Malcom Gladwell's "Outliers" has an interesting take on what it takes to be successful. He notes that as long as someone has the requisite skills (is above some threshold of talent/intelligence), works hard, and most importantly is in the right place at the right time they will be successful.

Interesting read (not all of his theories were strongly backed, but good anecdotes nonetheless) which relates to this topic.

What works for me is to surround myself with people better than me at the business I did. Pass tense due to this works and subsequently i retired.

It won't. The math is pretty easy to do but you don't even need to bother since the way the model is marketed gives it away. The whole selling point is that if you do this you'll have a net worth of $1-3M when you are 60. That isn't rich and on top of it you are 60 so you've wasted the majority of your life.

It isn't possible to make a suggestion because what to do is individual specific depending on their skills and opportunities. My only point was that it will never happen -- or at least the likelihood of it happening is greatly reduced -- if you don't create a situation where you are motivated. Take Jay -- Jay works in tech and makes $120-160k a year depending on bonuses, he lives like a pauper and has between $300k and $400k saved and invested. He has absolutely no motivation to get to the next level. He'll just keep working away building wealth so that when he is old he has in his case a pretty impressive net worth but still not really rich and he is old. On the other hand if Jay started to develop expensive tastes he would be motivated to do something to radically increase his income / wealth now -- the how could be leaving and finally developing the idea he had into a start-up, it could be a more aggressive form of investing, it could be bankrolling a bunch of crack dealers, whatever -- Basically whatever it is that he sees as his best option given his skill set and the opportunities presented. People who have comfortable lives rarely take this step so you need to take what would normally be a comfortable life and make it uncomfortable to get the motivation.



No. This assumes the pie is fixed which it isn't. My whole point is that by going to 30% you will be motivated to increase your income so that your 30% lifestyle represents 25% of your new income. Then you repeat. I'm making a few assumption in that I assume the individual is intelligent enough that he realizes taking on the expensive tastes requires that he also then work harder and increase income rather than just spend more. I am also assuming the individual has the intelligence and skills to do better and just needs motivation. This isn't something that will work for everyone and I never claimed it was. My only point is that it is the better approach than the work hard and sacrifice your life so that you can be upper-middle class when you are 60 approach.

I've been skimming this loosely, but essentially you're arguing for a sort of anti-complacency via standard of living?

Yes

That and that the model of sacrificing your life for delayed gratification advocated in the horrible personal finance books leads to complacency.

1. luck

i would say the most important traits are:

1. work ethic
2. people skills
3. intelligence/expertise (i think some people are successful because they are brilliant, but more are successful because they have developed significant expertise in something that allows them to make big $. i am not talking about formal education here fwiw).
4. emotional stability
5. integrity

speaking personally, the main reasons i try to accumulate wealth are for peace of mind and because the feeling of competing and "winning" is intoxicating to me. as i get older though i think i will settle down and try to enjoy my life/money as much as i can (i hope). for now, even though i don't need more money for the foreseeable future, a very large percentage of my time is spent focused on trying to make money.

But you're arguing for a method in which you're *never* happy. lol As soon as your income reaches a new high, you're upgrading your lifestyle to the point that you're unsatisfied again.

+ a zillion.

Close thread.

oh, wait, this has nothing to do w/ OPs question.

Still, a great comment nonetheless.

This post got seriously hijacked. Not that some of the posts haven't been interesting to read, but the back & forth between posters often has little or nothing to do w/ OPs question. I suppose in some ways my response was the 1st hijack, but only because the term "financial freedom" is so vague & means so many different things to different people that IMO it was an impossible question to answer without first clarifying the question. A clearer & perhaps easier question to answer would have been this:

"What are the top five most common traits of people in America who have saved $5,000,000 while working within the last 40 years?

So let's assume average Americans (not sport/movie stars, computer gurus, etc.) from 30-65 yrs old who have earned & accumulated (legally, not inherited & not won via the lottery or some other BS) a net worth (not including primary residence) of $5,000,000. That dollar figure will probably meet most people's definition of "rich".

1) They possess unique skills, talents, or training that is highly sought after & financially rewarded.
2) Willingness to work hard & preserver = work ethic.
3) Willingness to live beneath their means by delaying immediate wants & desires for (what they perceive to be) greater future rewards.
4) Willingness to take calculated risks.
5) Willingness to make long term sacrifices in other areas of their lives in order to earn & save more money.

If I were given a six trait to list, it might be "good people skills".

In a sense yes except that not being happy doesn't mean you are miserable just not satisfied. Further the process isn't really as instantaneous as your post implies but rather a more gradual shift. When you first get to a new lifestyle bracket you are ecstatic and then over time it becomes the norm and you are pretty neutral about it. Then you start dipping your toe into the next level and then that makes your current level seems so inferior and you can no longer really be happy at it so you need to start making more money. Faced with the prospect of unhappiness people can be very ingenious and productive.

berkshire hathaway owns Netjet.... theres a reason why he doenst own one. he owns an entire fleet and flies in them for all occassion. LOL.

Success being correlated with intelligence does not imply that the smartest people in the world would be the most successful. You need to revise your understanding of the word "correlate".

As for your presidents remark, I'm not sure if you mean Obama and Bush, or Clinton and Bush, but you do realise that both Obama and Clinton are both much, much smarter than you, right?

My point was you'd be surprised how unimportant intelligence is to financial success.

I used the president example partly as a joke, as 90% of all Americans hated at least one of them (Obama or Bush). Yes, I realize they are both pretty smart people (I believe Clinton was a Rhodes Scholar and Obama was head of the Harvard law review). I voted for both of them.

Were you going to add something interesting, or state more obvious things?

seems like total bs empirically. and obv people being successful in making much money prly wont say they just got lucky.
social background is obv hugely important for financial success every study is showing this.

id like to hear some opinions here, since this argument seems to lend itself to some kind of threshold amount which obviously varies by age and lifestyle but i think the answers will be telling.

I'm not an extravagant guy, but as of right now, I'd say about 10,000 a week would do it. My original number was 3,000 a week but I'll add in future growth needs (kids, paying for school, pimp vacations, you know)

So, lets say I can get back 4 percent a year back.. so, 25 million dollars lump sum should do it.

I can survive on much less. If I can get 10-12 million lump sum, I'd probably never work again. Well, work in terms of getting out of bed and doing something I don't want to do.

I just fell in love with this sentence.

The person that spends their life blowing their money on material things and constantly being unsatisfied with what they currently have will have lived an unfulfilling existence void of happiness. This persons values need to be re-arranged with a focus on things that will lead to a happier life. They're doing it wrong if material things comes at the expense of internal content.

yeah i got a kick out of seeing luck being #27 on that list. nobody wants to attribute any of their own success to luck.

Luck is obviously #1 and it's not even close.

I dunno just bink a WPT or something. :P

Disagree. I'd put it no higher than 3rd, behind knowing what you're good at and hard work.

What you guys perceive as luck isn't really luck.

Perfect example : Do you think Google is lucky? Or do they work really hard to implement ideas?

Is Apple "Lucky"? Their stock went from 7 to 270. Luck?

Is Warren Buffett "lucky"? Hard to luckbox being the richest man in the world.

Don't get me wrong, being in the right place at the right time is *always* helpful. But putting yourself to be in position for that opportunity is part of "being lucky".

Just something to think about.

As suggested by previous posters, you need to learn what "correlate" means. It would be one thing to try to make this point (which I agree with to some extent):

But when you say something as idiotic as this:

You're never going to convince anyone.