1. The attention and adulation is your drug. I think there's no shortage of people who fall into this category.
2. To convert that fame into opportunities you wouldn't otherwise have; and
3. To convert that fame into money.
Obviously if you're just plain rich then (3) is moot. If you fall into (1) then money can buy you fame to a degree.
So that leaves (2). Wealth will give you many opportunities fame will but certainly not all. Or at least the costs to replicate that are truly ludicrous, like being a star in a Marvel movie, spending a year on the ISS, going to the Moon, that sort of thing.
The way I see it the downsides of fame are significant. I've heard tales from people who worked in media years ago that the very stars who now want the media to leave them alone and to respect their privacy would beg them for stories and coverage just a few years earlier.
I don't think I'd want to be ultra-wealthy (as in a billionaire+). At that point you're almost removed from society. I imagine you end up moving in circles with other ultra-wealthy people that are actually quite small. You risk being a target of the desperate, the criminally minded (fraud, kidnapping, blackmail, that sort of thing) and the mentally unstable.
And really what is the practical difference between having $20m and $2b? Sure you'll have nicer houses and more of them. You may well have a super-yacht at that point. But who cares? I know I don't.
You could say "you would if you had $2b" and maybe that's true. I'm sure I'd buy a nicer place but I think I'd still want to keep a relatively low profile.
> And really what is the practical difference between having $20m and $2b? Sure you'll have nicer houses and more of them. You may well have a super-yacht at that point. But who cares? I know I don't.
I found this Reddit comment [1] insightful on that front. Don't know to its validity but have seen it linked to in a few different places.
> $1billion
> I am going to exclude the $10b+ crowd, because they live a head-of-state life. But at $1b, life changes. You can buy anything. ANYTHING. In broad terms, this is what you can buy:
> Access. You now can just ask your staff to contact anyone and you will get a call back. I have seen this first hand and it is mind-blowing the level of access and respect $1 billion+ gets you. In this case, I wanted to speak with a very well-known billionaire businessman (call him billionaire #1 for a project that interested billionaire #2. I mentioned that it would be good to talk to billionaire #1 and B2 told me that he didn't know him. But he called his assistant in. "Get me the xxxgolf club directory. Call B1 at home and tell him I want to talk to him." Within 60 minutes, we had a call back. I was in B1's home talking to him the next day. B2's opinion commanded that kind of respect from a peer. Mind blowing. The same is true with access to almost any Senator/Governor of a billionaires party (because in most cases, he is a significant donor). You meet on an occassional basis with heads-of-state and have real conversations with them. Which leads to ... influence ... (continued)
Even just in terms of money. $20 million invested is--depending upon your assumptions--something like $1 million/year ~risk-free without touching the principle. (OK, a diversified portfolio is probably going to do better than that but that gives something of a baseline.)
Obviously that's a pretty nice passive income stream. But it's not really have a couple nice homes in prime locations, hire full-time assistants, fly private jets everywhere, etc. sort of money.
1 million per year is a fat budget. You can get close enough to that lifestyle by renting slices of the components on-demand and being more efficient from wasteful (and preyed upon) apex lifestyle.
For instance: private air travel in USA. Find some friends with aligned lifestyles and together buy a high performance twin engine propeller passenger plane that seats 8 people for about 5 million.
There are agencies who will take care of all of the complexities of owning and operating this aircraft and renting it out while you’re not using it. With careful decision making you can bring the aircraft to close to net zero steady state operating cost as the revenue flights paying for maintenance, storage, liability etc. You also get access to a stream of excellent pilots on demand.
These agencies can also book you on a larger plane in their portfolio when you want to go further and for some reason aren’t willing/can’t fly first class commercial.
Real estate is much simpler—tons of fabulous rentals all over the world. And an assistant surely could be hired somewhere for 100k or less annually.
$1 million/year without working is very rich. You could definitely have multiple houses and full time assistants. I have two houses and part-time assistants at an income of $300k. And most of my time is dedicated to work at someone else's company, owning all of your own time makes them much more wealthy than me.
I'm not really arguing with that. But there's a difference between being very comfortable and money basically being a non-factor even for expenses that the typical person would consider a complete extravagance/unaffordable and cost basically being completely irrelevant.
In fairness, I suspect that they're cold and unpleasant because of all the vultures that constantly circle them.
When you're being constantly hounded by people that believe that you being wealthy means they inherently deserves a share of it, that'll probably distort your worldview real quick.
They are nice party tricks but add negligible value to your life. Money at those levels is mostly useful to project power, if you don't care about that then I don't see the point. There is a reason many billionaires live relatively normal lives without any of the things mentioned in that post.
Interesting reddit article, I have only spent time with aone billionaire, and while his home was amazing, you would never know he was that rich. Very kind and honest person who does not spend much money at all. He would fix his clothes rather than buy new but ALWAYS pick up the tab at dinner. Not all 1B+ people fit into that description.
An extra reason for being famous (could be included in #2 of the above list) is to amplify your positive impact in the world. E.g. if Bezos wasn't famous i'd probably never learned about his business strategies (costumer first, risk taking & innovating, etc). IMO this is the best reason for being famous.
What is so special about customer first? I work for a small unknown company, my product managers and support team do “customer first”, I doubt any of them are reading Bezos biography or philosophy. This is just common sense and being nice to customers, that’s all.
I hope people don’t learn his “work employees to death” and related philosophy ...
Bezos named it Amazon so it would appear high in alphabetical order. In pre-search engine world of 1994 it was a big deal. New sites would be found by consumers through site directories.
Interesting tangential fact: Ford Motor Company was not Henry Ford's first automotive company. He previously started the (less descriptive) Henry Ford Company (his second automotive venture) which was bought and turned into the Cadillac brand.[1] Cadillac would eventually become General Motors.
Combine that with the split between the Dodge brother investors, and all the Detroit "Big Three" manufacturers can be traced to Henry Ford. [2]
There is no way to escape the envy and judgement from your "friends" even if you are just a "little" rich. A friend of mine, who is a former Googler, and keeps a "low key" lifestyle just tries to keep all the "triggers" that people use to recognize wealth out of their life because they value their friendships.
Isn’t it possible to become a billionaire without anyone knowing?
What if you just get there quietly through private investment?
Not a billion, but I’ve built up a decent chunk myself and nobody seems to know or even suspect that about me. Nobody begs me for anything more than spare change, no sycophants, nobody trying to impress me. Marketing for luxury goods doesn’t even reach me.
I could easily see myself reaching a billion in a few decades just through private investment, and there must be thousands of people doing the same. I imagine there are many more who have earned millions publicly, then sold their stake and went to a billion privately.
"Optometrist Herb Wertheim may be the greatest individual investor the world has never heard of, and he has the Fidelity statements to prove it. Leafing through printouts he has brought to a meeting, you can see hundreds of millions of dollars in stocks like Apple and Microsoft, purchased decades ago during their IPOs. An $800 million-plus position in Heico, a $1.8 billion (revenue) airplane-parts manufacturer, dates to 1992. There are dozens of other holdings, ranging from GE and Google to BP and Bank of America."
"The Microsoft shares he bought during the IPO, which have been paying dividends since 2003, are now worth more than $160 million. His 1.25 million shares of Apple, some purchased during its 1980 IPO and some when the stock was languishing at $10 in the 1990s, are worth $195 million."
The Bloomberg billionaires index does exactly this... Out private billionaires.
First off it's hard being a billionaire and people not knowing. You're going to make a splash somehow. But there's still plenty of billionaires, especially in emerging market countries, that have still to be uncovered.
>I could easily see myself reaching a billion in a few decades
So your plan to "easily" become a billionaire is to "follow Warren Buffet" and make decades worth of out-performing private investments?
Wait until you learn that markets don't go up forever, and that paper profits on out-of-touch valuations aren't cash. As they say, "everyone's a genius in a bull market".
Whats your endgoal? I was thinking the other day about fortune, wealth and becoming wealthy. I’d very much prefer to not pursue becoming wealthy and concentrate on a diferent goal. I don’t think I could change the world in a financial sense, I might as well contribute positively from a different angle that is not from a wealthy position. That’s why I am asking you what your endgoal is since you chose anonimity and not to flaunt your wealth. I suspect you don’t need any kind of validation or any other ego tickling so do you have an endgoal that you’d like to pursue through your acumulated wealth?
I plan on following in Warren Buffett’s footsteps. Without his influence, I would be working the graveyard shift at a gas station right now.
End goal career-wise is to amass as much wealth as possible by giving smart and capable people a path to building new things that benefit everyone, and then direct that amassed wealth toward the betterment of humanity before I die.
I’m not sure exactly how I’ll do that.
I actually think most philanthropic organizations do more harm than good. I think an effective non-profit would probably look like a boring faceless middleman, affecting positive change by influencing capitalistic markets to serve the underserved. By serve I mean serve, not provide goods to.
I also have my own idea of what it means to better humanity. I think there are better ways to feed and shelter people than feeding and sheltering them.
Whatever I do, it’ll probably be really boring, won’t provide for any photo ops, and there’s a good chance it might even seem pointless and ineffective to most people.
It means enabling them to do it themselves and not make them dependent on someone's aid. Creating such an environment and opportunities, bootstrapping them so to speak.
You mean by creating an economy where everyone is paid sanely, instead of an economy geared to moving wealth from people who don't have it to people who do?
Both of those methods are accessing the public markets. Private investment means investing in non publicly traded companies. Like venture capital... For example
> And really what is the practical difference between having $20m and $2b? Sure you'll have nicer houses and more of them. You may well have a super-yacht at that point. But who cares? I know I don't.
At $20m you can shape your own world, and your family's. But at $2bn you can change society. You can buy a lot of influence both by directly spending the cash to accomplish goals and by bribing politicians to act on your behalf.
My understanding of the question of "why want to be a billionaire" is that it ultimately comes down to the circles of people you associate with. You might own a small company and might take in $1 million in income a year. Great. Well if your friends are making $5 million a year and have X Y Z you might want to push yourself to get there. Imagine being friends with Jeff Bezos, you wouldn't really ever feel like you're successful enough. It's probably the worst for people born into being rich, because they get born into that world and get friends and family who are already bought into being at whatever that level is. And they have to either reject it or try and get there.
I think the same problem exists at pretty much all income levels. I'm having sort of the opposite problem currently. I make considerably more money than most of my friends, mainly just because I was a cs major and they chose other paths. I can afford to go to nice restaurants, bars, whatever, but my friends can't and I don't make quite enough to pay for all of them to go with me. I do find myself wondering what the point is sometimes. for now I'm happy to have people over and pay for pizza/beer, but it seems a little awkward.
$20m is not really that much. You can spend that buying a new nice house in LA or a new penthouse in New York. If you have a large family (say 5) and your kids are adults/studying then $20m networth is not really that much to make them live the good life. (Not that I’m saying it’s a good thing to do so).
$25m @ 10%/year (assuming your actively investing a have no real estate) can afford you a good baller life around US most expensive cities if you are single or just a couple.
> I don't think I'd want to be ultra-wealthy (as in a billionaire+). At that point you're almost removed from society. I imagine you end up moving in circles with other ultra-wealthy people that are actually quite small. You risk being a target of the desperate, the criminally minded (fraud, kidnapping, blackmail, that sort of thing) and the mentally unstable.
That's been the reality of Denmark's richest family (richest ever since CF Møller, head of Mærsk, died a few years ago). They've had numerous run-ins with people after a slice of their wealth. This lead them to keep as far from the public eye as possible (according to one piece I read) until they were the most talked about Danes of the season last year, as they tragically lost 3 of their 4 children in a bombing that was aimed to wipe them out.
It's hard to imagine a worse scenario to survive as a parent or sibling.
I can name you lots and lots of broke poets and writers from the last thousand or so years, but I can only name you a handful of wealthy people that died more than 100 years ago: Rockefeller, Carnegie, maybe the first Rotschilds (which one, though?), Jakob Fugger and the Medicis.
I generally agree with you, but I think a counterpoint is that the dynamic which currently obtains, where the merchant class is on equal footing with the political class in terms of power and influence, is a relatively new phenomena. For most of history, people simply farmed the land and the only notables were the (relatively small) political class that wielded power, mostly at the tip of a sword.
