Funny article about rich people
This made me laugh: Four Simple Steps to Becoming a Billionaire.
As many folks in usability / user experience know, don’t listen to self-reporting. People are very bad at explaining why they did something, and instead, you have to watch them objectively and study their decision-making patterns to reach any conclusions. That’s why it’s silly to ask customers what features they want and develop them specifically, without putting it through a filter of customer motivation and context.
Related to the idea that people can guarantee a string of successes is a recent blog called the Myth of the Serial Entrepreneur. How many are really out there? And how good are they compared to a layman? After all, in a hit-driven industry, it just matters that you hit it once. Plus, the difference between an "expert" entrepreneur and an amateur one might be 0.1% success rate versus a 0.2%, with the rest of it being attributed to Luck. (I’m exaggerating to make a point – proven entrepreneurs are probably several thousand times better than average entrepreneurs, as you see in other expert performance studies)
That said, whereas you can’t guarantee you’ll succeed at a billionaire level, you CAN guarantee that you won’t. I have many friends who are very smart, motivated, and capable people.
In fact, they are probably no less capable than the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world – that’s why you always see posts on that Internet that say, "Oh, I could have done that!" But of course you could have, but you didn’t. And that’s what counts.
Whereas
successful entrepreneurs took a shot with 1 in 1,000,000,000 odds, many
of my friends are stuck at Microsoft enjoying safe, reasonable
lifestyles with 0 for 1,000,000,000 odds. So there’s no possible upside
beyond their salaries. So experts might get 0.2%, amateurs might get 0.1%, but Microsofties get 0% :)
Anyway, my business plan after reading that article is to illegally acquire some energy assets in Russia and kill a bunch of people. Now I just need to find a VC to fund that…
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