Im pretty sure you just won the game. People fund the most RANDOM stuff anyhow, gotta imagine a legit ransom fundraiser on Kickstarter etc would go viral. I mean, the 2nd Veronica Mars movie got funded...

You could always set up a gofundme account. Paint your mom as mother Theresa, people will start donating. You have to really pump this go fund me account and market the **** out of it. But...

I'd probably invest in real estate, lever up to the moon, buy properties, apply a fresh coat of paint, trim some bushes, resell the home at a profit, and hope it works out.

Or grind out 10 million hands at 200NL, at winrate + rakeback of 5bb/100 and have no living costs. (Along the way you can always invest your money in a non-variance low yielding vehicle life short term bonds, to squeeze out some extra money)

From 0 to 1 million liquid in 5 years is pretty hard if you don't have a good business idea, like me sadly.

Start investing in ZNGA

here is the question I have: who is this guy who kidnapped my mother, and why does he care that I am a millionaire? According to the OP's initial scenario, the kidnapper isn't asking for the money or saying "give me a million dollars", just that I have to be a millionaire within a certain time period. So just borrow the money, park it in an account, show kidnapper statement, mom comes home, I have meatloaf and that's game, set match.

also, I feel like the correct answer involves Pokemon Go somehow....

I think the quickest and surest way to a million dollars still must be investment banking. It doesn't really take any skills beyond tolerance for misery (long hours of drudge work) and great enthusiasm for investment banking. One limitation is that you can't get your foot in the door of the most prestigious spots by grit and determination. Their recruitment path is very specific and closed. But you can do fine at a regional position like oil and gas in New Orleans or government bonds in Cincinnati. Those too will have their notions of who they hire from. But it widens the field for you if you have a college degree that is respected in some region of the country.

Getting $1M in the bank or an annual pretax income of $1M in 5 years would be a stretch. But I think it would be a gimme in 10.

"Derivatives trading" sounds like a strange answer to me. That's been my job for a bunch of years, but I nor anyone I know would ever put it that way. It's practically nonsensical without specifying a market or range or markets? Equities, fx, commodities? Sell side or buy side? Esoteric arbitrage (eg capital structure)? High frequency? Even brokering counts as being in derivatives trading. And who would just say "derivatives" for all that covers? why specifically derivatives as opposed to the underlyings? People running huge long short equity books or trading high frequency equities certain aren't a lower tier in any way...

This is a bigger hurdle than you make it out to be. It's essentially torture.

I for one actually really loved ibanking, even as bottom of totem pole intern.

Everyone else I worked with it were miserable though. A quarter of the interns bluntly admitted they were doing 2 and out. Another quarter was in denial that the dreams were actually nightmares. Another quarter subscribed to work hard and play hard and fully understood the tradeoffs and accepted them.

Surprisingly large number of people actually do like the job though and you can tell very early on.

kidnap his mother and ask for $1M ransom LDO

Point taken. I somewhat have that sense but don't have direct knowledge of it.

But here's some comparison I was thinking about or imagining. Suppose a person has grown out of their immaturity, recklessness, irresponsibility etc. And they are highly committed and motivated. A bit more realistic scenario than a parent as hostage might be having a severely disabled child, with insurance coverage expiring in a few years. So you need a million a year starting in a few years. And, you don't have any extraordinary abilities beyond an unshakeable commitment to showing up on time and working until you drop. Where can that commitment lead you to a big payday? Or put another way, what percentage of the population can achieve success in a field mainly through determination?

Professional sports? For a random person, determination is worth essentially zero. Several orders of magnitude less than 1% of the population can make it no matter how much they want it or how hard they try.

Sciences? (Forget for a moment that they don't have huge money). I believe math is the hardest. I think the numbers are very similar to those for sports. Way less than 1% regardless of determination could make professor in a top 10 department. Similar thing for chess or classical musician.

Now what about medicine? Let's say specialized surgeon. Here I think we're starting to look at more than 1% of the population that could get there if they work hard. Probably over 10%.

Skip to investment banking. Assuming the highest motivation (which is a big assumption of course and is what keeps the field so small), I think you're talking about probably more than 25%. Not sure how high I'd go on that. Probably not over 50%.

How about starting a tech company? (Or any company?) Here there are so many factors inside and outside of the person. The quality of the idea. The ability to run the business. The ability to market the idea. And the luck of having everything line up with demand. I think we're back to less than 1% of the population (maybe instead of "population" I should be more specific and say percent of graduates from a top 100 college/university. Okay, that's a gigantic shift to slip in at the end. I don't know how high in the general population you would rank the abilities of the average student at say the #65 college. But to be fair, I've almost always been surrounded by that college educated population. )

The thought experiment is a bit non-sensical because it's not clear what it means to take a 75th or 50th percentile say 24 year old and give them 98th percentile motivation. It's kind of oxymoronic.

