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I had the highest SAT scores in my high school and graduated 38^th out of 440. I had the third-highest SAT scores in my college class and graduated 91^st out of 220. Don’t get me wrong, smart and lazy people are good, but I was going nowhere in life.

In 1997, I acquired an interest in finance. I started reading lots of books about trading and investing. I wanted to become a trader. Just to show you how little I knew, I thought an “over-the-counter trader” was someone who handed out stock certificates behind a lunch counter. I still have this vision in my head of guys in ties handing out stock certificates.

Still, I didn’t take any action until I read a book called The Fast Track by Mariam Naficy, which was about how to get a job in investment banking and management consulting. Inside the book was a table showing how much you could expect to earn after n years in the business. It said that after 4–6 years, you could expect to earn $600,000. This was in 1998.

I stopped and stared at that number for a minute, dumbfounded. I could make $600,000 at the age of 30? I had no idea.

Do You Want to Make a Lot of Money?

Now, this may not have come as a surprise to you, but it came as a surprise to me. My grandparents worked for the phone company. My father was a Coast Guard officer. My mother was a substance abuse counselor. I didn’t know any traders. I didn’t know any rich people. I had no exposure to Wall Street whatsoever growing up, and I didn’t know it was possible for people to make this kind of money.

So, was I motivated by greed? Absolutely. But even before I read The Fast Track, I had more than an academic interest in the financial markets. I had a passion for them. What I really wanted to do was prove the efficient markets hypothesis wrong. I have spent the last 26 years doing that, and it is loads of fun. The money isn’t bad either.

Let’s face it, some people are motivated by money while others aren’t. I teach a personal finance class at Coastal Carolina University, and the first thing I ask the class—the very first thing—is, “Who here wants to make a lot of money?” Usually, everyone raises their hands, except for one person. Then I ask that person, “Why don’t you want to make a lot of money?” And the answer is that they just want to keep their lives simple. And this is true: If you don’t have a lot of money, your life will be very simple.

Most of the rest of them are liars—they think they want a lot of money, but they aren’t willing to do what it takes to get it.

Flip the Switch

Overnight, I went from being one of the laziest people in my peer group to one of the hardest-working ones.

Finance bros like to talk about incentives. The incentives were there—work hard, and you can get stupendously rich. You might be surprised to learn that the vast majority of people do not respond to those incentives. The average real estate agent does zero closings a year… two-thirds of them. If you work hard, you can make seven figures without breaking a sweat. You get out of it what you put into it, which is pretty much true about everything in life, broadly speaking.

The financial incentives are everywhere. You can get rich in real estate. You can get rich in finance. You can get rich in tech. You can also get rich in restaurants, gas stations, plumbing, HVAC, jewelry stores, and cigar lounges. Probably the worst thing to try to get rich at is writing books, but I still try.

Even with all these incentives laying around, so many people trip over them and fail to flip the switch. There is a saying: People who don’t take risks work for people who do. You can have a comfortable life, but you won’t have the nice vacation, the nice car, or the nice house, and you’re just one illness or injury away from destitution.

Nobody gets rich by accident, even the lottery winners. You still have to buy the ticket!

I read this recently: People like to speculate on the causes of poverty. There are no causes of poverty; it is the default state. Instead, we should speculate on the causes of prosperity. And all of us here know the causes of prosperity. You become really good at something, and then you try to sell it. I was very good at writing about finance and decided to sell it. Built a business around it.

A former intern of mine became an investment banker. After about five or six years of that, he decided to buy an HVAC company. But first, he took classes on HVAC systems at the local community college and became an expert. He now has 30–40 employees, a fleet of trucks, warehouses full of equipment, and a thriving business. Someday, he will sell it for many multiples and live in a gated community. I love stories like this—you can literally make money in anything.

For some people, the money is incidental to the satisfaction of building something and making something. Remember “You didn’t build that”? Not the greatest word choice out of Obama, but what he was trying to say (and what Elizabeth Warren later said) is that there are no individual achievements, only collective achievements. If you built a business, it is because you had help. In my last Daily Dirtnap conference in 2024, philosopher Chris Freiman picked that one apart like a carcass.

Speaking of Which

I just held my sixth Daily Dirtnap conference in Pawleys Island, South Carolina, last Thursday and Friday. It was amazing, as usual. In case you’re wondering how much people love this conference, it sold out this year in 39 seconds, and there were 80 people on the waiting list. Not quite as popular as Berkshire Hathaway’s shareholder meeting, but we’re getting there.

So, we are starting to outgrow our current space. The plan is to move it to Nashville next year and hold it in the fall of 2006 (and invite a lot more people). The Daily Dirtnap conference will become the Jared Dillian Money conference, and it will be open to everyone. Daily Dirtnap subscribers will still have preference in getting tickets (which is a pretty good reason to subscribe to The Daily Dirtnap). We don’t have a date or hotel yet—we’re going to be working that out in the next few months—but just make a mental note that something good is going to happen in the fall of 2026 in Nashvegas.

As anyone will tell you, I get the best speakers. Maybe not the most polished speakers—the circuit speakers you see at every conference—but the realest speakers, the people who actually move markets, not the people who talk about it. And remember: There are no egos at my conferences; they are entirely a jerk-free zone. I hope you can make it.

Jared Dillian, MFA