If you're so smart, why ain't you rich?

Why?

The man.

You da man

I’m not that smart. Especially, I’m not socially smart.

I’m comfortably well off, happy with my life, rich in the ways that count.

Never been interested enough in being rich, as distinct from reasonably well-off but still having to work for a living, to try to figure out a way to get there.

"If you’re so rich, why ain’t you smart?’

“Hey, that’s class warfare!”

  1. I didn’t choose a career path that leads to big money/big prizes.

  2. I wasn’t born rich.

Either of those things, if different, would have led to a life of fabulous wealth and riches for me, I am sure.

Immigrant family with no legacy assets.

ETA: And I’m not so smart.

Right. Social intelligence is a better predictor of economic success.

Plus, I’m lazy.

I don’t make a senator’s salary, but I do make more than the immense majority of Spaniards while working on-and-off, and I don’t have a nuclear family to share it with: so, not showy-rich but rich. And this without having the foggiest interest in being showy-rich: I’ve wanted to be independent since I can remember, and realized pretty early that this required economic independence, but I don’t care about most of the showy stuff, and much of the stuff that other people get as “coolness items” are job-related for me (trips abroad, laptops with more power than that car I barely use).

What do you define as “rich” first of all?

To become extremely rich, there are a couple of paths I can think of:
Win the lottery
Inheret it
Invent something worth millions+
Become a professional athlete
Become a professional entertainer
Work your way up to a senior executive level position in a major corporation
Be a successful lawyer, investment banker, trader, doctor or other extremely lucrative profession
Start your own company and make a lot of money from it
Of these paths, how many rely solely on having a big brain?

How many of these paths require a grinding career of long hours, polticial bullshit and putting the needs of your employer ahead of everything else?

The fact is, “study hard and go to college” isn’t designed to help make you rich. It’s designed to prepare your for working in our nations corporate high rise towers and office parks much in the same way high school was designed to prepare students for the structure and tedium of working in our nation’s mills and factories.

I ended up checking all of the boxes! :eek:

I’m not so smart and I’m poor. :frowning:

“If you’re such a smart person, than why can’t you see… that you aren’t.” - Stephen Colbert

I’m decently intelligent, got my MBA, but don’t have the work ethic or drive that would lead me to one of the careers where you can turn that into gold. That and I’m a bit too tied into my personal ethical code to do the business that some of them do.

I disliked my job at Wells Fargo Home Mtg when I had to help the branches enhance profitability by manipulating the terms used on the HUD documents. “If you call the fee x, you have to refund the excess to the customer. If you call it y, you don’t. So call it y.” Just doing that left me feeling like a sleezy asshole, I can’t imagine how working for GS would feel.

Right now I’m in M&A, and if my company was in the business of making an acquisition and laying off the staff, I would have a really hard time doing my job. Because we are in an expansionary mode, and every acquisition we want to keep it as is, where is, I don’t have any guilt. I literally cannot fathom being part of costing a bunch of people their jobs. I would feel so awful that I wouldn’t be able to do it for long.

My Dad told me to be an accountant or a lawyer, as he’d never met a poor one. My Dad was right. So he was obviously smarter than me, who chose art college instead.

Bang…you got me. :stuck_out_tongue:

I always think of the quote from Citizen Kane - in the interview with Bernstein, who is now an old man:

Reporter: Well, he made an awful lot of money.

Bernstein: It’s no trick to make a lot of money … if what you want to do is make a lot of money.

I’ve always wondered if that’s really true, or if it’s just a comforting something that not-rich people tell themselves.

For myself, I never had the drive or grit to do what it takes to be rich (not being born rich, either). Thanks to my parents and to my own efforts, I have a comfortable middle-class life. I feel lucky to have that.
Roddy

I just realized a year or so ago that I totally, totally lack ambition. I’m no genius but I am smart enough and a hard worker, but if you look at my personal history and see the things I could have done versus the things I chose to do…yikes, I’m a real slacker!

I read Wired magazine and they are always interviewing or discussing people who hop around from million-dollar tech company to million-dollar tech company, after making millions of dollars at one or another. Or super-rich people who keep trying to invent the next best thing or start the next best company. I am totally in awe of them but cannot fathom having that sort of drive, where the prospect of taking all your riches and ceasing to work doesn’t even cross their minds.

I also figured out that my parents completely lack ambition, and while they didn’t push me they also were fine with holding me back. Not their fault though - I never pushed back.

I wouldn’t mind being rich, but I never had any interest in doing the things you do to get rich. In law school, it would have been easy to focus on corporate law, business, tax, etc - but the problem with that stuff is that it’s boring. And I fear boredom way more than being stuck in the middle class.

Boy, do we have a bunch of unmotivated slackers here!

Including me.