A more accurate title for this is "How to Be Financially Successful".
I'd love for Sam to write a post called "How to Be a Successful Human" or "How to Live a Successful Life". This more important topic has little-to-nothing to do with financial success.
Re-reading this made me notice the overlap between the two posts. Most of the suggestions across both posts fall into a few common themes. I find having a shorter list of "keys to success" helps me keep them top of mind day to day. I see four main themes here across both posts:
1. Be internally driven. Gain energy by working on things you are excited about. Think independently. Don't get pushed around. Don't default to doing the same thing everyone else is doing. Don't chase status. Have almost too much self belief. You can only motivate yourself to work hard and sell your ideas to others if you genuinely believe in them and your motivation is internally driven.
2. Have clear goals. Have bold goals. Make them achievable by breaking them down by day, by week, by decade. Take advantage of compounding to make small daily accomplishments snowball to reach bold long term ambitions. Compounding works not just for financial wealth, but also for building knowledge, developing skills, relationship, and health. Taking new risks constantly will help you learn new things faster and speed up compounding in all domains. Try to create enough buffer to be able to take risks and experiment in all areas of your life.
3. Be focused and don't waste time on things that don't matter. Minimize cognitive load. Minimize personal burn rate. Being focused does not mean sacrificing exercise, eating well, and sleeping. Most people would gain by spending more time thinking about which critical priorities to focus on. Start by killing the most obvious bad uses of time like TV and twitter.
3. Work hard. Whether your goals are in business, family, fitness, or altruism, working hard at something that naturally excites you is not only easier than working half-heartedly on things you hate, but is also the only way to achieve your goals. Working hard goes beyond putting in hours - it also means being willful, pushing through rejection, being persistent to bend the world to your will. Being a doer not a talker is just the first step.
4. Surround yourself with smart ambitious people who may join your team, teach you something, energize you and give you ideas. Invest in relationships by putting others first: be quick to do favors, don't judge too quickly, be forgiving, do not burn bridges, pause to think before acting especially if you're angry, be nice to everyone including strangers.
These lists are always the same and never say anything new. Work hard, have goals, be focused, etc etc. No fucking shit. Everyone has heard this stuff X1000. The problem is, you can read the same shit again and again, but if you're not that way from the beginning, reading the same crap isn't suddenly going to change you.
Most people who are mega driven are that way because of their birth parents and childhood. If you were born into a crap family who didn't encourage you, by the time you're 18, it's radically harder to change, no matter how many billionaires come along and say "hard luck chum, just work harder and set some goals."
I agree a tough background makes it a lot harder. But I don't think that takes away from the fact that people find these kinds lists helpful in moving forward from their starting point. I can think of a few famous examples of people who attribute their success partly to crafting and refining their own personal guidelines. Charlie Munger of Bershire Hathaway and his "mental models". Ray Dalio of Bridgewater documents the principles that helped him in a landmark book called Principles. Now I'm curious to look up people's backgrounds to see what successful people from tough backgrounds put in their lists.
> The problem is, you can read the same shit again and again, but if you're not that way from the beginning, reading the same crap isn't suddenly going to change you.
> Most people who are mega driven are that way because of their birth parents and childhood. If you were born into a crap family who didn't encourage you, by the time you're 18, it's radically harder to change
I both wholeheartedly agree with the above statements, but not necessarily the intent they seem to have.
I came from an incredibly disadvantaged background - single parent household, below the federal poverty line my entire childhood, unstable household (moved 20+ times before I turned 18, and spent several years of my childhood technically homeless and couchsurfing). I was fully self-supportive by the time I turned 17.
While I've had a lot of missteps and baggage due to my childhood, I also owe my current success and drive to it. The same coping mechanisms I developed them have served me well in my professional career:
- My brother and sister used our circumstances to give up, whereas I used them as motivation to try harder to get the hell out.
- I developed a very pragmatic and flexible mental framework. Growing up with zero power in any situation and zero support to fall back on, I learned to pragmatically accept what is while simultaneously evaluating any potential leverage points to change what is. I became incredibly effective at identifying those leverage points, and mutually-beneficial ways to exploit[1] them.
