Q&A: Why Not "Just" Get Rich? (Before other things...)

there is a very peculiar and very
architectural a distinctive Buddhist temple off in the distance there I guess you guys can't see it at all it's funny how a cell phone camera captures some things with tremendous accuracy but some things further off in the distance it seemingly cannot capture it all I had a question a couple of months ago someone ready to ask me a longtime supporter of the channel why didn't I simply resolve to get rich before doing these other things with my life before deciding to study languages before deciding to do humanitarian work and in many cases as you probably know the languages I was studying in the past were directly linked to my political humanitarian aspirations so obviously I was not learning a language like lotion in order to get rich I was not learning language like Cambodian to get rich let alone Cree in a jib way first nations languages indigenous languages of Canada well let you in a little secret right now I'm learning Chinese and I'm not doing in order to get rich so somebody wrote in to me a longtime viewer the channel asking in a sympathetic way why didn't I devote some years of my life to making as much money as possible before embarking on these other research interests of a humanitarian interests political interest so on and so forth I said recently in a video on a very different topic that when we talk about impatience we are talking about a very complex phenomenon in an overly simplistic way what do we mean when we say that someone is impatient very often what we mean in fact is that they refuse to listen to what you're saying so it is commonly said in our culture that people who have become wealthy people who've gotten rich or people are very successful in the course oh they're impatient they're too impatient to listen to this to listen to that they take on imperious arrogant and impatient mannerisms and behaviors we would not use the same description for the same behavior in a religious context for example if I am speaking to a devout Muslim and I'm describing the history of how Islam slaughtered Buddhists in the past how they murdered Buddhist monks who had no weapons and offered no military resistance how they looted pillaged and burned down Buddhist temples right in the core of the Buddhist heartland destroying you know the geographic and cultural center of Buddhism from discussing that sort of history with someone who actually believes in practices Islam they may act very impatient indeed they may cut me off in mid-sentence they may interrupt me they may quarrel with me without being able to actually speak to the substance of the facts right they may also stand up and walk out of the room right this kind of impatience what we mean by impatience it's not impatience at all right it's a refusal to listen and the refusal to listen to a contrasting point of view it may come out of a kind of strength but more often it comes out of a kind of weakness right there's maybe a fear that by listening to this person by listening to their view of the world by listening to the facts they have to present at the experiences they have to share maybe it's gonna your own faith your own certainty your own self confidence maybe you're gonna lose faith in Islam in this case there are Muslim certainly many times I have spoken with Communists and socialists and it's been obvious to me that they're afraid to let me speak they want to interrupt me they want to cut me off or they want to walk out of the room or they want to just insult me you know throw insults at me and shut down the conversation because they can't listen to what I'm saying again we could describe this as impatience but is impatience really the word and this again for someone who's a communist or a socialist comes out of a fear that if they listen to me it will take away some of their faith some of their certainty in this case in a religious story in this case in a social doctrine a political doctrine but it resembles a religious doctrine and it's fervor I recently heard an interview with a kind of political commentator here on here on YouTube guy makes his living talking about politics in the internet and he said that he was a big believer in socialism until he went and visited the Soviet Union he went to Russia in the early 1980s as soon as he started living in Russia he lived there for some time continuously he wasn't just the tourist he completely lost all faith and not just communism but socialism itself his political views radically changed because he saw the depressing horror of daily life in the Soviet Union so some people are open-minded and flexible about those things and some people are brittle so they will refuse to hear what you say they will shut themselves off to reality so why are these behaviors why is this frame of mind associated with the acquisition of wealth why is it associative my task also with some professor put some professions some career paths more than others does success necessarily have to lead to arrogance and close-mindedness no it doesn't but it's remarkable the consistency I see among computer programmers for example is an amazing amazingly consistent set of arrogant imperious close-minded brittle thin-skinned vengeful behaviors it goes much deeper than your impatience where people who work in computer science computer bro don't want to hear what you're saying I've had reason to reflect in the last few days about my interactions with a young man who dropped out of his ph.d program I was thinking about partly you know I made that video thing that you shouldn't drop out of university in order to do YouTube full time he did exactly that this guy Harrison Nathan I mention him on the channel couple times he dropped out of his ph.d program in mathematics in order to try to do basically YouTube full time he was gonna do digital vegan activism on YouTube on Instagram on Facebook and all the platforms he had high hopes to himself and man I had one conversation with that guy I could not believe what a jerk he was to me I could not believe how imperious and high-handed and reproachful and his sense of self-importance sense that he was the expert in this and I was the beginner whereas I was already like five years deep into talking about vegan I'm on YouTube so dude I have a lot of experience in this field I have a lot of inside knowledge of this how it works that I could share with you you could stand to learn a lot from me but instead you're using this conversation as an opportunity for you to lecture me about how how morally superior to me you supposedly are how you know better than I do well what it is to be successful in in specifically this forum and specifically in doing YouTube videos about politics and veganism it was mind-blowing but I had to reflect that and have to reflect now that guy's behavior his attitude his outlook on life it's been formed by the experience of devoting his time and energy and his thinking to mathematics in a way that I can only slightly imagine right I've had different jobs where I was doing math every day and your way of thinking changes you get of course you get better math you become conversant with numbers in the same way that thinking and speaking Chinese every day you become conversant with the vocabulary that the Chinese language your patterns of thought in being a computer programmer in being a mathematician and then the way that translates to impatience again really meaning something