Quote from Cheese:
This is an excellent point.
Ideas are a dime a dozen. They can be good but are not important unless you are going to test, research and work at implementation. Often just a little rigorous thinking and actual checking will show up the hurdles and difficulties attending faulty ideas. Even if do-able in some fashion, no success or no big success can be guaranteed.
Ideas for most individuals don't do much more than feed the dreamworld of their imaginations.
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Quote from myminitrading:
The key to success, is to stay out of debt. Why is the suicide rate higher with the affluent, then the poor.
Wealthy people have nothing to look forward to, how many jets or diamond rings can you buy.
Poor folks have much more to look forward to.
Failed in what way? To become super-rich? Or failed to achieve anything at all? There are degrees to "failure". I would rather try and succeed only in part - which in absolute terms would be "failure" - than not try at all and not achieve anything. If you assume that every man's hand is against you and the game is rigged from the start (which I don't) then of course you will believe differently.Quote from timmyz:
and btw, for every 1 person who succeeded by not being afraid, there are probably 100 others who did the same thing, worked just as hard, but failed.
Quote from inflector:
He's spot on with two of the most important ideas about becoming super rich. First, that you need to be willing to take risks that expose you to potential failure and ridicule to make a lot of money, and second that it is execution not ideas that count.
I'm always amused by people who look down on others who have made a lot of money and then stumbled at something else for a bit; as if it were possible to have success without the possibility of failure along the way.
These are the same guys looking for the 90% success rate trading systems that have no risk and return 1,000% per year. The "critics" of Teddy Roosevelt's famous quote on risk and failure:
Very few billionaires have not taken large risks to get there. Its not a coincidence that many of the richest billionaires have been college dropouts. They believed in their own success enough to leave the traditional path, a risk most would not take.
I've seen a lot of well executed mediocre ideas make money and many very good ideas crash and burn in my days in high-tech startups. Microsoft is a great example of mediocrity well executed. Apple pre-jobs-return was an example of great ideas very poorly executed.
Any failures in my own startups were invariably failures in execution not ideas.
- Curtis