Getting rich is simple

That's not to say it's easy

My friend Dylan went viral for his excellent article on how “getting jacked is simple.” I can personally attest that whatever he did worked, because when I met him he was not jacked at all, and now he is very jacked. “Oh I’m Dylan, I’m a jacked dude and everyone loves my writing and father_karine recommends my work” fuck you, man.

Anyway, since what most young men really want is to be jacked and rich, I thought I’d write something for people interested in the second half of male aspiration. This is targeted at young men aged 17 to 27 or so, or anyone else who wants to prioritize wealth, but I think the best time to do it is in that young, zero-responsibility period of life. Much like in fitness, the zone is already flooded with advice from alpha male influencers on how to get rich. The most famous ones will sell you classes on getting both jacked and rich. Most “how to get rich” advice is even worse than lifting advice, because at least in fitness the core concept of “lift weights to get stronger” is universal and correct, even if the specific exercises recommended are bullshit. By contrast, the deluge of guidance on moneymaking is all over the shop, probably because the people doling it out have made money shilling on the Internet: you should be a dropshipper, no an influencer, you have to build a brand, drop out of college, no you need an Ivy League degree, found a business, work really hard for someone else on an oil rig, move to Thailand and stop paying taxes, it’s all about passive income so sell covered calls in your free time, you need to own crypto, and real estate, and stocks even though you have no money to begin with.

In fairness, there are many ways you could get rich—you could win the lottery, or be an early investor in the next Google, or buy a Manhattan brownstone in 1995. None of these methods provide a particularly good risk adjusted return. You could also make money slowly, over time, grinding away at a salaried position and investing prudently for 30 years—but then by the time you are “rich”, you will be old and retired. No, contrary to much of the finfluencer advice, the best way to “get rich” is earning money.

0. Find a role model

First of all, you need to be clear about how much money you want to earn. If you want to be a billionaire by the time you’re 30, that’s much harder than making $5m by age 30, even though I’d count both as “rich.” My aspiration (detailed here) was to make mere millions of dollars at a young age, and I think that is the case for most ambitious young men. If you want to be the next Elon Musk, nobody can tell you how to do that anyway. This guide is about how to get merely “rich”, which is easier because it’s been done many times before.

The first step to becoming rich is to find someone else who already is rich, and is still earning a lot of money every year. These people are everywhere—they are entrepreneurs, hedge fund managers, sales people, engineers, investment bankers, executives, and technologists, to name a few. But the object is to find someone—really several people—who have already achieved what you want to achieve. Nearly a million people in America earn over a million dollars a year¹, and tens of thousands of people earn over $5m a year. Further, these numbers are for W-2 income (which is just money that somebody pays you in a normal job), and so exclude people who are paid in stock or entrepreneurs who start a company and then sell it. High-earners tend to congregate in cities, so you should live in a major global city (New York, SF, LA, Chicago, and London are all good examples).

Ideally, you should have some concept of what you’re well-suited for, but you should not follow the advice of “do what you love” because that’s obviously moronic Boomer to Millennial slop, and because what you “love” to do is probably play video games or whatever, and that isn’t going to make you any money. You also should be realistic. For example, pro athletes getting rich off of their natural athleticism and physical fitness are bad role models for this purpose, because it is very hard or impossible to attain that level of ability at this point in your life. You want something that you’re well-suited for, meaning it is not above your intellectual or physical paygrade. Luckily, tons of money is made by total idiots, so this isn’t hard. Finally, you must find your chosen field at least somewhat interesting.

1. Get the first job

Once you’ve identified people who have the type of earnings you want for yourself, the best thing you can do is work for that person, or short of that, figure out where they started their career and try and get that job. This is easier said than done, especially if the job is prestigious and well-known (working as an analyst at Goldman Sachs, for example). The bad news is, applying to jobs online almost never works, unless you have a very specific type of resumé—there are just too many people who want prestigious jobs enough to send in a CV and call it a day. The good news is that most people, including most rich people, are starved for human connection and are willing, even eager, to talk to young, ambitious people about their careers. Further, while online job portals are inundated with job applications, astonishingly few people are willing to go the extra mile and actually reach out to people, due to a fear of face-to-face or even voice-to-voice contact that is deeply embedded in all the generations raised with text messaging.

LinkedIn profiles are an okay way to start, but better is to figure out office emails—every company has a simple formula for this (something like firstname.lastname@company.com). Write a short, succinct email introducing yourself as a young person interested in their field, and ask to meet for coffee or a phone call. Write it yourself, don’t use an LLM. Do your research about their career and have intelligent questions to ask that cannot be answered with a quick Google search. At the end of the conversation, say you’re interested in employment in the field or with them specifically and ask if they have any resources to help you get started. Stress that you are willing to do work extremely hard and do whatever needs to be done in exchange for the opportunity to learn from them.

Getting the first job is the hardest part of the whole thing, so don’t get discouraged. You probably will need to speak with five to fifteen people (if you do it right every time) to actually land a job, but it gets easier from here.

