How to Pull Off Fast Wealth Creation?

Most of us aren’t born with silver spoons hanging out of our mouths.

That means the deck isn’t neatly stacked in our favor from Day 1.

And that’s okay. Because despite what some people say, meritocracy often doesn’t apply in the real world—at least not in the simplistic “hard work = big payoff” sense.

But here’s what I’ve discovered—through pain, trial, and a PhD in Applied Mathematics:

You can still create massive wealth if you understand a few crucial concepts—concepts that are rarely taught in schools, rarely shared by the “top motivational speakers,” and definitely never spelled out in the average business book.

---

The Real Meaning of “Wealth”

Wealth is not the same as money.

Money is a medium of exchange—the stuff we pass around to trade for what we want. But wealth is what people actually desire: better software, better food, better experiences, bigger payoffs in less time, you name it.

A government can print more money—it can’t just summon more wealth out of thin air. That’s on you, the entrepreneur, to generate. If you build something people genuinely value, you create wealth. It’s that simple.

---

Why Speed Matters

If you hate your 9-to-5 and feel like you’re pacing around in slow motion, you’re on to something. Because fast wealth is about compressing 40 years of “steady” corporate labor into a few insane years of ultra-intense work.

That’s the startup approach:

1. Burn high-octane fuel for 2–4 years.

2. Build or join a small outfit obsessed with delivering something the market craves.

3. Take advantage of outsized returns on your time, ideas, and stamina.

But let’s face the facts: picking up these skills isn’t taught in school. Top universities might teach you advanced calculus, or how to run a standard corporate project, but how to turn 2 or 3 sleepless years into life-changing money? Crickets.

---

Where the Leverage Hides

People like to point at CEOs, movie stars, hedge fund managers, pro athletes—they see them raking it in. What do they have in common?

• They operate in domains where you can measure their performance clearly.

• They have leverage—their decisions (or skills) impact a lot of users, customers, or watchers all at once.

Think about it:

• A hedge fund manager’s returns are measurable daily.

• A star quarterback or a top actor’s performance can make or break a billion-dollar franchise or film.

• A CEO’s decisions ripple through entire organizations and markets.

When you can measure real impact, you can be rewarded for it—often to a degree that dwarfs the typical paycheck. Startups are the democratized version of this phenomenon. You don’t have to be a star athlete or the next Leonardo DiCaprio. In a tiny, elite team solving a tough technical or market problem, you can also get measured—and rewarded—like the big shots.

---

Why Startups?

Big companies drown you in bureaucracy. If you’re the most brilliant engineer in a thousand-person org, your potential payoff gets averaged out with 999 others—many of whom are just coasting along.

In a startup, that averaging effect shrinks to 5, 10, or 20 people.
Your personal contribution becomes visible. You write a new feature that users love? Everyone sees the user base (and the revenue) spike. And that means a direct correlation between your skill and your payoff.

But there’s a cost: you’re not clocking out at 5:00 p.m. with a carefree mind. You’re compressing that multi-decade career grind into a shorter time frame. Stress, uncertainty, and risk are the price you pay for leverage.

---

The “Wealth Pie” Fallacy

I can’t stand the talk about how “the top 5% own half the wealth,” as if the pie is fixed and we should just fight over who gets the bigger slice. That’s nonsense.

We can always make a bigger pie.

Want a bigger slice? Don’t moan about scarcity—just create something else people want. That might be an app, a medical device, a new method for delivering food faster and cheaper—whatever. You add real, tangible value. You become the person who literally bakes a new pie and takes a piece for yourself in the process.

---

The Secret: Hunt Down Hard Problems

Here’s the hidden gem: go after the big, gnarly issues others avoid.

In the world of technology, new markets, or tough logistics, if a problem is painful enough, you can bet people (or companies) will pay you handsomely to solve it. That’s real wealth creation—and it erects a natural moat around you. Big, lumbering competitors hate clawing their way through difficult terrain. They’d rather you do it, then try to catch up. If you’re consistently tackling the hardest stuff first, you’re always moving faster than they can.

A startup that nails the hardest features before the competition even tries is instantly more valuable.

---

The Trade-off Nobody Tells You About

Let’s talk about the lottery effect in startups.

• You can be insanely productive and devoted, only to discover your timing’s off by six months, your competitor sneaks in with deeper pockets, or you run out of cash right before a big break.

• That means the median outcome for many startups is zero.

