Zuckerberg is an outlier.
For every wanna-be Zuckerberg that tried (or would have been able) to create something similar as he did, there are probably dozens that got left by the roadside. Despite their extraordinary programming skills, efforts and whatnot. Zuckerberg is just survivorship embodied. And luck.
Zuckerberg even thought about selling (then) âTheFacebookâ for about $10M in 2004.
I heard this from an M&A guy at the GOOG who was apparently one of the potential buyers.
The deal supposedly fell apart because of negotiating delays introduced by another potential buyer and Eric Schmidt not willing to pull the trigger because of his experiences in the dot com bubble (when Schmidt was still at Novell, a company I bet most of you have not heard of).
Alphabetâs founders wanted to sell Google to Excite in 1999 â anyone remember Excite as the second largest search company behind Yahoo! back then? â for a million bucks.
Exciteâs main venture capitalist talked Larry and Sergey down to $750k which they accepted.
Exciteâs CEO finally refused the deal.
I heard this from Sergey himself in the wee hours of one of the China incident days/nights (China hacking Google in 2009) about a decade later, when we got stuck with researching why from his personal laptop there were DNS queries into random sites he was definitely not visiting.[DNS]
I believe the better known Google selling story is when Yahoo! was looking to buy them (well, actually only the PageRank system) for $1M, but Yahoo! eventually declined.
DNS Turned out that Chromeâs aggressive â to speed up response time â search prompt algorithm looked up potential IP addresses of domains as you typed in the domain, e.g. if you were going to search for or surf to âsuperbowl.comâ, as you typed âsâ it would look up the most common domain names that would follow with users after typing âsâ. Letâs say the most common name after typing âsâ would be âsex.comâ and âsec.govâ at the time. Chrome would then pre-emptively fetch the IP addresses of www.sex.com and www.sec.gov, even though you hadnât even typed the second letter in your search or URL request after typing âsâ.
This explained Sergey (DNS-) looking up sex.com and sec.gov although he didnât actually surf either site.
Yes heâs an outlier. An extreme one at that.
But anyone who makes $10m is also an outlier, which comes back to my point: if you want âright tailâ outcomes, you are unlikely to get it with âmedianâ actions and efforts.
Sure, many may have tried and got left by the roadside. But at least they tried. How many more want the results of Zuckerberg but didnât even try to do anything at all?
For those who want to quickly make $1m or aim for $10m, do an honest stock take: in the last 60 days, how much time did you spend watching TV and doom-scrolling? Compare that with how much of your free time you spent working towards the $1m/$10m goal.
Right tail outcomes maybe comes with left tail risks?
Not saying you should not try, but just âwanting to have âright tailâ outcomesâ does not come guarantueed even with augmented efforts of trying, IMHO.
I much prefer the âslow and steadyâ approach, but I admittedly realize I was lucky and I donât need a fast track to even more luck.
It depends what you do.
If you take the 4-5 hours that the average person spends watching TV every day and use that to work on something, whereâs the âleft tailâ risk there? Itâs all just potential positive outcome, right?
The left tail is burnout?
(Now people do manage to get burnout all the time without that extra 4-5h trying to become rich, but sitll âŠ)
Maybe.
(and, yikes, I wasnât even sure if you were sarcastic ⊠imagine that)
I personally lack the imagination of seeing that person watching 4-5 hours of TV every day and turning them into someone more productive, but Iâll admit, Iâm still unsure about whether your comment was sarcasm or not.
Apologies if it was sarcasm all along, and even more apologies if it was not. At any rate, itâs bed time for me.
Not sarcasm. Iâm just surprised at the somewhat defeatist attitudes on a FIRE forum.
You seem very sure of yourself as for how I got to where I am and that it must be do to inheritance, extreme exception (lotto? Crypto?) or otherwise. None is the case but yes I do earn more than most. there is nothing exceptional about me or how i got to FI beyond that.
this is why I nolonger post actual numbers on my salary or NW - personal finance itâs like driving - people that pass you are f**** maniacs and must have f**** problems and people you pass are f** idiots that should be banned from driving on the same roadd
Somehow however well intended, topics ends up being taken hostage because people cant reflect themselves in the that reality. Curious.
