> They take whatever job pays and spend decades fighting upstream.
I suspect that this affects a lot of folks in tech. There's a lot of money to be made, so people get into it. They don't really like what they do, so it's always a chore. Their work often shows it, too.
I'm retired. I don't have to write software, but I spend more time writing software (for free), than I did, for most of my career.
I like the Integrity part, too. That seems to be something that's missing (from most vocations), these days. One of the reasons that I stuck with my last job for so long, was because the people I worked with, and for, had Integrity, and that's pretty important to me.
The older I get, the more I realize what a critical component of personal and social relationships it is, and how deeply it reinforces virtually everything good in society. There's never a good reason to forgo it, and never a good reason to accept spending time with people who don't have it. It only leads to trouble.
I started my career in ad tech and it was often such abject misery because of this. I couldn't put my finger on it at the time, but a large part of the problem was working with people who had very little integrity. They were great at masking it and presenting a different persona, but ultimately, we did bad things to people and made filthy money. I don't miss anything about it.
> I'm retired. I don't have to write software, but I spend more time writing software (for free), than I did, for most of my career.
Same. Claude/Gemini/DeepSeekV4/Qwen3.6 are enabling me to do way more experimentation than I could do on my own. 10X at least. Not getting paid for any of it, but that's OK, getting paid imposes limitations on what you can work on and imposes responsibilities that I don't care to have anymore. There's a certain kind of integrity in that as well.
This is conflated by the fact that most people start to enjoy things that give them a lot of money and prestige. Otherwise everyone would be in playing sports and making art, the things kids do before they care about money and prestige
This is from 1880 and reminds me of something Dostoyevsky had written 14 years before. His quip in The Gambler was even more extreme because he spoke about working hard and saving every penny for generations with the subtext being that it makes everyone miserable.
At the same time you have to be out there in the world, increase your luck surface - if you sit in your cubicle/room/private chatroom all day you are less likely to make a mark on the world despite your brilliance.
Again I forgot which artist said it but that in New York art scene the most successful artists spent most of their working days socializing not painting/sculpting etc.
What are those artists successful at? Making art, or marketing it? The New York art scene is a curious example in this context, because it is notoriously all about who you know rather than what you do, and that's not usually considered a good thing.
One of my thoughts is that it's not easy for people to discover what they're truly good at.
The reason is that if you're truly good at something, if you have a real talent for it, then it's easy for you to do it well from the start, so you rarely judge it or realize how good you are. Just as no one thinks they're good at their heartbeat and breathing. Because you have the talent to be good at them from the beginning, so you don't put in much effort to learn them, and therefore you don't realize how difficult they are.
I think a real way to discover your strengths is not to reflect on what you do well, but on what makes you most frustrated when you see others doing it. It feels like an experienced driver watching a student drive and getting frustrated: Why can't you do such a simple action correctly? If you find yourself constantly wondering on something: why can't everyone just do this and it's so simple? You can remind yourself that that one might not be simple at all, but rather that you possess a genuine talent for it.
>>The reason is that if you're truly good at something, if you have a real talent for it, then it's easy for you to do it well from the start, so you rarely judge it or realize how good you are.
I've often wondered about this (beyond basic abilities). I'm sure there are exceptional people for whom this is true but in my experience most people start out not being very good at what they later end up being really good at.
Would love to know if there's some sort of data / research on this.
> Barnum’s first rule: pick the work you’re built for, then aim to be the best at it.
Edsger Dijkstra, in one of his letters, giving advice (IIRC) to a PhD student: "Do only what only you can do."
Kind of funny to see one of the greatest computer scientists and one of the greatest public entertainers giving the same advice, but I guess that speaks strongly in its favor.
I could never do anything, I could talk fancy and bullshit and could come up with all kinds of great ideas as an ideas guy.
Nothing useful.
So I became a developer and data engineer, and I became really good at it even though, like the protagonist in Gattica (with whom I share other similarities), I had to work twice as hard and spend all my off hours obsessed with it because my nature worked against me.
