Does this book offer good advice?

it was pretty interesting, but imo, there was only 3 or 4 points that i thought were useful.

a lot of it is: "we were successful at paypal because x, x is a good idea".

why not read it though? you should be reading more as it is, user.

> competition isn't capitalism
> now this is the one i don't understand his rationale behind and i suppose it would help if i READ THE FUCKING BOOK

My intuition tells me that it's because competition makes it very difficult or impossible to be substantially profitable (really competitive businesses like restaurants, for example, are always going out of business after a year or two and almost always seem to lose money or barely scrape by for a long time) whereas capitalism is about the accumulation of profits and capital, but maybe my normie brain is playing tricks on me and that's not where he's going at all.

>Disclaimer: haven't read the book yet still
I think that might be it, but would seem to contradict some other notions he raises. I mentioned Zipf's law applying to cities, the larger the city the better the services it offers to it's residents. The more efficent it can be.

Since markets aren't really finite, no company has ever sold a product to each and every person on the face of the earth (although Coca Cola has come pretty close), competition can actually cause a market to expand, you have double the resources expanding the potential customer base: creating the infrastructure to distribute a product or service, advertising and making people aware of a product.

You might say "well a monpolous company could do it anyway" there is no guarantee they will, and on top of that it might be the threat of competition that makes them look beyond their own backyard at new pastures.

I do understand how competition though can lead to the depletion of resources, the kind of zero-sum games which Kissinger talks about, where Guerrilla armies are winning as long as the war continues. Two competing companies may be in a race to the bottom, undercutting one-another and neither making a profit.

But I still subscribe to the theory in that Nietzsche speech about the Ancient Greeks, where he basically said the constant competition between the city states is what allowed them to flourish.
Then again, maybe in Theil's book this point isn't so dogmatic as I'm interpreting it.

Completion may well cause markets to expand, but it does't necessarily cause *margins* to expand, and margins are important if you want substantial long-term profitability.

It's possible to have a very large market and very high revenue, but little to no profit. Think of the airlines, for example. They've made, in aggregate, nothing over the entire lifetime of the industry, with intermittent periods of profitability and intermittent periods of substantial losses. The net result is effectively zero profits in the last hundred years.

Coca-Cola and Pepsico are effectively a duopoly in soft drinks, and don't compete with each other that much - especially not in their namesake products. Relatively few people would switch from Coke to Pepsi or vice versa if one were 5% or 10% cheaper than the other; they have quite clear and well-defined preferences for one or the other. Across their product lines, they seem quite deliberately (and sensibly) to have avoided offering basically identical products, because when the products are basically identical price becomes the determining factor - and once you have to compete on price, you're dead.

Coke and Pepsico of course love the idea that they're competitors because nobody with a monopoly / duopoly position actually wants people to know about it. They in fact perpetuate this myth by publicly being 'rivals' and portraying the other as the only alternative. But really, as long as people are gulping down the products of each of them in similar quantities and everyone else in the market is close to irrelevant, they're very happy.

Competition* in the first line.

Yeah I'll buy that argument.
Especially the one about Pepsi and Coke's product lines not quite intersecting... I don't know if it's true, but I can imagine how if it is that would be a way of avoiding competition and having an "effective" monopoly without ending up in a airline scenario, Zero Sum game like you said.

>Think of the airlines, for example.
Airlines are one of his examples.

Essentially he redefines Capitalism as innovation, Instead of zero to one, you could call it from nothing to a new thing (rather than from many to many plus one more). Of course he doesn't talk about execution or stealing relatively new ideas.

Not terribly surprising given how famous they are for being very challenging businesses to run for a whole variety of reasons and notoriously unprofitable, despite doing something the world would be a lot worse without.

It's kind of amazing there are so many airlines when it's such a difficult, unprofitable industry.

But then there are also so many nightclubs, bars, restaurants and so on. People seem oddly drawn to hyper-competitive unprofitable industries. Maybe something to do with how oddly romanticised competition is, in the US especially. People might love the idea of beating other people so much that they don't stop and think A) is it really likely that I'm going to be so much better than my competitors that I really do win, and by a large margin and B) whether it's even really worth working that hard to win. You could have the most profitable (in terms of absolute numbers, rather than margin) restaurant in New York City or London but probably still not personally be making that much money; certainly nowhere near as much as you could make by working that hard in a really profitable industry like software.

People seem not to realise this, but it's perfectly possible to be extraordinarily good at what you do - even the best at what you do - and still not be making anywhere near as much as someone who is merely 'good' or 'very good' at something actually profitable.

It's shit

Can you explain why?

This seems a rather different opinion to most expressed here; in fact, I've already ordered it from Amazon. Eagerly anticipating reading it on Friday

You'll see in

>JUST THINK OF NEW IDEA AND BECOME A BILLI SENPAI

The Book

>ultrawealthy
Ultrawealthy is billionaires.

You don't know any billionaires, because people who know billionaires don't browse Veeky Forums

>Focus on one field of expertise, don't be a jack of all trades master of none.

This goes against latticework of mental models approach by Charlie Munger. He says multi-disciplinary approach is necessary for success in his "Poor Charlie's Almanack".

Any opinions?

I'm the "jack of all trades" guy and might be just buying into confirmation bias.

Charlie Munger with Warren Buffett still specialise in finding great businesses for a fair price or underpriced, so I guess that is their specialisation, but they go about it by evaluating it via mental model approach.

I know a billionaire. So gfy

You don't.

There are like 10, and you are on Veeky Forums.

There aren't 10. There are a lot of billionaires in the world.

>Also, implying rich people don't use Veeky Forums

we all do. there's a fuckload of altcoin billionaires in this shit hole that cannot shut the fuck up. it's why this place sucks.

What. There's 500+ just in the US.

gr8 book imo

There are over 3,000 billionaires in the world bro

>competition is stoopid!!!
All you are talking about is a different type of competition. Instead of comparing yourself to people in your own industry, you compare yourself with people outside your industry. That's the only difference.

my professor had recommended it.

I haven't read either, but I've never understood why broad expertise and specialized expertise are mutually exclusive.

I think the notion of specialization is a particularly modern concept, look at all the great thinkers and doers of years gone past: Fredrick the Great, Aristotle, Avicinna, Averroes, Michelangelo, DiVinci: they all got along fine by exploring multiple disciplines.

I mean the scientific method can apply to anything.
Hell, even as a painter if you understand chemistry that's a huge help, you can anticipate how certain chemicals will react and use that knowledge to produce colors and textures on your canvas.

The counterargument is that in the case of Michelangelo and Divinci is that they were artists, and once you understand how fine art "works" you can apply it to anything: sculpture, painting, architecture, fashion design, film, video, even sound installation.

Personally I think be greed, be both the fox and the hedgehog. Don't be a "jack of all trades, master of none" be a "jack of most trades, master of some". Everyone knows that multidisciplinary education helps you see beyond your own backyard and pinch solutions from others.

Just read Marvin Minsky.