Almost-Billionaires (2014)
lackingambition.comFor a long time, my plan was to "get rich" and then use my money to work full time on specific interesting tech ideas of mine. The tradeoff of time spent "getting rich", even if it took a decade, was worth it because of the free time I would have afterwards. With this in mind, I tried building various startup ideas and joining startups that could blow up big. Nothing really worked out, and I realized just how difficult it is to get rich in that way. In the mean time, I was trading what I really wanted to be doing for these failed attempts at things I didn't want to do, and meanwhile the years were ticking away.
It took me a long time to realize that the gamble isn't worth it to me. If my end goal is to be working on the interesting tech ideas full time, I need to make it happen regardless of my financial situation. So that's where I'm at now: consistently taking 1 step every night and weekend. It's much slower than my ideal hypothetical world of riches, but it is more fulfilling because it is real. I'm making actual progress now, as opposed to maybe-future progress.
I've thought about this too. It reminds me of the blog post Do the Real Thing^[1]. Too many people do everything except the goal they actually want to accomplish. While getting rich is not "easy" per se, it's an easy goal to set that won't get you any criticism from most people. Often times the loftier goals are not as clean cut and direct, and require serious amounts of introspection.
[1]: https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2020/05/04/do-the-real-thin...
One of the premises of the article is that cross-training does not bear fruit, but I recall claims that, for example, piano players picking up guitar had a much easier experience, than a non-musician picking up guitar.
Perhaps reality is more nuanced than that? Like, there may be tasks that appear very similar, but they are actually not cross-trainable?
Was exactly in the exactly same circumstances like you until a near death experience changed my perspective on life, Now I live doing things I like with the goal to die with lesser regrets if I die tonight.
I can really resonate with you, having the same thought process on working and dedicating time to own problems in tech after achieving financial independence,but not sure how it is going to go. Day job makes me tired and not sure how motivated i will be after achieving certain amount of money targeted to solve problems what i want.
I'm sorry your startups didn't work out. It sounds like those startups didn't build on your interesting tech ideas (why not?). Did you learn where you went wrong? I'm working on a startup to help people with problems like that, CxO Industries [1].
[1]: https://cxo.industries.
About losing all motivation after financial independence, I've experienced it for myself. I'm not rich but I know how to live simply. What do I do with my time? I spend so many hours consuming random content on the internet nowadays. I feel kind of bad for the girlfriend, who has to listen to me regurgitate the content back to her.
People looking in from the outside scratch their heads. Don't I have hobbies? Passions? I'd do X Y and Z, they often say.
Reminds me of this blog post: https://philip.greenspun.com/materialism/early-retirement/
It's too bad Mike (the lackingambition.com guy) stopped updating his blog.
Thank you for sharing Philip Greenspun's blogpost. I read his blog 10 years ago and now I rediscovered it through your comment. I think his post is even better than the one I originally submitted.
His old posts are so entertaining. His daily posts have taken on this 'political rants' flavor which isn't very interesting to me.
Not sure it's losing motivation rather than being confronted to one's wishful thinking.
If I have so many plans for when I retire early, how come I do none of it now? If that's really what I want, how come I don't spend at least a few minutes on it every week?
I don't have to find a 50h/week activity to replace my work. I don't need any activity that replace my work routine. I can simply take whatever hobby I had while working, and spend at least as much time as when I was working full-time.
Exactly something everyone should try. It can give you a lot of insight if those future plans are really all that interesting and rewarding if you start doing it now while you are alive and young.
Has financial independence been worth it?
I've never been a big spender and I likely never will be, so it's not like I sacrificed much in getting to this point. An 80% saving rate for 9 working years while being lucky to invest starting 2011 goes pretty far.
If financial independence is its own cage, I'm not willing to leave.
I can't say I regret it - perhaps I should have had something else cooking during my working years that doesn't include blogging about FI.
I suspect most people are like me (and not Elon) - without a carrot or stick, a kind of meaninglessness sets in.
Are you concerned about events that might cause your wealth to disappear or be drastically reduced? For example my old CPA was forced to come out of retirement and restart his CPA work because his wealth was drastically reduced in the 2008 crisis. It seems you'd have to have extreme trust in your risk mitigation in order to begin to "do nothing," for possibly decades while the skills that made that money atrophy.
