[quote=davelj][quote=flu]You know. People like to focus on on the success stories. But reality is we never hear about the countless failures. Because, well they failed.[/quote]

This is what all of these real estate investment program scams are built on. They cherry pick the winners as examples of what everyone should be doing when, in fact, these are the handful of successful folks following their program. The “countless failures” remain conveniently outside of the camera’s view.

Likewise, it’s why everyone should be very suspicious of books by successful people who basically say, “This is how I did it – You can too!” They’ve bought into their own success story, after all. Most would be better off reading a book called, “The 100 Ways I Failed” and learning from that before accelerating off into the sunset looking for “success”.[/quote]

A buddy of mine used to work at Montgomery Street Securities in SF, advising newly minted Silicon Valley millionaires on how best to protect their money (nearly all of them were entrepeneurs who had just hit the big time via sellout).

One of his clients had just sold his company for over $50MM, after having gone through a dozen failures previously. He had literally gone through 12 iterations and cratered each one. My buddy asked him how he knew that the 13th one was gonna work. The guy looked at him and burst out laughing. “I didn’t”, was his response. Meaning, he was going to keep on going until he hit it.

Yeah, luck counts for a lot. But so does persistence.

We live in a very entitled and very lazy society now. Antediluvian values like persistence, sacrifice, hard work, are considered laughable. As are the “immigrant” values of frugality, living within one’s means and doing what it takes to get it done (whatever “it” may be). Why bust your ass when it’s far easier to sit on it and have the gubment hand you a check?

It all comes down to incentives, regardless the discussion. Are they correct or perverse?