While others with this natural prediliction could spend all their time in type 1 thinking I had to live in type 2.
But it was a success, and I found myself becoming an executive at long last on the strength of my technical abilities, and it turns out executives don't actually need to do much of anything and really, outside of maybe some complex CFO roles, executive roles are by far the easiest roles at existing profitable companies. I suspect csuite positions are actually the roles most secretly replaced by Ai already.
Even if you find a vocation that you generally enjoy, it doesn't mean that you will enjoy every part of it. I love to program, but there have been a number of jobs and tasks during my career that I definitely did not like.
I think this probably applies to every career. You have to navigate within your available options to balance things that pay well with the ones you enjoy doing.
I have a side project that I truly enjoy working on. It is big enough that I have spent years working on it in my spare time. I am still trying to find traction for it in the market. If it ends up making me a lot of money, then great; but if it never makes anything, I have still enjoyed building it.
Does anyone else feel like they overindex on this principle? I have on multiple occasions found myself too conservative to take advantage of the leverage available to me. (Example: doing a refinance in 2020 I could have taken out a 30-year mortgage at the rock-bottom rate, but chose to do 15. This is irrational given that I could have taken all the money I didn't have to pay toward the mortgage and even putting it in completely safe investments, come out ahead (even before considering the mortgage interest deduction).
I'm not saying I envy those leveraged up to their necks, but I think growing up in a family that didn't really have any money and did have a lot of the bad kind of debt made it hard for me to feel comfortable owing money even when it would probably be in my best interest (no pun intended).
Like with many things, finding the best is hard, finding a good enough fit is a lot more attainable and maybe should be the goal.
If you work on projects in groups often, you might be able to find what fits you by what things you end doing especially if you do those parts well. Do you read and interpret the directions, do you do the assembly, do you keep the group on task, do you verify the output is acceptable, do you figure out how to proceed when there's a problem, etc.
Also, what tasks do people who know you ask you to help with; especially if those people have choices for who to ask and then specifically ask you. Those are things that likely fit you; especially if you get enjoyment out of doing those tasks, beyond the enjoyment you might get from doing any task for someone. Sometimes, you might get asked to do these things for reasons other than you're good at them, or you may be good at them and also hate doing it, etc; so like be aware of that.
If you're lucky, what fits you is distinctive and commercially apprechiated. But not everyone has those fits, so it's good to also look for things that fit well enough to pay the bills. You may need to develop other skills to get into a position to use your good fit as well.
Are you an extrovert or introvert? Look at how you spend your time. Do you have to spend time with people or have to be alone sometimes?
What do you do when you have nothing else to do? I know that's really hard these days with all the distractions we have. So maybe what do you watch or read about? What are your interests?
But the world changes. I started out as an engineer and that got shipped to China. I pivoted to IT, shipped to India. Pivoted to technical writing and now there's LLMs.
I figure things out and share to make it easier for others too. That works in a lot of industries.
What do you find yourself gravitating to? What part of your job comes easiest? That things are easy to you that other’s find difficult? What do you spend time learning more about even when you don’t have to? Those are directional. For me the first time I started writing code I knew that’s what I’d need to do for a living.
Ask people who know you well what you are talented for. Oftentimes we don't see it ourselves. As you get good at something, it become easier, and you think of it as a given. On the opposite, we tend to over appreciate what is difficult for us.
A lot of pop-psychology doesn't hold up when subject to empirical review, but OCEAN / "Big 5" does, and it's probably a decent starting point.
E.g. if you are low in extraversion and agreeableness, you probably wouldn't make a good nurse or waiter, but you might not make a bad lawyer or engineer.
What a good book! I was expecting some "follow your dreams and lean into the hustle" pablum, but no. He talks pretty frankly about how the pursuit of extreme wealth, (100s of millions) which he'd succeeded at, isn't worth it even then because a single-digit amount of millions is quite enough to enjoy life, but adds that he expects readers will ignore that part and attempt to get filthy rich anyway.