much much more profound and deep than our word impatience in English would normally suggest how that translates to impatience with person to person face to face reality political reality social reality how it leads to a very different kind of struggle with the human condition and indeed a certain kind of brittleness we are not willing to listen to the other person's perspective that was Harrison's main problem Harrison couldn't listen to me and why was that again with the comparisons already have been established to what it's like talking to a devout Muslim if what you're saying maybe threatens their sense of faith we're talking to a devout communist what you're saying threatens their sense of faith I think for him the problem is if he could talk to me about veganism or even he could talk to me about YouTube well being a youtuber that would threaten his sense of belief in himself the ultimate religious and social doctrine the ultimate cult is the cult with just one member one leader one follower it's the cult of believing in yourself and a lot of these people the reason why they can't talk to me or why they they can't be open-minded to and really hear and receive and respond to whether critically or otherwise other people's perspectives is this feeling that it threatens their in their sense of self sorry about the noise pollution here guys I can get up and give you a different view of this park as has been established this particular camera will not give you much of a view off the edge of this mountain so look suppose the question were asked to me why didn't I take a few years to get rich to to just get rich right to just amass a fortune to just earn a bunch of money in one one profession or another one trait or another you know I think that to say that you know it's really kind of insulting to the people who've made the tremendous sacrifices that are required to get rich and those sacrifices very often are sacrifices on the level of oh come on all right I'm not gonna put up with stray dogs attacking me for this video you know people talk about selling your soul to get rich well that may be a bit maudlin but it often comes close enough to that I had a friend a very good-looking female friend who was thinking about going into real estate and the real estate business if you're not born rich is one of the few reliable ways of really making a lot of money in the english-speaking Western world these days in so-called developed economies and she had connections in the field she knew people who are successful in it she a few people who owned real estate brokerages firms she had she had various advantages including as mentioned that she was good-looking and let's face it real estate is a tremendously shallow business they are definitely interested in good-looking women who can stand there and present a property and the sort of thing they're much more interested in how you look in real estate than your knowledge of microeconomics or what-have-you it's a field anyone can get into and many people switch careers in midlife go out and get a real estate license and she talked to me about this was sometime her thoughts or plans about going to real estate and then she said to me one day suddenly from my perspective she came to the realization that she didn't want this job she'd never take up a career in real estate because she didn't want to be nice to people she didn't want to pander to people day in and day out that's her professional duty and she realized I assumed it was that she went to some real estate event she was in some contexts where she saw what the job was like in practice she realized that being in real estate what it meant was smiling at people and serving them platters of small sandwiches and serving them coffee and taking them to see a house and asking them about how many kids they've got and how many kids they want and do they have a pet dog do they want to have a backyard for the dog and isn't that wonderful and isn't that nice and how many cars do you have and what kind of garage do you want for the cars that this kind of endless hobnobbing was absolutely crucial to your career if you really wanted to make money in real estate now the type of change the type of transformation you'd have to undergo to work in real estate you have to love the city you're living in you have to learn the geography of the city learn the neighborhoods drive around that city constantly there's a certain level of math involved but above all is I think she was right I think she made the right decision that what she identified was a social element for the job that would really require her to change the way she thinks the way she acts that would really force you to reconsider the type of person she wanted to be take on a new set of behaviors and even a new identity there in this sense getting rich is never easy and don't get me wrong I could tell you now stories of people who made money especially in computer science you know within my generation especially you know in in some high-tech businesses viewers who made money without ever working a day in a coal mine without ever carrying a heavy load of wood in their back without doing any of the hard work that would be involved in buying a plot of forest land and chopping down the trees and turning it into a farm conventional medieval ways of becoming wealthy yes in some ways getting rich can seem effortless but in terms of this type of sacrifice in terms of the transformation of your character in terms of who you are and who you will become the type of sacrifice type of transformation is really quite profound I definitely was not born into circumstances where I was tempted to get rich one way or the other I was definitely born into a family where I was told that earning money was basically evil my parents were far more left-wing than the average communist that a human being shouldn't be motivated by money at all this sort of this sort of thing was very much part of my upbringing but above and beyond that I was sensitive to the fact that when you choose a career when you choose a profession when you choose to compromise not just ethically look I don't just mean compromising with your employer but I mean when you take on a body of knowledge and you inhabit it and you use it you live with it every day the way that a mathematician lives with his numbers the way that a chess champion memorizes and thinks in terms of a hundred different ways to open a game of chess and a hundred different ways to end a game of chess this kind of commitment in your thinking and feeling and your perception of the world and the narrowing of the mind that comes with it and the impatience towards any other perspective and the inability to hear other people's perspectives because the threatens your perspective I see all of these consequences that come from the most intimate compromises that becoming wealthy entails and looking back at my youth looking back at the decisions I made at the end of university sure I made a lot of bad choices that I regret but I looked at my professors and university I looked at all the role models that surrounded me and I thought I'm not gonna make the same mistakes as you people I at least I'm gonna get out there while I'm young and strong well I'm not yet injured well I can take risks and live with the consequences I'm gonna get out there I'm gonna make my own mistakes for myself now and both the terrible disadvantages that brought in my life and have also had the rewards