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If you get into a relative mindset, you’re always going to hate people who do better than you, you’re always going to be jealous or envious of them. They’ll sense those feelings when you try and do business with them. When you try and do business with somebody, if you have any bad thoughts or any judgments about them, they will feel it. Humans are wired to feel what the other person deep down inside feels. You have to get out of a relative mindset. [10]
being anti-wealth will prevent you from becoming wealthy, because you will not have the right mindset for it, you won’t have the right spirit, and you won’t be dealing with people on the right level.
The problem is, to win at a status game, you have to put somebody else down. That’s why you should avoid status games in your life—they make you into an angry, combative person. You’re always fighting to put other people down, to put yourself and the people you like up.
It’s a zero-sum game instead of a positive-sum game. [78]
What is the most important thing to do for younger people starting out? Spend more time making the big decisions. There are basically three really big decisions you make in your early life: where you live, who you’re with, and what you do.
Humans evolved as hunters and gatherers where we all worked for ourselves. It’s only at the beginning of agriculture we became more hierarchical. The Industrial Revolution and factories made us extremely hierarchical because one individual couldn’t necessarily own or build a factory,
There are almost 7 billion people on this planet. Someday, I hope, there will be almost 7 billion companies.
What is your definition of retirement? Retirement is when you stop sacrificing today for an imaginary tomorrow. When today is complete, in and of itself, you’re retired. How do you get there? Well, one way is to have so much money saved that your passive income (without you lifting a finger) covers your burn rate. A second is you just drive your burn rate down to zero—you become a monk.
Whether in commerce, science, or politics—history remembers the artists.
Art is creativity. Art is anything done for its own sake.
I can create a new business within three months: raise the money, assemble a team, and launch it. It’s fun for me. It’s really cool to see what can I put together. It makes money almost as a side effect. Creating businesses is the game I became good at. It’s just my motivation has shifted from being goal-oriented to being artistic. Ironically, I think I’m much better at it now. [74]
It looks like work to others, but it feels like play to me. And that’s how I know no one can compete with me on it. Because I’m just playing, for sixteen hours a day. If others want to compete with me, they’re going to work, and they’re going to lose because they’re not going to do it for sixteen hours a day, seven days a week. [77]
Money is not the root of all evil; there’s nothing evil about it. But the lust for money is bad. The lust for money is not bad in a social sense. It’s not bad in the sense of “you’re a bad person for lusting for money.” It’s bad for you. Lusting for money is bad for us because it is a bottomless pit. It will always occupy your mind. If you love money, and you make it, there’s never enough. There is never enough because the desire is turned on and doesn’t turn off at some number. It’s a fallacy to think it turns off at some number.
The punishment for the love of money is delivered at the same time as the money. As you make money, you just want even more, and you become paranoid and fearful of losing what you do have. There’s no free lunch.
You make money to solve your money and material problems. I think the best way to stay away from this constant love of money is to not upgrade your lifestyle as you make money. It’s very easy...
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Another thing that helps: I value freedom above everything else. All kinds of freedom: freedom to do what I want, freedom from things I don’t want to do, freedom from my own emotions or things that may disturb my peace. For me, freedom is my number one value.
For someone who is early in their career (and maybe even later), the single most important thing about a company is the alumni network you’re going to build. Think about who you will work with and what those people are going on to do. [76]
The first kind of luck is blind luck where one just gets lucky because something completely out of their control happened. This includes fortune, fate, etc. Then, there’s luck through persistence, hard work, hustle, and motion. This is when you’re running around creating opportunities. You’re generating a lot of energy, you’re doing a lot to stir things up. It’s almost like mixing a petri dish or mixing a bunch of reagents and seeing what combines. You’re just generating enough force, hustle, and energy for luck to find you. A third way is you become very good at spotting luck. If you are very
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Ways to get lucky: • Hope luck finds you. • Hustle until you stumble into it. • Prepare the mind and be sensitive to chances others miss. • Become the best at what you do. Refine what you do until this is true. Opportunity will seek you out. Luck becomes your destiny.
One of the things I think is important to make money is having a reputation that makes people do deals through you. Remember the example of being a great diver where treasure hunters will come and give you a piece of the treasure for your diving skills.
If you are a trusted, reliable, high-integrity, long-term-thinking dealmaker, when other people want to do deals but don’t know how to do them in a trustworthy manner with strangers, they will literally approach you and give you a cut of the deal just because of the integrity and reputation you’ve built up.