But guess what? Successful founders don’t dwell on the median. They obsess about beating it—by understanding users, measuring results, and iterating insanely fast. They know the payoff is an asymmetrical upside: if they hit, it can be 10, 100, or 1,000 times the average corporate career. That’s what allows them to endure ungodly amounts of stress for a shot at exponential rewards.

Yes, the stress is real. Would I prefer a sure $1 million to a 10% chance at $10 million? Emotionally, yes. But that’s not the game we’re playing. In the current system, you either go all-in for a huge upside, or you settle for the slow-and-steady path. There isn’t much middle ground.

---

Users. Users. Users.

If you forget everything else, remember: your real boss is your user.

• The best measure of whether you’re creating wealth is if people are actually using what you’ve built.

• I don’t care how cool your technology is or how long your résumé bullet points are. If your user base is nonexistent or yawning, it’s game over.

Investors, acquirers—everyone—will eventually judge your product by user adoption or revenue traction. Don’t get lost in “interesting technical problems” that nobody wants solved. That’s just academic daydreaming. Focus on delighting your users.

Build the minimal version. Deploy it. See if people bite. Then you optimize. If you’re not measuring real engagement, you’re lost in illusions.

---

Exiting the Sprint

The reality is, sustaining a startup forever is not always wise or necessary. There’s a reason so many founders sellonce they hit a certain level. You can only sprint at top speed for so long before you burn out.

• Selling diversifies your risk.

• It can free you up to chase that next ambitious project.

• It puts a chunk of capital in your pocket while you’re still young enough to enjoy it.

But big acquirers generally move slowly, and they’re cautious. The trick to actually get them to act? Demonstrate unstoppable user growth or show that their competitors might snatch you up first. Nothing lights a fire under a corporate giant’s M&A team quite like the threat of losing a valuable asset to a rival.

---

“But Isn’t That Unfair?”

Let’s look at history: for centuries, the typical path to wealth involved land grabs, wars, tributes, or plain old theft. Actual productive creation wasn’t the norm. Eventually, certain societies realized: “Hey, if we allow people to build new things and keep the rewards, everyone benefits.” That’s how modern industrialization took off.

The reason Europe, then the U.S., soared economically? They let the “nerds” (makers and innovators) keep a decent portion of the wealth they created, instead of letting feudal lords seize it. The same principle applies to any modern economy:

• If you want growth, stop punishing innovation.

• If you want to lead, empower the creators.

When you do that, you accelerate breakthroughs in everything from microprocessors to biotech to AI. Meanwhile, your global influence grows. The curve of innovation is unstoppable once creators know they can keep the fruits of their labor.

---

Final Words of Madness

1. Stop Reading Motivational Junk and Start Building Something.
   You can’t learn wealth creation from generic business books alone. You’ll learn far more by messing up in a safe-ish environment, seeing what real people want, and fixing it.

2. Find Tiny Teams, and Pick Brutally Hard Problems.
   That’s where leverage and visibility lie. Avoid big-company anonymity—your brilliance doesn’t shine when 999 others drown you out.

3. Obey the Iron Rule: ‘Does This Truly Help People?’
   If the answer is “meh,” pivot or scrap it. So many “revolutionary products” have zero real users because they solve imaginary problems.

4. Brace Yourself for the Rollercoaster.
   Most startups oscillate between euphoria and near-death experiences. If you’re not comfortable with that, you might want to reconsider. This is the price of massive upside.

5. There’s No Fixed Pie.
   Don’t obsess over how big someone else’s slice is. Focus on baking something new and needed. That’s how new fortunes are born—and that’s how you can outrun the dinosaurs.

---

Making 8 or 9 figures might sound like science fiction when you’re new. But once you crack the code, it becomes repeatable, even easy. And that’s the dirty secret behind “fast wealth”—the knowledge is out there, but it’s usually locked up among people who already made it.

They rarely teach it in classrooms.
They rarely put it in bestsellers.
They sometimes hand it to their kids.

But you?
If you can piece it together from direct practice, from real mentors, from countless small experiments and a few huge leaps, you just might rewrite your entire future.

I’m here, writing on this Substack, to offer a faster route. I’m a math PhD, a professional dart thrower at the carnival of entrepreneurship, and I’ve seen the difference between the folks who get just one throw and the ones who get unlimited tries because they’re well-funded (or well-connected). The real challenge is ensuring that while you’re practicing your throw, you’re stocking up on opportunities to take the big shot when it counts.

May the LORD bless you and your family,
Jack Roshi, MIT PhD