That PT Barnum... it's interesting because it really is a good read, and the whole way through you do feel like he's giving you some kind of good advice (so, if you had purchased it back in the day you don't feel ripped off), but at the same time it's not really practically actionable. You won't actually get closer to being like PT Barnum (even if you were reading it in the 1800s) or understand the steps to becoming like him, or necessarily become any better at making money. But at the same time, you're satisfied enough with the read to feel like you hadn't wasted your time and money on it. That's his real trick :)
To be sure, most people who got successful don't really understand how they got there. Most of the time they think they do but then what really happens is they are rationalising and/or using circular logic.
Don't get me wrong, they most likely put a lot of work in and most likely did a lot of things right but deep understanding of it is not necessary for success.
I understand perfectly well how I achieved success: a little bit of work and a whole lot of luck, mainly in the form of being in the right place at the right time on more than one occasion. The problem is not that this is hard to understand, the problem is that it is hard to replicate, even for me.
Interestingly, I read that is why Reason exists anyway as per evolution, source for this is a book called The Enigma of reason.
Basically, through evolution, our ability to 'Reason' is basically to provide excuses for things that sound plausible or are beneficial to us, it came about as we began to communicate, we needed to explain our actions.
When viewed through this lens, it makes a lot of sense that this is basically all that is happening here and perhaps all that is ever happening, the problem then becomes that we don't realise this and our logical thinking becomes an exercise of reading other peoples 'excuses'.
People explaining things, is just people giving reasons for them, but it is a reason that sounds plausible after the fact it happened and not necessary why it actually happened in the first place.
This is similar advice on how to get wealthy as to what you would find in Poor Richard’s Almanack or more recently Poor Charlie’s Almanack.
Most of these major takeaways are grounded in the core idea of knowledge is power and patience is a virtue. But because it is said by someone with less integrity and known for larger hoaxes than say Benjamin Franklin or Charlie Munger, you may have a harder time believing it.
There is no recipe to making money so what generally applicable advice can be given is more often what _not_ to do. I find this applies to most areas, from losing weight to romantic relationships. And judging by my anecdotal evidence of people who failed to make money I can find pretty much all the traps listed in there. Many, including me, would have avoided a lot of pain if they would have kept these rules in mind at all times.
The book is the lesson. If you read the book as a model, and write a book just like it, you will get money just like Barnum did. If you're a sucker, you follow the text. If you're shrewd, you understand the techniques of the text and learn to imitate them.
Good copywriters and salesmen can make money from nothing.
far be it from PT Barnum to be overly scrupulous, but he seemed to have a problem with getting financially wiped out by fire and built a fortune three of four times over, so it's possible he could've done it twice by the time he did the lectures and just been broke at the moment. He might've been one of the most qualified people around to make a lecture about getting rich.
I couldn't possibly disagree with this comment more in a broad sense, in that -- oh, so you want a surefire literal step-by-step guide to consistently make money that stays relevant over centuries? That's fairytale thinking; you will never have that.
Now, why has this guide stayed popular despite apparently having "little value?" Probably because it actually does, just perhaps not in the precise way one believes they need right now.
Doesn't at all read like a step-by-step guide to make money. I got more of a "7 habits of effective people" for the 19th century vibe. I honestly don't even think he wrote this. He's probably just licensing his name to a ghost written document and signing off on the bullet points.
Edit:
I was curious about this and it looks like he wrote this after he'd fallen on hard times.
Haha I agree, we have so many people now that after huge success try to write a book, give advice, or come up with some method to do it that others can follow (see: most former start up founders that went through an acquisition and then join a VC to tell everyone else how to do it and write 3 books).
I'd wager that people are getting more cynical over time. Cynicism sort of launched mid to late 90s in the US and its only gotten worse over the last 30 years.
This is great and remarkably similar to my personal philosophies on spending and work. For example avoiding unproductive debt, spending below means, vocation you enjoy, etc.
I do disagree with the bit about accepting rude customers. I will happily forfeit business of a rude customer. This is especially true if your employees are high value and you don’t want them subject to abuse (feel valued), and I hypothesise that in fact genuinely rude customers aren’t as listened to by friends as they think in their own mind.
