today I started a list: things I'll do when I'll have a lot of money.
I understood how used I am to being so close to poverty when I wrote stuff like a 20 bucks bluetooth speaker and a set of screwdrivers.
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@arteteco the difference between a rich person and a poor person is that a rich person spends most of their time trying to think of ways they could spend/invest money they don't have yet, a poor person thinks up ways they will spend money they don't yet have :)
Though I think this applies a bit farther above the poverty line than you are dealing with too. Obviously you gotta cover the basic needs first. but someone told me that once and it stuck with me.. how you spend (in your head) the money you dont have yet says everything about your financial future.
Thats just pure hyperbole and not really what was said at all. Obviously simply having a thought will not fix the problem. However patterns of thinking reflect patterns of action. How you plan to spend money you don't yet have is an indication of how you will spend that money when the time comes that you do have it. Thoughts alone may not get you from rags to riches, but when those thoughts represent your financial plans for the future or in general then absolutely and of course it will be an indicator of financial success to some degree.
With that said there needs to be more than just positive thoughts and there are absolutely external factors that may work for or against you as well.
@freemo @arteteco Sorry if I’m salty over it, but people have been repeating the same tired old argument for so long, that it’s not their fault for being super rich, and if I support their exploitive system, then one day I too may be rich beyond compare! It’s both excusing the crimes that the rich can get away with because of the imbalance of power, and blaming the poor for their own oppression.
Yes, almost everyone has some influence over their financial situation, and that influence is tiny, doesn’t matter, and the vast majority of financial ruin is due to the actions of others. What you’ve been led to believe that I have to do to stop being poor is either something that the richest among us have never had to do, or else it’s a rigged game with uncountable millions who’ve spun that same wheel of fortune and got nothing but regrets in return.
There is so much to unload in that statement.
For starters lets be clear I do recognize and agree that there are plenty of examples of governments where the laws are designed in such a way that is unfair for those in poverty and makes it harder to get out of poverty than I'd like.
With that said, I certainly wouldnt adopt the idea from this statement you made:
> Yes, almost everyone has some influence over their financial situation, and that influence is tiny, doesn’t matter.
As someone who grew up in absolute poverty, on welfare, had to grow up in a home with 4 generations under the same small roof and never even had a room of my own until much later in life, someone who later made my own success and am now financially successful, I can say first hand, at least in the USA, that nothing can be farther from the truth.
My success didnt come at the whim of some rich person, no one gave me a chance, I worked my ass off in near-starving conditions to get there on my own. I spent my free time at the library, I studied at a very young age, and by the time I was 15 years old I figured out how to make 6 figures from a house hold that otherwise could barely feed me.
I've been through the process, I've seen it first hand, and I can say without a doubt int he USA we have a great deal of power to define our own financial freedom. While that doesnt mean the system is fair, and it doesnt mean you have the same advantage as someone born rich, it is clear the notion of ones control over their own financial health as being insignificant is simply not the reality.
I should also point out I spend a good deal of my free time tutoring young adults in subjects that they cant afford to go to college to learn, in the hopes they can use that knowledge to get out of poverty on their own. I never give these people dumps of money or give them favors to start them out in life, the only thing I do is spend a year or more helping them study and learn marketable skills. Virtually everyone I ever taught who lasted a year without quiting went on to make very good money and be successful despite having a start in life of poverty...
So I also know im not the exception, I've seen dozens of people go from rags to riches due to their own hard work and study and little more. So even if we agree that the cards may be stacked against them it is also clear that most people have a great deal of influence on their financial standing, the system may not be fair, but you do have a lot of the power to change your situation despite this.
I worked my ass off in near-starving conditions to get there on my own. I spent my free time at the library, I studied at a very young age, and by the time I was 15 years old I figured out how to make 6 figures from a house hold that otherwise could barely feed me.
Yes that would be the “wheel of fortune” I mentioned. There are billions of people working their ass off in near-starving conditions, many from a young age, many using the library, all trying to figure out how to make 6 figures, and only a handful of them have succeeded. I know you did a lot of good for people in your hard work, and I really respect that. It’s incredible what you did, even if anyone just as good as you could have failed, gotten fooled, and ended up with nothing. Most who try to “work hard” though only end up perpetuating their own suffering. Hard work is suffering, after all, and their employers are all trying to arrange it so that they get ahead before the employees, so fortune favors the ones in control, even if a few exceptions manage to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
Virtually everyone I ever taught who lasted a year without quiting went on to make very good money and be successful despite having a start in life of poverty…
Forgive me for being skeptical about the efficacy of your method, because if what you say is true, then wealth would be evenly distributed over a bell curve, where the few who were most able and willing to do the hard work made the most money, but the vast majority of the wealth was still in the middle class. Instead we have this: http://lcurve.org/
> Yes that would be the “wheel of fortune” I mentioned.
Yes I realize that is what you were thinking of. But as I said this isnt an isolated incident, virtually every one of my past students, of which there are many dozens, almost every single one who made it past a year of tutoring had similar success. This shows me my situation was not just some luck on a wheel of fortune but rather a consistent and predictable result that the vast majority of people can achieve.
> There are billions of people working their ass off in near-starving conditions, many from a young age, many using the library, all trying to figure out how to make 6 figures, and only a handful of them have succeeded.
I think this statement right here is where the error in your logic takes place. It assumes that my argument is basically "anyone who works hard will become rich", however that is not at all what I am trying to say. Hard work in and of itself is not enough to ensure financial success. I could work really really hard trying to learn how to fit 6 billard balls in my mouth and even if I make the world record in that category after a life time of hard work I wouldnt expect you to walk away a millionaire from such a venture. In other words, hard work in and of itself, does not guarantee you financial security (nor should it). Much like a person running around in a circle will do all the same work as someone running in a straight line, but wont get anywhere.
