Is “Get Rich Through Diligence” the Biggest Lie? Six Economic Truths That Will Upend Your Beliefs
“Get rich through diligence” is the factory preset for almost all of us. But what if I told you that this very belief has set you in the wrong direction from day one on the road to your first pot of gold?
You think you’re creating value, but nobody told you that between value and wealth lies a bottomless chasm. And the people who made their first million didn’t build bridges—they learned “how not to build bridges.”
Today we’re not here for chicken soup—we’re here for the rules. These six cold economic truths will completely upend your understanding of wealth. You’ll discover that the real-world chessboard and the manual you grew up with are not even the same game.
1. Rent-Seeking: Stand in the River of Value, Not Inside the Factory
Cast your mind back to Shenzhen in the early 1990s—the air thick with dust and the legend of “overnight revenge.” While countless people were flooding into factories, trading sweat for hourly wages, another group was doing nothing at all—they didn’t produce a single screw, didn’t develop a single piece of technology, didn’t even have an office.
They simply did everything they could, before the official policy documents were issued, to lock up the tracts of wasteland that were about to be zoned commercial. A few years later, factory workers’ wages had multiplied, but the people who did nothing had seen the value of their land deeds multiply by hundreds.
In economics, that behavior has a cold and precise name: rent-seeking. The theory was proposed by economist Anne Krueger in 1974, and its core idea cuts open the truth of wealth accumulation like a surgical scalpel—getting rich doesn’t only have the path of “production”—there’s another, more hidden and more efficient path called “rent capture.”
What does “rent capture” mean? It means you don’t need to bake a new cake—you only need to change how the cake is distributed. You don’t need to make more water in the river—you just need to build a sluice gate at the narrowest point and decide who the water flows to.
You think capitalists are producers, but their real role is more like plumbers—they stand at the key nodes where value flows, siphoning off their share from the massive flow.
This logic plays out again and again in commercial history: the early European wool merchants monopolized not wool production but the ports of export; the first internet ad platforms monopolized not content but the distribution rights to attention; today’s top real-estate agencies monopolize not houses but the fragile information channel between buyers and sellers. None of them directly created anything—but they all stood at the choke point of value flow.
2. Power-Law Distribution: Why Your Effort Is Just Fueling the Winner’s Chips
Imagine a game: 100 people, each starting with NT$1,000 in principal. Each round, flip a coin—heads, your assets grow 60%; tails, they shrink 40%. By expected value, this is an absolutely positive-EV game.
But if you actually run the game, you’ll find that about 1 out of the 100 players ends up taking home 80% of the money. The other 99 split the remaining 20%, most of them already busted out.
This is the brutal truth of power-law distribution. In most games, the prize money isn’t distributed evenly—it’s captured by a few at an exponential rate. Your effort grows linearly, but the winner’s returns grow exponentially.
In a power-law world, effort isn’t the cure—it’s the trap. When you work ten times harder than someone else, your return might be just 1.1x theirs; but when you stand in the right position, you might do nothing and earn 100x their return.
3. The Diligence Trap: The Math of Diminishing Marginal Returns
Inside a factory, the first worker takes output from 0 to 1, the second from 1 to 1.8, the third from 1.8 to 2.4. Each additional worker adds less and less.
But inside a platform company, the first user takes the platform from 0 to 1, the second from 1 to 4, the third from 4 to 9. Each additional user adds more and more. This is the math underneath platform economics, network effects, and power-law distribution.
The track you choose decides whether your effort is “burned” by diminishing returns or “amplified” by increasing returns. The same diligence, in the wrong track, is combustion; in the right track, it’s compounding.
4. So What Do You Do? Map Out Your Value Chain
Instead of trying harder to produce value, find the nodes where value flows and stand there.
How? Simple: map out the value chain of your industry, from raw materials to end users—who does the money pass through, whose filter does information pass through, whose approval do resources need. Find the matchmaking, the interface, or simply the “permit-to-pass” node—that’s where the rents are thickest.
But discovering the node is only step one. Most people’s instinct is “I’ll try even harder to get into this node.” And the word “effort,” in the next chapter, is an extremely dangerous trap.
Closing: Six Truths, One Logic Behind Them All
“Get rich through diligence” isn’t a lie, but it’s a truth that only holds for people standing at the right node.
Wealth has never been linearly accumulated—it’s structurally distributed. What you can capture depends on where you stand in the value chain, which end of the power law you’re on, and whether you’ve seen through the disguise of the “diligence trap.”
Behind these six economic truths is only one logic: see the rules of the game clearly first—then decide whether to step onto the board.
This article shares economic concepts and does not constitute investment advice. Cases and figures are conceptual illustrations; please make decisions based on your personal risk tolerance and consult a financial advisor with proper credentials.
Disclaimer: This article shares investment and financial concepts and reference information. It does not constitute any specific investment, tax, or legal advice. Markets involve risk; invest with caution. Please make independent judgments based on your own risk tolerance and consult a professional advisor.
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