Also, he later became a poet (a very good one, too, if I remember right) and early on in his life tried to be a pop singer. Feels a bit like that whole multi-decade career as founder and owner of a massive publishing empire was an odd detour for him.
Very fascinating person, and the book's definitely worth reading.
Oh boy, this did not age well. Most cases of “extremely successful” people I can think of exhibit the opposite of these core principles: have no “knack” whatsoever, except not giving a shit about whatever they pretend to be their focus while only focusing on personal return; they contract clusterfucks of debts, just usually never end up having to repay them personally; very few of them even know what “going all in” means, they usually live easy while exploiting others to actually do anything; they have no integrity whatsoever, and they do not have to, since apparently demonstrating lack of it is no longer cause for being told by everyone to fuck off into oblivion anymore.
And yes, yes, of course there are good people out there too that just want (/need) money to get by, but it’s funny to read this and think about those with _lots_ of money
Indeed. This book strikes me as yet another "guide to making money" which was created in order to make money for the author. It is all just his opinion, without any evidence. One might do the exact opposite, and make money as well.
Yes Jeff Bezos was famously passionate about retail and Marc Benioff would build customer relationship management solutions using paper and glue as a young lad
Barnum’s pamphlet was published in 1880, squarely between two major financial panics linked to stock bubbles. 1873 wiped out thousands of businesses and triggered the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, crushed by federal troops. The Panic of 1893 would come a few years later. In both cases, the likes of Rockefeller, Carnegie, Morgan, etc. used the chaos to consolidate monopolies, buying distressed assets at rock-bottom prices.
The private rules for the Robber Barons were almost the exact opposite of Barnum’s advice (build skills, avoid debt, work hard, be honest):
1. Control the Vocation of Others: Ensure you own the system in which others work. Vertical and horizontal integration of your businesses is the mechanism by which you ensure all the value created by labor ends up in your pocket.
2. Use Other People's Debt as a Weapon: Strategic debt is your friend, and you can generate corporate debt so vast it becomes a systemic threat. Ensure you have access to pools of capital, so that during a a panic you can buy assets for pennies on the dollar. Inflate the stock price of your holding company far beyond its actual assets, and become a giant creditor. If your debt-financed bet fails, ensure the bag is held by the public. Privatize the gains, socialize the risks.
3. Whatever You Own, Defend With All Your Political Might: You need the ability to shape legislation, control the courts, and deploy state violence to protect your assets and destroy competition. Bribery, lobbying and blackmail are your tools. Those political expenditures are your real insurance policy when your assets are threatened by populist anger or economic chaos, and will also grease expansion into new markets and help you capture foreign resources (oil, bananas, etc.).
4. Control the Definition of Integrity: Never break the law and steal from business partners; instead, change the laws to make your actions legally defensible in court. Claim that the only integrity that matters is the confidence of the capital markets. Stock manipulation, bribery of politicians, and crushing competition with frivolous patent lawsuits are just enterprise, public service, and fairness. Your integrity is your public image as a builder and a captain of industry. Hire biographers and buy newspapers to tell this story.
Finally, blame the victim. Tell the destitute it’s their own fault that they hadn’t figured out how to successfully navigate a system designed to strip their wealth from them and hand it over to the monopolists. This same self-help message of ‘individual responsibility for your economic condition’ is constantly pumped out to the American public today by an endless stream of self-help books in the Robber Baron 2.0 era, and for the same reasons.
I believe modern capitalism operates quite differently from the methods preached in this book. There are clear limits to relying solely on a labor-intensive mindset without strategic leverage.
I didn't have any special talents, outstanding skills, or privileges. In my twenties, I worked 69 hours a week for two straight years. Yet, I only made minimum wage and had nothing to show for it. I didn't develop any meaningful skills, either. Simply putting in the effort didn't guarantee I would get everything.
Ironically, it was the choices I made during my downtime—taking a step back, reflecting, and reorganizing my thoughts—that actually allowed me to earn more money. Even then, the working hours were much shorter, around 52 hours a week. That choice was programming. (Though, to be fair, even that is getting tougher now because of LLMs.)
