How to make wealth? There are a lot of ways to get rich and this essay is about only one of them.

This essay is about how to make money by creating wealth and getting paid for it.

The advantage of creating wealth as a way to get rich is that it's is not wealth. This paragraph is key to understanding this entire essay. Wealth is the stuff

we want. Food, clothes, houses, cars, gadgets, travel to interesting places and so on. You can have wealth without having money.

If you had a magic machine that could on command

make you a car or cook you dinner or do anything else

that you wanted, you wouldn't need money. Whereas if you were in the middle of

Antarctica where there's nothing to buy, it wouldn't matter how much money you had.

Wealth is what you want, not money. But if wealth is the most important thing, why does everyone talk about making money?

It is a kind of shorthand. Money is a way of moving wealth and in practice they are usually

interchangeable, but they are not the same thing.

The people most likely to grasp that wealth can be created are the ones who are good at making things, the craftsmen.

Their handmade objects become store-bought ones, but with the rise of

industrialization there are fewer and fewer craftsmen. One of the biggest

remaining groups is computer programmers. A programmer can sit down in front of a computer and create wealth. A good piece of software is, in itself, a valuable thing.

Programmers literally think the product one line at a time.

It's also obvious to programmers that there are huge variations in the rate at which wealth is created.

At Via Web, which was Paul's startup that he sold to Yahoo.

At Via Web, we had one programmer who was a sort of monster of productivity.

I remember watching what he did one long day

and estimating that he had added several hundred thousand dollars to the market value of the company.

A great programmer could create a million dollars worth of wealth in a couple weeks.

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