Smartcuts by Shane Snow

Author:Shane Snow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-11-11T16:00:00+00:00

II.

In the late 1990s, the Internet created thousands of millionaires—and a handful of billionaires—in Silicon Valley. Many entrepreneurs who rode the wave early and bailed out before it crashed in the early aughts suddenly found themselves in an unfamiliar position: having worked 80-hour weeks at Internet startups for the past few years, they now no longer needed to work at all. Ever . For the millionaires, smart financial planning meant a comfortable life and the freedom to pursue new things. For the billionaires, champagne baths every morning and new Lamborghinis every afternoon couldn’t deplete the fathomless amount of cash on hand. “Your entire philosophy of money changes,” writes author Richard Frank in his book, Richistan. “You realize that you can’t possibly spend all of your fortune, or even part of it, in your lifetime, and that your money will probably grow over the years even if you spend lavishly.”

There are dotcom entrepreneurs who could live top 1 percent American lifestyles and not run out of cash for 4,000 years. People who Bill Simmons would call “pajama rich,” so rich they can go to a five-star restaurant or sit courtside at the NBA playoffs in their pajamas. They have so much money that they have nothing to prove to anyone.

And many of them are totally depressed.

You’ll remember the anecdote I shared in this book’s introduction about being too short to reach between the Olympic rings at the playground jungle gym. I had to jump to grab the first ring and then swing like a pendulum in order to reach the next ring. To get to the third ring, I had to use the momentum from the previous swing to keep going. If I held on to the previous ring too long, I’d stop and wouldn’t be able to get enough speed to reach the next ring.

This is Isaac Newton’s first law of motion at work: objects in motion tend to stay in motion, unless acted on by external forces. Once you start swinging, it’s easier to keep swinging than to slow down.

The problem with some rapid success, it turns out, is that lucky breaks like Bear Vasquez’s YouTube success or an entrepreneur cashing out on an Internet wave are like having someone lift you up so you can grab one of the Olympic rings. Even if you get dropped off somewhere far along the chain, you’re stuck in one spot.

Financial planners say that this is why a surprisingly high percentage of the rapidly wealthy get depressed. As therapist Manfred Kets de Vries once put it in an interview with The Telegraph, “When money is available in near-limitless quantities, the victim sinks into a kind of inertia.”

Wait—the victim? We’re calling the courtside pajama guy a victim?

It’s hard to feel entirely sorry for him, but in a sense, yes. Life has stopped moving forward. When businesspeople cash out big, says wealth coach Susan Bradley, “Momentum has been building for a while. Then there’s this moment that it’s over, and all the champagne is gone, and there’s this feeling of this drop into an abyss.

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