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Why You Shouldn't Imitate Bill Gates If You Want To Be Rich (bbc.com)
dryriver writes: BBC Capital has an article that debunks the idea of "simply doing what highly successful people have done to get rich," because many of those "outliers" got rich under special circumstances that are not possible to replicate. An excerpt: "Even if you could imitate everything Gates did, you would not be able to replicate his initial good fortune. For example, Gates's upper-class background and private education enabled him to gain extra programming experience when less than 0.01% of his generation then had access to computers. His mother's social connection with IBM's chairman enabled him to gain a contract from the then-leading PC company that was crucial for establishing his software empire. This is important because most customers who used IBM computers were forced to learn how to use Microsoft's software that came along with it. This created an inertia in Microsoft's favor. The next software these customers chose was more likely to be Microsoft's, not because their software was necessarily the best, but because most people were too busy to learn how to use anything else. Microsoft's success and marketshare may differ from the rest by several orders of magnitude but the difference was really enabled by Gate's early fortune, reinforced by a strong success-breeds-success dynamic."
scruples didn't hurt. He had little problem with raiding others ideas and pushing them out of the market. Many of the things he did to get on top of the pile would be actionable today.
Step 1 to being like BG has nothing to do with his exact circumstances. It has to do with making use of YOUR special circumstances effectively. Capitalizing on each situatiin and conpunding the gains
The Misconception: You should focus on the successful if you wish to become successful.
The Truth: When failure becomes invisible, the difference between failure and success may also become invisible.
Survivorship Bias; You Are Not So Smart
So I shouldn't have a extremely wealthy family, who is well connected, and further take vast sums of money to start a business - and if it fails just take even more money to try again? I'm pretty sure that is possibly the single most consistent detail of the success stories of the super wealthy.
I was very active in startups between 1995 and 2000. Many entrepreneurs made a lot of money, and many lost the money again, because after the trick that earned them the cash, they thought they were pretty smart and wanted to replicate the success by investing in newer startups. Then they found out the hard way it wasn't how smart or special they are that made them successful at first, but that they were at the right place at the right time.
The most successful ones, though, combined psychopathy with the hard work of others.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
To get rich you need three things.
Hard work - Don't discount this. Yes, connections and money make things easier, but it still takes work. A lot of it.
Intelligence - Hardest work on the planet won't always get you further.
Sheer flat out luck - Being the hardest working smart person doesn't help if you get a crippling illness or just at the wrong time. Being born wealthy or with connections is genetic lottery.
You pretty much need a lot of all three to get super wealthy. Two will get you into a decent place and you'll do fine.
It is true that there are a lot of people that claim that since monopolists are successful and charge high prices for poor products, you can become successful by charging high prices for a poor product. That generally doesn't work for non-monopolists. On the other hand, the emphasis on Bill G's parents does ignore the fact that IBM offered the same opportunity to Digital Research, which turned them down. And IBM offered a word processor of its own - can't have more advantages than that - and it failed in the marketplace. It also offered an OS - what happened to that? Maybe it was higher quality than Windows, but it was 10 times as expensive and the only print driver it came with was for a single dot-matrix printer.
Again, playing the lottery has higher success rates than that.
This is basically what's wrong in the country today. Until not so long ago, you could actually get to a comfortable life by being productive, working hard, giving something useful to the community. Not rich, mind you, that still took a lot of luck, that special "right place at the right time" kind of luck. But you could actually get somewhere. A single working person in a family of 4 could sustain them. Buy a house, have a car, see your kids grow up right, all that stuff. That actually worked out.
Somewhere in the last 40ish years that changed. Today, both parents HAVE TO work just to make ends meet. And you're not getting anywhere, it doesn't improve, you work your ass off and it's not going anywhere. You rent a tiny apartment because buying a house is simply out of the question. Where you used to progress slowly but steadily, you now struggle just to stay afloat.
The american dream is dead. Or rather, it changed. It went from "work, innovate, become your own boss and you too can one day be rich" to "screw that, play the lottery and hope for the best".
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Gates DID get a lucky break - there's no question about it. However that "break" was to be born into a well-off and well-connected family.
And, honestly... if you can pull that off, it's almost certainly the best way to "become" rich yourself.
#DeleteChrome
Gates DID get a lucky break - there's no question about it. However that "break" was to be born into a well-off and well-connected family.
That's not the half of it. He also had the "good fortune" to pick a mother who could persuade the chairman of IBM to cut her son a ridiculously favourable deal.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
Microsoft didn't have an operating system. They had to get it from someone else. IBM basically went to talk with Microsoft because Gates' mother, who used to be a bank manager, did benefit work on weekends with people connected with IBM's management. And Bill Gates' father, one of top lawyers in the area, helped craft their (highly favorable) contract with IBM.