Paul Graham is a lottery winner telling everyone who will listen the best way to get rich is to play the lottery. It has worked for a hundred years, why not get in on the money train. Bo Burnham in his stand up special had a bit where he talked about success. He said to not look for inspiration from people who are celebrities or extremely successful. He compares Taylor Swift to a lottery winner. For every Taylor Swift, Bo Burnham, Paul Graham, or Mark Zuckerberg there are hundreds if not thousands of people who weren’t successful. Think about Mark Zuckerberg, he is very rich and most people in the United States know his name, but the Winklevoss Twins who had a very similar idea are neither of those things. The only reason they are known is because Mark Zuckerberg stole their idea and made facebook, then someone else made a movie about their missed opportunity. As it is, most people think of them as jerks who were played by Armie Hammer, not what they did. But even the Winklevoss Twins are an exception. In most cases you don’t win the lottery. For every successful startup out there there are hundreds of startups that just don’t make it. I feel like there will always have to be people willing to take the chance to risk it all on their startup, or their musical career, or what have you, that is the only way to truly innovate. Startups and new stars change the game and advance society, but it is not for everyone. There is a film called The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit about a man trying to find his place in society after the Second World War. In the film, he meets with the founder of the company he is working at who explains that some people are willing to only be nine to fivers and live a life with their family, while others are people who will focus on their work to the exclusion of all else. This is not exactly the distinction Graham is making but parallels can be seen. People who go into startups as a get rich quick scheme are doing it at the chance of losing everything. Society will always encourage people to push the docket, to strive for the start up and risk taking in the chance of getting extremely rich, however, the majority of people do not ever achieve this and some do not even try and that is perfectly fine. People should be encouraged to push the envelope to potentially achieve incredible risks. But when Paul Graham talks about getting rich by working at a startup as a sure thing, it falls flat of what real life will be like. If every person in class started to work at different startups, maybe one of us would end up rich. I feel this is especially true now, tech used to be the wild west, no one truly understood the field and everything was always up in the air, but now it has become more like other fields and settled down to a degree. One thing Graham was right about though is that you don’t need to be rich to live well. A person today can live a very comfortable life, without being considered rich, and that is fine for some people. Some people will always be content to live life comfortable instead of stupidly rich.