- I didn't make waves, but I learned how to ride the ones around me in ways that didn't rock others' boats. Having no resources of my own, and in some cases being wholly reliant on the benevolence of others, I intimately learned the value of introducing as little friction as possible into situations.
- I became very aware of implicit assumptions around me, and the friction and potential hardships[2][3] created by them. I make a conscious effort to address assumptions explicitly, because of that.
- Being under chronic stress for my entire childhood, I have an incredibly high tolerance for high-stress situations and how to cope with them.
Not everything that came out of my childhood was positive, but I've been able to translate much of it directly into incredibly valuable and fairly unique capabilities in a professional context, and I've made a successful career using those as a foundation. It could be argued that I may have been more successful at this point in my life if I had started on better footing, but it could have also gone the other way if I had never had the impetus to develop the internal motivation and skills/abilities I have today.
[1] I don't mean exploit with any negative/malicious intent, but exploit as in "don't waste an opportunity".
[2] I was able to get accepted to Columbia, and qualified for a free ride due to both academic and financial reasons. I passed on it because even though the school and room/board was free, I wasn't sure how I'd handle the logistics costs of moving there, summers/holidays, incidentals, etc. Turns out there are resources for these types of needs, but I didn't know that at the time and their acceptance literature didn't address it at all.
[3] To this day, I have an intense aversion to birthdays. It's incredibly common to have kid's birthdays at places which have incidental expenses for participation or admittance, such as game centers or theme/water parks. And rarely do people make it explicit on the invite what those are and if those incidentals are covered as part of their event fee or expected to be paid by the person invited. For my daughter's birthday, I always ensure and state that all activities are covered, and also explicitly state that gifts are optional, won't be opened during the party, and that they please be anonymous if anyone chooses to provide one. For most people, neither one of those parts of the invite will be very meaningful. But for some people, simply stating that can be the difference between them declining the invite outright, accepting it and it being a hardship and causing undue stress/friction for them, or accepting it and enjoying themselves. The same sorts of scenarios exist both professionally and personally, and being cognizant of them can bring a lot of success in life.
The only point that I really disagree with is that money can buy freedom. Only enlightenment brings freedom and it can't be bought. Keep up the good work!
"On every bookstall, in every magazine, you may find works telling people how to succeed. They are books showing men how to succeed in everything; they are written by men who cannot even succeed in writing books. To begin with, of course, there is no such thing as Success. Or, if you like to put it so, there is nothing that is not successful. That a thing is successful merely means that it is; a millionaire is successful in being a millionaire and a donkey in being a donkey. Any live man has succeeded in living; any dead man may have succeeded in committing suicide. But, passing over the bad logic and bad philosophy in the phrase, we may take it, as these writers do, in the ordinary sense of success in obtaining money or worldly position. ..." - G.K. Chesterton, The Fallacy of Success
To be honest it just seems a bit like playing with words. Of course you can use "success" in sentences where it loses the meaning intended in the current context, but it seems clear to me that when someone writes "to be successful" there are implications that it means being successful on some measure that the author finds valuable or intends the reader to think valuable (in order to sell a book or something).
And of course people can argue all day about what is "being successful", since you could mostly put it as a matter of taste depending on what one finds satisfaction in, in life. It is indeed true that someone who doesn't have the same frame of reference for success as the author will have a harder time finding useful information in such a book/article, but that doesn't mean that because the measure of success can vary from person to person, it doesn't exist at all.
When such an article or book talks about that, there is a meaning behind those words that is conditioned by the cultural context in which it is used (as materialistic as it can be) and obviously this is pretty much never meant to be understood as "how to act as to be able to formulate statements that match 'I successfully did .*'", which is how this quote feels like to me...
You really should read the whole article. I definitely recognize what he talks about.
"It is perfectly obvious that in any decent occupation (such as bricklaying or writing books) there are only two ways (in any special sense) of succeeding. One is by doing very good work, the other is by cheating." (...)
