<story><title>Gates to students: Don’t try to be a billionaire, it’s overrated</title><url>http://www.geekwire.com/2011/gates-tells-uw-students-billionaire-overrated</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ehsanu1</author><text>The point of making the billion dollars yourself is having a say in where it gets spent, not in &quot;giving it all away&quot; indiscriminately. Indeed, someone else might choose to just keep their billions in the family, for the sake of obnoxious levels of luxury. I&apos;m sure there are some billionaires exactly like that.&lt;p&gt;Anyways, the whole problem with &lt;i&gt;trying&lt;/i&gt; to become a billionaire is that it&apos;s really a lottery. Sure, someone determined could probably earn a few million through effort alone, but becoming a billionaire requires a special mix of smarts, hard work, and luck. Mostly luck, disproportionately so. You can&apos;t just will yourself to earn billions.</text></item><item><author>hugh3</author><text>&lt;i&gt;But Gates&apos;s own example shows how wonderfully useful and fulfilling it can be to have tens of billions of dollars to mobilize in a really heroic cause, like working to eradicate various infectious diseases from the human experience.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Maybe. But it doesn&apos;t particularly make &lt;i&gt;me&lt;/i&gt; want to be a billionaire. If the main satisfaction you get out of having $100 billion dollars is giving it all away again, I&apos;d rather let someone &lt;i&gt;else&lt;/i&gt; make those $100 billion dollars and give &apos;em away.&lt;p&gt;I figure Bill Gates made $100 billion and gave it away so I wouldn&apos;t have to. Thanks Bill!</text></item><item><author>bfe</author><text>Billionaire-scale conspicuous consumption is certainly overrated. But Gates&apos;s own example shows how wonderfully useful and fulfilling it can be to have tens of billions of dollars to mobilize in a really heroic cause, like working to eradicate various infectious diseases from the human experience.&lt;p&gt;Just to get started, as long as we don&apos;t have clean water, plenty of food, proper healthcare, good education, meaningful personal freedom, and a well-functioning legal system for every human being in the world, cheap carbon-neutral energy, strong environmental protection and sustainable ecosystem conservation throughout the world, a cure for cancer, a complete genome and proteome and extended phenotype encyclopedia for all life on Earth, telescopes that can image Earthlike planets in other galaxies and the first stars to ignite in the extremely early Universe, robots crawling around under the surfaces of Europa and Enceladus and screaming through interstellar space toward Alpha Centauri and Epsilon Eridani, and human colonies on Mars and the asteroids and in the clouds of Venus, there will be plenty of interesting and valuable things to do for someone with tens of billions of dollars to throw at an ambitious project.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vladd</author><text>&amp;#62; The point of making the billion dollars yourself is having a say in where it gets spent&lt;p&gt;I doubt people that are great at creating value would appreciate making these kind of decisions once they get to know what&apos;s involved.&lt;p&gt;Just to give an example: an 8 year-old requested $50&apos;000 from Bill and Melinda Gates foundation to help him survive by contributing to his leukemia treatment, but Gates turned the request down because they don&apos;t contribute to individual cases (their policy is to fund programs designed to target large groups of people, i.e. population control in Asia).&lt;p&gt;I don&apos;t imagine great founders or great engineers getting up in the morning because they dream in having a &quot;point&quot; to say in this kind of decisions. They love to do what they do best: creating something people want.</text></comment>
<story><title>Gates to students: Don’t try to be a billionaire, it’s overrated</title><url>http://www.geekwire.com/2011/gates-tells-uw-students-billionaire-overrated</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ehsanu1</author><text>The point of making the billion dollars yourself is having a say in where it gets spent, not in &quot;giving it all away&quot; indiscriminately. Indeed, someone else might choose to just keep their billions in the family, for the sake of obnoxious levels of luxury. I&apos;m sure there are some billionaires exactly like that.&lt;p&gt;Anyways, the whole problem with &lt;i&gt;trying&lt;/i&gt; to become a billionaire is that it&apos;s really a lottery. Sure, someone determined could probably earn a few million through effort alone, but becoming a billionaire requires a special mix of smarts, hard work, and luck. Mostly luck, disproportionately so. You can&apos;t just will yourself to earn billions.</text></item><item><author>hugh3</author><text>&lt;i&gt;But Gates&apos;s own example shows how wonderfully useful and fulfilling it can be to have tens of billions of dollars to mobilize in a really heroic cause, like working to eradicate various infectious diseases from the human experience.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Maybe. But it doesn&apos;t particularly make &lt;i&gt;me&lt;/i&gt; want to be a billionaire. If the main satisfaction you get out of having $100 billion dollars is giving it all away again, I&apos;d rather let someone &lt;i&gt;else&lt;/i&gt; make those $100 billion dollars and give &apos;em away.&lt;p&gt;I figure Bill Gates made $100 billion and gave it away so I wouldn&apos;t have to. Thanks Bill!</text></item><item><author>bfe</author><text>Billionaire-scale conspicuous consumption is certainly overrated. But Gates&apos;s own example shows how wonderfully useful and fulfilling it can be to have tens of billions of dollars to mobilize in a really heroic cause, like working to eradicate various infectious diseases from the human experience.&lt;p&gt;Just to get started, as long as we don&apos;t have clean water, plenty of food, proper healthcare, good education, meaningful personal freedom, and a well-functioning legal system for every human being in the world, cheap carbon-neutral energy, strong environmental protection and sustainable ecosystem conservation throughout the world, a cure for cancer, a complete genome and proteome and extended phenotype encyclopedia for all life on Earth, telescopes that can image Earthlike planets in other galaxies and the first stars to ignite in the extremely early Universe, robots crawling around under the surfaces of Europa and Enceladus and screaming through interstellar space toward Alpha Centauri and Epsilon Eridani, and human colonies on Mars and the asteroids and in the clouds of Venus, there will be plenty of interesting and valuable things to do for someone with tens of billions of dollars to throw at an ambitious project.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>femto</author><text>An interesting point.  Is it more interesting to do the work, or to pay for the work?  I&apos;d come down on the of doing the work, though I guess if you pay for the work, you can be present for the fun bits and absent for the hard slog (the majority).&lt;p&gt;The problem with doing is that it can be hard to make end meet while doing interesting work with long term payoffs.  The options I can think of are:&lt;p&gt;1) Get an interesting job.&lt;p&gt;2) Fight tooth and nail to the top of the career/academic heap in a boring job and hope you make it to a position of being able to set your own interesting work while you still have brain cells.&lt;p&gt;3) Find an angel or patron who is prepared to pay for an interesting long shot.&lt;p&gt;4) Say hang it, and do interesting work while keeping your lifestyle within the modest remuneration you can scape together.&lt;p&gt;5) Part time work, with interesting stuff making up a full time load.&lt;p&gt;Can anyone suggest other options that might work with dependents?</text></comment>