My conclusion is that all advice from successful people is heavily packaged. I constantly think about the concept of 'effort.' What exactly is genuine effort? What is deliberate practice? In modern capitalism, the kind of effort that gets rewarded isn't trading time for money; true success lies in building assets that decouple your time from your income.
However, even that feels somewhat meaningless to me now. If we constantly assign value to everything and strive only to be the 'best,' I'm always left wondering: does that make me a meaningless person?
Looking at it coldly, I am heading into my mid-thirties, and I have only just finished paying off my student loans and the debt I incurred from being scammed. I don't have a fancy degree, nor have I built a globally renowned program.
My bank account currently sits at $30, and I'm worried about next month's rent. But because I've survived so many different grinds, I have the confidence that I'll figure out a way to live on somehow. Though, I do feel a bit regretful about not having been married yet.
More importantly, though, I feel that the more value we place purely on money, the more the other joys of life fade away. Living life itself is an effort. Pausing to look back is also an effort. The only thing that truly renders the time in our lives meaningless is believing that the 'present me' has nothing left to learn from the 'past me.' Everything I've gone through has definitively helped me in some way.
I believe these types of books are ultimately just acts of assigning arbitrary values to sell copies. They manufacture the idea that their specific worldview is the 'correct' one just to collect book royalties and speaking fees. But the way I see it, life is not built on these linear values. Life rests on non-linearity.
The more you try to cram life into a linear framework, the more you inevitably lose the non-linear values. Think about how computers represent numbers. Human cognition perceives a continuous, infinite line, but computers represent it as discrete dots (floating-point numbers), right? I believe there is a similar kind of 'precision loss' in life when forced into linearity.
Capitalism defines surplus, "meaningless" time as an inefficiency and preaches that we must try our absolute best at all times. But from everything I know, the world simply doesn't work that way. There are only people who desperately want to believe it works that way.
Some people waste their time on a stack of paper filled with mere letters. Some waste it making images appear on a computer screen. Others shed tears while watching television. None of these actions make absolute logical sense, and I believe life is precisely the sum total of all these incomprehensible acts.
I highly doubt whether it is right to confine the entirety of life into a tiny box called 'success.' I believe the shape of that 'success box' depends entirely on the shape of one's own life. From that perspective, the showman's text doesn't address the complex leverage required in modern society; it simply looks like a tool designed to sell the false illusion of the American Dream.
Another one I'd like to add is: fuck prestige. Everybody wants to run a Café or a Bar, nobody wants to run a gutter cleaning service. Of the former ones most go out of business within a year. Transfer that to other things as well.
Things looking good is not necessarily the same as things working out financially.
> They take whatever job pays and spend decades fighting upstream.
I suspect that this affects a lot of folks in tech. There's a lot of money to be made, so people get into it. They don't really like what they do, so it's always a chore. Their work often shows it, too.
I'm retired. I don't have to write software, but I spend more time writing software (for free), than I did, for most of my career.
I like the Integrity part, too. That seems to be something that's missing (from most vocations), these days. One of the reasons that I stuck with my last job for so long, was because the people I worked with, and for, had Integrity, and that's pretty important to me.
> and that's pretty important to me
The older I get, the more I realize what a critical component of personal and social relationships it is, and how deeply it reinforces virtually everything good in society. There's never a good reason to forgo it, and never a good reason to accept spending time with people who don't have it. It only leads to trouble.
I started my career in ad tech and it was often such abject misery because of this. I couldn't put my finger on it at the time, but a large part of the problem was working with people who had very little integrity. They were great at masking it and presenting a different persona, but ultimately, we did bad things to people and made filthy money. I don't miss anything about it.
> I'm retired. I don't have to write software, but I spend more time writing software (for free), than I did, for most of my career.
