Thread by @visakanv

Yea even in Singapore some of the smartest people I’ve met are broke and some of the most clueless people I’ve met are wealthy. The interesting thing is how rare it is to meet people who are interested in really understanding and navigating this. The categories are all wrong

https://twitter.com/perez_writes/status/1332731692105261056

I think the real amazing trait in people is not wealth or intelligence but actually courage & compassion. This used to sound really cheesy and fake to me as a kid but the older I get the clearer it becomes how real it is

Re: intelligence & wealth: if you’re broke + smart, you CAN become moderately wealthy using your intelligence– but lots of people are compromised by scarcity mindset and struggle to make + stick with long term plans. A smart mind can be sick, and struggle to free itself

there are a set of traits that people don’t seem to talk about, that really make all the difference in a practical sense. You don’t need to be hyper-intelligent. You need imagination. You need project management skills. You need to learn to handle your emotions. These are hard

And I think possibly most importantly of all you need to be connected with good people. I think this is the most critical variable for all but the most hardcore “thriving in isolation” types. I’m better in isolation than most people I know, but even I can’t do it on my own

the counter-intuitive thing about wealth is that you don’t need to be broadly right about lots of things. you mostly just need to be very right about something. and you can kinda blunder into it, that’s the fun of entrepreneurship. I’ve sold like 10,000 tshirts almost by accident

That doesn’t make me *wealthy* (my fixed costs were pretty high and one of my vendors owes me like $10,000 that I’ll probably never see), but it certainly gave me breathing room to take time off and figure out all the other things

I think lots of people have this vague assumption that wealth is created by “generally competent people”. In reality I’d say quite often it’s almost created despite staggering incompetence. “How can incompetent people be allowed to make money?” Son that’s not how the world works

Here’s a thing that drives me mad: lots of otherwise smart people, when confronted with this reality, either choose to deny it, or reason that the game is rigged against them and that they cannot and will never win

You won’t be #1, but you can certainly get quite comfortable

I think it’s kind of related to a sort of pass/fail, win/lose, up/down mindset. Binary thinking. Absence of playfulness, discomfort with multiverse reality. Which is how the world *is*... shit-

People would rather lose than be wrong.

There’s a Courage To Be Disliked element here. You win almost in direct relation to the amount that you’re willing to fail and be wrong. It’s the fear and avoidance of being wrong, looking stupid, etc etc that limits your game, and by extension, your winnings