"You may want to jump or to play cards; but you do not want to read wandering statements to the effect that jumping is jumping, or that games are won by winners. If these writers, for instance, said anything about success in jumping it would be something like this: "The jumper must have a clear aim before him. He must desire definitely to jump higher than the other men who are in for the same competition. He must let no feeble feelings of mercy (sneaked from the sickening Little Englanders and Pro-Boers) prevent him from trying to do his best. He must remember that a competition in jumping is distinctly competitive, and that, as Darwin has gloriously demonstrated, THE WEAKEST GO TO THE WALL." "
And the article then ends with:
"At least, let us hope that we shall all live to see these absurd books about Success covered with a proper derision and neglect. They do not teach people to be successful, but they do teach people to be snobbish; they do spread a sort of evil poetry of worldliness. The Puritans are always denouncing books that inflame lust; what shall we say of books that inflame the viler passions of avarice and pride? A hundred years ago we had the ideal of the Industrious Apprentice; boys were told that by thrift and work they would all become Lord Mayors. This was fallacious, but it was manly, and had a minimum of moral truth. In our society, temperance will not help a poor man to enrich himself, but it may help him to respect himself. Good work will not make him a rich man, but good work may make him a good workman. The Industrious Apprentice rose by virtues few and narrow indeed, but still virtues. But what shall we say of the gospel preached to the new Industrious Apprentice; the Apprentice who rises not by his virtues, but avowedly by his vices?"
As I was reading point 1 of Sam's article, Compound yourself, I was thinking, ah ok, teachers are in the wrong field evidently, for Success. They can never be exponentially increasing their force and effect in the way suggested.
Although there are people like Gilbert Strang, making his excellent courses (e.g. Linear Algebra) available online, which over a million people around the world have watched and benefited from, and helping to create a world with an amazing variety of free online course videos available in all subjects. That is success for a teacher, I suppose. And we're asked to believe (in this culture) that making a lot of money is or could be in any worthy sense a greater success..
You should read the article I linked to! Sadly it was a bit too long to paste the whole thing.
When I was younger, my father gave me a thick and nauseating compendium labelled The University of Success, filled with extracts from vacuous books of the kind Chesterton talks about. I guess he thought I wasn't 'successful', and it would teach me how! By then I'd already read and got a lot from some of the useful books in the field - Awaken the Giant Within, Life 101, How to Win Friends and Influence People, The New Guide to Rational Living, Effortless Mastery, The Art of Possibility etc. For the kind of success I value most, I've been inspired for decades by, and owe the most to, writers such as Robert Fulghum, SARK, and most of all, Emerson.
Isn't success defined by your own metrics at the end of the day? You need to choose what are the things you are willing to tolerate/live with and what is your end goal in life.
It's hard nowadays to define such thing with so much information around, moulding what a "successful" life should look like, how should it feel and where should it be lived.
It's up to us to define what we care about and how to measure our happiness.
The opening two lines says that it's also about building something important, and subtly imply that's the better goal of the two.
As a non-profit founder I found the advice useful. If you think the incentives of the world are such that doing something important is basically the same goal as making money, then that's great, but I don't think so.
Being a successful human, on the other hand? Is it measured by one’s own satisfaction with life? By one’s impact on the society? By the number of offspring one produces? It’s all very confusing.
I recently discovered, which was difficult as an atheist, a huge body of work on this, under the topics "spirituality" and "philosophy". It makes so much sense now, but we've lost touch with it in our modern society. The idea of "what makes a successful human life" has been the hottest topic of written literature for all of history, it's just that we've lost a little touch it.
The only difference is, the metrics I listed are all metrics of success in life (according to different viewpoints). The personal feeling of satisfaction is a metric from the viewpoint of an individualist. The impact on society is a metric from the viewpoint of a socialist (or possibly a historian). The number of offspring is reproductive success, which is all what counts from the viewpoint of an evolutionary biologist. (And of course I completely forgot to account for the viewpoint of a theologian.)
If you acquire a billion dollars and give 10% of that to give well, I will say you have been a successful human, since it is "only" estimated to cost 175 billion a year to end poverty in 20 years[0], which means we only need 1750 such individuals each year for 20 years to end poverty, worldwide, forever, which is a goal worthy of humanity[1].
[1] One of the goals of the UN is to end extreme poverty by 2020, a very worthy goal, but this is going one step beyond that and ending global poverty, in all its forms, forever.
I'd love for Sam to write a post called "How to Be a Successful Human" or "How to Live a Successful Life". This more important topic has little-to-nothing to do with financial success.