Same. Claude/Gemini/DeepSeekV4/Qwen3.6 are enabling me to do way more experimentation than I could do on my own. 10X at least. Not getting paid for any of it, but that's OK, getting paid imposes limitations on what you can work on and imposes responsibilities that I don't care to have anymore. There's a certain kind of integrity in that as well.
This is conflated by the fact that most people start to enjoy things that give them a lot of money and prestige. Otherwise everyone would be in playing sports and making art, the things kids do before they care about money and prestige
Given how much these jobs pay, this is not necessarily a bad thing.
> I like the Integrity part, too.
Integrity is great. Their dapp is solid and currently offers 2,000 free prediction market tokens when signing up with your biometric data.
If you haven't signed up yet hit me up for my rec code: you'll get an extra 1,000 tokens and I get 5x credits!
This is from 1880 and reminds me of something Dostoyevsky had written 14 years before. His quip in The Gambler was even more extreme because he spoke about working hard and saving every penny for generations with the subtext being that it makes everyone miserable.
I am paraphrasing but I think it was W. Buffett who said:
"Work at the job that you do not hate"
In other words, not all vocations that you are great at and talented and want to pursue are valued by current world.
I love playing chess way more and actually am reasonably good at it, but programming and teaching are valued more and I like those too.
As Jimmy O. Yang's father reportedly said: "Pursuing your dreams is how you become homeless"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GO6ntvIwT2k&t=22s
At the same time you have to be out there in the world, increase your luck surface - if you sit in your cubicle/room/private chatroom all day you are less likely to make a mark on the world despite your brilliance.
Again I forgot which artist said it but that in New York art scene the most successful artists spent most of their working days socializing not painting/sculpting etc.
What are those artists successful at? Making art, or marketing it? The New York art scene is a curious example in this context, because it is notoriously all about who you know rather than what you do, and that's not usually considered a good thing.
One of my thoughts is that it's not easy for people to discover what they're truly good at.
The reason is that if you're truly good at something, if you have a real talent for it, then it's easy for you to do it well from the start, so you rarely judge it or realize how good you are. Just as no one thinks they're good at their heartbeat and breathing. Because you have the talent to be good at them from the beginning, so you don't put in much effort to learn them, and therefore you don't realize how difficult they are.
I think a real way to discover your strengths is not to reflect on what you do well, but on what makes you most frustrated when you see others doing it. It feels like an experienced driver watching a student drive and getting frustrated: Why can't you do such a simple action correctly? If you find yourself constantly wondering on something: why can't everyone just do this and it's so simple? You can remind yourself that that one might not be simple at all, but rather that you possess a genuine talent for it.
>>The reason is that if you're truly good at something, if you have a real talent for it, then it's easy for you to do it well from the start, so you rarely judge it or realize how good you are.
I've often wondered about this (beyond basic abilities). I'm sure there are exceptional people for whom this is true but in my experience most people start out not being very good at what they later end up being really good at.
Would love to know if there's some sort of data / research on this.
> Barnum’s first rule: pick the work you’re built for, then aim to be the best at it.
Edsger Dijkstra, in one of his letters, giving advice (IIRC) to a PhD student: "Do only what only you can do."
Kind of funny to see one of the greatest computer scientists and one of the greatest public entertainers giving the same advice, but I guess that speaks strongly in its favor.
For all non-Dijkstra-level people, I guess that means "Do only what you are particularly good at".
I could never do anything, I could talk fancy and bullshit and could come up with all kinds of great ideas as an ideas guy.
Nothing useful.
So I became a developer and data engineer, and I became really good at it even though, like the protagonist in Gattica (with whom I share other similarities), I had to work twice as hard and spend all my off hours obsessed with it because my nature worked against me.
While others with this natural prediliction could spend all their time in type 1 thinking I had to live in type 2.
But it was a success, and I found myself becoming an executive at long last on the strength of my technical abilities, and it turns out executives don't actually need to do much of anything and really, outside of maybe some complex CFO roles, executive roles are by far the easiest roles at existing profitable companies. I suspect csuite positions are actually the roles most secretly replaced by Ai already.
