2025-02-23 12:07
Status:
Tags: building
Reference
Paul Graham https://paulgraham.com/selfindulgence.html
Notes:
The way you keep a fortune isn’t the same as how you make a fortune.
Through study of how rich people become poor, it is never self-indulgent spending, but rather bad investments.
Those who have been able to make a fortune in the first place have typically trained this alarm: 🚨 Luxury and self-indulgence is bad. Investing is better. (This is even what salesman say for expensive things.. “It’s an investment”)
So they just “Move the money” by investing. (I imagine all advice about fortunes are focused on investment, but for those who just want to keep it, not making a mistake is most important The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel) It’s very hard to spend all your money into being poor, it is extremely easy to lose it all in bad investments.
The problem here is that “investing” bypasses the alarms built in that stop us from the self-indulgence. There’s no alarm stopping us from bad investments.
Time is much the same concept. We already have our fortune of time, (Time billionaires) we cannot make more. The question is how do we not lose it to poor investments?
“The most dangerous way to lose time is not to spend it having fun, but to spend it doing fake work.”
It’s very hard to waste time by self-indulgence for long. Our alarm goes off.
Yet when we “invest” our time into something that seems worthwhile. It’s quite easy.
Fake work is what we feel is productive, yet at the end of the day we can ask ourselves “What did I get done today?” and answer “Nothing.”
Fake work bypasses our alarms by pretending to be more virtuous, travel, “learning” new things or skills, checking email.
“the most dangerous traps now are new behaviors that bypass our alarms about self-indulgence by mimicking more virtuous types. And the worst thing is, they’re not even fun.”