Well, in the context of the submitted text, the matter seems different: the section «Be Polite and Kind to Your Customers» expresses a different direction in that very title, and the anecdotal example is about "an usher that «intended to whip a man», «“Because he said I was no gentleman”»" - which (also) heavily suggests that the writer may have omitted some details about "what actually happened".
So, about «accepting [which] customers», well do your Cost/Risk/Benefit calculations; about behaviour, good sense be the ground and in case of controversy add more of the same.
I read this as the customer was rude to the Usher (perhaps due to his station?), and the Usher was rude, but the owner basically told the employee he had to put up with the insult because the customer is entitled to because they paid, and may also bring future business. I think there's a line in the sand (which will vary person to person) where inappropriate unprovoked rude behaviour should not be tolerated by customers. That's all. My line is around unprovoked verbal abuse, where I'll give the customer a serve to protect the employee. Obviously if it's a common theme around a particular employee, perhaps they are the issue !!
"He began his career as a showman in 1835 when he was 25 with the purchase and exhibition of a blind and almost completely paralyzed slave woman named Joice Heth, whom an acquaintance was trumpeting around Philadelphia as George Washington's former nurse and 161 years old. Slavery was already outlawed in New York, but he exploited a loophole which allowed him to lease her for a year for $1,000, borrowing $500 to complete the sale. Heth died in February 1836, at no more than 80 years old. Barnum had worked her for 10 to 12 hours a day, and he hosted a live autopsy of her body in a New York saloon where spectators paid 50 cents to see the dead woman cut up, as he revealed that she was likely half her purported age"
I'm really excited to see another link to The Gutenberg Project. They do amazing work. And if their download stats are accurate, they must be one of the largest libraries of PDFs on the public Internet.
> excited to see another link to [Project Gutenberg] ... they ...
It is a bit different. They started it, they started it all. The Project started in 1971, when Michael S. Hart as a student was offered computer use and realized it was a good idea to digitize texts, for preservation and distribution.
Project Gutenberg is one of the foremost Cultural Preservation and Promotion Projects of the XX Century.
A while ago, I was helping a student collect 19th century texts for corpus analysis. Since the books were out of copyright, PDFs were downloadable from Google and the Internet Archive. Although the scanned versions from the two sources were equivalent, the OCRed versions were very different. The OCRed texts from Google had a very low error rate and could be easily corrected by hand. The ones from IA were unusable, with many extreme typos on every line.
Another comment pointed out that at 25, Barnum exploited an old black woman as a slave in a sideshow, eventually after she died selling tickets to her dissection.
At 45, Barnum destroyed a true engineer-entrepreneur. In an era where clocks were essential for organizing commerce as the country grew, Chauncey Jerome revolutionized clockmaking by using stamped-out brass gears - both cheaper and more reliable, among the first shifts from craft to manufacturing. Then Barnum suckered Jerome into a venture that destroyed all the wealth and business Jerome had accumulated.
But we don't directly have that kind of impact... crypto, brick-and-mortar businesses, journalism if not democracy, the rise of successful surveillance states, the ubiquity of software rented instead of bought coupled with complete absence of warranty, digital services coupled to force arbitration clauses...
If you dig around the web youll find out that it's because one of their books infringes on the rights of some publisher.
The book and the publisher are unknown to me, but they succeded in getting the site blacklisted, all of it. The optics of the whole thing are horrendous imho
> Work at it, if necessary, early and late, in season and out of season, not leaving a stone unturned, and never deferring for a single hour that which can be done just as well now. The old proverb is full of truth and meaning, "Whatever is worth doing at all, is worth doing well." Many a man acquires a fortune by doing his business thoroughly, while his neighbor remains poor for life, because he only half does it. Ambition, energy, industry, perseverance, are indispensable requisites for success in business.
The secret is the luck & skill of making sure your efforts go towards the options in front of you (or in the curation/creation of options) that have the best balance of size & odds of reward.
First, most of the comments are about getting rich, which is a different skill than making money.
To make money, sell something valuable to others.
To get rich, first you have to define "rich" - most people's definition is attainable purely by the thing above, over a long enough period of time.
For large enough definitions of "rich", or if you want to get rich "quick", you have one of two ways: get a lot of money from a small number of people, or a little money from a large number of people.