Even if you find a vocation that you generally enjoy, it doesn't mean that you will enjoy every part of it. I love to program, but there have been a number of jobs and tasks during my career that I definitely did not like.
I think this probably applies to every career. You have to navigate within your available options to balance things that pay well with the ones you enjoy doing.
I have a side project that I truly enjoy working on. It is big enough that I have spent years working on it in my spare time. I am still trying to find traction for it in the market. If it ends up making me a lot of money, then great; but if it never makes anything, I have still enjoyed building it.
> Even if you find a vocation that you generally enjoy, it doesn't mean that you will enjoy every part of it.
Agreed.
But I think you would have been worse off had you chosen a career in something you did not like, be it law or finance or fitness training etc.
This is a great little book that everyone should read. It's available for free here: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8581
> " 2. Avoid Debt Like the Plague"
Does anyone else feel like they overindex on this principle? I have on multiple occasions found myself too conservative to take advantage of the leverage available to me. (Example: doing a refinance in 2020 I could have taken out a 30-year mortgage at the rock-bottom rate, but chose to do 15. This is irrational given that I could have taken all the money I didn't have to pay toward the mortgage and even putting it in completely safe investments, come out ahead (even before considering the mortgage interest deduction).
I'm not saying I envy those leveraged up to their necks, but I think growing up in a family that didn't really have any money and did have a lot of the bad kind of debt made it hard for me to feel comfortable owing money even when it would probably be in my best interest (no pun intended).
The hardest thing is to know what's your best fit. Any advice?
Like with many things, finding the best is hard, finding a good enough fit is a lot more attainable and maybe should be the goal.
If you work on projects in groups often, you might be able to find what fits you by what things you end doing especially if you do those parts well. Do you read and interpret the directions, do you do the assembly, do you keep the group on task, do you verify the output is acceptable, do you figure out how to proceed when there's a problem, etc.
Also, what tasks do people who know you ask you to help with; especially if those people have choices for who to ask and then specifically ask you. Those are things that likely fit you; especially if you get enjoyment out of doing those tasks, beyond the enjoyment you might get from doing any task for someone. Sometimes, you might get asked to do these things for reasons other than you're good at them, or you may be good at them and also hate doing it, etc; so like be aware of that.
If you're lucky, what fits you is distinctive and commercially apprechiated. But not everyone has those fits, so it's good to also look for things that fit well enough to pay the bills. You may need to develop other skills to get into a position to use your good fit as well.
Are you an extrovert or introvert? Look at how you spend your time. Do you have to spend time with people or have to be alone sometimes?
What do you do when you have nothing else to do? I know that's really hard these days with all the distractions we have. So maybe what do you watch or read about? What are your interests?
But the world changes. I started out as an engineer and that got shipped to China. I pivoted to IT, shipped to India. Pivoted to technical writing and now there's LLMs.
I figure things out and share to make it easier for others too. That works in a lot of industries.
What do you find yourself gravitating to? What part of your job comes easiest? That things are easy to you that other’s find difficult? What do you spend time learning more about even when you don’t have to? Those are directional. For me the first time I started writing code I knew that’s what I’d need to do for a living.
Ask people who know you well what you are talented for. Oftentimes we don't see it ourselves. As you get good at something, it become easier, and you think of it as a given. On the opposite, we tend to over appreciate what is difficult for us.
Turn procrastination into pragmatism.
Switch from service-to-self to service-to-others, or vice versa.
See your mind as shut gates that can be opened to something already perfect.
Make your sub-conscious super-conscious - any tips there?
I remember Prince (musician) said he would receive things from God and send them back to source.
Cut the strings that make you a puppet??
A lot of pop-psychology doesn't hold up when subject to empirical review, but OCEAN / "Big 5" does, and it's probably a decent starting point.
E.g. if you are low in extraversion and agreeableness, you probably wouldn't make a good nurse or waiter, but you might not make a bad lawyer or engineer.
