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If you have nothing in your life, but you have at least one person that loves you unconditionally, it’ll do wonders for your self-esteem. [8]
Books make for great friends, because the best thinkers of the last few thousand years tell you their nuggets of wisdom. [8]
Making money is not a thing you do—it’s a skill you learn.
Getting rich is about knowing what to do, who to do it with, and when to do it.
If you don’t know yet what you should work on, the most important thing is to figure it out. You should not grind at a lot of hard work until you figure out what you should be working on.
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 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 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.
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.
“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 judgment.
Judgment 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. Those are 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 it wasn’t what you were seeking in the first place. But that is for another day. [11]
Productize Yourself
Technology democratizes consumption but consolidates production. The best person in the world at anything gets to do it for everyone.
Society will pay you for creating things it wants. But society doesn’t yet know how to create those things, because if it did, they wouldn’t need you. They would already be stamped out.
Specific knowledge cannot be taught, but it can be learned.
When I talk about specific knowledge, I mean figure out what you were doing as a kid or teenager almost effortlessly. Something you didn’t even consider a skill, but people around you noticed. Your mother or your best friend growing up would know.
Examples of what your specific knowledge could be: Sales skills Musical talents, with the ability to pick up any instrument An obsessive personality: you dive into things and remember them quickly Love for science fiction: you were into reading sci-fi, which means you absorb a lot of knowledge very quickly Playing a lot of games, you understand game theory pretty well Go...
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No one can compete with you on being you.
Most of life is a search for who and what needs you the most.
