Max (all)
Double down on “stress”
(a) wealth is the result of the amount of capital you can bear responsibility for.
(b) you gain responsibility because people give it to you.
(c) people give responsibility to you because they think you can do something with it they can’t do as well themselves.
(d) The more you are responsible for the more risks you have to mitigate from other people who are as equally competitive because they are equally responsible, and equally trusted.
(e) The more risks from the more people you have to mitigate in competition with people who are equlally responsible, competitive, and mitigating,
(f) the trade off is that the quality of opportunities for you to gain responsibility for, mitigate, and profit from, increases, so that you have inverted the supply demand curve facing all people who want to gain wealth. And the quality of people you deal with are more responsible themselves, more capable themselves, and mitigate more effectively themselves.
(g) And eventually you run into the problem of seeking returns that are no longer from holes in the market unserved by people with more wealth than you have, but competing for commodity opportunities that require vast wealth even to participate in, and which are subject to political risk.
(h) meanwhile all wealth is subject to entropy (depreciation).
(i) So every step in that process increases stress.
I don’t think it’s possible for the average person to comprehend how hard people work who have a great deal of money, nor the condition of stress they are under the entire time. Nor how prescious any time away from that stress is. Nor how impossible it is to escape it at all. You must treat every person you interact with as wanting something from you. You can only really trust a few close people. And a yacht for example is a reprieve, and worth every cent – simply because people can’t get to you. 😉
I know myself, running companes across north america and europe, and with customers worldwide, that I can outwork most people. But there are people who can outwork me, and people for whom outworking me is simply much easier, and less stressful. You must process information and make decisions and judge people constantly.
In other words, just as there are sports athletes there are social athletes, work athletes, and intellectual athletes. And most of us understand that atletics of each kind combines some kind of strength with one thing: endurance that is unberable and unimaginable by the majority.
Cheers
Reply addressees: @themaxstoic