Thought exercise: A malicious but trustworthy djinn appears to you. He tells you that one minute after your death, he's going to release magically faked evidence that you were a violent pedophilie.
All of your remaining friends and family will believe this, and the case will be so bad that your name will become associated around the world for the sheer heinousness and reprehensibility of the things you supposedly did. However the djinn is willing to bind himself to not doing this, but you have to pay him $1 right now.
If "nothing matters after you are gone", then you wouldn't even be willing to pay $1 to avoid this scenario.
While I’m alive, I would gladly pay $1 if it would avoid a traumatic experience for my friends and family (or even a stranger). I don’t see how this hypothetical changes that. In particular, it’s not about the memory of me, it’s about how that memory affects the lives of those who might care about me.
But you said that you don't care about things after being gone. So this clearly demarcates an exception to this.
You care about the wellbeing of your friends and family after your death, even though you're not "around to observe it". So there are at least some things that you value in life, that you still value after death.
Many people being value being respected in life. There's nothing particularly different about extending that value to being respected after death. At least not if you already assign valence to other values post-death.
There is a big difference between not being cause of hardship for your family and being remembered for the sake of being remembered.
The former rises out of natural empathetical feelings you've towards your close ones which will be a cause for grief and depression till the end of your life, you get it's b repercussions in your life itself, unless you're a psychopath who don't have any regard for others suffering. Surely you can't just ignore it as 'nothing matters after I'm gone' as in being remembered, because being remembered for the sake of being remembered is merely just for the ego satisfaction from that recognition when you don't even have a working brain to enjoy it and unless you are one of those types that crave for attention and not being remembered affects your current state too emotionally. Trying to be billionaire to be remembered is just like trying to chase the moon.
Just because the results of it are non-observable (fair assumption) to the person leaving some sort of legacy behind them, doesn’t mean that doing so isn’t valuable to them. It is the satisfaction you get while still living, knowing that after you are gone, some (hopefully positive) remnants of you will still live on.
That may be what you believe, but it's a fringe belief. I point to every statue, every hospital named after someone, every estate still generating income for non profits, every example of suicidal selfless sacrifice in history as evidence.
There is such a thing as a-causal trade. Newcomb problem, prisoner's dilemma, that sort of things.
Few people really don't care what happens after they're gone. We almost always want something to linger on, be it descendants, a master works, or just the world.
How many dead billionaires from the last century do you remember and can name without googling?
If it's just the feeling of being remembered for something then there are lots of other things you can do to make people remember you. Nobody remembers the rich merchants from 2000 or 3000 years ago but people still remember the conquerors who changed maps and the artists of those days whose works have been immortalized. Whether you like it or not, someone like Hitler or Tolkien will be more likely to be remembered than someone like Gates and no, Hitler won't still be considered as an irredeemable monster then, just like how people don't get offended by the conquests and massacres by Genghis or Napoleon unless for nationalistic/jingoistic reasons.
> Obviously if you're just plain rich then (3) is moot.
That's assuming that rich people don't want _more_ riches, which I would guess to be not true in more cases than not.
20M isn't quality of life wise too different from 2B, but if you got the chance to get 2B, legally and even morally, would you not?
Frankly, All people with a annual income of either $1B, $10M, or $100K likely live in closer and better quality of life than some medieval king. I'm thankful for our times.
Here's the view I subscribe to: "Being a billionaire must be insane. You can buy new teeth, new skin. All your chairs cost 20,000 dollars and weigh 2,000 pounds. Your life is just a series of your own preferences. In terms of cognitive impairment it's probably like being kicked in the head by a horse every day."
I was always tempted to do a reality TV show where you get outside and are famous for a few months then forgotten about, for the reason that you could hopefully experience what fame is like and hopefully be forgotten about if you didn't like it.
The only wildcard in USA is lawyer fees in case of criminal charges, divorce and such. Make it $30-$50 mil, just in case and you'll live like a king without anyone knowing your networth, unless you want them to
I am publicly in close proximity to someone famous for my job and with a modest (~15k) Instagram following because of that, I've experienced most of this behavior to one degree or another. I was completely unprepared for it and it really freaked me out.
I love the Bill Murray quote, and I've been living by this, also from the article: "You want everyone to know your name and no one to know your face.” It really seems to affect people that I don't post selfies and pics of myself anywhere....second to requests to be put in contact with the famous person to whom I'm obviously connected, people really want to know what I look like. As someone who is fairly private as well as nothing special in the looks dept, I'm in no rush. I'm googleable because of the absurd name under which I started, but most people can't or won't put in the effort.
I've definitely concluded that in my particular case, some respectable form of following on IG is necessary (I'm a photographer) and I certainly won't get rich, but damn I was utterly not ready for nor was I expecting 5-screen-long tales of woe and death and disease and pleas for help and mercy along with the same kind of "I know what you did and I'll expose you" shit several times a week.
I hate to admit this but I wrote 3 of these woe—and-misery letters in the late ‘90s, when I was a teenager.
One to Bill Gates, one to Bill Roper, and another to Chris Metzen.
I didn’t send them expecting a response, and didn’t even really consider that. The act of writing it down and throwing it out there just lifted my mood somehow, like throwing coins in a fountain.
I didn’t choose Bill Gates, Bill Roper and Chris Metzen because I was expecting anything from them. I chose them because they were significant to me, and connecting what I was going through to them somehow provided relief and made things feel surmountable.
Not saying that’s how a perfectly healthy brain thinks, but that’s how teenage me felt at the time.
The people writing you might be the same way?
Next time you get one of these letters, just think of yourself as the fountain they’re throwing the coins into.
I'm surprised a photographer would be such a target, even if they identify themselves with a well-known (and somewhat controversial, I suppose) figure. TIL!
Reading stories like this just makes me that more determined to never be well-known. Not that I'm in any particular danger of that, mind you, but still...
I was surprised too. It's a variety of "I need X to speak at my charity event," "hey can you give X my contact info," "here's my nude selfie and my number, please tell X," to "X is impersonating himself on social media and swindled me out of thousands of dollars, I'm going to report you and everyone else."
Ironically, being relatively faceless has burned me as well. I have a fairly common name, so when someone else with the same name made a shitty comment on some board on Facebook, I had days of being attacked, getting DMd to kill myself, brutal comments on all my posts...it was hours and days of cleanup and banning people.
The worst is probably having a somewhat unusual name that overlaps with a notorious person who could at least plausibly (especially to somewhat off-kilter randos) possibly be you.
I went to school with someone who shared a name with an individual who is in a high-profile public legal spat in NY involving another high-profile NY personality. (Not going to say who or you can figure out the name with modest Google-fu.) My classmate got various death threats etc.
The fact he’s a photographer doesn’t have anything to do with the downsides mentioned. Could just as well be any family member or a close friend of the famous person
A common assumption is rich<=>famous. Obviously, famous doesn't imply rich because someone could be, say, a notorious criminal and be poor. But it's quite amazing the degree to which you can be rich, super rich, but still be anonymous. Even in today's world.
I remember reading one of Forbes' annual listings of the world's billionaires in which they tried to include a photo of everyone in the top couple hundred. Astonishingly a few had no photos -- Forbes said that they couldn't find a photo. According to Wikipedia, "Forbes employs a team of more than 50 reporters from a variety of countries to track the activity of the world's wealthiest individuals." So you can absolutely be among the richest people on Earth and not have a publicly available photo.
On the current Forbes list the following have no photos: #23, #36, #61, #122, #153, #167, #191, #198, #215, #233, #244, #272 (two people at this rank), #290 (also two), #343, #355, #365, #379 (two again), #394, #413, #452 (two again), #504 (four people), etc.
That means that 5% of the richest people in the world (24 of the richest 500) are so anonymous that there isn't a photo that even a dedicated team of reporters can find.
The link between "no photo" and "couldn't find a photo" are different things. #36 (Dieter Schwarz) pops up with a ton of photos when I google him, for instance.
> That means that 5% of the richest people in the world (24 of the richest 500) are so anonymous that there isn't a photo that even a dedicated team of reporters can find.
Either they can't find it or they were asked not to put it up? They have lawyers after all and might prefer to be anonymous.
The stalker thing is real - and I didn’t realize how real until a buddy who’s a moderately-successful YouTuber (750k subs) got his very own.
Thankfully it’s a relatively benign case, but man, it’s real. There’s a kid who, for the past ~10 years, calls him Every. Single. Day. Without fail. For 10 years (that’s 3600+ phone calls). He leaves a voicemail and just talks about his day - what video games he’s playing, etc. I think his mom once called and apologized (although she doesn’t seem to try and stop the behavior, which is also odd, but who knows).
Now imagine the same kind of obsessive behavior, but...less benign. Scary.
A friend of mine is a famous musician and there is a women who somehow pops up on most public events he visits. He's often too nice and hugs her before telling her that she should leave him alone because he's there in private with his friends.
He's always "yes, stalkers bother me a bit, but they aren't that bad"
Well, yes, if it's a small cute woman bothering you now and then it's not that bad, but who has the luck to only get such harmless stalkers?
The way someone looks doesn’t say much about their mental health. Being stalked by someone raises the alarm a bit but sure, not all the time a bad outcome comes of it. Theres the potential to attract nutcases and in my opinion this is a high cost for being famous.
I knew a guy who dated some crazy woman, because "what's the worst that could happen, she's a small woman, haha". Well, he gravely underestimated her abilities...
Reminds me of working on a CRM. Our integration was breaking because one record that was being sent over was 100x bigger than any other record we'd seen during testing.
Turns out some poor fellow had an issue with mental health, not sure the specifics - but every day like clockwork he'd fill in one of our 20 page forms, submit his identification and apply for something. We had records for this same fellow going back 20 years when he first attempted to get involved with our organisation. The team responsible for actioning those forms are familiar with him, and have manually built in steps to ignore his submissions from reporting and extraction..
Whilst debugging this issue I found notes from each new manager that came and went over the years who encountered this fellow. Each had different opinions on what should be done, thankfully humanity reigned and nobody wanting to seek legal measures won.
When debugging this, I noticed the submissions stopped 4 months prior. I looked him up online, lo-and-behold an obituary.
You're talking cell phones, which is perhaps a reasonable assumption in this case. Historically, phone numbers were public in white pages by default though.
Fair enough! I generally think of cell phones when I see the word "voicemail" because we never used that term to describe the messages left on the answering machine my family had when I was a kid; they were just "messages", which at the time was unambiguous when talking about phones :)
It could also result in the stalker never calling again. I guess it’s important to understand the probability of outcomes before just listing negatives.
How? They wouldn't know unless he'd drop the old one. I imagine he isn't calling the kid back to say "hey, got your voice mail, sounds good, keep it up", so the kid wouldn't know that their voice mail goes straight to /dev/null while he uses a different number.
Don't feed the trolls. Being fearful of blocking unwanted calls, so you allow the calls to continue just feeds them. You are telling them this is acceptable.
The trolls have already been fed. If you receive and occasionally take 3000+ calls over a period of years from some crazy person, they think that you’re in some sort of relationship.
Fragile people act out in unpredictable ways. After 10 years, this isn’t a kid anymore.
The stalker thing reminds me of Bjork, the singer and the stalker who wanted to kill her through mail. Very disturbed person developed an obsession with her, imagined her telling him things through her songs and so on. There are plenty of nutcases out there and being famous only paints a target on your back.
I’ve always thought being famous with a pseudonymous name but an anonymous appearance and legal name is the best of both scenarios.
Someone like Bansky or Daft Punk, for example. Everyone knows your artist name and your work, but virtually no one recognizes you on the street and you can check into hotels or use your real name without most people noticing.
I read Kevin Hart’s autobiography and one takeaway from the book was that famous comedians or famous people don’t use pseudo/nicknames but just use his/her own name.
Kevin Hart was known as Lil’ Kev the Bastard until one of his early mentor told him to drop that nickname.
Stewart says the name change has still invited criticism from people who think he made the switch to mask his Jewish background. "People always view it through the prism of ethnic identity," he said. "I hate myself for a lot of reasons, but not because I'm Jewish."
