
A Millionaire Mindset Never Made Anyone Rich - tortilla
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-04-06/a-millionaire-mindset-never-made-anyone-rich
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wgerard
This is a bit rambling, but I always find that whole genre of literature
("highly effective habits" style literature) to be really fascinating, mostly
because it doesn't totally make sense to me.

My thinking has always been that the Gates/Obamas/RBGs of the world didn't
overly concern themselves with trying to emulate previously successful people.
Not that they didn't take lessons from them, but that it wasn't so overt. No
sense of, "if I just imitate these 5 behaviors of Andrew Carnegie I'll be
successful".

And maybe indeed the problem is that those individuals weren't just trying to
be successful for the sake of being successful, which is sometimes the feeling
I get from reading articles like the ones mentioned.

Obviously, I could be entirely wrong or missing the point of literature like
that. And as the article notes, there's some generally beneficial advice in
there (living below your means, for example).

Still, it seems like if your goal is to become the next Madeleine Albright,
you should emulate her by not trying too hard to emulate her!

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CM30
That's because (like many genres of literature that claim to know the secret
to becoming rich and successful), the writers really don't know what makes
that the case. So they're taking surface level qualities they see in
successful people, and assuming that's at least part of the reason for their
success. It's just cargo culting really, like those tribes who build airports
out of wood because they think that causes supply planes to land.

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jwdunne
I remember a great comment on HN once about this very subject.

They said it's like taking a 1000 people, having them flip a coin and
eliminating anyone with tails. Once you're down to ten people, you ask them
how they did it, what made them flip so many heads in a row.

I think the name of it is called "survivorship bias".

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psyc
Weird article. Seems to agree there is an effective version of a 'millionaire
mindset' and then attacks a strawman version of it that only 'The Secret'
types would promote. And even they probably aren't completely wrong.

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CompelTechnic
While I agree that the strawman "hustler's ethic" presented by the article is
false, there are mindsets that correlate with wealth.

There are numerous sociological studies presenting the high correlation
between conscientiousness and income/wealth [1]. It would be very difficult to
separate the cause and effect, but in action you are left with a Pascal's
wager scenario:

Knowing that conscientiousness correlates to wealth, and knowing
conscientiousness to be a virtue in and of itself, should you try build a
mindset rich in conscientiousness?

The conclusion seems obvious to me. It's possible that you can't change your
personality enough for it to matter, but that's just another facet of the
Pascal's wager.

[1][https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3498890/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3498890/)

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Analemma_
I'm curious that you're using Pascal's wager as an argument _for_ believing in
something, when almost everyone uses it as an illustrative example of flawed
reasoning. Do you also believe in God because of Pascal's wager?

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psyc
I don't know about every objection to Pascal's Wager, but overall it's quite
different. In PW it's the belief itself that might be the key to heaven, and
you can't have an authentic belief that you adopted simply because you had an
incentive to adopt it. With conscientiousness it doesn't really matter what
you believe or how strongly, all you have to do is behave conscientiously and
see if it helps.

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Can_Not
The objection is that you have 5 major world religions to choose from, there
could be 1,000 to 1,000,000 minor religions to choose from, the gatekeeper of
heaven might be selecting only non-believers who non-believe for the right
reason, the gatekeeper of heaven might have an even more arbitrary or
unpredictable criteria than laid out by your geographically predetermined
choice of religion. The religion could represent actual spiritual phenomenon,
but the entities could have lied about who they are or what's to be expected.
Not to mention that we could be a random occurrence of life in a universe
created for a set of aliens we could never meet. The wager is flawed because
you have to consider a near infinite number of evidence-less hypothesis about
getting to heaven, which might not exist or might not even have a gatekeeper.

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pryelluw
Luck is the biggest millionare maker. Yes, preparation and opportunity do
matter, but being born into the right circumstances is just plain old luck.

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fwdpropaganda
> Millionaires don’t waste their mental bandwidth on how much a caramel
> macchiato costs.

This isn't exactly big data, but the few wealthy people I've met (single-digit
millionaires) were extremely frugal people.

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personjerry
If you make 150k and frugally save over 20 years or so, you can be a single-
digit millionaire. To be a billionaire, you have to play a different ballgame.

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fwdpropaganda
Are you either a millionaire or a billionaire?

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personjerry
Don't you think that a millionaire or billionaire giving you their experience
and guidance would be subject to survivor bias?

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fwdpropaganda
Sorry, how did you jump from my question to asking a seemingly unrelated
question?

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dpweb
I suspect IQ plays into it, the ability to think.

But, very few people really want to be rich. They fantasize about it but then
go about working a job that can never get them rich. It’s probably better that
most people’s priorirites are family, friends, etc.. than just grabbing up
money.

However if the goal is just to get rich, and my kid or something really wanted
it, Id say,

1\. You have to be prepared to live your life in a way where you take complete
responsibility for your actions and results. Most people cannot do this. Its
always someone or somethings fault when things dont go well, or attributed to
luck. Luck does exist in the world, but your goal is not to be lucky. Your
goal is to control what factors you can so bad luck can’t knock you off track.

2\. Pick the right job. You have to either be a person who makes money from
others’ labor (business) or have some very special talent where you as an
individual contributor makes extremely outsized salary.

3\. If the goal is millionairre rich, get a moderately high paying job >100k,
work for a couple decades, and live like a pauper. You’ll become a
millionairre. If the goal is billionaire rich, you need to be on the ground
floor of something thats going to be huge in the next 20 years (ie.. the
Internet).

Starting a business in a mature industry, you have more problems with
competition, that is, pricing power, and competing against established players
for customers, and also for labor, etc..

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bitxbitxbitcoin
A millionaire mindset has definitely made more than one person poor, though!

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wolco
Changing a mindset is the first step to something new.

