“My own instinct is that it’s much harder than anybody believes to bring up kids in a wealthy environment. People are ruined by challenged economic lives. But they’re ruined by wealth as well because they lose their ambition and they lose their pride and they lose their sense of self-worth… there’s probably some place in the middle which works best of all.”
From Malcolm Gladwell , David & Goliath
In the book Gladwell cites a Hollywood millionaire problems rising his kids. He claims that parenting with no money is extremely difficult but with lot's of money is also challenging Your kids are spoiled and used to only the best, have never experienced rejection & difficulties They are not prepared for life !
That is the reason Wealth contains the seed of it's own destruction.
Normally Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations is the norm. To prevent this i guess you should not give everything to your kids they have to fight for something. You have to say no
How?
when they ask for something you should never say that you can't afford it but that you can but you won't. This is key for them to figure out that the money is difficult to earn and that it should be difficult to spend to.
About this is important to not confuse necessity with desire.
The best advice i ever heard was this
Recent performance is a very good indicator of future performance.
Never buy a stock that isn't going up.
In the SEC page we could read
This year's top-performing mutual funds aren't necessarily going to be next year's best performers. It’s not uncommon for a fund to have better-than-average performance one year and mediocre or below-average performance the following year. That's why the SEC requires funds to tell investors that a fund's past performance does not necessarily predict future results. You can learn what factors to consider before investing in a mutual fund by reading
I don't agree with this paragraph, the best funds of this year probably will do better next year than a basket of this year worst funds.
It's kind of simple but it works.
To me there is no inequality here. If you are good like BEYONCE you can sell 1 million downloads in 1 hour from your webpage. 50 years ago FRANK SINATRA could gather 2000 people in a room. That is the difference.
What you should do? Go for it, do something that you cane scale up big time.
if you get into Harvard it's because you are already good
If a college degree always means higher wages, then everyone should get a college degree: That’s the conventional wisdom encapsulated by Obama. But how can everyone win a zero-sum tournament? No single path can work for everyone, and the promise of such an easy path is a sign of a bubble.
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A Reformation is coming, and its message will be the same as it was 500 years ago: Don’t outsource your future to a big institution. You need to figure it out for yourself.
The bottom line on this is simple. No asset is so good that it can't be bid up to the point where it's overpriced and thus dangerous. And few assets are so bad that they can't become under priced and thus safe (not to mention potentially lucrative)
Howard Marks, Oaktree 2013
No doubt if you manage to get into Harvard you will do better than average. But you will be no Bill gates, Steve Jobs or Zuckerberg. You will do good for 2 reasons:
1.if you get into Harvard it's because you are already good. People are hand picked, you don't get good at Harvard, you were already good before getting in. Harvard is a stamp of quality.
2.If you don't miss the multiple parties on Campus you will make some friends for life. That is the biggest asset from higher education. Party til you die.
The flip-side is that higher education is unaffordable to many and even if you are smart enough to land at Harvard you don't get much bang for the buck! It's not a huge deal anymore. Too expensive.
what to do?
start doing as soon as you can. Stop studying in formal education. Work & read & do some higher education sorties (some 2 weekends programs, etc....), study as you go, never stop studying.
Everything that is physically possible will be invented
Humans are capable of an infinite amount of progress. We can improve things without limit, and learn without limit. This covers not just material improvement but also moral improvement. We have to invest in knowledge non stop.
The way to go is to study forever.
Deutsche Bank goes on to say that solar electricity is on track to be as cheap or cheaper than average electricity-bill prices in all but three states by 2016—assuming,that is, that the federal government maintains the 30 percent solar investment tax credit it currently offers homeowners on installation and equipment costs.................................
And prices for solar are expected to keep falling as technologies improve and financing becomes more affordable. Solar leasing has helped hundreds of thousands of Americans realize the dream of going solar without breaking the bank. The companies behind such programs—SolarCity, SunRun and others—take care of installation, maintenance and upgrades while the customer ends up paying about as much for clean, green power as for grid power from coal or other fossil fuels.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/rooftop-solar-cost-competitive-with-the-grid-in-much-of-the-u-s/
The future is some of us studying & inventing the future and a lot of us idle. Machines will do more & more. The future will be good. There will be a lot of spare time. Perhaps because of that NIKE stock is doing so well. Leisure has a good future.
https://www.linkedin.com/home?trk=nav_responsive_tab_home
Since our parents inevitably made errors in their courtships, we are unlikely to be ideally balanced ourselves. We have typically come out too tall or too short, too masculine or too feminine; our noses are large, our chins small. If such imbalances were allowed to persist, or were aggravated, the human race would, within a short time, founder in oddity.The will-to-life must therefore push us towards people who can, on account of their imperfections, cancel out our own (a large nose combined with a button nose promises a perfect nose). Schopenhauer liked predicting pathways of attraction. Short women will fall in love with tall men, but rarely will you see tall men go for tall women (they unconsciously fear the production of giants). Feminine men will often be drawn to boyish women with short hair.
Alan de Botton, The Consolations of Philosophy