There are simpler explanations at hand for stage names, such as being easier to spell, remember and pronounce. In the case of Louis, "C.K." is approximately the English pronunciation of his last name.
And there tend to be specific motivations. Tim Allen's case is apparent enough. Larry and Rodney wanted stage names to reflect a character. Dangerfield for a guy that never gets a break.
In the case of Jon, he wanted to distance himself from his father.
Mel Brooks: "During his teens, Melvyn Kaminsky officially changed his name to Mel Brooks, influenced by his mother's maiden name Brookman, after being confused with the trumpeter Max Kaminsky."
Jamie Foxx: "When he found that female comedians were often called first to perform, he changed his name to Jamie Foxx, feeling that it was a name ambiguous enough to disallow any biases. He chose his surname as a tribute to the black comedian Redd Foxx."
In show business, stage/screen names are often used to fit the actor's desired image. This definitely fits in with the ethnicity thing--most Americans are not going to see someone as an "everyman" if his last name is too "ethnic". But this was once common even for people who already had Anglo names; Gary Cooper apparently didn't think "Frank James Cooper" projected the right image, and I don't think anybody would accept Marion Morrison as a cowboy/war hero as readily as they accepted John Wayne. In other cases, people come up with stage names just because they're more cool. Who would you rather see in a movie, Vin Diesel or Mark Sinclair?
The only exception to this that I can think of is Arnold Schwarzenegger. I guess with the accent it wouldn't have mattered if he'd changed his name to Mark Johnson or something.
Up until fairly recently, I had no idea Charlie Sheen's birth name was Ramon Estevez.
Martin Sheen, actually. Charlie Sheen is Carlos Estevez, and chose his screen name to match his dad. In contrast, Charlie's brother and Martin's other son, Emilio Estevez, deliberately goes by his real name.
It still is if it's non-obvious how to pronounce it. People will avoid saying your name which has some indirect effects on things like interviews and introductions
I have an Anglo-Saxon surname, but it's rare and very difficult for people here in SE Asia to pronounce, so I use a simpler, shorter, one-syllable last name when I'm here. This used to be a common thing that people would do internationally, even non-famous people like me. Some native English speakers back home might think I'm doing it for subversive reasons, but it's actually to make things easier for the natives here to say, spell, and remember.
Fully aware that it can still be an issue. I have such a surname and spend a lot of time explaining it. Just writing that however unaccepted it is today, it was less accepted in the past.
A number of studies here in Canada have found that resumes are more likely to get a call-back if the person's name is typically Anglo-Saxon as opposed to pretty much anything else. I think the effect has been shown in the USA too.
Employers are probably biased towards hiring a "John Watson" over a "John Adeyemi" or even a "John Kaminski", all other things being equal. So people change their names. It's pretty common. I doubt show business is any different.
Our sales guys have african-sounding names; after taking alter-egos of western names, their response rate tripled up to the normalized comparison of other employees with western names.
In contrast to people like John Stewart who changed his name to sound less Jewish, Whoopie Goldberg (born Caryn Elaine Johnson) changed her name to sound more Jewish. She said she changed her name early in her career to sound Jewish because it would help her career. It's interesting that both of these very successful actors/comedians started from very different assumptions but in the end both ended up being top people in their field.
> It's interesting that both of these very successful actors/comedians started from very different assumptions but in the end both ended up being top people in their field.
Who says they started with very different assumptions?
Order of preference:
1. White non-jew
2. White jew
3. Black
He changed his name so he could get by more easily as the top-ranked preference. For her, a non-jew white name would be hard to distinguish from black. She chose the name that more affirmatively promoted her above the lowest ranked spot.
I doubt either of them would disagree with the above ranking order, though.
That's because he is trying to shame him for supposedly hiding his Jewish heritage. Could be a dog whistle for the anti-Semites, but that's one level deeper than Trump's thinking ever seems to go.
It's rather rich considering Trump's grandfather changed the family name from Drumpf to Trump.
Come on, "Larry" is a common nickname for Lawrence, people go by their middle names all the time, and nobody thinks "The Cable Guy" is a real surname. You might as well put Cedric the Entertainer on this list.
What can you achieve with fame that you cannot achieve with money alone? What is this need for wanting others to know that you exist at all?
Jobs that demand "fame" of some sorts will always take an emotional toll on personalities that are never comfortable with fame, limelight and podiums.
I have been an introvert my whole life but only recently realised this about myself at the tender age of 40! It was a cold slap for me to accept it. I have always imagined myself gregarious and outgoing and friendly - wanting to speak to strangers, breaking silence in a lift - but these have never really sat comfortably with me afterwards. I'll be chewing and ruminating about the imagined mistimed comments or miscued lines for ages. I have bruised myself emotionally believing that I needed to be an extrovert to be successful when in fact I was only demanding too much of myself. Fame, and outrageous fame will likely kill me too.
I made lots of money but always felt rejected/ignored by society. So I ended up lonely.
I was sold a dream that become financially well off and affluent and women will flock to you - it never happened!
I stayed a non smoker, non drinker because I consider these uncessary risks. I don't see any upside
Aced the classes, did good in sports but still become Mr. Noone.
But lately, I got into body building and started using steroids (I know they are harmful) but I've decided that with all the money - I don't wanna live a long life, just wanna be famous and be desired by opposite sex and if it comes at a price of dying after few years - it meets my risk profile.
So, yes validation, being desired and getting sexual opportunities and so people feel intimidated in my presence is all I want.
Money helps you buy expert supervision, time and quality drugs and outfits and also being able to afford a nice car all helps. But money can't directly help you buy the attraction.
I've been getting lots of attention lately from opposite sex since I've got Greek physique dialed in, so anyone who thinks it doesn't matter and all you need is money - I am just a millionaire, there are many like me. I don't want to become a huge man, I just do minimum required to build a physique that opposite sex finds attractive.
I never said I am after bodybuilder physique, I mentioned I am after "fight club" look only but little more defined I'd say. (think Henry Cavil in superman)
I've done enough research to know women find huge body a turn off.
I trained 6 years in a local gym without ever achieving that fight club look and within 3 months after steroid use, I reached there and surpassed my expectations.
When I started - I had patchy beard and face with no well defined jaw. After steroid use - I've now full beard and square jaw (I chew chewing in gym which I copied from Arnold) but not sure if chewing made my jaw bigger or steroid.
Achieving low body fat without losing your muscle on calorie restricted diet is hard as you end up losing some muscles and some fat - steroid makes it easier to put on muscles and get low body fat.
Ofc, there are side effects but imho they are worth it for me.
My HDL levels went down and LDL went up and arterial plaque might build up and I might die from stroke. My heart might become large and weak. But there is also a chance that I might not have any problem at all - here I am gambling with my life. Skin have got thinner but no difference in hair, not gone bald so far others might not be this lucky but who knows.
Also, there are things I am curious about, if you guys know please answer:
If steroid mimicks testosterone. How is using steroid different than a man having naturally high testosterone level which produces androgenic and anabolic effects?
So I started doing Karate since 5 years ago. Before that I was not chubby but not fit either. I have cheek fat and my arms, chest and belly have some fat as well.
I started doing Karate and my weight went down quick and I notice my face gets leaner and now I have a defined jaw line. I’m not sure maybe just my genetics but maybe you got your jawline from losing weight.
3 years ago met a girl online, dated her and she is my wife now. When saw my previous photos she was quite shocked at the difference.
Fast forward now, I don’t have a body builder physique or male mode physique but I do have physique that most contact martial artist have, still have some belly fat but my chest, arm, thigh and belly muscles are thicker without using steroids.
I’m 33 now so I already past my growth rate as a man even 5 years ago, but still managed to change drastically.
>I started doing Karate and my weight went down quick and I notice my face gets leaner and now I have a defined jaw line. I’m not sure maybe just my genetics but maybe you got your jawline from losing weight.
I was skinny and atheletic type with super low body fat then I didn't have visible square jaw.
After that I started eating lot more and training hard, so I did gain some muscle (early newbie gains) but gained fat also. So now my muscles while I could feel them, got burried under layer of fat.
People in my tribe don't have strong jaw. It's hard to find them even in the village I hail from, you can find strong built bulky men and women but no strong jaws.
I see. So do you think steroids contribute to it? It is amazing how hormones can actually change your physical appearance drastically even after someone is past beyond their growth phase.
You mentioned chewing gum. I saw these videos about mewing but don’t actually believe that would work.
There are so many desirable and wonderful women in the world who don't care about any of this. I've had women I consider hot, intelligent, and kind tell me that they prefer a little bit of a gut because it's comfy. Might be partially about age group. More mature women (and people, in general) tend to grow out of a lot of the teen to thirties BS and illusions.
> If steroid mimicks testosterone. How is using steroid different than a man having naturally high testosterone level?
If your body perceives that there is too much testosterone, it stops producing its own testosterone. Your testicles will shrink. It may not take a very high dosage for this to start to happen. That won't be happening in a man with naturally high T who isn't supplementing.
By the way, how are your estrogen levels? Be sure that your doctor is keeping an eye on that. A number of things can cause your body to convert testosterone into estrogen, and you don't want high estrogen (for reasons of appearance as well as behavior). Conversely, there was at least one study some years ago which linked an increased risk of heart disease to men with both high testosterone and low estrogen. After supplementing with testosterone for about seven weeks or so, make sure your ratio of testosterone to estrogen is in check.
Another difference might be in how well you mimic the body's natural daily cycle of testosterone. A male's testosterone level is usually highest around 8am, declining throughout the day and at its lowest just before bedtime. (As it turns out, low levels of testosterone will help you fall asleep faster and sleep more soundly. Never supplement right before bedtime.) Those with low-T using patches, gels, and creams will generally apply them each morning and that does a great job of replicating the natural cycle. Additionally, their testosterone peak and lows are going to be more stable from day-to-day. That's exactly how it should be for a man with naturally high testosterone.
My understanding is that injections will give you a quick initial peak that will steadily decline (and when you're about ready to take your next injection, your testosterone levels may have fallen even further below what you started with). I don't believe that injections will preserve the natural daily cycle of testosterone (high in the morning, low at bedtime). I'm also wondering if the ratio between testosterone and estrogen remains stable throughout the peak and the decline. (My strong assumption: no.) If you're injecting, you'll want to research that and/or check with an expert. If you're already injecting, find an outside resource to confirm what the risks are and what your level of concern should be.
You didn't sound like you're cycling on/off your testosterone. But if you were, that would be another huge difference between yourself and a naturally high-T male.
I'm sure you're already aware that in both cases, high testosterone can have other unwanted effects like back hair, baldness / receding hairline, increased risk (or growth) of prostate cancer, increased anger, etc. You're likely to see at least one or more side-effect, especially when matching the level of a high-T male. Do not rely entirely on your own observations and opinions when monitoring for behavioral changes. Your best choice will be to rely on someone who you spend time with on a regular basis.
You seem to be aware that supplementation for low-T by a primary care physician is going to be substantially different than supplementing for bodybuilding. If you're going to a male health-and-wellness facility which intentionally tries to bring you to a high-T level, the advice which best applies to you is going to be somewhere in the middle of the other two groups. For more answers, you might want to find yourself a good subreddit. You'd be surprised by some of the high-quality answers you're going to be able to get over there. Still, I hope that all of this helps you in some way.
Disclaimer: I and most people here are not medical doctors, but I'm sure you knew that.
If you wear anything more than a t-shirt nobody would even suspect that you have a sixpack. Unless you're actually big, even a basic button-down shirt hides all your gains. How many and how often do other people see you shirtless?
I've been lean 165lbs / 5'10" (75kg, 178cm) since 15 till like 21. I've had a sixpack, but nobody knew about it because I don't usually go to the high school and university shirtless. When I got to 187lbs (85kg) I actually started to look like I lift even when dressed. At 200-210lbs (90-95kg) I actually look strong even in sweater. At my height to get the grotesque "bodybuilding big" I'd have to weigh ~120kg (260lbs).
Getting big has had a dramatic positive effect on my attractiveness.
