The richest people I know personally are all incredibly hard workers with rather wide-ranging skillsets and certainly a willingness to try new things. But that's just anecdotal so take it with a grain of salt.

I think what we've learned here is that the only thing rich people have in common is that they all have a lot of money.

As a rich person with very little money I am offended ;)

Exactly this. It is all anecdotal. I was just telling an opposing anecdote the the original story.

It does depend on what you are doing and how difficult the particular job is. Cutting wood and hammering nails is easy and somehow relaxing. Tiling walls and roofing are both difficult and easy to screw up, and I don't think I ever had the homeowner with me on those occasions. Painting, laying linoleum, hanging prefab cabinets, etc are all easy to do and easy to take part ownership in. I like the thought that a homeowner can brag to their friends that "they" built something.

Having some sweat equity, as an owner, is really nice. It just gives you a good feeling about your house, car, etc., to know that you built at least some of it with your own hands.

I love to work on my muscle car. To me, just writing a check to buy someone else's muscle car is not interesting, nor does anyone have "cred" with me if they just bought it.

Agreed, it's a hobby. Even if I screw it up I learned something. What I find funny is when I talk to people who say "I rebuilt the engine last year", or "I just painted my car a deep metal-flake blue." I say "That's awesome, I totally want to learn how to do that! What was it like?" just to find out that by "I did" they mean "I paid someone to do". Meh.

I find that to be true of the poorest people I know as well. Which is way-below-the-poverty-line poor.

Unfortunately, spending time with the poorest people I know makes it glaringly obvious why they are poor.

One possible reason for the disparity is that being poor sucks and is really hard in many parts of the world (like NYC I would imagine), however where I live, rents and other expenses are low and it's relatively easy to get government handouts.

Maybe that's true where you live.

I left home at 16, spent ten years homeless and hitchhiking, am told I'm quite good at what I do, and have spent the last 3 years or so exerting the herculean effort required to rise through poverty. I currently live half on a couch of some good people I know, and half in the office of the web shop I work in. I have never had government assistance. I wouldn't have known where to find it, nor been in a situation to be given it in most cases.

As far as handouts go, when you are zilch-zero-nada poor, at least in the US, there are a lot of things in life that will be higher on your priority list than either figuring out that they're there, or going through the process of acquiring them, keeping them, and then becoming self-sufficient. In many places in the US, government handouts are a joke.

I'm not going to try to go into detail, but I can tell you that I know a lot of people whose reason for being dirt poor is not so glaringly obvious as the ones you know, and a fair amount of people who aren't poor because they had the luck to be born to the right people in the right place at the right time, regardless of their work ethic.

I've been thinking a lot about socio-economic disparity amongst technically competent people a lot lately, I should probably try to gather my thoughts more cohesively.