Each requires different talents, a tremendous amount of luck, and ultimately a willingness to lie, cheat, and steal to hold on to the ladder as you climb.
It's certainly something we as a society should dissuade. The more people we have in mode A - sell something valuable, get modestly wealthy over a long period of time - the better off we are.
This feels like it would be most helpful to a teen who's just starting out. Otherwise, I just see this as a reminder to "be within my own boundaries" with regards to spending, work, etc.
> a South London lad who became rich virtually by accident
I think I'll read this, considering others' praise, but I find it funny that the abstract introduces the "expert" at getting rich as someone who did it by accident: doesn't that imply that he didn't know how to do it?
That PT Barnum... it's interesting because it really is a good read, and the whole way through you do feel like he's giving you some kind of good advice (so, if you had purchased it back in the day you don't feel ripped off), but at the same time it's not really practically actionable. You won't actually get closer to being like PT Barnum (even if you were reading it in the 1800s) or understand the steps to becoming like him, or necessarily become any better at making money. But at the same time, you're satisfied enough with the read to feel like you hadn't wasted your time and money on it. That's his real trick :)
To be sure, most people who got successful don't really understand how they got there. Most of the time they think they do but then what really happens is they are rationalising and/or using circular logic.
Don't get me wrong, they most likely put a lot of work in and most likely did a lot of things right but deep understanding of it is not necessary for success.
I understand perfectly well how I achieved success: a little bit of work and a whole lot of luck, mainly in the form of being in the right place at the right time on more than one occasion. The problem is not that this is hard to understand, the problem is that it is hard to replicate, even for me.
4 replies →
PT Barnum got where he got by being a good bullshitter. I think he was well aware of it, and I think he was smart enough not to put that in writing.
1 reply →
This is accurate for people without a long-term track record of success. One hit wonders.
But for others, it’s the same stuff that great entrepreneurs always say…
- luck: having a great team with the right skills
- luck: being in the right place at the right time
- resources/luck: having enough capital to realize an opportunity
- focus/discipline: being able to focus on 1-2 things and disciplined enough not to pick up other items
- moral fortitude: it’s hard to be successful in business long-term while being a full-time crook
Interestingly, I read that is why Reason exists anyway as per evolution, source for this is a book called The Enigma of reason.
Basically, through evolution, our ability to 'Reason' is basically to provide excuses for things that sound plausible or are beneficial to us, it came about as we began to communicate, we needed to explain our actions.
When viewed through this lens, it makes a lot of sense that this is basically all that is happening here and perhaps all that is ever happening, the problem then becomes that we don't realise this and our logical thinking becomes an exercise of reading other peoples 'excuses'.
People explaining things, is just people giving reasons for them, but it is a reason that sounds plausible after the fact it happened and not necessary why it actually happened in the first place.
Can you define "success" ?
Was all poor artists who died in poverty successful in the past ?
1 reply →
"To be sure, most people who got successful don't really understand how they got there."
IMHO: Wrong. "People that win the super bowl didn't just show up. It was intentional."
2 replies →
Not that I disagree, but how can you be confident that this is the case? Have there been studies on this topic?
This is similar advice on how to get wealthy as to what you would find in Poor Richard’s Almanack or more recently Poor Charlie’s Almanack.
Most of these major takeaways are grounded in the core idea of knowledge is power and patience is a virtue. But because it is said by someone with less integrity and known for larger hoaxes than say Benjamin Franklin or Charlie Munger, you may have a harder time believing it.
Sounds like a lot of tech and business blog posts when you put it like that.
LOL. Just imagine unleashing prime P.T Barnum on silicon valley. He'd "circle-back" and get some shit BOOTSTRAPPED.
There is no recipe to making money so what generally applicable advice can be given is more often what _not_ to do. I find this applies to most areas, from losing weight to romantic relationships. And judging by my anecdotal evidence of people who failed to make money I can find pretty much all the traps listed in there. Many, including me, would have avoided a lot of pain if they would have kept these rules in mind at all times.
The book is the lesson. If you read the book as a model, and write a book just like it, you will get money just like Barnum did. If you're a sucker, you follow the text. If you're shrewd, you understand the techniques of the text and learn to imitate them.
