保罗·格雷厄姆：如何浪费时间和金钱

1998年我们卖掉初创公司时，我突然获得了一大笔钱。那时我不得不开始思考一个从未考虑过的问题：如何避免失去它。我深知从富有到贫穷的可能性，正如从贫穷到富有一样。虽然过去几年我深入研究过从贫穷到富有的路径，但对从富有到贫穷的路径却几乎一无所知。为了避免重蹈覆辙，我必须先识别这些陷阱。

When we sold our start up in 1998, I suddenly got a lot of money. I now had to think about something I hadn't had to think about before, how not to lose it. I knew it was possible to go from rich to poor just as it was possible to go from poor to rich. But while I'd spent a lot of the past several years studying the paths from poor to rich, I knew practically nothing about the paths from rich to poor. Now in order to avoid them, I had to learn where they were.

于是我开始关注财富流失的途径。如果小时候你问我富人如何变穷，我会说是因为花光了钱。书本和电影里都是这么演的，毕竟这种情节更具戏剧性。但实际上，大多数财富的流失并非因为过度消费，而是源于糟糕的投资。普通人很难在不自知的情况下挥霍一空——没有谁会花掉几万美元后还毫无察觉。

So I started to pay attention to how fortunes are lost. If you'd asked me as a kid how rich people became poor, I'd have said by spending all their money. That's how it happens in books and movies because that's the colorful way to do it. But, in fact, the way most fortunes are lost is not through excessive expenditure, but through bad investments. It's hard to spend a fortune without noticing someone with ordinary tastes would find it hard to blow through more than a few tens of thousands of dollars without thinking, wow, I'm spending a lot of money.

但若你开始交易衍生品，转瞬间就能损失百万美元。在大多数人认知里，奢侈消费会触发警报机制，而投资则不会。奢侈总显得放纵自我。除非你的财富来自继承或中彩票，否则你早已被反复告诫：放纵会招致恶果。而投资却能绕过这些警报。

Whereas if you start trading derivatives, you can lose a million dollars as much as you want really in the blink of an eye. In most people's minds, spending money on luxuries sets off alarms that making investments doesn't. Luxuries seem self indulgent. And unless you got the money by inheriting it or winning a lottery, you've already been thoroughly trained that self indulgence leads to trouble. Investing bypasses those alarms.

你并非在消费，只是将资产进行转移——这正是推销昂贵商品者声称'这是投资'的话术。解决之道在于建立新的警报机制。这很棘手，因为防止过度消费的警报植根于人类本能，而防止错误投资的警报则需要后天习得，有时甚至反直觉。几天前，我发现了令人惊讶的真相。

You're not spending the money. You're just moving it from one asset to another, which is why people trying to sell you expensive things say it's an investment. The solution is to develop new alarms. This can be a tricky business because while the alarms that prevent you from overspending are so basic that they may even be in our DNA, the ones that prevent you from making bad investments have to be learned and are sometimes fairly counterintuitive. A few days ago, I realized something surprising.

时间与金钱的处境惊人相似。最危险的时间浪费不在于娱乐，而在于伪工作。当你娱乐时，自知是在放纵，警报会迅速响起。若某天早晨我躺在沙发看整天电视，会感到严重的不适——光是想象就让我皱眉。

The situation with time is much the same as with money. The most dangerous way to lose time is not to spend it having fun, but to spend it doing fake work. When you spend time having fun, you know you're being self indulgent, alarms start to go off fairly quickly. If I woke up one morning and sat down on the sofa and watched TV all day, I'd feel like something was terribly wrong. Just thinking about it makes me wince.

连续看电视两小时就让我坐立不安，更遑论一整天。但确实有些日子，我的实际产出与整天看电视无异。这些日子过后我也会懊悔，但远不及虚度整天看电视的负罪感。若真整天看电视，我会觉得自己正在堕入深渊。而当我因处理邮件这类表面像正事的行为导致零产出时，那些警报却不会响起。

I'd start to feel uncomfortable after sitting on a sofa watching TV for two hours, let alone a whole day. And yet I've definitely had days when I might as well have sat in front of a TV all day days at the end of which if I asked myself what I got done that day, the answer would have been basically nothing. I feel bad after these days too, but nothing like as bad as I'd feel if I spent the whole day on the sofa watching TV. If I spent a whole day watching TV, I'd feel like I was descending into perdition. But the same alarms don't go off on the days when I get nothing done because I'm doing stuff that seems superficially like real work, dealing with email, for example.

你坐在办公桌前完成这些事，过程毫无乐趣，所以这必然是工作。时间如同金钱，仅靠避免享乐已不足以防微杜渐。这种机制或许足以保护采集狩猎者，甚至整个前工业社会。

You do it sitting at a desk. It's not fun. So it must be work with time as with money. Avoiding pleasure is no longer enough to protect you. It probably was enough to protect hunter gatherers and perhaps all pre industrial societies.

因此，天性与后天培养共同作用让我们避免自我放纵，但世界已变得更加复杂。如今最危险的陷阱是那些新型行为——它们通过模仿更高尚的行为模式，绕过了我们对自我放纵的警报系统。最糟糕的是，这些行为甚至毫无乐趣可言。

So nature and nurture combined to make us avoid self indulgence, but the world has gotten more complicated. The most dangerous traps now are new behaviors that bypass our alarms about self indulgence by mimicking more virtuous types. And, the worst thing is they're not even fun.