There’s this idea out there that rich people are always some kind of hardworking visionary. People say things about them like “they were right when everyone was wrong” or “they accomplished this with nothing but hard work and determination” and that’s, quite frankly, bullshit.

The Rich People

The rich people like to portray this idea of being super intelligent and being experts on everything. They’ve got a lot of money, why wouldn’t they also be great at running the goddamn country. It’s an ego trip for them and it gets people to listen to what they have to say. They don’t want to acknowledge the insane amount of luck that went into their success as well.

A multi-billionaire who invested in Bitcoin 15 years ago isn’t some kind of investing savant. In fact, they’re probably actually kind of stupid to put that much money into something so volatile, even then. What came out of it was a lot of money, not because they somehow saw the future, but because they got lucky and Bitcoin exploded in price with little to no actual reason for doing so. They’re not special, they were a particular combination of stupid and lucky.

The Rest of Us

Well we all like to ignore the amount of luck that goes into these people’s success as well.

Why?

Because if it was all luck, then what control do we have over being able to be like them? If the things that we can do, like working late and sacrificing time with our friends and family won’t get us success, then what’s the point in doing any of it?

That’s right: there’s probably not a point to it.

Your future success is largely at the whim of your boss, or a hiring manager, or the market, very little of it actually has to do with your abilities.

Practice Does Not Make Perfect

This was one thing I learned a lot while studying music and competing at the national level in Drum Corps: practice doesn’t make perfect, practice makes consistent. You can practice something for hours a day, but that doesn’t necessarily make you better. Like me, you could spend hours practicing the wrong chord voicing on the 3rd half note triplet partial on measure 97. That certainly wasn’t making me play the music perfectly.

Even if you practice the right notes the whole time, that doesn’t mean you’re going to play it perfect 100% of the time. It certainly increases the chances of performing better, sure, but when you’re playing with 150 other people, it’s still not a guarantee that you’re going to get a perfect score (which has literally never happened in the history of the sport, though individual sections have done it).

So What?

Well if nothing matters and it’s really just luck that gets you success like that, then what’s the point? Well, we have to stop chasing extrinsic motivation behind doing everything. Money, status, etc shouldn’t be your goals. Money and status can certainly help with landing a safe and secure life, but it’s not everything.

So with all of this I just kinda do what I like. I write this blog because I like to write this blog. I build apps that I want to exist. I spend my time building up the things that I care about and I offer my experiences as more ideas out in the world.

It’s one of the ways that I try do be different from those rich idiots; I’m not saying I know what I’m doing, I’m not telling you that being like me is the key to being happy, I’m just offering my experiences, my ideas, and my code in the hope that maybe it’ll help someone else too.