Good copywriters and salesmen can make money from nothing.
IIRC from when this book was mentioned earlier, probably on HN, he toured the US giving lectures about getting rich while he was broke.
far be it from PT Barnum to be overly scrupulous, but he seemed to have a problem with getting financially wiped out by fire and built a fortune three of four times over, so it's possible he could've done it twice by the time he did the lectures and just been broke at the moment. He might've been one of the most qualified people around to make a lecture about getting rich.
It would be probably be very successful as a fake-rich influencer
I couldn't possibly disagree with this comment more in a broad sense, in that -- oh, so you want a surefire literal step-by-step guide to consistently make money that stays relevant over centuries? That's fairytale thinking; you will never have that.
Now, why has this guide stayed popular despite apparently having "little value?" Probably because it actually does, just perhaps not in the precise way one believes they need right now.
Doesn't at all read like a step-by-step guide to make money. I got more of a "7 habits of effective people" for the 19th century vibe. I honestly don't even think he wrote this. He's probably just licensing his name to a ghost written document and signing off on the bullet points.
Edit:
I was curious about this and it looks like he wrote this after he'd fallen on hard times.
Haha I agree, we have so many people now that after huge success try to write a book, give advice, or come up with some method to do it that others can follow (see: most former start up founders that went through an acquisition and then join a VC to tell everyone else how to do it and write 3 books).
Funny that it was even happening back then!
Sounds exactly like Masterclass edutainment.
So pretty much the prototype for all those get-rich-quick people who keep taking out youtube ads for their courses.
Related:
Golden Rules for Making Money (1880) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=88544 - Dec 2007 (12 comments)
HN comments on this seem to get more cynical over time.
I'd wager that people are getting more cynical over time. Cynicism sort of launched mid to late 90s in the US and its only gotten worse over the last 30 years.
Looks like it was due another repost.
Yes and reposts are fine after a year or so (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html).
The reason for listing old related threads is just that many readers find them interesting.
Oldest one dating back the 19th century
This is great and remarkably similar to my personal philosophies on spending and work. For example avoiding unproductive debt, spending below means, vocation you enjoy, etc.
I do disagree with the bit about accepting rude customers. I will happily forfeit business of a rude customer. This is especially true if your employees are high value and you don’t want them subject to abuse (feel valued), and I hypothesise that in fact genuinely rude customers aren’t as listened to by friends as they think in their own mind.
> rude customers
Well, in the context of the submitted text, the matter seems different: the section «Be Polite and Kind to Your Customers» expresses a different direction in that very title, and the anecdotal example is about "an usher that «intended to whip a man», «“Because he said I was no gentleman”»" - which (also) heavily suggests that the writer may have omitted some details about "what actually happened".
So, about «accepting [which] customers», well do your Cost/Risk/Benefit calculations; about behaviour, good sense be the ground and in case of controversy add more of the same.
I read this as the customer was rude to the Usher (perhaps due to his station?), and the Usher was rude, but the owner basically told the employee he had to put up with the insult because the customer is entitled to because they paid, and may also bring future business. I think there's a line in the sand (which will vary person to person) where inappropriate unprovoked rude behaviour should not be tolerated by customers. That's all. My line is around unprovoked verbal abuse, where I'll give the customer a serve to protect the employee. Obviously if it's a common theme around a particular employee, perhaps they are the issue !!
2 replies →
https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/p-t-barnum/the-art-of-mone...
Came to post the same link (-:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._T._Barnum#Early_life
"He began his career as a showman in 1835 when he was 25 with the purchase and exhibition of a blind and almost completely paralyzed slave woman named Joice Heth, whom an acquaintance was trumpeting around Philadelphia as George Washington's former nurse and 161 years old. Slavery was already outlawed in New York, but he exploited a loophole which allowed him to lease her for a year for $1,000, borrowing $500 to complete the sale. Heth died in February 1836, at no more than 80 years old. Barnum had worked her for 10 to 12 hours a day, and he hosted a live autopsy of her body in a New York saloon where spectators paid 50 cents to see the dead woman cut up, as he revealed that she was likely half her purported age"
Narcissism is the key to success.
To boldly go where no man has gone before, into forms of exploitation unthinkable to others.
