(08-29-2015, 07:39 PM)Shannon Wrote: You point to Bill Gates as proof that luck is why someone becomes wealthy, but it really has nothing to do with it. In those cases where it appears to be luck (which are the minority, by the way) there are other things in play that are not luck. The vast majority of people who become wealthy do so because they have the right personality traits. Those traits are naturally occurring for some, and can be developed for others. But to attribute wealthy to luck is laughably inaccurate.
Bill gates had an opportunity presented to him, and he took full advantage of it. He used his knowledge, his natural skills and his contacts to achieve a goal. That's not luck. That's taking full advantage of an opportunity and using one's natural skills, contacts and knowledge to do so.
Bill Gates is wealthy because his personality is prone to wealth. He has the traits that make a self made millionaire, and in his case, billionaire. If it was luck, it would be random. He would have randomly succeeded or failed at each step of the way to millionaire and then billionaire. He did not; his failures were predictable, just as his successes were, if you know what you're looking at. And he is a billionaire because his successes were vastly in excess of his failures, and that is not a random chance happening; that is him making what happened, happen.
Luck does not exist. All things happen for a reason. Just because you cannot see why they happen does not make them random.
If you look at the most wealthiest people in history they all happened to have been born in the same era.
They're are a lot of people who have the same personality traits as Bill Gates who are not millionaires, there are a lot of people who are smarter than Bill Gates who aren't as successful. If you know Bill Gate's story you know he was exposed to computers at a very early age when access to them was scarce even for universities. From there it was his years of practice and passion, or obsession for computers that led to his success.
There's something in sociology called the Matthew effect, or "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer", it shows that people get to where they are because of accumulative advantage. It really has nothing to do with personality traits specifically, maybe entitlement.
You act like people are scheming to be wealthy, most of the time they just happen to be passionate about something that's profitable.
