Which box do you pick?

I just read an interesting article on Hacker News: Rich vs. King in the Real World: Why I sold my company.

To summarize, the article is to explain why the author sold his company. There are two main points in his opinions:

• People always consider to be "rich" or "king" (to have a lot of money to never have to work again or to build a lifestyle and personal identity).
• When the amount of money crosses a critical line, it changes your lifestyle a lot!

Here is his graph which reflects his second point:

I admit that all the points are so true in real life. People want to be free to do whatever they want to make them happy. But somehow it's only right with regular people. He used an example of Box Game to illustrate how amount of money affects your choice:

Imagine I have two opaque boxes. Box A contains $10. Box B has a 50% chance of containing $20, and a 50% chance of containing nothing at all. You pick either box and take whatever's inside. Which box do you pick?

and the difference when:

Now box A holds $5,000,000. Box B either holds $10,000,000 or nothing, 50/50 chance. Which do you pick?

Sure, most of us will choose box A. But like a comment on Hacker News, this only makes people like Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates so extraordinary! They don't really care about "rich" or "king" (or look like that). They aim to change the world. In other word, they choose neither box A nor box B, they're looking for box X, Y or Z.

This story reminds me of an article of Paul Bucheit.

Every system has two sets of rules: The rules as they are intended or commonly perceived, and the actual rules ("reality"). In most complex systems, the gap between these two sets of rules is huge.

Sometimes we catch a glimpse of the truth, and discover the actual rules of a system. Once the actual rules are known, it may be possible to perform "miracles" -- things which violate the perceived rules.

Not everyone has the hacker mindset (society requires a variety of personalities), but wherever and whenever there were people, there was someone staring into the system, searching for the truth. Some of those people were content to simply find a truth, but others used their discoveries to hack the system, to transform the world.

Yes, there are always such persons have the hacker mindset like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg hacking systems, transforming the world and creating the future.

And you, you just follow the common rules or try to discover the actual rules? Which box do you pick?