“Be a maker who makes something interesting people want. Show your craft, practice your craft, and the right people will eventually find you.” [14]
If someone is talking a lot about how honest they are, they’re probably dishonest. That is just a little telltale indicator I’ve learned. When someone spends too much time talking about their own values or they’re talking themselves up, they’re covering for something. [4]
People are oddly consistent. Karma is just you, repeating your patterns, virtues, and flaws until you finally get what you deserve. Always pay it forward. And don’t keep count.
This is not to say it’s easy. It’s not easy. It’s actually really freaking hard. It is the hardest thing you will do. But it’s also rewarding. Look at the kids who are born rich—they have no meaning to their lives. Your real résumé is just a catalog of all your suffering. If I ask you to describe your real life to yourself, and you look back from your deathbed at the interesting things you’ve done, it’s all going to be around the sacrifices you made, the hard things you did.
If you want to make the maximum amount of money possible, if you want to get rich over your life in a deterministically predictable way, stay on the bleeding edge of trends and study technology, design, and art—become really good at something. [1]
You don’t get rich by spending your time to save money. You get rich by saving your time to make money.
Judgment is underrated. [1]
My definition of wisdom is knowing the long-term consequences of your actions. Wisdom applied to external problems is judgment. They’re highly linked; knowing the long-term consequences of your actions and then making the right decision to capitalize on that. [78]
The direction you’re heading in matters more than how fast you move, especially with leverage. Picking the direction you’re heading in for every decision is far, far more important than how much force you apply. Just pick the right direction to start walking in, and start walking. [1]
The good news is, the moment of suffering—when you’re in pain—is a moment of truth. It is a moment where you’re forced to embrace reality the way it actually is. Then, you can make meaningful change and progress. You can only make progress when you’re starting with the truth.
The hard thing is seeing the truth. To see the truth, you have to get your ego out of the way because your ego doesn’t want to face the truth. The smaller you can make your ego, the less conditioned you can make your reactions, the less desires you can have about the outcome you want, the easier it will be to see the reality.
The more desire I have for something to work out a certain way, the less likely I am to see the truth. Especially in business, if something isn’t going well, I try to acknowledge it publicly and I try to acknowledge it publicly in front of my co-founders and friends and co-workers.
“Tension is who you think you should be. Relaxation is who you are.” —Buddhist saying
Any belief you took in a package (ex. Democrat, Catholic, American) is suspect and should be re-evaluated from base principles.
I try not to have too much I’ve pre-decided. I think creating identities and labels locks you in and keeps you from seeing the truth.
There are no permanent solutions in a dynamic system.
I love the blog Farnam Street because it really focuses on helping you be more accurate, an overall better decision-maker. Decision-making is everything. [4]
Blog
The best mental models I have found came through evolution, game theory, and Charlie Munger.
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Author and trader Nassim Taleb has great mental models. Benjamin Franklin had great mental models. I basically load my head full of mental models. [4]
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Mental models are really just compact ways for you to recall your own knowledge. [78]
Evolution, thermodynamics, information theory, and complexity have explanatory and predictive power in many aspects of life. [11]
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don’t believe I have the ability to say what is going to work. Rather, I try to eliminate what’s not going to work. I think being successful is just about not making mistakes. It’s not about having correct judgment. It’s about avoiding incorrect judgments. [4]
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was really into complexity theory back in the mid-90s. The more I got into it, the more I understand the limits of our knowledge and the limits of our prediction capability.
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think basic mathematics is really underrated. If you’re going to make money, if you’re going to invest money, your basic math should be really good. You don’t need to learn geometry, trigonometry, calculus, or any of the complicated stuff if you’re just going into business. But you want arithmetic, probability, and statistics. Those are extremely important.
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If it doesn’t make falsifiable predictions, it’s not science. For you to believe something is true, it should have predictive power, and it must be falsifiable. [11]
Should I marry this person? Should I take this job? Should I buy this house? Should I move to this city? Should I go into business with this person? If you cannot decide, the answer is no.
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If you’re evenly split on a difficult decision, take the path more painful in the short term.
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most of the gains in life come from suffering in the short term so you can get paid in the long term.
Reading science, math, and philosophy one hour per day will likely put you at the upper echelon of human success within seven years.
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