This reads like the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition.
I'm really excited to see another link to The Gutenberg Project. They do amazing work. And if their download stats are accurate, they must be one of the largest libraries of PDFs on the public Internet.
> excited to see another link to [Project Gutenberg] ... they ...
It is a bit different. They started it, they started it all. The Project started in 1971, when Michael S. Hart as a student was offered computer use and realized it was a good idea to digitize texts, for preservation and distribution.
Project Gutenberg is one of the foremost Cultural Preservation and Promotion Projects of the XX Century.
A while ago, I was helping a student collect 19th century texts for corpus analysis. Since the books were out of copyright, PDFs were downloadable from Google and the Internet Archive. Although the scanned versions from the two sources were equivalent, the OCRed versions were very different. The OCRed texts from Google had a very low error rate and could be easily corrected by hand. The ones from IA were unusable, with many extreme typos on every line.
Another comment pointed out that at 25, Barnum exploited an old black woman as a slave in a sideshow, eventually after she died selling tickets to her dissection.
At 45, Barnum destroyed a true engineer-entrepreneur. In an era where clocks were essential for organizing commerce as the country grew, Chauncey Jerome revolutionized clockmaking by using stamped-out brass gears - both cheaper and more reliable, among the first shifts from craft to manufacturing. Then Barnum suckered Jerome into a venture that destroyed all the wealth and business Jerome had accumulated.
But we don't directly have that kind of impact... crypto, brick-and-mortar businesses, journalism if not democracy, the rise of successful surveillance states, the ubiquity of software rented instead of bought coupled with complete absence of warranty, digital services coupled to force arbitration clauses...
I'm here to bemoan the fact that project gutenberg is censored on italian soil and italian DNS for no. good. reason.
Using DNS over https in Firefox should typically avoid any domain name blocking
Is any reason given, even a not good one?
No. The site will not resolve at all.
If you dig around the web youll find out that it's because one of their books infringes on the rights of some publisher.
The book and the publisher are unknown to me, but they succeded in getting the site blacklisted, all of it. The optics of the whole thing are horrendous imho
> Work at it, if necessary, early and late, in season and out of season, not leaving a stone unturned, and never deferring for a single hour that which can be done just as well now. The old proverb is full of truth and meaning, "Whatever is worth doing at all, is worth doing well." Many a man acquires a fortune by doing his business thoroughly, while his neighbor remains poor for life, because he only half does it. Ambition, energy, industry, perseverance, are indispensable requisites for success in business.
Put more simply: Effort doesn't guarantee reward, but all rewards come as a consequence of effort.
The secret is the luck & skill of making sure your efforts go towards the options in front of you (or in the curation/creation of options) that have the best balance of size & odds of reward.
First, most of the comments are about getting rich, which is a different skill than making money.
To make money, sell something valuable to others.
To get rich, first you have to define "rich" - most people's definition is attainable purely by the thing above, over a long enough period of time.
For large enough definitions of "rich", or if you want to get rich "quick", you have one of two ways: get a lot of money from a small number of people, or a little money from a large number of people.
Each requires different talents, a tremendous amount of luck, and ultimately a willingness to lie, cheat, and steal to hold on to the ladder as you climb.
It's certainly something we as a society should dissuade. The more people we have in mode A - sell something valuable, get modestly wealthy over a long period of time - the better off we are.
From what little I already read, it seems interesting and mostly translateble to modern lessons. Will pin to read later.
This feels like it would be most helpful to a teen who's just starting out. Otherwise, I just see this as a reminder to "be within my own boundaries" with regards to spending, work, etc.
The first self help book?
No, there was a book called "Self help" by Samuel Smiles a few years prior. But self help has been around forever dating back to ancient Egypt.
Check out Felix Dennis's books for a modern take.
Felix Dennis - "How To Get Rich"
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1837402.How_to_Get_Rich
> a South London lad who became rich virtually by accident
I think I'll read this, considering others' praise, but I find it funny that the abstract introduces the "expert" at getting rich as someone who did it by accident: doesn't that imply that he didn't know how to do it?
2 replies →
Salty, but a true classic. Having read easily several hundred "business" books, this one is my desert island book.
Pretty good!
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