Please don't think that. Pitt was underweight when playing that role, and he's a Hollywood superstar with the best personal trainers and nutritionists and chefs at his beck and call. That is not realistic for the majority of people.
If you're not in your very early 20s, that level of lean ripped-ness is not sustainable 12 months of the year.
Also, the entire point of the Tyler Durden character is that he's a subversive but idealised projection of the Narrator's imagination. He looks that way because he's not real.
Depends on how far you go. From all I've read, steroids do help you achieve your fitness-based aesthetic goals with less effort (or at all). Including the Fight Club look.
> From all I've read, steroids do help you achieve your fitness-based aesthetic goals with less effort (or at all).
That isn't how steroids work. In fact, it's almost the opposite - they optimize the body's natural process of repairing muscles. They also reduce inflammation, which allows you to train more with less recovery time. The idea that taking steroids automatically gives you muscles is false. You still have to work out hard and often.
The "Fight Club" physique is attainable mostly by cutting body fat (and of course with working out.) Pitt's BF was 8%, which is really low compared to the average fit person.
The group that took testosterone without exercise gained just as much, if not more, muscle mass than the people taking a placebo and actually working out.
Keep in mind, the dose for this study was 600mg/week of testosterone with nothing else added in. This wasn’t a several-grams-per-week pro bodybuilder steroid stack. This was a fairly low dose that might represent someone sticking their pinky toe into the world of steroids.
So for people who say, “oh, steroids don’t make you bigger and stronger. They just let you work harder,” I’m sad to inform you that such a statement is patently false. They may help with recovery and let you work harder, but I guarantee you that you could stick with the exact training routine you have now, start taking steroids, and gain more size and strength from it – no extra work required. And an untrained person might (would probably) gain more muscle from just taking steroids than they would if they actually worked out.
In any case, whatever your desired physique, even if it is the one without too much muscle mass but with very low fat, steroids will make it easier to get there.
Interesting read, thanks for the link. It's a pretty complex post and with some unconventional conclusions. Especially about the power of placebos. It still seems suspect to me, though, as there is virtually zero discussion on the negative aspects of steroid use. The post is entitled The Science of Steroids: The Physiology and Psychology of How Steroids Make You Stronger.
In any case, I was more referring to the common perception that taking steroids will make you jacked without doing anything.
I was saying that most physiques are easier to reach with steroids; and some are only achievable with steroids, ie achievable at all.
(The 'at all' wasn't about effort, but achievability.)
For an untrained person, getting to the Fight Club look takes quite a bit of training, and then cutting. Just cutting without any muscles won't give you that look.
> I was saying that most physiques are easier to reach with steroids;
Sure, this is somewhat true, but the difference isn't enough to be worth the side effects, unless you're going for the huge bodybuilder physique. Diet, exercise and time will get you results that 99% of people find impressive.
> and some are only achievable with steroids, ie achievable at all.
True, but these sort of physiques are definitely not the kind that are perceived as desirable. So, if your reason for working out is to attract the opposite sex (which is a bad reason IMO, but that's a different discussion), steroids are absolutely not worth the side effects - especially if you're a millionaire and can afford a personal trainer and meal-planner.
>especially if you're a millionaire and can afford a personal trainer and meal-planner.
Born to immigrant parents I was always taught to work hard so I ended up with good work ethics and strong willpower - I never skipped training and I was mostly self driven, do not need external encouragement to walk towards my goal.
Yes, now people ask how did you achieve this physique? I never tell them it's steroid because who would give any respect to a guy who just injects some drug? Who will desire him?
I just tell them it's genetics and I spend 2 hours in gym. They look at my well built parents and they believe it. Actually I only spend less than 40 minutes 3 days a week.
>Diet, exercise and time will get you results that 99% of people find impressive.
If many men aren't using steroid to look good, where is all that steroid in the world going? Why is so much steroid caught by Scandinavia customs every year? Specially when Scandinavia is seen as "good genetic stock" and "healthy population" in all metrics.
If other guys around you set expectations of physique not naturally achievable there is not much you can do.
> If other guys around you set expectations of physique not naturally achievable there is not much you can do.
I find this thread fascinating because it's almost common knowledge that this is true for women in contemporary society. It should come as no surprise that this is also the case for men. The looks arms race continues.
The irony is compounded by the number of times "Brad Pitt in Fight Club" has been mentioned in this thread. The whole film was a screed against this kind of arms-race thinking of "I need this, this and this, and then finally, I'll have ______".
Getting a personal trainer is indeed a great way to outsource the need for will-power. And you don't even need to be a millionaire for it.
Whether steroids are worth it is a question of trade-offs. I assume that the effects and side-effects vary with dosage. And most of the bad side-effects come at higher doses. So there's probably some low enough dose that's useful.
For attracting your desired sex: make sure you exercise not just the portions of the body that you can see in the mirror (for guys: arms, shoulders mostly), but your whole body, including your legs and butt.
Do also keep in mind that different people have different preferences; and some do like being huge or looking at huge people.
It's not about effort for serious bodybuilders using steroids, it's more about increasing the physical limits for how much muscle they can maintain/grow. Since steroids help bodybuilders recover better, it actually allows them to productively put in more effort in the gym
Brad Pitt in fight club is like the canonical example of non-bodybuilders talking about a good physique, but there are a lot of reasons it's not realistic.
He has a good face, and is famous, so that makes him look a lot better at a given size. The lighting is done to accentuate how big he is + he has some sort of film over his skin to make himself shinier. And he's also very lean which is not pleasant to maintain for long periods of time for most men. It's comparable to what a smaller person would look like if they were competing at a bodybuilding competition.
It seems odd to argue that Brad Pitt in Fight Club doesn't have a bodybuilder physique, just because he has slightly smaller biceps than a typical body builder.
Just looked it up, definitely not a body builder. Incredible physique? Yes. Bodybuilder? Not even close. I'd estimate he's around 175lbs there. He'd need almost another 80-100lbs of lean muscle mass to be considered a bodybuilder.
Feel free to use your own favorite definitions for words and call Brad Pitt whatever you want... he still spent a ton of time in the gym doing weight exercises, just like a bodybuilder does.
I think usually body builders are associated with insane size which mostly people don't think can be achieved naturally.
But I've had girls tell me that Arnold during his peak in bodybuilding was all natural and that he has superior genetics than everyone else on the planet which helped them achieve that size.
This seems like a very superficial way of attracting girls. From my experience if you want girls you need experience dating and having an attractive personality which isn't easy. It takes time to be comfortable being yourself around girls. And you don't wait for women to "flock to you". You have to pursue them by asking them on dates.
Reading what he's posted, it doesn't seem like he's interested in dating, but rather hooking up, and fast. Tinder is still the go-to for that, and it is by design a looks-centric platform.
Something I've come to realise is that being introverted isn't necessarily the same as being shy. I consider myself more introverted than extroverted (I'm happy with my own company) but over the years, I've learned to communicate confidently to individuals and groups.
A lot of the learning was due to the need to communicate at work (e.g. giving complex presentations / demonstrations to challenging audiences) and also exposure to life situations that helped me realise that a presentation going wrong really isn't the worst thing that could happen to you.
I’ve tried to express this a few times online and fallen foul of offended introverts - my observation is that some people like to use the label of being an introvert as a shield or justification of (their dissatisfaction with?) their shy or antisocial behavioural traits.
From my perspective (as an introvert) I would replace the "Introvert" line with:
* Introversion: I may or may not enjoy ice cream, but eating very much makes me exhausted. (Or "I feel full after eating just a bit".)
From my perspective, your analogy makes the very mistake that the grandparent comment brought up: conflating introversion with not liking social interaction.
Introversion is often confused with or confounded with other attributes. Sometimes when folks talk about introversion they are describing other things like social anxiety etc.
There’s nothing wrong with avoiding social relationships if that person so desires, if anything accusing said person of “antisocial behavioral traits” does more harm than good.
> There’s nothing wrong with avoiding social relationships if that person so desires
Well yes and no. Socially, that's nobody's business indeed. Professionally, that can be a problem or at the very least a weakness. Social relationship are a skill, being bad at it isn't neutral.
Sure you can be wanting to avoid social relationships while being good at it, but I doubt this is any sort of common.
> wanting to speak to strangers, breaking silence in a lift - but these have never really sat comfortably with me afterwards. I'll be chewing and ruminating about the imagined mistimed comments or miscued lines for ages.
This resonates very strongly with me. I will throw a party, have a great time, and then lay in bed replaying scenes and focusing on every slightly awkward thing I could have done differently.
> I have bruised myself emotionally believing that I needed to be an extrovert to be successful when in fact I was only demanding too much of myself.
For me, I think don't it is the extroversion part of the equation that's wrong, it's the negative obsessing afterwards. Sure, being less social avoids that, but it feels like a crutch and not a cure. The cure I am pursuing is learning to care for myself enough including all of my flaws such that I don't beat myself up afterwards for not having every social interaction go perfectly.
I think you could "generalize" any pyschological problem to that. Every psychological problem, by definition, means thinking things that are harmful. Thinking requires attention, and if you know they are harmful, presumably it is a lack of control that makes you think them.
But I don't think that's a particularly useful generalization in most cases. Unless a person has general problems controlling their attention, then the likely culprit for negative thoughts is not attention control in general, but something related to why those thoughts in particular are prevalent.
In other words, if you eat rocks, the most likely explanation is pica, not gluttony.
For one, if you’re any sort of “thinker” (i.e. an economist, philosopher, writer, etc.) that wants to spread your ideas, fame goes a lot further than money. Sure, you can buy a marketing budget and people to spread your message, but that has its limitations.
The Bloomberg candidacy will be an interesting test of this- he is emphatically not a charismatic personality, I’m curious to see how far his unlimited budget will carry him.
I'm still not convinced he's doing it to win - if he gets a few delegates he can then legitimately dump a load of money into whoever wins - if it's Bernie he's going to need it because it could end up being a referendum on socialism rather than trump and the economy is doing fairly well
> What can you achieve with fame that you cannot achieve with money alone?
You can use fame to get money. If you're poor and famous, you can become rich off of your fame. But obviously, if you're poor and not rich, you can't become rich by using the money you don't have.
> > What can you achieve with fame that you cannot achieve with money alone?
> Reaching a larger audience.
Money alone can do that; all fame does is make it more likely than someone else (or multiple people) substitutes their money so you don't need your own.
But then, money can also buy fame pretty easily, so if fame did allow something directly that money did not directly, money would still be sufficient.
We are currently witnessing this experiemnt play out in the real world. Let's see in how far Bloomberg is able to buy a larger audience for his campaign.
One of the odder experiences in my life was when I started a social meetup and suddenly became many times more attractive. Up until that point I was just another nice guy in the crowd but once I was the leader of something, even something as inconsequential as an after work drinking club, women who in the past would always forget my name suddenly were coming on to me, sometimes in obnoxiously aggressive ways. It was a nice ego boost for a very very short period of time but quickly became annoying and got in the way of the purpose of the meetup, which was for a group of similar people to have a relaxing way to end their work day.
Experiencing the dynamics of social proof was quite the eye opener.
Entirely different. Groupies aren't aiming to leave the encounter with anything material. They're after you. They desire you. A gold digger is financially motivated. They desire the money. If they could cut you out of the equation and just get the money they would. You're on the opposite side of the desired/desirer dynamic with gold diggers.
They don't know you, so they're actually after some imaginary you that's perfect for them. Combining desirable known properties of you with a truck load of imaginary properties that they think you have.
If they believe me to be extremely high status and I'm extremely high status, then that's knowing that I'm extremely high status. They know me to the extent that it matters.
You're talking about personality. That's one aspect of who you are. Hell, I'm a bit of a shithead. Anyone who likes me for my personality is wrong. I'm certainly not going to get caught up on needing people to like me for it.
Reminds me of a recent "Hidden Brain" episode - about "Secret Friends" - people of whom others believe to be friends but aren't. The show implied it's fairly easy for the Human Brain to develop a belief those whom are seen or heard often are friends, even if not known personally.
Tim mentions feeling that he is a tribal leader of millions of people. And, he definitely has the attention of those people. People who trust him. And, from an anthropological (and perhaps biological) perspective, I wonder if people stalk him because they really believe him to be their tribal leader Maybe those people really do look at him like he's a friend.
