Red pill spaces abound with hustlers who have ambitions of making it someday, and think those ambitions will be advanced by acting and talking as if they already have.

You can spot them by their expensive watches and cheap apartments. They are typically salesman types, and "everything is sales" is their favourite stupid thing to say. They would have you believe, mostly as a side effect of trying to make themselves believe, that wealth building is "all about the hustle", and that anyone can become wealthy overnight if they are willing to work very hard, and take advantage of suckers.

What I do for a living is that I am what's called a "Principal" software engineer... which means I am in charge of large projects, doing design work, directing the efforts of other software engineers, aligning priorities with large scale business strategy, and reporting results to C-level executives. I don't consider myself wealthy (although perhaps some of the younger people here would), but I've spent considerable time in the company of very wealthy people, some of them billionaires whose names you know very well indeed.

I know what's different about them, and it's not hustle.

It's knowledge and opportunity. Simply put, they know how to run business enterprises, and they have the resources to start them. Specifically, they have the resources to start them multiple times until one project takes off. Most of them were born into wealth, but not nearly as much wealth as they now have.

It matters very much what parents you have, but not for the reasons you think. It has nothing to do with "oppression". Purge that commie nonsense from your skull right now, before it poisons your entire life. It has to do with being past a certain critical tipping point, the point where you can afford to start multiple business ventures until one of them takes off. This requires resources in two ways.

The first is that you have to fund a business somehow, but this is actually the lesser problem. Plenty of promising enterprises have started on a shoestring budget. More seed money helps, but all you need is some.

The second, far greater, problem is that you need to be wealthy enough to not be dependent on a regular income. You need to be able to start the business out while earning nothing, and, even further, you need to be able to do so multiple times if necessary until one of them "clicks".

These two factors create a "tipping point" which mimics the one that forms a barrier between tradesmen (such as carpenters and auto mechanics) and professionals (such as physicians and engineers). Carpenters and auto mechanics get paid apprenticeships, so they can "earn while they learn". But professionals need to go college, and, even if their tuition is fully funded by scholarships or socialism, they still need to be wealthy enough to spend four years (or eight) not earning an income. Unless you have a certain amount of "fuck you money", you can't take time off to go to college. In fact, most poor people not only don't have enough to support themselves for four years of non-productivity, their families need the income they bring in working. Like Alice's Red Queen, they are running to stand still.

By now you probably understand how there is a similar boundary at the upper edge of the professional class. Professional-class people, to leap that barrier, need not only seed money to become an entrepreneur, but enough "fuck you money" to get by, and not sink into poverty, if multiple failures come before eventual success.

This means that building wealth is certainly a life-long, and usually a multi-generational, process.

Which brings us to the red pill. Our messages have always been optimistic ones, messages of hope, but one needs to distinguish between hope and wishful thinking. TRP does not teach how to conquer reality and make circumstances not matter, because magic doesn't exist and we know that. TRP teaches how to play poker intelligently with the hand of cards you were dealt, and try to slowly draw better ones.

Before you can join that class of people, you need to gradually accumulate that kind of fuck-you money. That happens by playing the hand of cards you have been dealt.

So, if you want to play your hand of cards well, and get wealthiER, here’s what to do:

• Learn a skill that’s in demand, ideally something that plays to your personal strengths and talents.
• Sell it at the highest price you can. Always negotiate salary, always be interviewing for new possible jobs, always know your market value.
• Spend only a fraction of your paycheck. Make sure your income exceeds your expenses by as wide a margin as possible.
• What you don’t spend, invest. Don’t just put it in the bank. Only keep a moderate amount of cash there, for unforeseen expenses.
• Invest doesn’t mean “play the stock market”. The stock market is not a game, and, if it were, the bigger, better connected players have far more pieces to control the board than you do.
• Invest means “put your money in low-fee, highly diversified mutual funds”. You are looking to bet on the market as a whole, not on any one particular stock.
• Yes, the market can fail, but if it does, everyone is hurting, not just you. And if it fully collapses, you have bigger problems than losing your dreams of being a big shot, and the only investments that will matter are your vegetable garden, your chicken coop, and your stash of rifle ammunition.
• Avoid prestige spending. Don’t buy new cars, expensive watches, or other things whose function is impressing others because they know how much money you burned.
• Be stingy with repeated expenses. Rent, eating in expensive restaurants, gym memberships, anything with a monthly fee, you economize on it. Quit smoking. Don’t take fancy vacations.
• Be slightly more liberal with one time expenses. Don’t buy shitty used cars that are going to break down. Don’t buy cheap boots that wear out in six months. You’ll end up spending more over time.
• Don’t check your investments every day. They fluctuate, and you’ll be far more depressed by temporary losses than you are cheered by slow gains. The market has a general upward trend, but with lots of jagged “noise’. Don’t get lost in that noise.
• Only borrow to acquire things that will appreciate in value… real estate, an education, or a business. Anything else, if you can’t buy it with cash, don’t buy it.
• Never. Get. Married.

2 tips given to Whisper by the community for this post.