Transcription
What up, guys? Welcome to my no-nonsense guide for how you can get rich. Now, I realize there's a lot of videos like this floating around on the internet, but this video is going to be superior to all those videos because it's going to be politically incorrect.
So, what do I mean by that? It's obvious that there's a correlation between IQ and income, but that's something you're not really supposed to talk about in the United States or other multicultural countries. And it's because they don't want you to notice certain patterns around that. Because if you keep asking the wrong questions, it's a Pandora's box that could lead to a civil war. So instead, they have you focus on things like sports, which is way more inclusive. And so people assign respect based on how good you are in sports, and they'll be like, "Oh, Brad just made varsity soccer. He's the man." But that's not really how culture works if it's not obfuscated by political correctness around multiculturalism. For example, homogeneous countries like Nigeria or China, you'll notice that they assign a lot of respect to people based on their academic abilities. And that makes a lot more sense because the only sport you should really be playing is the sport of life. And in the sport of life, you keep score by your net worth. So, this video is going to be brutally honest about things like that. It's going to analyze things from first principles. All right, let's get into it.
Right. So this is my more detailed version of the IQ versus income graph. So all these little dots basically represent the scatter plot of all the individual data points of different people and their professions. And this main line right here is the average of all the people. So you can see there's a there's a correlation. And I had it go a little bit more exponential at the end there. And that's because I believe from personal observation that once you get to the very highest points of IQ, it doesn't go linear. It actually goes exponential. And you see that with like the 10x engineer genius who, you know, just has a meeting with some high-level person and you find out he's making a 10x salary. Just people who are at the very, very six-sigma part of the IQ curve, the rules don't apply to them and this tends to go exponential.
I also split this up into three IQ tiers just to keep things simple. So, let's get into this a little bit. The lower IQ, you got physical laborers, plumbers, a lot of manual labor type jobs. Medium IQ, you got like accountant, sales, insurance, and high IQ, doctor, lawyer, banker, engineer. And you can see that these are the jobs that are most closely fit right underneath this line. Because one concept people don't get about this graph, IQ versus income, is that this line is roughly the upper bound of how much you can earn given where your IQ is. And obviously there's there's exceptions to that, but I'll get into that. So for most people who just end up working a normal job, a 9 to 5, these are the type of jobs that can get you closest to your potential.
But what is this section down here? These are jobs that earn less. These are jobs that don't optimize for the earnings potential of your IQ bracket. So a guy bagging groceries or fast food worker, he could earn more as a plumber, but he just he is not maximizing his potential. And then it's not always about money, right? People have different priorities. So someone who just wants to add value to the world as a high school teacher or a nurse, they might be able to make more in one of these other fields. But well, nurse probably should go up here. A lot of nurses do make a lot. But the point is that this whole section down here is people who could be earning more for their IQ bracket, but they just like what they're doing. So they accept the lower salary because that's just what their their job earns in the free market.
And then over here on this side, you got professor, researcher, chess player, you know, I guess authors like Stephen King. I guess some authors, they're really smart, but their book sales aren't going anywhere. Now, I want to go over some of these really high earning data points. With the low IQ, you got drug dealer, which makes sense. I mean, these guys are dumb asses that couldn't find any legal way to earn a lot of money, so they chose to be a drug dealer. You'll notice down here, I put prison because the way this works, I don't have a way to indicate the distribution too much, but obviously everyone wants to be as high up here as possible, but people who make it up here took huge risks. And so for every drug dealer, there's a hundred people in prison or dead and maybe more. So when you see this, there's a sense of survivorship bias where you think, well, I should just be a drug dealer or, you know, I should just play the lottery. You know, these jobs are deceptive because you only see the end result. You don't see all the people who failed trying to get there. So you got lottery winners. I'm not saying every lottery player is a low IQ person, but it is a known fact that people who play lottery frequently on average have lower IQs because it is a negative EV proposition and they still take part in it.
In the mid IQ, I got rockstar, pro athlete, actor. You know, to be fair, some rock stars are idiots and some rock stars are brilliant and same with athletes and actors, but just taking the average of all of these people, I figure they're they're in the mid IQ bracket. So, I put them here. A lot of these guys, they basically won the lottery for their profession. Most of these guys end up down here at the bottom or they failed in trying to be the top of their profession. It's only the top 1% or less of their profession that gets to make it up here, probably 0.01%. And then everyone else is down here playing at their local dive bar and just making peanuts, right? And the pro athlete, the G-League or somewhere just can't make it to the higher paying leagues. You can make it up here if you take huge risks, but the expected value of attempting to do these things on average is lower than just being roughly along this line. Like the average drug dealer, if you took the average between this guy's wealth and all the people in prison, he it's somewhere around here. So, it it's actually not the most efficient use of your time. It's high variance, low return. Same with these kind of professions, rockstar, pro athlete. If you're gonna just take the average like actor, I believe I read a study saying the average actor makes less than minimum wage or something because they do a lot of free gigs to try to get their name out there and they'll get these contracts where there are just some backup extra and you know when you average it all out, even averaging in the Tom Cruises of the world, the average actor makes like less than minimum wage, something like that. So when you consider that the EV of being an actor is actually lower than just these jobs, accountants, sales, insurance, it's like somewhere down here.