I am definitely risk-averse. For that reason my savings rate is still pretty high despite a much lower income nowadays. So my only risk mitigation is "spend as little as possible without feeling deprived" - but sure, everything can crash all at once.
Because of this risk, I keep thinking about keeping myself economically relevant. I've been in this Resistance (as Pressfield would call it) limbo for almost two years but here's hoping I do something about it.
I can relate to this a lot. I am quite blessed to be multi talented and able to do various things easily. It gets to the point that I have too many hobbies and interests. But I think none of those hobbies can make me singularly focused. I become jack of all trades.
I am a software engineer by trade, doing regular web app business line applications. Work in FAANG salary. On the side I play music on weekend (acoustic guitar, electric guitar, bass, and singing). I do martial arts around 3 days a week. I have my outlet of creativity such as building PC for gaming and crypto mining rig, building aquarium/terrarium/vivarium scapes. I read philosophies, religion, economies, etc. I play PC games, I ride my motorcycle for leisures. I think I'm decently good at all those activities, signaled by people who came to me and ask me to build their stuffs or play in their band or compete in their tournament.
I keep jumping and trying to find more things to do. I don't have kids yet, maybe when I do things will going to change.
My hobbies aside, right now I find no motivation on starting a new software project for learning purposes. I feel that I am stagnant now in my software engineering skills.
I used to learn programming languages as a hobby. Those aren't interesting to me anymore. I don't know what to do next. I want to learn deeper like maybe learning how to create a game engine, or compiler, or even going hardware, or try learning electrical engineering or mechanical engineering for DIY hobby projects, but maybe I would get bored and eventually stopped doing those.
I don't know what else to do.
First world problems.
> I don't know what else to do.
Kids man. Get on that train you wont have to worry about what to do in your spare time.
Yeah it seems that is inevitable.
It seems you didn’t study CS. If you did, then we studied different courses :P
- Compilers
- Game Engines
- Gnarly multithreaded problems
- Using IDA Pro to analyze X86-64 binaries
- Computer systems and networks (e.g. NAND2Tetris)
- Creating your own kernel
- Creating your own database
- Replicating meltdown and spectre. Repkicaring rowhammer attacks
- Web attacks (check out hackthebox.eu)
I did almost all of these during my CS bachelor and master. Other than that, a friend of mine learned a ton at an internship working on LLVM (a few years ago). He now works on low level stuff in the HFT space. So you might want to look there (the game dev space has overlapping problems with the HFT space but for a much lower salary).
Currently I am doing leetcode because I’d love to earn a FAANG salary (HFT is not for me). Leetcode feels most reminiscent to graph theory.
I did study CS, but the courses weren't quite as deep. Out of all the topics above, I only did interpreters (compilers) and multi threading.
I don't think I wanna do HFT. Not interested in numbers or statistics. I don't wanna do data science/ML as well.
I was just thinking what can I do to spark joy in programming once again. Maybe I need some creative-type of programming work like creating useless toys or tools.
Leetcode is mostly just brute-forcing yourself through problems. I've done around 500 Leetcode problems, its not that hard after you gone past 200 problems, it gets repeated but different style. Yeah a lot of Leetcode problems mostly are just graph problems. I think Leetcode managed to distract me a bit but after a while I got bored as well, after all I already got the FAANG salary, no interest for me doing Leetcode anymore.
Pick a small self-contained project that has a very clear end. Work on it periodically, meaning daily, weekly, as schedule permits; but not necessarily for copious amounts of time. Make a small amount of tangible, obvious progress each time. Tangible and obvious are going to be subjective to you and might not mean much to someone else. No matter, this project is for you. You'll feel a spark joy type feeling after some number of periods.
It's important to not rush this and just let it happen while keeping the momentum going. Skipping every so often is ok, but don't skip more than 2 periods in a row. Track your progress in a way that's meaningful to you. Your brain is rewiring itself as you do this so the time it takes might vary depending on overall health.
I think that some component of challenge is required to live an interesting life, keep you on your toes, and keep you close to living at your edge.