I know our Westernized cultures cherish individuality and independence, but I also wonder if people who decide to enter (and stay within) the limelight have a Human responsibility to be a leader and friend. I know, that's a crazy thought.
That is very interesting. I follow a number of "Just Talking" podcasts and I have come to consider the members as my friends. Some of them really are, but others are just purely because I listen to their podcast.
I don't think it's a crazy thought at all - being famous gives a person some kind of power, and I think some responsibility comes with that.
However, if a famous person behaves in a way that doesn't seem to be fulfilling that responsibility I think the best we can do is ignore them - trying to enforce our idea of responsibility in this area seems unlikely to be a net positive.
I think this is exactly the right way to understand celebrities: our primitive brain thinks it understands who these people are, how they relate to things we care about (shows, books, issues, movements), and identifies them as "familiar", and "known".
And on the other side, this looks utterly bizzarro to the celebrity, because not only don't they know the fan, but it should be obvious to the fan they know absolutely nothing fundamental (or very little) about the celebrity as a human being.
It is a really crazy set of circumstances. The culture of celebrity is completely crazy.
If the problem is so widespread I imagine that all the really rich and famous have A few people on staff to filter incoming correspondence, triage and follow up on credible threats, check with police as needed etc.
What of the modestly famous and not that rich? There ought to be an agency where one could outsource this sort of work for a fraction of the in-house cost. The agency would accumulate experience and might even keep the database of known crazies which gives it economy of scale.
Well, that's definitely where I'd want to work if I was a crazy. Imagine the access! Thousands of wealthy and famous clients contact information and in some cases direct access to their correspondences for filtering purposes... The potential for extortion, bribery and worse would be unprecedented.
I'm sure there's a screening process that could be employed. After all talent agencies, movie studios, and other fame adjacent companies must do something to prevent stalkers from getting jobs there. I also suspect that stalkers don't usually have the qualifications and experience that make them attractive candidates.
I opened this on a computer without an adblocker installed (yeah, my mistake), and a minute or so into reading the article it suddenly pops up a full-screen ad to buy this guy's book. That's on the same level of annoying as autoplaying videos imo.
Yes. Sometimes I like what Tim writes, but his marketing tactics on the website and elsewhere are really bad and annoying.
Tim, if you're reading this: please consider a different approach. You're rich and famous, you don't need the extra $$ of a slightly better conversion rate.
Ah, the humble pop up. I don't see them so much anymore, but I also don't visit many websites that would do that anymore. It's always startling, sometimes it can take a good minute just to get through the onslaught of popups, popovers, chat widgets and permissions requests just to see the article.
> I always want to say to people who want to be rich and famous: ‘try being rich first.’ See if that doesn’t cover most of it. There’s not much downside to being rich, other than paying taxes and having your relatives ask you for money. But when you become famous, you end up with a 24-hour job. . . . The only good thing about fame is that I’ve gotten out of a couple of speeding tickets. I’ve gotten into a restaurant when I didn’t have a suit and tie on. That’s really about it.
The unspoken premise of this quote is that fame and fortune don't easily convert into each other. The believe that both go hand in hand is what most people get wrong already.
And there is also a certain asymmetry, because popularity at least can be bought to some degree but converting pure fame into lasting wealth is hard work if, depending on the circumstances, possible at all.
That belief has been illustrated in technicolor over the past decade. Plenty of "famous" people on social media have very little to show for it. I'm not talking about the Logan Pauls or PewDiePies of this world - they're clearly outliers - but the average famous person on YouTube or Instagram (tens to hundreds of thousands of followers), might have a decent to great income but they're not "rich", where rich is defined as not dependent on any source of income[1]. Many of them are in fact enslaved to the need to constantly produce new content, which is fine if you enjoy it but perhaps not so much otherwise.
[1] My preferred definition is actually the ability to do what you want, when you want, and with whom you want, which is a little broader than simply money.
> The believe that both go hand in hand is what most people get wrong already.
That's because it used to be true and was for quite a while. Fame means lots of people know who you are, which requires widely amplifying and broadcasting your identity and work. For most of modern human history, technilogical limitations made that broadcasting very expensive. You had to spend some money for each reached human. Think printing pamphlets in Dickens' era.
This meant that, generally, only the rich could afford to become famous. Fame following money and the direction was very rarely reversed aside from occasional cases of infamy like mass murderers.
Broadcast TV made that much cheaper. A single show could reach millions. But production was very expensive so even though the marginal cost per viewer was low, the barrier to entry was still very high. That meant few got in and those were mostly otherwise well connected or part of an established privileged class.
You do start to see an increasing number of "marginally famous" people here who got recognition from being guests or contestants on shows. Think "Jerry Springer" famous. These people tend to be quickly forgotten but have the misfortune of experiencing everything about fame with almost none of the money.
Then the Internet and video streaming happened. Now the barrier of entry is virtually zero — everyone has a smart phone that can shoot video. The marginal cost is zero — ads pay for distribution so the producer fronts nothing. Some money comes in, but its very little. So now there is a larger and larger group of people for whom fame came first and wealth came later or never.
I don't think our culture has caught up to that reality yet. There's still a presumption that anyone famous always has enough money to deal with the downsides but that's sadly not true. I honestly feel bad for people like mid-level YouTubers who have stalkers and death threats but are effectively making minimum wage.
Why trying to become rich? Once you have enough money to have a great quality of life without stress, having more money isn't improving much your happiness. Sometimes it makes it worse. However trying to become rich can be very difficult, tiresome, and disappointing.
> Why trying to become rich? Once you have enough money to have a great quality of life without stress
Generally speaking, to me being rich (disclaimer: I'm not) means having that kind of money today and the confidence that, no matter what happens (barring large scale events like wars or asteroids) I will still have it for the rest of my life.
To me, being rich is simply about living life through passive income sources. Most of the rich people I know live this way - they make their money through investments, especially fixed income assets like real estate.
The moment you have money there is people out there that want to take it. It has always been, there is this part on the Bible that says that when you have money, there will be robbers making holes in your walls to take it. That was thousands of years ago.
It is human nature.
For me, being really rich is that you know the way to make wealth(not money) when you need it. This knowledge is more useful than the outcome of it.
You're basically never 100% safe. In this particular case, the broker at which you bought the index fund units can scam you. It actually happened in Poland maybe 10 years ago - managers at a respectable brokerage firm were taking in orders from people but, instead of buying the requested papers, bought something else which they believed would be more profitable. They ended up being wrong and, when the clients wanted to eventually "sell" their papers (which were never bought in the first place), the company folded as it didn't have enough to pay the clients.
If memory serves, The largest single-day drop was around 25% and the biggest total was around 90%. That leaves 10% to live off of: if you have 10x what’s necessary for the rest of your life invested you can absorb those losses.
To have 10x what's necessary, you need to be able to survive on 1% returns (I'm trying to be generous there). So if you can live on $30,000, you need to have "only" $3MM invested.
You should also not be investing more than 25% of your assets into a single asset class, so you need to have $6-12MM of assets (range depending on considerations) in the first place.
I think having even $3MM is a reasonably called 'rich', but others may disagree.
I don't think the people who are non-obvious rich put their money solely in an index fund. They'll generally have about 50-500 apartment units in some big city, which (if properly insured) guarantees you can weather anything except for wars and asteroids. Maybe they put their earnings into an index fund though ...
>>"have enough money to have a great quality of life without stress" is how many people define "rich".
sure, but "great" is not easily defined. A new car or a jet? A $500K home or a $15M one to host parties with rich and famous. But people usually like to show off, one way or another.
If you hit it big with a company, and have, say, $10 Million you can live extremely stress free everywhere in the world. And very few would know, at least no one in your town or extended family. But quite a few hint at their wealth, political donations, charity (announce it publicly) etc etc. It's tempting, but once you hit the news is over.
In USA people might sue you for one thing or another, but in banana republic countries you can "taxed" by criminals: Give us $1 Million or your child is...
It's very hard to find a life partner who is willing to live merely comfortably knowing they can draw more blood from you, and had to resign your children to mere comfort, knowing they'll have to compete for ever scarcer living-wage-paying jobs.
Merly comfortably? At 10 million dollars, you can live off of 4% of that for the rest of your life. After 15% cap gains, that gives you $340,000 to spend a year. Outside of the bay area, you can easily afford a 5000 square foot house in a top school district, own multiple cars, take lavish vacations, own a second vacation home, pay for your kids college education and more.
What additional benefits are you imagining in which having more money would not "resign your children to mere comfort"?
Ever meet old money? They manage it; that's how they pass their money on through the generations. If you're a tech dude in the Bay Area though, you have my sympathies: many predators.
True. I guess "rich" because you can pay your family bills and have the hobbies you love and "rich" in "rich and famous" don't mean the same kind of wealth.
The difference in stress of needing to hold onto a job, versus of being their voluntarily, is huge. And it's not binary. If you have a few years cushion saved up, it's a huge decrease in stress. If you have a mortgage paid off and enough to retire off of, most people in the world would call that 'rich.'
Because there is an unlimited number of things you can do with it. You're limited only by time and your imagination.
I've never understood the premise I'm responding to, it doesn't make sense, unless a person has zero ambition and zero creativity - and I don't think that's true of anyone.
I could never have enough money. I could never run out of good things to use it on. Give me $100 trillion and a thousand years, please.
You could spend $100 billion and 60 years of your life on just going after Malaria and you might not manage to vanquish it. You could spend tens of millions of dollars and decades on trying to eliminate homelessness in a small city and still not eliminate it (swap out homelessness for any number of problems that need fixing in most any nation, or city). There is what might as well be an infinite number of good uses for money, at every possible scale. I'd run out of time long before I'd run out of positive uses for large amounts of money.
Yeah, the DOT has some value to baseline effectiveness of programs: if they have $30,000 they can improve some intersection or stretch of highway and save one life a year. They can always turn extra cash into lives saved, so they use that to measure the effectiveness of spending. (Preventing malaria deaths is much much cheaper, maybe the conversion rate should be lower, but let's go with 30k for now.)
If someone says they don't want $30k because they live comfortably, even though they could immediately donate it to GiveWell, it's like saying they don't value saving other lives because their life is fine.
Substitute in anything else you value. You could sponsor modern art competitions, or film preservation, or buy land for ecological preservation, or help fund policy research on key issues from think tanks...
People reflexively associate money with consumptive hedonism, so it can seem like a negative, but it can also support almost any value you have.
Money can build you and tacky gold lined apartment and buy you a loud sports car, but money can also cure the sick, feed the hungry, and house the homeless.
Sure being rich is nice, you can do more things than most people.
My point is that you will probably never be rich. The concept of rich people is to be more healthy than most people. So you should probably not have a shitty lifestyle because you want to be one of them but you aren't succedding. If you enjoy trying, good for you.
Ambition and creativity is different than wanting to be rich. A researcher usually does not care about money but would love the frontpage of Nature or a Nobel price. A musician is usually more thinking about its art and the people than the sales. A politician wants power. Lots of examples.
Saving the world and making the society better with a lot of money is good, but thankfully rich people are not the only solution.
It is a useful illusion to have while destroying it. Hey, we will fix this in 10 years with our billions. It is a huge pill we incidentally forget we swallow daily. No need to remind.
If you don't become rich, the money that you would've earned will land in somebody else's pockets and presumably they can also use it for some good (possibly even greater one).
Money is life force in a quantifiable form. We literally trade life for money. If you have a drive to accomplish something greater than you alone could accomplish in a lifetime, then you need to amass capital so you can buy other peoples time and energy.
This. When people act like money is worthless after $X, I think of Musk and Bezos pushing us towards space. I'm sure they both spend plenty of cash on useless shit that doesn't improve their lives at all, but if they only had $10 million each then nobody would landing large reusable rockets right now.
That depends on your personality and the job. Although, as I've noticed, seeking money as the number one goal tends to lead to jobs which cause more stress and a lower quality of life. For example, I could make more money at top tech company but then I'd have bureaucracy and a vacation policy (I took 6 weeks last year) to deal with.