This section I think is interesting. Basically the zero to one. I didn't necessarily categorize this as all the other business owners because these are zero to one founders. So they're founders of businesses that revolutionize an entire sector of the economy. You know, like Musk with his EVs and his SpaceX like landing rockets. Like these guys are doing stuff that didn't exist before. You know, of course, these guys when they get their share of profits in revolutionizing the economy, they're going to become billionaires. I guess Disney wasn't a billionaire, but I included him here because I wanted to make a point about the mentality of these guys. These guys are insane risk-takers. Like Musk went all in and was near bankruptcy multiple times through growing his companies, like hanging by a thread multiple times. Walt Disney went all in on Snow White. I think he reverse mortgaged his house. He also went all in again on like Disneyland and Disney World. He had like a hundred million and he risked everything on placing another bet and he did that multiple times. And if you read biographies of people like Richard Branson, you'll notice that they're all huge risk-takers. Like Branson also went all in multiple times. And you realize that life is sort of like a one long poker tournament. You'll notice in poker tournaments that the guys who just play really reckless and go all-in a lot. A lot of them make it to the final table. And that doesn't mean going all-in all the time is somehow a winning plus strategy. It just so happens to be because of survivorship bias that guys who have that level of risk-taking appetite. A small percentage of them are going to make it very far and be very wealthy because they expose themselves to that variance. And there's always going to be that guy that flips heads like 20 times in a row. If you get thousands of people to just flip coins, these are the guys who flipped heads 20, 30 times in a row. You know, when you compare Musk from Peter Thiel in the PayPal mafia, it's not like Musk is 300 times smarter than Peter Thiel. I mean, I think Musk's net worth is something like 300 times that of Thiel, but it's arguable that Thiel is actually smarter than Musk. It's simply a matter of risk appetite. Musk, he took tremendous reckless risks and he ended up being on the winning side of it. If you replayed his life a hundred times, in a large percentage of those lives, Musk would end up being bankrupt and Peter Thiel would still have his five billion or so. A lot of people don't understand that. They just sort of wait at the finish line to see who the winners were and then they assume, "Oh, well, you won. Let's hear what you have to say. You must be brilliant." And to be fair, I put these guys on the highest part of the IQ curve because these guys are all very smart to make it to even play in this arena. You have to be very smart, very hardworking, and very risk-taking. So, you have to have all those things going for you to even enter this arena. For all the guys who make it in this upper right corner, there's hundreds of bodies down here just who made no money but took the gamble to make it up here.
And so, this line is sort of the most standard career path for a person who wants to take the least amount of risk. They end up working for someone else and topping out their income potential for their intelligence. And from this line, you can deviate up or down based on how much of a risk appetite you have.
Now, I'll get into this little section with the business owners. It is my belief that people who choose to make it into this area, business owner is the highest EV bet you can make as an individual who wants to maximize their net worth. And it's because unlike the zero to one businesses which are wildly competitive trying to create an AI code editor, for example, there's already just like a bunch of them and Y Combinator alone. All the things that have zero to one potential and growth, they're super crowded and your odds of success are going to be super low. But this section, business owner, and when I say business owner, I don't mean a zero to one business. I mean if you're a doctor, you start your own medical practice. If you're a lawyer, you start your own law firm. These bankers can start their own little consulting firm and and so on. You know, the accountant can start a little accounting business. These guys tend to start their businesses in their 40s unlike these like hot shots who start right out of college or drop out of college and they utilize their experience having worked many decades grinding along this line and they start their business with their experience and their industry connections. And so the people who start these more conservative businesses along this section, their success rate is much higher, you know, like 80, 90% success rate. You just have to have the ambition to take your knowledge and go out on your own and start your own thing. And so you can get your income one level higher by being in this business owner section. Again, it is a risk. You might end up failing and being down here and then you come crawling back to your original job, but it's a very high EV risk. If you're careful and thoughtful and dotting the i's and crossing the t's, you have a very high chance of success. My advice to most people, while it's not sexy like these jobs that everyone sees, the EV of ending up one of these people, it's not very great. Just take the average of people who made the decision to try to end up over here, it's somewhere around here. If you just take the pure average, you know, author, for every Stephen King, there's just hundreds of people who no one reads their book, just pure EV wise, you want to be a business owner of like pretty conservative, tried-and-true, tested business model. If you purely care about money and optimizing the amount of money you can make for your IQ bracket, this is where you want to land. And a good example of being in this section is being an Airbnb owner. Someone who does Airbnb and has multiple rental properties and rents them all out. That's being a business owner that you could do pretty much in any of these IQ brackets and it's a pretty tried-and-true business that makes money. So, a lot of people will try to do that as a side hustle while doing their accounting job or you know, even these guys down here or the mechanics or you know, the lawyers, they can all take part in that as a second stream of income. But yeah, if you're going to take away one thing from this video, it's that the highest EV use of your time is by being in this business owner section. You want to choose a business in your IQ league so that your chances of success are highest. So if you're a plumber, you want to eventually try to start your own plumbing business. That's your bread and butter. You know about it and you can eventually try to start your own plumbing business and you can get your income up to here, which is going to be higher than a lot of just working doctors and lawyers, right? It's up here. So, that's the way you want to think about this stuff.
Anyways, that's a video. Um, I also do Calendly one-on-one career coaching. So, if you guys want to sign up for that, I left a link in my bio. All right, take care.