Comfort takes away the need

Living frugally when you don’t have to is a good way to have everything you need and it’s also a fairly reliable way of never getting rich.

That isn’t a criticism and for most people it isn’t a problem because having everything you need is the thing money is for and a Lamborghini is not obviously an improvement on it. It’s worth saying out loud anyway because the two goals get talked about as though one leads to the other and they mostly don’t.

Nearly every genuinely rich person I’ve met and by rich I mean assets over roughly a hundred million that weren’t inherited, has had two things in common.

The first is focus and it’s the one that sounds admirable. They can take an idea and see it all the way through which sounds like a small thing and is enormously rare. They believe in themselves, they believe in the specific idea and then they execute on it for years without the belief degrading. Anyone deliberately living below their means to work on something is displaying exactly that and it’s the harder of the two to acquire.

The second is need and it’s the one nobody puts in the interview. Actually needing the money whether to start at all or to fund a lavish life, or to keep up with a group of people whose approval matters to them, turns out to be a powerful driving force. Not a noble one. Powerful, and considerably more reliable than the noble version.

Those two interact in a way that catches people out. If you arrange your life so the need goes away, you’ve removed one of the two engines and most people cannot execute on an idea for a decade on focus alone. Grow your assets slowly until you’re comfortable and the odds are you never level up again because the thing that would have pushed you through the bad eighteen months in the middle isn’t there any more. You don’t need to. The comfortable version of you keeps making the reasonable decision.

So the advice, for anyone whose actual goal is to get rich rather than to be fine, is uncomfortable. Growing steadily and then working on an idea from a position of security is not how it usually happens. It’s much more common to see somebody young who needs it to work driving an idea all the way to an exit, precisely because there was no acceptable version of stopping.

None of that is universal and it isn’t a rule. Plenty of people come to an idea later, with a house and assets behind them, and execute brilliantly. It’s just noticeably less common and the explanation isn’t that older founders have worse ideas.

Which leaves a choice that mostly gets made by accident. Almost nobody sits down and decides between being comfortable and being rich. They optimise for security year by year because each individual decision is obviously correct, and then wonder later why the ambition drained out of it. The decisions were right. They just added up to a different life than the one being imagined alongside them.

The useful version of this isn’t a strategy for getting rich because most people reading it don’t want that and shouldn’t pretend otherwise. It’s that ambition of any kind runs on some sort of pressure, and comfort dissolves pressure indiscriminately without asking which of it you were using.

If there’s something you intend to do eventually, it’s worth noticing what currently makes it feel urgent, and whether you’re quietly in the process of removing that.