What DOES matter is if you do the hard work that is needed, over an extended period of time, and it is invested explicitly into marketable skills or marketable investments, then, and only then, will you have a very good chance of being financially stable. So while I agree there are a great many people working hard and never becoming particularly well off financially, that really isnt saying much, what matters is how many of those people are 1) in the USA or a country of comparable opportunity and 2) are working hard and investing in their own marketable skills and resources. For most people in poverty in the USA who do in fact work hard, and there are many, are almost always the people who are not investing that hard work in themselves but rather in short term gains. If you invest 5 hours a day working a register at mcdonalds you are working hard but you wont get very far. If you invest 8 hours a day, 5 working a register at mcdonalds and 3 at a library hard in study of marketable skills or working in starting your own company with those 3 hours, then there stands a good chance of your success.
> Most who try to “work hard” though only end up perpetuating their own suffering.
I agree with this too by the way. Hard Work isnt enough and if all you do is put in hard work but dont invest it in the right places it will eventually break you and likely make you not want to try at all, that is unfortunate. Which is why it is important for people to understand that hardwork without the proper direction isnt enough. I dont like to see hard work wasted because as you say, that can really bring a person down.
> Forgive me for being skeptical about the efficacy of your method, because if what you say is true, then wealth would be evenly distributed over a bell curve, where the few who were most able and willing to do the hard work made the most money
I wouldnt say this statement is true either.. As we already covered it isnt just about hard work, so that already invalidates the assertion here. But even if it was the assumption would be that hard work follows a normal distribution as well, and thats an assumption which im not sure is true. Fair systems (and im not saying the system **is** fair) does not imply that it will follow a normal distribution.
In fact everything else aside we know that even if the underlying properties that determine wealth were themselves normally distributed we can in fact conclude that wealth in a society would not, in that case, be normally distributed. Normal distributions are only valid on unbound data. That is, where the x axis goes infinitely in both directions. Wealth however is single-sided bound in any practical sense, as such it would be literally impossible for wealth distribution to ever follow a normal distribution (bell curve), it would have to follow a one-sided bound distribution at a minimum, which looks nothing like a bell curve.
if all you do is put in hard work but dont invest it in the right places
Willingness to work, intelligence, perceptivity, random inspiration, it all falls on a bell curve. If the only poor people were the ones who were doing it wrong, then wealth distribution would also fall on a bell curve. It does not, therefore it’s not their fault, and there’s in a majority of cases, nothing they can (legally) do about it. Because the system is rigged.
Normal distributions are only valid on unbound data
Normal distributions are completely valid estimations on bound data, and the larger the data set, the more accurate the estimate is. Random variance of limited sample sets shouldn’t ever randomly change a fair distribution into highway robbery, once you get past a hundred data points or so.
The picture you attached to your last post does not depict a normal distribution and the distribution depicted in the various charts have no relationship to the normal distribution. As you can see none of the following phrases appear in the image "Normal Distribution", "Bell Curve", "Gaussian Distribution".
> Willingness to work, intelligence, perceptivity, random inspiration, it all falls on a bell curve. If the only poor people were the ones who were doing it wrong, then wealth distribution would also fall on a bell curve.
Again, no, that is not at all true.. Even if we assume those qualities fall on a bell curve that does not imply wealth would fall on a bell curve, though youd have a hard time arguing if those qualities even really do fall on a bell curve at all
> Normal distributions are only valid on unbound data
>
> Normal distributions are completely valid estimations on bound data
Also not correct, and im not just talking about a matter of opinion here, it is literally incorrect by the **definition** of the normal distribution in the first place. Let me explain why, its actually fairly easy to understand.
The normal distribution is another word for "bell curve", it is also called the gaussian distribution, all these terms refer to the same thing, and its a specific equation, a function. It takes an input (x) and produces an output (y), x is the random variable you want to know about and y is the chance of x being observed when randomly selected from the group. So it is an equation f(x). while the specific shape of the normal distribution can vary depending on a few constants (variance and mean) the equation always has a few universal properties. One that is relevant to what we are discussing is that for **all** normal distributions for any input, x, the output must and always will be a positive value that is greater than 0. This is the reason why it is not valid on bounded data and why a different distribution is required to represent bounded data.
This should be obvious now why, but let me give a more concrete example to drive it home. Lets say we are talking about the age of people in a population, this is bounded data, no one can be younger than 0 years old. so it is single-sided bound random variable. If we look at the probability in the population of a randomly selected person being a particular age you will quickly see that the normal distribution fails. If I ask the normal distribution "If i select someone from the population randomly what is the change their age will be -12 years old" you will get a positive non-zero value, suggesting that there are people in the population who are younger than a 0 year old, which obviously isnt true.
Statistics is literally my expertise and I cant emphasize strongly enough that no, normal distributions make absolutely no sense when applied to bounded data, single or double bounded. It only applies to unbounded data. We have different distributions for that.
@freemo From the other side of the fence, I agree. I'm not on the low end of the income spectrum because "powers were against me", even though I studied hard at many things I also never managed to market them or to properly sell myself, also out of shyness. I never properly learned how to go for jobs and I spent years travelling and discovering the world without giving a fuck about my income. Choices.
I could have make quite some money in my life if I did things differently. I won't lie, I feel stupid now, and I feel not appreciated and bla bla bla, but most of it is definitely on me.
I'm sure that holds more true for some other countries, but for EU, USA and rich places... man, I don't know, I don't think so
@cy