- Seek wealth, not money or status. Wealth is having assets that earn while you sleep. Money is how we transfer time and wealth. Status is your place in the social hierarchy.
- Understand that ethical wealth creation is possible. If you secretly despise wealth, it will elude you.
- Ignore people playing status games. They gain status by attacking people playing wealth creation games.
- You’re not going to get rich renting out your time. You must own equity - a piece of a business - to gain your financial freedom.
- You will get rich by giving society what it wants but does not yet know how to get. At scale.
- Pick an industry where you can play long term games with long term people.
- The Internet has massively broadened the possible space of careers. Most people haven't figured this out yet.
- Play iterated games. All the returns in life, whether in wealth, relationships, or knowledge, come from compound interest.
- Pick business partners with high intelligence, energy, and, above all, integrity.
- Don't partner with cynics and pessimists. Their beliefs are self-fulfilling.
- Learn to sell. Learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable.
- Arm yourself with specific knowledge, accountability, and leverage.
- Specific knowledge is knowledge that you cannot be trained for. If society can train you, it can train someone else, and replace you.
- Specific knowledge is found by pursuing your genuine curiosity and passion rather than whatever is hot right now.
- Building specific knowledge will feel like play to you but will look like work to others.
- When specific knowledge is taught, it’s through apprenticeships, not schools.
- Specific knowledge is often highly technical or creative. It cannot be outsourced or automated.
- Embrace accountability, and take business risks under your own name. Society will reward you with responsibility, equity, and leverage.
- The most accountable people have singular, public, and risky brands: Oprah, Trump, Kanye, Elon.
- “Give me a lever long enough, and a place to stand, and I will move the earth.” - Archimedes
- Fortunes require leverage. Business leverage comes from capital, people, and products with no marginal cost of replication (code and media).
- Capital means money. To raise money, apply your specific knowledge, with accountability, and show resulting good judgment.
- Labor means people working for you. It's the oldest and most fought-over form of leverage. Labor leverage will impress your parents, but don’t waste your life chasing it.
- Capital and labor are permissioned leverage. Everyone is chasing capital, but someone has to give it to you. Everyone is trying to lead, but someone has to follow you.
- Code and media are permissionless leverage. They're the leverage behind the newly rich. You can create software and media that works for you while you sleep.
- An army of robots is freely available - it's just packed in data centers for heat and space efficiency. Use it.
- If you can't code, write books and blogs, record videos and podcasts.
- Leverage is a force multiplier for your judgement.
- Judgement requires experience, but can be built faster by learning foundational skills.
- There is no skill called “business.” Avoid business magazines and business classes.
- Study microeconomics, game theory, psychology, persuasion, ethics, mathematics, and computers.
- Reading is faster than listening. Doing is faster than watching.
- You should be too busy to “do coffee," while still keeping an uncluttered calendar.
- Set and enforce an aspirational personal hourly rate. If fixing a problem will save less than your hourly rate, ignore it. If outsourcing a task will cost less than your hourly rate, outsource it.
- Work as hard as you can. Even though who you work with and what you work on are more important than how hard you work.
- Become the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until this is true.
- There are no get rich quick schemes. That's just someone else getting rich off you.
- Apply specific knowledge, with leverage, and eventually you will get what you deserve.
- When you're finally wealthy, you'll realize that it wasn't what you were seeking in the first place. But that's for another day.
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Specific knowledge
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Accountability
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Leverage
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Judgement
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Lifelong learning
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No is going to value more than you value yourself
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Set a very high personal hourly rate and stick to it
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Factor a time to eveything
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Penny-pinch your way to basic sustenance
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Hire people less than your hourly rate if you can't do that task
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What you work on is more important than who you work with
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Pick the right area
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then pick the right people work with is the next most important thing and
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Work hard as you can
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Surronud yourself with best people possible
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Sprint - Rest - Re-assess - try again (Marathon of sprints)
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Inspiration is a beautiful and a powerful thing and when you have it just sieze it.
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Inspiration is perishable act then and there when you have it.
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Impatience with actions and patience with results
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Give up on the results you have to be patience with your results because you are dealing with complex systems and dealing with lots of people and it takes long time to market to adopt, it takes time for people to get comfortable working with each other, It takes time for great products to emerge as you polish away polish away
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We sqaunder our time with a death of a thousand cuts
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Busy mind and busy calendar will detroy your ability to do great things
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To do what you want you need a free mind and free time
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You want to be a number one but you want to keep changing what you do until you are number one, you can't pick something arbitrary you can't say I'm gonna be the number one.
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Escape competetion through authenticity
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Sometimes you just get trapped in the wrong game because you are competing, to escape the competetion be authentic to yourself
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Sometimes it takes the suffering of doing the wrong thing to motivate enough you to do the right thing.
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb - Fooled by Randomness