I think some people will invent challenges for themselves, even arbitrary looking ones, if they are otherwise unchallenged at the time, just to keep themselves engaged.
All kinds of things can pose significant challenges: relationships, learning a new language, travel (um, thanks 2020), a sport, yoga...other stuff that pushes you outside your comfortable zone and where you are in the space where you actually have to think, react, decide again, and where you have limited information and don't know.
I don't think you have to do this, but you can try it if you're looking for that "ah i feel bored, or just too comfortable I wanna do something" kind of vibe.
I think an advantage is you don't have to care: is this right for me? Is this what I want to do (bigpicture)? Just pick something you don't know how to do, and try it, and for some of those things you might end up caring about becoming good at it or overcoming the challenges of it. If you can't even care about finding something challenging or that you don't know, you probably have some sort of mental illness or unresolved emotional issues or inner work you need to face and simply are avoiding that or don't know how to deal with that, and then you need to process that yourself or with some counselling to try to sort that out. But sometimes pushing out of the zone, especially doing something physical like sport or yoga, brings that stuff up anyway. So there's many ways to get forward.
I moved to Hong Kong from France with a passable english and no cantonese.
Life is a constant challenge, it's really a fun life to live: the language gap in English can be overcome but not Cantonese, finding a partner in such a different culture is also a lot of fun, you can move flat within the blink of an eye where you need weeks of pre approval in France, so you're always moving around, jobs are so plentiful your own boss tells you you should move elsewhere and get a payraise he can't give you - so you double your salary every X years. And now, there's a game to play on politics with China !!!
Honestly, I feel everyday at the center of the world, am always constantly busy and never have enough money. I can't feel like it's normal life like it was before, it's like an adventure book everyday :D
Yeah, man! There's so many jobs there and so many cool places to live and things to do. I totally agree. I also moved to HK from AU many years ago and found fun in those things. The language was so cool. I guess part of it was I felt AU was too boring and not enough challenge there, I'd already done all the cool stuff, so I may as well try someplace else and HK seemed so exciting and different. It was awesome. The rates I got there were unlike anything I got anywhere else :D But after a while I found it a bit too easy, so I suppose I sought challenge someplace else!!! I'll be back tho -- i think there's a whole other level at HK that I haven't touched yet and I really want to. :D
I feel like much of the time when people think about giving a challenge a go it relates to the external world. Sport, hobbies, a software project.
For people who have financial independence, what about mastery of our internal world, our thoughts and emotions? If we can feel joy most of the time and get enjoyment from what we do, by looking after ourselves and helping others and living well, I'm not sure what else there is?
Yeah man that's a good idea. Like Maslow actualization hierarchy of needs. Somehow Marcus Aurelius meditations and stoics comes when you talk about that mastery. Could be one approach to it.
Good point. I think though that being a entrepreneur and especially a manager is a lot harder than it looks. There is no real reason why a coder or a comedian would be good at starting a company. Yeah being the boss looks easy until you actually have to do it.
It would be very interesting to hear you elaborate on this, as from the outside it really does look pretty easy.
Well for me having made the jump from IC to being responsible for my whole team, the issue is that the promises I used to give were based on my ability, whereas now I have to take the whole team into account. And so sometimes, I'm left saying to another team, it's going to take X weeks to do this, even though if I were doing it, I think I could do it in Y < X weeks. But I have to face the reality that my team is less senior than I am and so will take longer, as I train them up.
Moreover, when I did overpromise, as an IC I would put in the extra hours to deliver, so my estimates always seemed to my superiors to be 'on time'. But now as a manager, I can't force my team to work extra hours (and I don't wanna be that guy), so I have to take that into account when making promises.
Ultimately, it's the difference between being responsible for myself, and now being responsible for others, not only responsible for the tasks they do, but also for being responsible for communicating the ability to do it to other teams.
This kind of reads like your bad management used to only affect you but now it affects the company. How does this translate to management being harder than it looks?
I dunno man, I gave my experience. Maybe it's unique to me, maybe it's not. I can't give another's and I make no claims to be an expert in this area.
Maybe take your flamebait somewhere else?
> Maybe take your flamebait somewhere else?
Ironically enough, this answers my question.