Book is available here:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/8581/8581-h/8581-h.htm
Previous discussion (2023-01-20, 69 comments):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34447945
Standard Ebooks has it too: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/p-t-barnum/the-art-of-mone...
More formats here:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8581
I've only ever been good at dancing to punk music, which has only cost me money so far.
For a more recent pop-culture version, I'd recommend Felix Dennis https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18749286-how-to-get-rich
What a good book! I was expecting some "follow your dreams and lean into the hustle" pablum, but no. He talks pretty frankly about how the pursuit of extreme wealth, (100s of millions) which he'd succeeded at, isn't worth it even then because a single-digit amount of millions is quite enough to enjoy life, but adds that he expects readers will ignore that part and attempt to get filthy rich anyway.
Also, he later became a poet (a very good one, too, if I remember right) and early on in his life tried to be a pop singer. Feels a bit like that whole multi-decade career as founder and owner of a massive publishing empire was an odd detour for him.
Very fascinating person, and the book's definitely worth reading.
I love this book, but its authority is somewhat undermined by the infamous Steve Jobs passage...
That guy looks nothing like Hugh Jackman
Oh boy, this did not age well. Most cases of “extremely successful” people I can think of exhibit the opposite of these core principles: have no “knack” whatsoever, except not giving a shit about whatever they pretend to be their focus while only focusing on personal return; they contract clusterfucks of debts, just usually never end up having to repay them personally; very few of them even know what “going all in” means, they usually live easy while exploiting others to actually do anything; they have no integrity whatsoever, and they do not have to, since apparently demonstrating lack of it is no longer cause for being told by everyone to fuck off into oblivion anymore.
And yes, yes, of course there are good people out there too that just want (/need) money to get by, but it’s funny to read this and think about those with _lots_ of money
Indeed. This book strikes me as yet another "guide to making money" which was created in order to make money for the author. It is all just his opinion, without any evidence. One might do the exact opposite, and make money as well.
Yes Jeff Bezos was famously passionate about retail and Marc Benioff would build customer relationship management solutions using paper and glue as a young lad
Nobody is going to seriously discuss moneymaking tips from 1880, right? …right?
Is the advice from The Richest Man in Babylon, published in 1926, out of date?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Richest_Man_in_Babylon
Avoiding greed, envy, the hedonic treadmill, etc, will never not be good advice.
Because people now are so wildly different from people 150 years ago? We are exactly the same, with slightly shinier toys.
Barnum’s pamphlet was published in 1880, squarely between two major financial panics linked to stock bubbles. 1873 wiped out thousands of businesses and triggered the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, crushed by federal troops. The Panic of 1893 would come a few years later. In both cases, the likes of Rockefeller, Carnegie, Morgan, etc. used the chaos to consolidate monopolies, buying distressed assets at rock-bottom prices.
The private rules for the Robber Barons were almost the exact opposite of Barnum’s advice (build skills, avoid debt, work hard, be honest):
1. Control the Vocation of Others: Ensure you own the system in which others work. Vertical and horizontal integration of your businesses is the mechanism by which you ensure all the value created by labor ends up in your pocket.
2. Use Other People's Debt as a Weapon: Strategic debt is your friend, and you can generate corporate debt so vast it becomes a systemic threat. Ensure you have access to pools of capital, so that during a a panic you can buy assets for pennies on the dollar. Inflate the stock price of your holding company far beyond its actual assets, and become a giant creditor. If your debt-financed bet fails, ensure the bag is held by the public. Privatize the gains, socialize the risks.
3. Whatever You Own, Defend With All Your Political Might: You need the ability to shape legislation, control the courts, and deploy state violence to protect your assets and destroy competition. Bribery, lobbying and blackmail are your tools. Those political expenditures are your real insurance policy when your assets are threatened by populist anger or economic chaos, and will also grease expansion into new markets and help you capture foreign resources (oil, bananas, etc.).