Top tech company offers 5 weeks vacation per year and offers unpaid leave too. The hard part is extricating yourself from (fake-) important projects long enough to enjoy a vacation.
You have unemployment and more than enough time to find a new job. And let's say you don't find one, the state will still give you enough money for you to survive. Maybe you will have to reduce your lifestyle and be unhappy for some time but there is no need to seek to be rich just to prevent an unlikely future.
> You have unemployment and more than enough time to find a new job. And let's say you don't find one, the state will still give you enough money for you to survive.
Quite a few commenters on this forum live in parts of the world where that is not the case. It's certainly not the case for the majority of the world's population.
I sense an optimism of someone who yet not lived through a major recession. When the economy takes a nosedive, even janitor jobs can be hard to come by.
And welfare, even where it is available, is usually severely capped both in amount and duration. You may not die of hunger but losing your place to live is entirely realistic.
It's true, I haven't experienced a recession. I rather take the risk of having a hard time during a recession than having a hard time my whole life though.
This suggests that the cost of living adjusted salaries of today is half of what they were in 1960s if two people need to work now versus when only one needed to.
Also immigrating to a country with good social benefits does not solve the need to take care of elders and relatives , which would not benefit from the social system of the country to which you would immigrate
> This suggests that the cost of living adjusted salaries of today is half of what they were in 1960s if two people need to work now versus when only one needed to.
It's that, or people's "needs" (wants really) just got inflated over time.
I recently had a conversation with a friend regarding this and we came to the conclusion that there is a balance with wealth. For us, the more important factor was freedom, and having enough money to facilitate whatever that definition of freedom is for you.
That really depends on your personality. There's a lot of things where objective value is hard to determine, and depends purely on your subjective feelings. Two people with narcissistic and schizoid personalities could have completely different experiences with fame: one could feel inspired and happy by the recognition, while the other would get anxious and depressed.
In the end, learn who you are and what's comfortable for you, before listening to anyone else's advice.
I think I do not want fame, but it's obviously easier to navigate some circles if your name is known: you don't have to introduce yourself, nor prove other people what you are worth.
This works on many scales: from a small team at work, where it's much easier to co-ordinate if everyone knows each other's strong points. It's also great for arguments: if you know that a person is very knowledgeable on a topic, you won't ask them to substantiate their claims, which speeds up the process.
I've been toying with the idea of creating multiple identities for multiple areas I'm engaging in: use my real name for socializing in real life with close acquaintances as well as paperwork, but maybe use a pseudonym for publishing papers, another for engaging in open-source communities, and online in general. I'm happy to say it's quite hard to find pictures of myself online, but it would be even better if they didn't come attached to a meaningful name.
I'm about to submit a paper with my real name this evening, and I am a bit unsure about this. Any experience on using pen names in that domain specifically?
The issue I have is that the longer you wait, the harder it is to change (which can also be a good thing: to change names is to get a fresh start).
It all boils down to reputation and identity somehow, two hot (and hard) topics in (distributed) social networks.
There’s a big difference between being known in your field and being generally famous as Tim Ferriss is talking about.
I am well known in my field and it has all the benefits you speak of. But it’s not a large field. So I have none of the negatives that the article speaks of.
That's right, of course, and I should have made this a bit clearer: I am mostly concerned with being known under the same name in multiple independent fields. While it certainly has benefits, it:
* Lowers the Signal/Noise ratio when searching for your works in that field
* Might not always be relevant for your future employer that (forgive my bad example) you are a skilled baseball player, for them to find some drunken pictures of you, or for your date to know that you are a speaker at defcon.
I think of it as controlling the flow of information, installing firewalls between different aspects of my life. I would prefer personal matters not to intervene in my work life, and vice-versa.
By virtue of not having a common first name, if you look mine up with a few keywords related to my interests, you can quickly track me down. This is not a big deal in general, and I don't do anything that would deserve it, but you always are one scandal away from fame, especially in today's world...
Possibly. Do you mean that in the sense on the article where a producer said it’s best if: “people know your face but not your name”?
That’s definitely a distinction.
But I actually meant it in the sense that most fields and sub fields are so small that you can be legit famous within them but have no problems of fame because the number of people involved is tiny.
But if the field grew 100-1000x, you would then have problems of fame with the sheer numbers.
Think of whatever speciality you’re in, then consider you probably know what 1-5 notable people in the field look or sound like, without knowing them personally. That’s essentially what fame is: the effects only get odd when the field is so generally that much larger numbers will recognize that same person. Some portion of any sufficiently large group will be over enthusiastic or malevolent.
One person who has talked about another benefit is Dan Harmon:
(apologies as I don’t remember where or the exact quote)
In an interview he mentioned that his [particular] fame meant that he no longer had to go through the superficial conversations when meeting someone new, that everyone knew enough of his authentic self that they could just jump straight in to meaningful conversation.
I remember this because, for me, that would be the only compelling reason to become famous.
That’s only assuming that, that particular celebrity is known to pour their thoughts out to the world. That same thing couldn’t happen to Leonardo do caprio for instance
Tim's post reminds me of a video the 8-Bit Guy did a while back about how many people contact him, both to try to strike up a conversation and to offer him their old 8-bit treasures. He sounded rather annoyed by the whole thing but he is a big star in the 8-bit pond so it comes with the territory. For his area of coverage, there is lots of childhood nostalgia involved so this might make his viewer connected with the channel (and him) to a greater extent than you'd otherwise think. Likewise in Tim's area of personal development, he makes an emotional impact on a large crowd. Strength of emotional connection times crowd size is going to be the big factors here.
Wow, didn't know about his other persona. I knew he has a channel named 8bit Keys but since I'm not musically inclined, haven't watched it much. Maybe his gun channel helps keep the types of fans Tim complains about away.
Wonder how effective is that though! I've been watching his 8-bit side for years. Had no idea until I started with competition shooting and YT recommendation engine decided it's my cup of tea.
The last time I wrote a mild critique about Tim Ferriss online, someone scoured the internet to reverse engineer my personal identity and sent an e-mail to my personal e-mail account to debate with me. (I have since switched to anonymous handles). I can only imagine what it's like for Tim Ferriss himself.
If you're not familiar with Tim Ferriss, there are several reasons why he's more attractive to dangerous followers than the average influencer:
- He was among the first to crack the "influencer" code, gaining fame and popularity through book publishing and early social media websites (pre-Instagram). Back then, there weren't nearly as many influencers to know about, let alone follow.
- He rose to fame via punchy self-help books like "The Four Hour Workweek" and "The Four Hour Body". He talks about having chosen those topics to give solutions to the average problems faced by modern people. He makes calculated moves to target the widest range of people who are looking for answers to life's basic challenges.
- He has moved toward more respectable topics over time, but his early work tended toward fantastical claims and unrealistic promises. It was more fantasy than practical, but always grounded in an inspiring shroud of "What if he's right?" This leaves the hopeful readers hooked while filtering out the rational skeptics. I joke that he applied the Nigerian prince scam filtering mechanism to self-help books.
- In the past, he dabbled in pure clickbait that wasn't grounded in reality. For example, consider his famous blog post about gaining 34 lbs of muscle in 28 days with only 4 hours of total gym time using secret techniques of the "little-known Colorado Experiment": https://tim.blog/2007/04/29/from-geek-to-freak-how-i-gained-... If you're at all familiar with weightlifting or exercise science you'll understand how impossible this is, yet it circulated for years on message boards from beginners who were convinced that Tim Ferriss was a guru who could help them achieve the impossible.
- One of Tim's books has a section about contacting famous people who you wouldn't normally expect to respond to you. He encourages readers to contact famous people as an example of achieving what you previously thought was impossible. This is intertwined with his stories about life hacking or using clever tricks to achieve impossible goals. It's not surprising that his fans have chosen to apply those techniques to Tim Ferriss himself, by following his social media and calling around at hotels to find him. He all but encouraged this behavior in his first book.
- Recently, Tim has been pushing Psychedelic medicine as a miracle cure for depression, anxiety, and PTSD. He has made some very respectable and noble efforts to raise money for proper scientific research. He also gives pseudo-warnings on his podcasts to not attempt DIY psychedelic treatment for psychiatric issues, but his disclaimers have a very "wink, wink" after we've received fantastical advice about getting rich, traveling the world, getting fit, and so on from Tim over the years. I have no doubt that many of his fans have begun experimenting with psychedelics to treat their severe depression and anxiety without the help of psychiatrists, which is not a recipe for healthy outcomes.
In other words, Tim Ferriss almost defines the modern "Guru" archetype. Fame and publicity always come with a risk of stalkers and negative attention, but I believe Tim's position as a self-help guru and psychedelic medicine pusher has amplified uniquely amplified his reach among the most vulnerable individuals. I feel truly sorry for him, of course, but it's helpful to understand the larger context of how he arrived in this position if you're wondering how this could apply to other internet-famous people.
Ferriss also frequently gives instructions on how to send cold emails or make cold calls to influential people for personal advantage. He’s strongly selecting for and maybe even actively creating the kind of person who will be predisposed to harass him.
I remember that chapter of Four Hour Work Week. I just found it again:
"Find Yoda: Call at least one potential superstar mentor per day for three days. E-mail only after attempting a phone call. I recommend calling before 8:30am or after 6pm to reduce run-ins with secretaries and other gatekeepers. Shoot for A players - CEOs, ultrasuccessful entrepreneurs, famous authors etc. Don't aim low to make it less frightening. Use [specific website for finding contact details of celebrities omitted here] if need be. Base your script on the following..."
The thing is, as annoying as that sounds, that chapter was actually really useful to me as an extremely shy guy who was too intimidated to even contact the 'CEO' of a shareware company. I never phoned & only emailed once, but having a template script for how to succinctly ask a question of a busy person I felt intimidated by was very helpful to me then.
All solid points, but I think the larger truth remains that you can’t get to an audience of 1 to 10,000,000 people without attracting crazy people in that audience.
I moderate a discussion board with about 50,000 members and we see a decent chunk of this unhinged behavior. Maybe 10 to 20 people per year? If you have an audience of 10 million multiply that by 200.
You would expect the audience of this forum to be dull and well adjusted.
> It's not surprising that his fans have chosen to apply those techniques to Tim Ferriss himself, by following his social media and calling around at hotels to find him. He all but encouraged this behavior in his first book.
This is a funny in an ironic sort of way.
It's like teaching thieves only for them to rob you.
Thank you for that, I really didn't know who this guy Tim was and why he said he was famous, your comment has cleared a lot of unknowns for me related to this submission.
The irony of this blog entry is that Tim Ferris is a relentless self-promoter who continues that practice for the entire first half of this essay before finally getting to the drawbacks of being a successful self-promoter. I appreciate the thought, but I question the motives of the author.
He is really good at it and does good with it, so I don't fault him. Not my cup of tea though. I tried to listen to his podcast, but for the first 8 minutes he talked about himself and his accomplishments. That's a bit much self-regard for me.
I thought the same thing. That escalated really quickly, and it's certainly given me pause about having any online presence (despite not being at all famous). Bookmarked to reread later.
Counterpoint: You want to help people, educate people, lift people up — and your only talent best suited for this is your writing skills, your speaking skills, your musical abilities or your acting skills.
Fame is how you reach a larger audience.
My high school teacher may have inspired a number of his students to love and pursue astronomy, but Carl Sagan inspired orders of magnitudes more.
Counter-counterpoint: If you are not too picky about the type of good you want to do, money can buy you an astonishing amount of it. See the effective altruism movement, e.g. https://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/impact-calculator/ . For a thousand dollars you can provide 781 person-years of save drinking water or purchase 500 bednets to protect against malaria.
Unless you are over-proportionally suited or talented at being famous, you can basically always do more good by earning and donating as much money as you can.
(Note, though, that it requires more reflection and conceptualization to feel as good by giving remotely than by giving to people locally or in your community.)
I think an argument can be made that, if an artist doesn't create their art because they figure they can earn more money as an investment banker and donate money to causes they care about instead, the world is actually worse off as a result.
I never wanted to be famous. Now I feel confirmed. Jesus. There’s liberty in being a nobody.