2. Distinguish yourself

Once you have the first job, the “dumb luck” part of the process fades out considerably, which is nice. The next part isn’t particularly fun though, because you have to work your ass off, and in the beginning you will usually be assigned menial labor since you know nothing and have no skills. In almost every job I have ever encountered, most people are unwilling to dedicate their lives to their work. As a young person without many responsibilities, you are therefore well-placed to outcompete them. I recommend spending at least one year, but no more than three years, working extremely hard on whatever tasks you are assigned to do. If they want you to get coffee, get the coffee and fucking nail it, and that will distinguish you because the most recent graduate crops feel like this task is beneath them, even though their boomer bosses all got coffee for people in their early twenties. If you run out of tasks, try and teach yourself what they’re doing and add value somehow—have opinions on the core revenue-generating machine within the business. Once you’re comfortable that you have some background understanding, run your opinions by your boss. It should be obvious to everyone around you that you are working extremely hard and are going to be successful no matter what—if it isn’t, you literally just need to put in more hours.

The key in this phase is to navigate between Scylla (getting lazy and phoning it in, or just being an average employee) and Charybdis (grinding too hard for too long and becoming a life-long lackey). You don’t actually want to be the Coffee-Getter Supreme for years on end. So at the first opportunity—this is usually one to three years in—you want to move up significantly.

3. Speedrun everything

In the past, step one was way easier. You could just waltz into a company with a physical CV and get a job. Now it’s a bitch where you have to scratch and claw your way past a billion other people applying online—c’est la vie. The good thing about the modern era is that there is way more mobility once you’re in. Once upon a time, you would have to grind for ten years in a 9-5 and be promoted on a slow schedule that was nearly immutable. Most jobs are not like this anymore. This concept is so alien to some people that they turn to conspiracy theories to explain the very young and successful:

In reality, Vivek Ramaswamy became a “partner” at a hedge fund after three years, but he had no ownership stake—just some discretion as a portfolio manager. I’m sure he exaggerated his returns (5,000 percent—yeah right), but they paid him an average of about a million a year for the first seven years on the job. Then he started his own biotech hedge fund after law school and became a billionaire. He was very smart and hardworking², had really elite sounding credentials, and was somewhat lucky, but he isn’t some CIA plant or whatever—that’s just how the world is now.

So however fast people tell you is typical for you to attain the job you actually want—the job that your role model from step zero has—you want to do it faster, as fast as you possibly can. This probably will mean you have to “bite off more than you can chew,” in the sense that you will need to take charge of tasks that you may not be sure you can do perfectly. Of course you want to know your stuff and make sure you’re well-trained, but in general increasing job responsibility creates a virtuous cycle of more learning, and in turn more responsibility.

In this phase, you will be accosted by doubters³, some of whom mean well. Phrases like “I don’t think either of us will be really rich” will emanate from peers, who deep down hope to see you fail, not because they harbor any particular animosity toward you, but because they need to internally justify their own mediocre careers to themselves. Even family members who grew up in a different time or place will doubt your grand ambitions are possible. But they absolutely are, and you need to ignore these people and press on.

When I say “speedrun everything,” I mean always be pushing to get to the next step of the ladder toward the role model as early as you can. Never turn down a promotion or increase in scope, even if your salary doesn’t move up much. Often, you will have to switch jobs to get these early promotions—this is normal and you should not feel too much misplaced loyalty toward people trying to extract value from your work. Accelerate, accelerate, accelerate.

4. Try to own your own means of production

As you near the end-state of this process, it’s important to try and own as much of your own means of production as you can. In many industries, people will want you to work for them rather than do your own stuff. To do this, they will try and get you sign exclusive contracts, and extract other legal promises not to leave them. Try to maintain control over your own labor as long as you can, though in some cases it is impossible not to compromise on this.

Final thoughts and other considerations

At this point, you should have achieved the type of job identified in step zero, and should be making millions of dollars a year. That’s not to say you’re done—there are many things you should do once you actually have one of these jobs to make even more money, and perhaps that’s a subject for another post. But if your goal is to make millions of dollars at a young age, I think this path generally takes you there.

Everyone knows that money isn’t everything, and you should strive to have a good life outside of your career. But most young men long to compete in an arena of some kind, and the one society celebrates the most tends to be financial success—I’m not saying this is good or bad, only that it’s the way things are. This process is what worked for me and countless others, and I hope formalizing it will be helpful for young aspirants to wealth.

“If you want to help people in your job, you should become a doctor. If you want to help one person in particular, you should do this.”

1. Couldn’t help feeling like Bilbo Baggins writing this—nearly a million of you earn more than a million a year, and millions more deserve to earn a millionfold as much.

2. I don’t know if he was doing insider trading or what, I have no opinion on or particular interest in any of the details of Vivek Ramaswamy beyond using him as an example of a well-accelerated career.

3. Also known as losers and haters.