Edit: So I'd break down the original question into two parts: 1. What are fields that offer large remuneration with some regularity? 2. Which of those fields don't require winning the genetic lottery or just life's lottery, for success?

There are no jobs that check off box 2. much harder than a 5% success rate. Remember that whenever you see some successful person(s) it might appear that they did something easy but there's usually a ton of survivorship bias.

Kidnap his mother and whoever else he loves most in the world. Kill his mother to show him you mean business. Demand your mother an 1M in cash in exchange for that person. Hope he's not a sociopath like you are.

All I did was ask myself 'what would El Chapo do?'

My gf told me about a guy that does business in a developing country that her non-profit company does business in. He basically came to her and asked if he could show some of his perspective clients around their work site and the school they built so it looks like his company is associated with her non-profit so it would look like his company is involved in helping the community. I went to his company's website and it is basically a REIT that says the have earned their clients a 14% annual return over the past 30 years and it is safer than the stock market as a whole.

If you need a million dollars in 5 years you could follow this guys footsteps in another country and collect people's money until you got a million.

Start an unscrupulous conservative super pac

All kidding aside I've often wondered how much money there is in running a 'charity'. Seems to me like there's almost no oversight and the risk of being caught isn't terribly high unless you get REALLY stupid/greedy.

Put a different way, there is oversight BUT unless you are stupid and greedy it takes a LOOONG time to get caught (if you do at all.) most of these fraud scenarios are uncovered after years and years of malfeasance.

i was only semi kidding.

I wasn't kidding at all. I'm not going to earn my living through fraud because I'm already doing too well legitimately for it to be worth it... But if I had to make a million dollars in <5 years from 0 I'd strongly consider it.

If I wanted to run a charity scam, I'd definitely start a church.

Come to think of it, that's even legal.

Hold up,

You need to average 200K x 5 years - its really not that difficult if you put your life and soul + 18hour days 7 days a week 365 days per year for 1/2 a decade.

If the mother****er was demanding 5 milley than this is a quandary but if you have some hard graft in you, dont mind working a 9-5 plus run a simple boring small business business in year one; food takeway, hair dressers, grocery store, liquer store, cleaning business, mechanics even a market stall or ebay trading type boring business... etc... and expand to 3-5 businesses.... this is easy as long as your solid with numbers and good with people. (and most of all dedicated)

The hard part is not spending it on luxuries over 5 years. But a monthly payment plan with the mother****er can lower your risk here.

anything below 1.5mill should be attainable for an average joe with hard graft and some wit and no dependents in said scenario.

"it's really not that difficult if you can do something that's extremely hard"

Do you have experience working a 9-5 while running side businesses (such as a hair salon, cleaning business, etc.)? Working a 9-5 is not really from 9-5 when you factor in commute time, getting dressed for work, some days past 5pm, its more like 730am-6pm. How exactly are you going to run a side business in the evening? Now playing poker after work, I can see, but running a brick and mortar store? Curious to know how you managed to do this or if you know someone who does this.

He doesn't. Also taxes make his plan unfeasible. He's one of those people who thinks that the key to riches is to work harder. IRL most people already work as hard as they can stand. The key to wealth isn't willpower it's brainpower. You have to figure out how to do something a bit better than everyone else to make a lot of money. The key is to find something people already pay for and figure out how to cut a corner on it without any customer facing consequences .

Dedicate yourself to poker Kid.

Maybe it all depends on our own skills. I found a complete star yesterday at our casino who is apparently related to some Price from Kuwait. He dropped around 40k on our table while I was there. I could have stayed longer but I was very tired. I made 9k sterling (nearly $12k at current exchange rates). And it was my b/day too!

How long would you have to work to get that? I have no work skills at all and would be in some low horrendously bad paid job. I did graduate with a degree and top marks, but I chose poker and that is really all I know.....and a little investing.

All depends on our skills. Find out what you know, then go for it.

How could you leave a game with that big of a whale? Lol, jk and Happy Birthday. On a serious note, I know we are on a poker forum and all, but why actively try and recruit smart, hard-working, motivated people into becoming a serious grinder? is that really going to help your bottom line? a lot of people think grinding poker for good $ is very hard and I would rather people continue to think that so they are deterred from trying. If you tell enough young college grads that got stuck working at Walmart how lucrative poker is, pretty soon you're going to find yourself out of a job, trading pots back and forth with young guys happy to be making a pultry $10 an hour playing cards. It's what happened to internet poker. I'm serious "kid." Be smart.