[davidw]

It's logarithmic. But your time as a consultant is worth more than some number of 9's of people on the planet (99.99% for instance). You've got one business that runs itself, and another one ticking along pretty well. Maybe you haven't made all the money you want to make, but you're well on your way to financial freedom, appear to be doing something that makes you happy, and have a family (congrats!), friends, and seem to be fairly happy with the world.

If you look at things in absolute terms, rather than relative terms (someone always has more), you seem pretty successful to me in a way that not a lot of people manage. I wouldn't belittle it too much.

[amyhoy]

He's not belittling it, he's (politely and patio11-ly) saying: "Stop putting this huge space between me and you because it isn't there, and you're short-selling yourself by pretending it is."

[davidw]

If we were to look at the most quantitative, objective thing, consulting rates, there very certainly is a difference between patio11 and the average HN user (and most of us are better off than the population at large, I'm willing to bet).

I've met him, and you're right that he's very polite, generally humble and a good guy, and I can appreciate he's seen plenty of people making orders of magnitude more money than him. Still though, he's pretty successful.

[mischanix]

It's a bit irrelevant to go down this road since patio11 has quit direct consulting, but from what I've read, patio11's path to (consulting) success goes like this: patio11 likes teachers, makes bingo card app, charges for it like a reasonable person; patio11 notices all these mistakes he's making while selling to teachers, blogs about it, blog gains popularity among like-minded individuals; patio11 falls into consulting, delivers a good service, and finds out how much he can charge for it.

There's nothing in this story that's dependent on being very lucky or being exceptionally smart; the only outstanding traits here are overcoming the fear of the unknown that plagues everyone and being a good teacher, but both of these can be learned. It mostly just comes down to spending your time doing the right things.

And now with AR, just by focusing on the major mistake from BCC (selling to teachers), patio11 has sort of proven my point for me: it doesn't take that long to bootstrap a successful business with all the resources available to you now. There are more than enough blog posts telling you what to do, what not to do, and there are more than enough open niches that are perfect for microbusinesses to supplant the dayjobs of everyone on HN who has the same restless ambition that makes staying in those dayjobs an impossibly depressing prospect. And from there, consulting for larger businesses with what you learn in your micro is just icing on the cake.