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Given today’s networked economy, with its extreme wealth disparity, many wonder how they can contribute. How does one not get discouraged by the concentration of wealth? What can you do to exist within this kind of asymmetric economy and still find meaning and make a good living? The usual solution offered by many is where people on YouTube and other social media sites say they can teach you how to make money online, or generate a ton of followers. I argue that these kind of methods are more akin to “get rich quick schemes” because they fail to acknowledge that asymmetric network properties guarantee that only a few nodes will have the overwhelming number of links, and therefore wealth. I argue that rather than following someone else’s so-called recipe for success you should learn to create and scale value for others by focusing on building things you find fascinating. By doing so you can attract a decent number of links to your node, creating real value for others and enriching your own life, all the while operating within an asymmetric, rich get richer network.

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