Doing all the work (at least at first), including convincing people to part with their money for your idea is easy?
The latter especially is incredibly stressful unless you're one of those people who don't give a fuck about others, their struggles and their things (I envy that btw).
You're envious of sociopaths?
Yeah, they just go get it. I'd be ashamed of borrowing a few thousand for an obvious scam or even a good idea that fails.
Meanwhile they take millions and shrug when it turns out no one wants their shit app or juicer.
The difference is making something you believe in, have vetted, and genuinely believe others would like a piece of. I’m in the middle of fundraising right now. A year ago the idea of getting others money sounded crazy, but now I’m just excited to share what I’m working on and half the investors I speak to want to use the product too.
Everyone wants to get in on a good investment. If you’re building a good investment, you’re doing them a favor by letting them invest.
Thanks for this. Indeed, I do have an idea I wouldn't be afraid of pitching, even though there's a minimum amount of money I'd need for success.
If what you want is the money you'd hypothetically get, I'd recommend forgetting about that because it's not worth sacrificing everything else that makes you human. Caring about not causing destruction is a good thing.
I think part of it is that it takes a lot longer to teach an engineer everything you know than it takes to make a piece of software great, and success may be impossible, and you probably won't get any credit. Who was Einstein's best teacher? Who was his best student? If nobody knows, is teaching a waste of time?
I'm pretty partial to this vignette by Bryan Caplan[1] about how many headaches and road bumps there are, for even the smallest, simplest business you can think of.
"Back in February, I got the idea to create a COVID vaccination t-shirt (now on sale!). Reflecting on my past experience, I figured it would be easy...
My thinking: The whole process would be pretty fun, so I’d only need to sell a few dozen shirts to cover the cost of the contest and count the project a success. I’m still optimistic, but the process has definitely been much more aggravating than expected. A chronological list of snags...
And selling t-shirts on Zazzle is virtually the lowest-hassle business I can imagine running. Which makes me picture the horrors of creating and managing an actual business.
Indeed, I suspect that anyone who’s ever run an actual business has been rolling their eyes at my self-pity. Twelve little snags? Real entrepreneurs face more challenges every day. Unlike me, they have to coordinate a long list of products, each with their own attendant baggage. Unlike me, they have to manage a physical space. Unlike me, they have to hire and direct employees. And unlike me, they have to cope with a morass of government regulation.
I don’t care if actual businesspeople do roll their eyes at me; their can-do attitude in the face of endless obstacles still fills me with awe. Note further that in this very blog post I’ve already publicly complained more about my business woes than most businesspeople ever will."
Also, a successful business tends to immediately create jobs (at least part time, if not full employees) to help it grow. People who denigrate business and the art of making profit - which truly is the art of fulfilling the wants of others - are so truly, intensely naive.
Meh, I think that's an equally overly simplistic view.
Capitalism earns its accolades as well as its criticism because it's fans want it to be this pure embodiment of helping people. But it's obviously responsible for just some of the things that help people. I think its pretty fucked up for example that full neighbourhoods of multi-millionaires if not billionaires exist in my city, while a huge portion of the people working in the jobs virtuously bestowed upon us by them can't simultaneously afford rent and savings or dental work. The dentist comes out fine, but unless you're very well covered by rare dental plans, you might lose all your annual savings with one tooth problem.
It’s funny but the high cost of both are of those things you mention are the result of artificial regulatory restrictions on supply.
Entrepreneur property developers are ready, able and willing to build a tidal wave of housing, but are shackled by NIMBY zoning laws, building codes, and land use restrictions designed to restrict the supply of housing and push up prices for existing home owners.
The high cost of dentistry is entirely a result of extreme restrictions on new dentists put in place by the ADA. Entrepreneurs are ready, able, and willing to train or import from overseas an army of new, cheap dentists. By they can’t because the ADA hasn’t approved opening any new dental schools since 1980 and won’t let Turkish, Thai and Costa Rican dentists practice in the US.
I agree, minimally. I don't want either of those being under the sole discretion of business people. Nobody really does except business people. Overly strict zoning laws probably need to be eliminated or more carefully and frequently thought about at the city level, in part because cities let developers do whatever the hell they want on the outskirts, and prevents new dev on the inner bits entirely
Maybe a manager would be. But not an entrepreneur.