> Suffice to say, I didn’t realize that this type of thing was part of the Faustian fame-seeking bargain.
Again, reading classics holds more weight than 90% of current self help and motivational books. Goethe was on point.
After having mastered all the sciences and still unfulfilled, Faust seeks Mephisto to know “was die Welt in ihrem Innersten zusammen hält” (What binds the essence of the world). And enters a pact with the Devil. Of course it all goes to shit.
It's fun to summarize Faust II for those who haven't read it. Faust I is so commonly read in school here, and so earnest and serious that the time-traveling madness of the second part comes at a surprise.
An unfortunate consequence of fame is that celebrities are sometimes forced to take counter surveillance matters into their own hands.
As it’s difficult for a celebrity to accept new people into their inner circle without knowing their motives, pre-emptive measures can be used to vet outsiders. The unfortunate consequence of this is the application of questionable methods by shady security forces. Celebrities don’t have their own Secret Service detail so they end up relying upon their peers to perform investigations of outsiders entering their fold. This can be disastrous all around, particularly when there exists political and cultural disparities amongst involved parties. Speaking from experience.
This reminds me of Ana Delvey, the fake NYC socialite scammer of a few years ago. I originally thought it was funny that she had ripped all these ultra-wealthy people off, but the sad fact was that she scammed a lot of people who were wealthy enough to have a high limit on their credit cards (~50k), but not wealthy enough to have this kind of social sophisticated social infrastructure in place. She got by into the circles my making various friends that all suggested influence separately (investment banker, editor at Vogue, etc), and together gave her the appearance of legitimacy to all the other friends.
Yep, I thought so. It very much reinforces the gut feeling I've always had - to avoid fame (not that I am in any danger of being famous myself :) ).
On that note, that is what has always bugged me about the traitor guy in The Matrix movie, when he negotiated with the agents, and wanted to be reinserted into matrix as someone famous. But I guess wanting to be famous said something about his character. :)
Law suits. The big one missing is law suits. That's a higher level of fame than this blogger has hit. That includes:
1) Nuts and idiots. For example, people who genuinely believe what you're doing is out to get them.
2) Jackals and vultures. People want what you've built, and see the legal system as a good way of extorting you to get it.
I hit this level of fame, and quickly backed down from anything which might give me more visibility.
I also stopped believing random accusations of famous people until there's proof or unless the accusers are really close. If someone is CEO of a 20,000 person company, and their closest associates accuse them of sexual harassment, exploitation, fraud, or otherwise? That's a plausible accusation. If someone runs a 20,000 person company, and 20 seemingly random people do? Well, that's almost guaranteed by statistics.
My understanding is even without fame, if you get anywhere interesting in the business world you'll need to get comfortable with litigation. Every wealthy person is entangled in it, even people you've never heard of that "only" have 50 million.
It is certainly not true that every wealthy person is entangled in litigation. Your typical not-famous, post-exit startup founder just doesn’t have any reason to get sued by anybody.
Sure, but if you rent out anything, you're going to be in court sooner or later. There's usually some wealth component to having something to rent out, but you don't need Internet Millions to do it.
This. Any company with any kind of marketing footprint is going to be the target of numerous lawsuits, from disgruntled employees, investors, shareholders, customers Etc.
The people who do best with Fame are like Bill Clinton, who ignored impeachment and went on to be a popular ex-president. You have to be able to compartmentalize. If you're the sort of person who takes things personally, let's things get under your skin, well, I think the public life is simply not for you.
One of the mitigating strategies here is to have a liability waiver that people sign to enter your office or home. Mine also has an NDA with a nondisparagement provision.
Personally, the only time i've had to sign a waiver is right before i've been doing something dangerous or life threatening. If a date made me sign a waiver before entering their home I'd be wondering what kind of fucked up things they've got planned and probably turn around and leave right there.
I have yet to encounter anyone who had any issue with it. Personally, I work at home and wouldn’t want anyone in the building who potentially had access to my office (it’s locked, but still) to not be under NDA at the very least. Opportunistic lawsuits make the liability waiver part important.
Hurt feelings when dating necessitates the non-disparagement clause. Several times I’ve had people I’ve politely rejected say all manner of false things about me, sometimes years after the fact.
I make it clear to anyone who participates in my life in any meaningful social capacity that they do so only on the condition of privacy and discretion. Those are the terms made plain up front. No one is required to participate.
Really though it comes down to physical safety. If someone doxes me, I incur approximately $40k in instantaneous expenses because I suddenly have to move, injunctions on posting or no, thanks to the internet. Having a document in place to be able to (somewhat) protect against or recover from that is a little bit of peace of mind.
No, you have yet to come across anyone who cared enough to be confrontational and refuse.
I guarantee you, 100% of people who have had to sign an NDA to enter your home, especially for social visits have a big problem with it and are totally weirded out by it.
Because it is weird and would come across as narcissistic and conceited to most everyone.
All I have to say that I feel sorry for you and quality of life you apparently live in 2020. Oh, and by being so paranoid, you're sending signals that you have something to protect in your home/office.
As for "dating," you can't police what they say. If you try to get smart with NDAs then it will be even worst since words spreads. But to each its own
>Hurt feelings when dating necessitates the non-disparagement clause. Several times I’ve had people I’ve politely rejected say all manner of false things about me, sometimes years after the fact.
Yeah it's true, you really can't control what people say about you other than through your own actions, even then people will say what they will, that's life.
>I make it clear to anyone who participates in my life in any meaningful social capacity that they do so only on the condition of privacy and discretion. Those are the terms made plain up front. No one is required to participate.
I can understand wanting privacy and discretion, but just the way you word this I find it...I'm not even sure, creepy as another commenter said, but more you've got this level of arrogance where you believe your life and the details around it are so important and special and every person that meets you and participates in 'your life' is a potential threat.
A friend or a social acquaintance isn't just someone that 'participates in your life', you are part of their life too.
I mean for me, if there's someone I know that just can't stop talking about everybody's personal stuff to everyone, I just don't share things with them I wouldn't want everyone knowing about.
>Really though it comes down to physical safety. If someone doxes me, I incur approximately $40k in instantaneous expenses because I suddenly have to move, injunctions on posting or no, thanks to the internet. Having a document in place to be able to (somewhat) protect against or recover from that is a little bit of peace of mind.
Really though, if someone's taking the time to stalk you and dox you, they're not going to give the slightest care about an NDA, will speak anyway and whatever litigation you try won't make much of a difference after the fact any way.
But in the end, the internet is fickle and ephemeral and has the memory of a goldfish and as soon as something more scandalous or interesting comes a long nobody will give a shit who you are again.
For what it's worth, rich people do not do this. It sounds like one of those nonsense things a person would do if they want people to think they're rich when they're not.
They do, however, have a good umbrella insurance policy to cover extra liability. If you have even a modest net worth you should also do this.
I’m not even accredited. I just don’t want to deal with the time
and hassle of a legal mess to defend what few assets I do have, or my reputation. I’ve had some specific bad experiences that the setup in its current design should hopefully mitigate; it’s not a theoretical thing. It bothers me that there isn’t a better way to do this.
As for “randos”; do you only date people you already know well? I know relatively few people well socially (ie less than dozen), and almost none in the cities in which I spend most of my time. I’m pretty reclusive despite having gotten to the point where death threats are a thing.
This sounds overkill, but mandatory arbitration clauses in business agreements is a good idea. In particular with partners, you don't want to have a nasty public fight over your company.
Can also include winner gets fees clause to discourage baseless claims.
This is tangential to the article, but James being “a frequent commenter on his blog and a huge help to other readers” was my first sign that he was not mentally well. Immediately knew things would not go well for him in this story.
People often say this as a joke, but I think it’s 100% accurate: Internet comment sections have a strong self-selection bias for the mentally unwell.
I’ll include Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, HN to some extent, etc.
Not exact numbers, but the math goes something like 100% of comments are written by 10% of readers. Of those that do bother to comment, the less utilized and less psychology stable and healthy they are, the greater their commenting volume is.
Healthy happy people simply do not spend much of their time that way.
(I’m including myself in that btw.)
The world treats these comment sections as if they represent a perfect cross-section of the general population, and the result is all the insane cultural rambling and nonsense you hear and read about in media and blogs, all the way up to Fox News and NYT. They think these insane ramblings are what represent the people and what the people want.
Then the population adjusts to some extent to match those insane ramblings, because they think that’s how other people must feel.
It’s a global feedback loop of political and cultural madness and hysteria.
I think there is a grain of truth to that, but it depends heavily on what you read. If you read a lot about politics and pop culture, probably. Likewise, as other people have said, the "personal development" audience likely has a lot of unstable people.
It's more accurate to say "outliers" than "insane", and some outliers are good!
i think you are completely right about this. for one thing, mania/hypomania can lead people to compulsively post, in the same way that it can make people hyper-talkative IRL. sometimes people taking stimulant drugs or having adverse reactions to other medications can end up in a similar state. to me this explains a lot of the strange behavior on the internet, in aggregate, although i make an effort not to diagnose individual people on the basis of some internet comments.
> Healthy happy people simply do not spend much of their time that way.
But what if making comments makes you happy?
While I don't disagree with the premises of what you are saying I think you are not considering that for some people saying something makes them feel good and they are perfectly mentally sane.
I could also say that 'healthy happy people do not spend their time socializing with others at parties' but we know people do that because 'it makes them happy'.
For what it's worth "mentally sane" and "healthy happy people" can be a little boring in real life, that's why lots of people like myself have decided to spend time arguing with people from the other side of the world on websites like this one or on reddit just because the subjects being argued about are interesting and there's no way you could find a person in your real life that could be interested in said subjects.
Very true. Also words vs. conversation tends to be very efficient although often lacking cues that come with voice or visually. No wasted time and much less boredom from feeling trapped.
"Healthy, happy" in this context, happy is not a momentary emotion as a response to external stimulus. This is happy in the sense of generally content and well-adjusted. One doesn't get made that way by something else, one makes oneself that way by adjusting the way they view the world. A better word would be equanimity. You can be "happy" in that sense even while going through distressing events.
That's an interesting theory, would you mind explaining why you think that's the case?
I wouldn't be surprised if there is at least a correlation - e.g. maybe those who spend a lot of time commenting online do so because they are trying to compensate for a lack of meaningful offline interactions, relationships, etc.
That said, is it so hard to imagine that someone might have both? i.e. even if there's a correlation, it seems like a bit of a stretch to suggest that a prolific internet commenter is necessarily mentally unwell. It seems very plausible to me that someone might both have a robust real life social life while simultaneously engaging in online interactions as well, no?
I'd also posit that this might depend on the forum - e.g. someone actively engaging in learning or sharing their expertise on e.g. nutrition or car repair forum may be a bit different than the median commenter on news articles linked from The Drudge Report.
Hypothesis: On twitter, when your follower count exceeds the number you're following, you become a little nutty.
I've noticed this odd trend where if people gain a lot of twitter followers, then often their views become reinforced to the point that outsiders look at their tweets and wonder what happened to make them express such ideas.
But there's bias here: for tweets like these to be noticed, they need to be seen. Only those with followers are in that position. It makes sense that wacky tweets we notice tend to come from people with lots of followers. So I'm not sure if it's true, or if there are just a lot of odd people on twitter.
My own experiences indicate that the sweet spot is around 1k followers. More than that, you attract a lot of noise. Less than that, and it's hard to get noticed. But perhaps this is just personal taste.
The reason I mentioned this is that I'm in the fortunate position of having attracted a lot of followers recently (for whatever reason), but I'm concerned that things will turn sour. I like twitter right now. There are cool people on there, and I've met friends through the platform. But will it still feel like that at 5k followers? 10k? 50k? I feel like I should stop whatever is accelerating the follower count before it reaches an inflection point. So the article resonated with me.
If you're ever jealous of people with lots of followers (or fame in general, for that matter), just tune in to https://twitter.com/paulg and see the way people respond to pretty much anything he says. What's the point of being famous if you can't express an idea without being beset by thoughtless people?
