The art of money-getting

"Those who really desire to attain an independence, have only to set their minds upon it, and adopt the proper means, as they do in regard to any other object which they wish to accomplish, and the thing is easily done. But however easy it may be found to make money, I have no doubt many of my hearers will agree it is the most difficult thing in the world to keep it. The road to wealth is, as Dr. Franklin truly says, "as plain as the road to the mill." It consists simply in expending less than we earn; that seems to be a very simple problem." PT Barnum

What Hacker News says

overu589Jan 2025

You’re lying to yourself kid. They’re doing what they’re doing because it works. You don’t like it because you’re not getting any. You say “corrupt” and yet you’re the one confused.

There is no once and for all solution for anything. Here’s the secret: the whole universe is falling apart and the only thing keeping anything together is someone/something paying for it.

You don’t need the whole pie. You might survive from the crumbs of a thousand pies.

You could read P.T. Barnum’s “The Art of Money Getting” and “The Richest Man in Babylon” to give you some insight into the classics. None of this will help your desperate sense of immediacy.

thread

carapaceMay 2022

Read "The Art of Money Getting" by P.T. Barnum. (It's a hundred and forty years old!) https://www.gutenberg.org/files/8581/8581-h/8581-h.htm

And read "The Richest Man in Babylon", a series of pamphlets publish a century ago "on thrift and financial success" https://archive.org/details/RichestManInBabylon_650/mode/2up

These two books will give you the basics of how to make money and what to do with it once you have it. You have to come up with the particular idiosyncratic business to pursue, of course.

> Do you have any ideas that I could focus on?

Assuming your general idea is to write some software and sell it, the easiest software to sell is generally software that saves or makes people money somehow.

thread

andrewmcwattersJun 2021

Thanks for sharing Mark Cuban’s book. It has some very tangible and practical words of wisdom that aren’t just masturbatory feel good stories in there.

It’s quite old and maybe overplayed but I enjoy THE ART OF MONEY GETTING or GOLDEN RULES FOR MAKING MONEY By P.T. Barnum. His insights might be about 200 years old, but they are in the exact same vein, and perhaps a bit more tasteful language.

thread

okareamanFeb 2021

Coincidentally I just read this today: "There is no such thing in the world as luck. There never was a man who could go out in the morning and find a purse full of gold in the street to-day, and another to-morrow, and so on, day after day: He may do so once in his life; but so far as mere luck is concerned, he is as liable to lose it as to find it. "Like causes produce like effects." If a man adopts the proper methods to be successful, "luck" will not prevent him. If he does not succeed, there are reasons for it, although, perhaps, he may not be able to see them."

THE ART OF MONEY GETTING or GOLDEN RULES FOR MAKING MONEY By P.T. Barnum

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/8581/8581-h/8581-h.htm

thread

carapaceNov 2020

I don't think you should write FOSS software if you want to get paid for copies of it or the use of copies of it. That kind of defeats the whole point[1].

Either: 1) Be comfortable being extremely poor. This was the route I initially took: I was homeless during the time I learned UNIX and Python, etc. and had plenty of free time to work on writing code.

2) Be wealthy already. The easiest is to be born to wealth, but if that didn't work out for you you'll have to acquire wealth yourself. There is a wealth (pun intended) of information on this already, and it's beyond the scope of this comment, but I'll recommend "The Art of Money Getting or, Golden Rules for Making Money" by P. T. Barnum (Yes, that P. T. Barnum!) esp. the last chapter: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/8581/8581-h/8581-h.htm and "The Richest Man in Babylon" which "remains in print almost a century after the parables were originally published, and is regarded as a classic of personal financial advice." ~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Richest_Man_in_Babylon_%28...

3) Get paid for the writing itself (which is hopefully solving someone's immediate problem, eh?) (This is what RMS himself does, FWIW.) (Can be combined with option #2 to bootstrap wealth.)

[1] The "whole point" being something like, "Let's accelerate the techno-singularity and go live in Star Trek with cool aliens who like us." yeah?

thread

edoceoJul 2020

> We used to joke that “we lose money on every transaction but make it up in scale.

Ooof, I remember that from 2000. Does anyone look at unit economics?

PT Barnum made a book called "the art of money getting" - which could help many, worth the read.

thread