A related discussion, also in Comedians in Cars: https://youtu.be/UM-Q_zpuJGU?t=820
Obama: How did you keep perspective?
Seinfeld: ...I fell in love with the work. And the work was joyful. And difficult . And interesting. And that was my focus.
I had a dream once that I was hired by a rich man.
I was given the freedom to hire the smartest people I could find and take on something challenging.
It paid only room and board for me and my family, plus a small equity share in whatever we created.
I would give anything for that dream to be a reality.
Please, if you’re reading this and you’re a millionaire, have some fun making someone else’s dreams come true?
Being a professor at a research institution is not too far from what you describe. You need to persuade the rich man that you are worth funding (i.e. grants) but with that you can hire the smartest people you can find to take on something challenging, get paid a modest but decent salary, and have a small equity share in whatever you create.
Sometimes you can exit with much more than that. A family member who spent decades in research was able to get the IP rights to some of their work and is running a stealth mode startup to develop it further.
Consider adding contact information to your hackernews profile, so that the millionaires can reach out to you privately.
Yeah, I imagine something like that so I could work on my lang/db engine (https://tablam.org).
But then, I wake up!. So moving a bit here and there and hope to find a small numbers of non-millonaires... hard, but possible?
What do you want to build?
> The death of George Floyd, the national reckoning over systemic racism and inequality, and the death of iconic U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg all focused attention on the rule of law
Highly doubt this caused the increase. There was a survey where only about 5% of non-elites (regular people) actually rate these issues as important.
I think you posted this in the wrong thread. This one is about almost-billionaires; the quote above is from an article about lawyers (who would be so lucky to be described in this way!).
This is gonna sound harsh, but I have never in my life met or seen a wealthy person become anything more than a dilettante in some new hobby / passion calling AFTER they acquired their wealth. There's nothing wrong with that, a lot of people enjoy being so-so at something they enjoy, as long as they get to dabble in that.
To become top-tier at anything, I believe you need more than just the lust. It take a mix of raw talent, discipline, passion, and drive - at minimum.
(Yes - there are probably numerous examples to disprove this, but I'll bet that the ratio is extremely skewed)
Top become top-tier at stuff, it's almost inevitable that you'll need to sacrifice a lot. Self-made wealthy individuals usually transition to "do things for the fun of it" mode. Those two are almost always incompatible.
I was a top-tier math competition participant. I gave everything to it for a few years. That's gone, the willingness to sacrifice so much is gone.
Now I have a relationship to take care and my generous paycheck makes my only worry be if my plants are well watered.
On the other hard, "top-tier" might be subjective or useless depending on the hobby. Does someone really want to be considered among the top 10 baristas in the world, or do they just want to know more than all their friends about coffee? Is the goal to beat Eliud Kipchoge or just buy an expensive Iron Man jacket?
There was a British princess who became a nun in Italy. It happens.
I suspect, this may be far too common for anyone who lives a "checkpointing" style of life, i.e. once I achieve this, I will pursue this ambition.
I've realized this sort of checkpoint-based planning is not helpful for the long run because naturally, times change, and with that ambitions change. If you haven't already had a taste of making progress towards the said ambition, and it happens to require a distinct set of skills, it becomes quite a mountain to climb.
I went into big tech to build up a warchest, and now I have no desire to build a company since I don't want to hire anyone. I'm going to "retire" and do some solo products around board games. I've got a secret weapon: http://www.adama-lang.org/
It'd be really nice if "figuring out what you want to do" was a course you could take, external to school. Re-evaluating how to effectively spend your time is really hard to do, especially for those without friends or family to help them.
It'd certainly help those in extreme post- or pre-financial-independence situations find a motivator.
I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest this is an inverse romanticization of desire (where it elevates the virtue of anti-desire, or anti-ambition).
I’ve heard this argument countless times when people say ‘money doesn’t buy happiness’. That’s always been an inversion to me. Money absolutely buys happiness.
So here in this article you have two incredibly successful men inverting their desires, and romanticizing it as some kind of epiphany.
In other words, a brazen humble brag.
Who shall be tormented by the fire of ambition?