Alternately, everyone has dumb thoughts from time to time, and the bigger and more tempting your megaphone, the more you risk shouting it out before having the chance to wake up 3 days later thinking "wow, that's completely insane."
This is also one of the reasons I abhor twitter. Everything is RIGHT NOW. Really, nobody should send a message to 1000+ people without sleeping on it or getting a second opinion.
Most people are also easily flattered and everybody is naturally opinionated. It's hard to keep your ego in check.
For example, you see respectable scientists and artists write a popular book, then the next one (because their publisher nags them), then a third one that is borderline unprofessional (no time, publisher send ghostwriter), and so on. Maybe some of them realize that a best seller can yield a lot of money and in no time time they appear in talk shows talking about topics they couldn't possibly know anything about (alien invasions, politics, the future of mankind). Finally, they appear to be nuts and everybody is angry about how "fake" they are and speculates about their mental problems.
If I would get book proposals and interview requests every day, I'd probably end up the same way.
Tucker Carlson once said it was hard to see his flaws after success because “everything about the experience reinforces what you’re doing.”[1]
Fame can be a funny teacher in that respect. The feedback you’d normally get after making a mistake can be smothered by all the praise and money that still pours in, irrespective of the decisions you make (at least in the short-term).
After a while, you can end up being this cartoonish version of yourself, trained by the preferences of other people and what they like and don’t like about you.
I think it’s how celebrities end up in situations where they’re blindly unaware of things that seem obvious to most people or act out in strange ways (like Bill Cosby making a distasteful Fat Albert joke before he goes to court, Kevin Spacey making videos in the persona of Francis Underwood, Britney Spears shaving off her hair, Dave Chapelle’s self-induced “exile”, OJ Simpson posting Twitter videos, and of course Kanye West’s song “I Love Kanye” where he sardonically talks about all the different things people want from him).
Yeah I tend to associate having even followers/following being people that are trying to build up their account by following loads of people hoping to get followed back.
I don't think I've gotten nuttier, but I have gotten more circumspect. I'm cognizant that my broader audience size means I can assume any person will have context for my tweets. It's really hard to make good jokes without a shared understanding so my humor tends to be more watered down.
I do miss the time when my twitter feed felt more like a hangout with a group of like-minded game dev and programming language nerd friends. It's still that, but it's sort of that + some nebulous cloud of strangers, which effects the feel.
At the same time, I am grateful that having a higher Twitter profile helps draw more attention to my writing. I've sold more books because of it and that materially helps me and my family, so I certainly can't complain.
It's not worse, just different. It feels very much like the difference in how you conduct yourself at a party with friends, versus on stage at a work conference. I'm still me and I still try to be interesting and funny. But I'm a more carefully cultivated, safe subset of me in the latter venue.
There is a threshold where your Twitter account flips from being a medium you communicate among a group to it’s just a microblogging platform. It’s amazing how much noise anyone with even a moderate number of followers will get as responses. It’s even more amazing how people can still continue to post good stuff after that.
I'm following ~375 and have ~800 followers, so by your theory I'm becoming a little nutty. Hopefully that hasn't happened yet, but I have definitely noticed thinking about tweets a lot harder recently before sending them - "would I be embarrassed to say this in front of my mom?" basically.
Does anyone else feel like he really misinterpreted the parable of the blind men and the elephant?
Jim Carrey’s quote also seems out of context, given that Carrey is talking about the philosophical nature of fame as a goal. How striving for it could become a part of your identity and then actually achieving it and finding your problems still exist would lead to a loss of identity, disillusionment and other existential stuff. Ferriss is dealing more with the practical realities of being famous on a day to day basis.
If you want to “try before you buy” the famous lifestyle perhaps try to get comfortable at night clubs and festivals. Once you kind of learn how that dynamic works and you can get the most attractive people there to pay attention/dance/party with you, you will see a lot of the positives and negatives that come with the territory.
Beautiful, heartless women. Jealousy. Needless power positioning. Regretful spending. But also fun and memorable experiences. YMMV
This seems mostly unrelated to the meat of the article. I'm not sure that your suggestion results in a productive sample of anything other than spending time in nightclubs.
I think it highly depends on the kind of fame. If you connect emotionally with your audience, then sure. But if, say, you are a famous researcher then I suspect you are facing far less of these problems.
I think his tribe-village-city analogy plays a big part in that, though.
A famous researcher probably wouldn't have as large an audience, and that audience would most likely consist of other researchers in similar or adjacent fields of research
Nope. More famous researchers face the same problems. It doesn't kick until it's popular fame, as far as I know. In other words, if most computer scientists know who you are, you might still be okay unless you get unlucky (but you might definitely get unlucky too). If Joe on the street knows who you are, you've got all this and more.
Yeah, it's very dependent on the kind of fame, as well as the field you're in. A major kpop star/Japanese idol is probably going to have all the problems in the blog article, perhaps magnified by ten. Their fanbase tend to be... a tad less on the sane side, and there are a fair few of them who are absolutely obssessed with their idols and will resort to stalking and harassment.
But at the same time, there are plenty of fields and claims to fame that won't get this. Researchers will get less of it. Someone who doesn't show their face online will seemingly have less of these issues (though people might get obssessed with finding out who they are, ala Satoshi Nakamoto and Banksy). And those focused on more technical/specialist fields may have less issues. Your average popular YouTube glitch hunter or speedrunner will have less problems than a popular YouTube political pundit.
It's not about you emotionally connecting with your audience, but the other way around. And that is something that is out of your control, as this article clearly illustrates. Lots of crazies out there.
I'd rather not be rich or famous. If I happened to become either I'd try and leverage them in some way to help or form organisations that can navigate the hot mess of our societies next few decades.
Becoming famous requires a lot of good luck and not just hard work. You have to be the right person at the right time kind of thing. I feel extreme good luck invites bad luck because of the negative energy surrounding the famous person. This has very interesting side affects on how famous people look at risk and make their decisions. But thinking of famous personalities like Gandhi, MLK, Kobe, MJ, Bruce Lee, I wonder what would have happened if they were not famous. Would their destinies be any different?
This was a surprisingly good article and I had not even really (odd actually) heard of Tim until literally the other day. Maybe I came across his name somewhere in the past but thought "he's a self help type author no interest". That said the thing that surprised me is the fact that he is doing the least likely things to make himself less of a target. You go to the blog there's a big picture of him on display and not exactly understated. So sure he could write his books and provide information and make it less likely that people would get mental over what he has and his success (because they would be less likely to focus on him and be jealous). After all something sparks the person who stalks him and I don't think a large part of that is words. Yes writers and others (w/o pictures) get stalked but for whatever reason my guess is it's much less.
Let's look at it this way. Not saying it would be possible to be famous w/o displaying yourself personally in a prominent way but what if he provided his helpful info and never had a picture of himself and/or used a pseudonym for his name?
Can anyone comment on his statement that having mail delivered to your house puts you on searchable commercial lists?
I’m wondering if it’s actually physical mail that’s at issue, or rather having your home address as say a billing address on a site you buy something from.
This one seemed fairly tough to avoid 100%, so I want to know more about the plausibility.
I worked for a company that bought mailing lists and linked them to public records. We didn’t sell to marketers but it did open my eyes that anyone who isn’t prohibited will sell info.
Some industries (utilities, banking) are prohibited from selling customer info. But most aren’t. If you ever subscribe to a magazine, donate to a charity, enter a sweepstakes, etc your info goes into commercial lists.
Cynically, that’s how I operate. A friend donated to Southern Poverty Law Center and never ordered anything. They entered their address on the credit card form and now gets mail from dozens of orgs including about a piece per week from SPLC.
Even billing addresses can be the off-site mail delivery services. Banks do need to know your physical address in the US due to the Patriot Act, but they don't have to put it in your statement or treat it as your billing address.
At least in Germany, the mail carrier (Deutsche Post) offers data cleanup & enrichment for address data, i.e. you tell them "I have John Doe, 123 SomeWrongStreet, ZIP" and they'll say 'He lives on 123 SomeStreet". Iirc, they collect this data (among other sources) from mail that was delivered to that address, since they OCR the recipient address for sorting etc anyhow. I wouldn't be surprised if they also (had; it's probably illegal with GDPR) sold access in general.
I think the only way to be rich and anonymous is wealth building through stocks, real estate, etc. No one outside of your broker, yourself, and the government knows about that in the case of stocks, and you can buy real estate through an LLC if you want to be extra anonymous.
More opportunities for wealth, women, power. More social interaction. Ego stroking. Getting a message out there. There’s a lot of great reasons if you’re the type of person who enjoys these things and can handle the pressure.
Funny I'm just a sometime blogger and I used to get weirdos finding my house and sending me handwritten letters. At one point I was tied up with one of Steven Spielberg's schizophrenic stalkers because of some dipshit I argued with on Usenet to pass time in grad school. Now I got my face on a fairly well known startup, which means various 3rd world places I enjoy are non-starters without having actual security precautions in place (which defeats the purpose of going to such places in the first place: freedom).
Being even slightly famous is shit. I quite enjoy writing and would take it to the next level, but I'd rather not be any more famous. The culture of narcissism which encourages people to seek fame is ridiculous: it's all the downsides of being surveilled except its eyes the size of your audience instead of a couple of creepy (but probably mostly law abiding) policeman at a terminal.
I've always been curious about traveling while famous. You generally have to show a passport at airports, hotels, etc.. So I always wondered how famous people moved around with any kind of annonimity.
Surely a fake passport is far too risky for legal reasons? Yet it would solve a lot of their problems when combined with sunglasses and a cap...
I guess what I'm asking is, what would be the "riskiest" country that you would actually entertain the possibility of visiting without serious precautions?
Fancy hotels have decent security and will meet you at the airport (I mean some of the people we're talking about have private jets and own hotels -though they have security teams to take care of matters). They're probably also used to "Harrison Ford" tier famous people showing up. California allows for pseudonyms on government documents and credit cards, basically because of Hollywood.
Have a personal assistance book hotel under their name and check in for you?
Airport is more difficult, but I assume the information is harder to get at (at least in developed nations). Otherwise, don’t fly commercial airlines? Charter a jet?
I honestly thought this is bad writing. It jumps from one idea to the next without bringing any of them to the conclusion. One quote too many, maybe? And too many paragraphs that are meant to catch and arounse the reader's interest?
I guess this is the style of writing needed to catch the attention of millions of followers. Am I mistaken?
I've stopped reading this after 5 minutes. I've reallly tried, though.
Edit: Downvotes expected for an honest opinion. That's fine :)
The article is merely the author bloviating about himself for attention (which appears to be his main goal in life). Unless everyone else here is also "famous" and giving each other tips on how to deal with it, there is no useful discussion to be had other than informing everyone their attention is being grifted
Neither can I, at my level. I don't think anyone can. (Of course, there are those with a lot more than me. Maybe they can... but I doubt it. So far as I know, the only real level in karma is at 500, when you can downvote comments.)
1. The attention and adulation is your drug. I think there's no shortage of people who fall into this category.
2. To convert that fame into opportunities you wouldn't otherwise have; and
3. To convert that fame into money.
Obviously if you're just plain rich then (3) is moot. If you fall into (1) then money can buy you fame to a degree.
So that leaves (2). Wealth will give you many opportunities fame will but certainly not all. Or at least the costs to replicate that are truly ludicrous, like being a star in a Marvel movie, spending a year on the ISS, going to the Moon, that sort of thing.
The way I see it the downsides of fame are significant. I've heard tales from people who worked in media years ago that the very stars who now want the media to leave them alone and to respect their privacy would beg them for stories and coverage just a few years earlier.
I don't think I'd want to be ultra-wealthy (as in a billionaire+). At that point you're almost removed from society. I imagine you end up moving in circles with other ultra-wealthy people that are actually quite small. You risk being a target of the desperate, the criminally minded (fraud, kidnapping, blackmail, that sort of thing) and the mentally unstable.
And really what is the practical difference between having $20m and $2b? Sure you'll have nicer houses and more of them. You may well have a super-yacht at that point. But who cares? I know I don't.
You could say "you would if you had $2b" and maybe that's true. I'm sure I'd buy a nicer place but I think I'd still want to keep a relatively low profile.