can take multiple large, failed, risks without ending up on the street then you have immense privilege.
It's hard for most people to "learn from their failures" and keep taking "big" risks, unless the risk to their own life circumstances was never actually that "big".
I don't think it's immense privilege. Like when Zuckerberg started Facebook he was 19. When I was 19 I lived with my parents and had almost no costs. I also just partied and didn't even try to start anything.