4. Control the Definition of Integrity: Never break the law and steal from business partners; instead, change the laws to make your actions legally defensible in court. Claim that the only integrity that matters is the confidence of the capital markets. Stock manipulation, bribery of politicians, and crushing competition with frivolous patent lawsuits are just enterprise, public service, and fairness. Your integrity is your public image as a builder and a captain of industry. Hire biographers and buy newspapers to tell this story.
Finally, blame the victim. Tell the destitute it’s their own fault that they hadn’t figured out how to successfully navigate a system designed to strip their wealth from them and hand it over to the monopolists. This same self-help message of ‘individual responsibility for your economic condition’ is constantly pumped out to the American public today by an endless stream of self-help books in the Robber Baron 2.0 era, and for the same reasons.
I believe modern capitalism operates quite differently from the methods preached in this book. There are clear limits to relying solely on a labor-intensive mindset without strategic leverage.
I didn't have any special talents, outstanding skills, or privileges. In my twenties, I worked 69 hours a week for two straight years. Yet, I only made minimum wage and had nothing to show for it. I didn't develop any meaningful skills, either. Simply putting in the effort didn't guarantee I would get everything.
Ironically, it was the choices I made during my downtime—taking a step back, reflecting, and reorganizing my thoughts—that actually allowed me to earn more money. Even then, the working hours were much shorter, around 52 hours a week. That choice was programming. (Though, to be fair, even that is getting tougher now because of LLMs.)
My conclusion is that all advice from successful people is heavily packaged. I constantly think about the concept of 'effort.' What exactly is genuine effort? What is deliberate practice? In modern capitalism, the kind of effort that gets rewarded isn't trading time for money; true success lies in building assets that decouple your time from your income.
However, even that feels somewhat meaningless to me now. If we constantly assign value to everything and strive only to be the 'best,' I'm always left wondering: does that make me a meaningless person?
Looking at it coldly, I am heading into my mid-thirties, and I have only just finished paying off my student loans and the debt I incurred from being scammed. I don't have a fancy degree, nor have I built a globally renowned program.
My bank account currently sits at $30, and I'm worried about next month's rent. But because I've survived so many different grinds, I have the confidence that I'll figure out a way to live on somehow. Though, I do feel a bit regretful about not having been married yet.
More importantly, though, I feel that the more value we place purely on money, the more the other joys of life fade away. Living life itself is an effort. Pausing to look back is also an effort. The only thing that truly renders the time in our lives meaningless is believing that the 'present me' has nothing left to learn from the 'past me.' Everything I've gone through has definitively helped me in some way.
I believe these types of books are ultimately just acts of assigning arbitrary values to sell copies. They manufacture the idea that their specific worldview is the 'correct' one just to collect book royalties and speaking fees. But the way I see it, life is not built on these linear values. Life rests on non-linearity.
The more you try to cram life into a linear framework, the more you inevitably lose the non-linear values. Think about how computers represent numbers. Human cognition perceives a continuous, infinite line, but computers represent it as discrete dots (floating-point numbers), right? I believe there is a similar kind of 'precision loss' in life when forced into linearity.
Capitalism defines surplus, "meaningless" time as an inefficiency and preaches that we must try our absolute best at all times. But from everything I know, the world simply doesn't work that way. There are only people who desperately want to believe it works that way.
Some people waste their time on a stack of paper filled with mere letters. Some waste it making images appear on a computer screen. Others shed tears while watching television. None of these actions make absolute logical sense, and I believe life is precisely the sum total of all these incomprehensible acts.
I highly doubt whether it is right to confine the entirety of life into a tiny box called 'success.' I believe the shape of that 'success box' depends entirely on the shape of one's own life. From that perspective, the showman's text doesn't address the complex leverage required in modern society; it simply looks like a tool designed to sell the false illusion of the American Dream.
It's not like this outside North America. Life is much more balanced.
Another one I'd like to add is: fuck prestige. Everybody wants to run a Café or a Bar, nobody wants to run a gutter cleaning service. Of the former ones most go out of business within a year. Transfer that to other things as well.
Things looking good is not necessarily the same as things working out financially.
Said another way: "Pride is for the poor."