Very wise words, and they apply to anything in life.
One of the best phrases I had the honor of quoting!
Just my 2 cents: in investing there is no additional performance without additional risk, no such thing as a free lunch.
But unfortunately not all risks lead to better performance. The main work of an investor is to find out which risks do and which not. And then depending on your strategy take more or less of the first type of risk and never ever the second type.
BTW: 4 hours a day is way too much, maybe in the beginning when searching for your way / your rules. After that you run on autopilot or at least you shouldâŠ
Now for the 10 Million the OP claims to have made: I was after the first for almost my whole life. Then compounding did its work and the next came quite fast. For me it is just a number, a measurement of how good I do my work. But for the universe probably it is just a measurement of how much luck I hadâŠ
People said this may lead to burnout, but I think you have a good point there. 4-5 hours may not be attainable for most, however, working an hour or even just half an hour a day on something consistently - which is attainable for most - may already create an opportunity to have great success.
Exactly, it doesnât even have to be something that makes money.
Youâd probably learn a language to a great level doing a hour a day for a couple of years.
That itself might lead to better job opportunities, promotions, connections, etc. which then leads toâŠ
Or gym/exercise for an hour a day. Imagine the health and fitness benefits.
Or spend 1 hour each day cooking something healthy.
Thatâs already 3 great things and we only used up 3 of the 5 potato hours!
I read nuggets post very differently to your interpretationâŠ
As an analysis of what it would take for a random person starting out to achieve what you achieved.
(Hence the following discussion.)
I think consistency is more important than the time you invest.
It takes me only a few minutes every day to follow my two strategies. Running a shell script and then depending on the output typing in some orders, thatâs it. And if I would trust myself a bit more I could automate even that.
I did that every single day since I retired in 2014. Not one single day without it! Because if you miss one single day it could be the decade-defining momentâŠ
I am enjoying now the effects of compounding. Every Cent earned long ago is many Dollars now. Same for my methods: every hour invested early in my career in developing investment rules is worth months or even years of holidays now! (I have to spend some minutes every day on investing⊠I see that like cleaning my teeth.)
If you ask me what are the most important skills in investing I would say consistency and patience. And a sane amount of distrusting yourself!
Best advice on this board. Ever.
I believe we might have talked past each other (or at least I misunderstood you).
Iâm absolutely in favor of turning 4-5 hours of non-productivity into something productive. There is no left tail risk here. There arenât even any tails involved.
What I mean with my âright tail outcomes come with left tail riskâ remark is that a desired outcome on the right tail of the return distribution (aka really high returns) come with having to take high risks on the left tail of the risk distribution (aka near or total wipeout of capital allocated).
Anyway, I see you took the theme to a seperate topic.
I came to the same conclusion a while ago.
câest la vie
I think we often ignore what salaries are paid for certain positions, I know many individuals that have annual compensations betweek 400-700kCHF without pillar 2. Be it in Pharma (on Director or Exec. Director level) or in Consulting (Partners, Principals)âŠ. so for me all of this is absolutely reasonable and not a surprise. But what I find impressive is how the TO has managed to completely avoid lifestyle inflation.
I agree. That for me was not a problem. I had so many counterexamples, stuff are such a mental burden for me, and social competition looks and sounds so ridiculous to me that it was easy to avoid, at least on buying things and showing off.
Experience, travel, restaurants, some comfort to make life more easy going, I do spend more than in my 20ies and I enjoy it. (40ish now)
I was late to combine high savings with investments. Knowledge, risk aversion had to be trained, and external unsolicited crap bearing more risk had to be dealt with during a decade.
My advice to young risk-averse people; donât pile up cash, train your risk aversion by investing asap, with all good advice you find on forum like this one. The cash stash might just refrain you from investing (it) later on.