More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
December 2 - December 15, 2021
If you go to the library and there’s a book you cannot understand, you have to dig down and say, “What is the foundation required for me to learn this?”
You can only achieve mastery in one or two things. It’s usually things you’re obsessed about. [74]
When you’re dating, the instant you know this relationship is not going to be the one that leads to marriage, you should probably move on. When you’re studying something, like a geography or history class, and you realize you are never going to use the information, drop the class. It’s a waste of time. It’s a waste of your brain energy. I’m not saying don’t do the 99 percent, because it’s very hard to identify what the 1 percent is. What I’m saying is: when you find the 1 percent of your discipline which will not be wasted, which you’ll be able to invest in for the rest of your life and has
...more
Follow your intellectual curiosity more than whatever is “hot” right now. If your curiosity ever leads you to a place where society eventually wants to go, you’ll get paid extremely well. [3]
You are waiting for your moment when something emerges in the world, they need a skill set, and you’re uniquely qualified. You build your brand in the meantime on Twitter, on YouTube, and by giving away free work. You make a name for yourself, and you take some risk in the process. When it is time to move on the opportunity, you can do so with leverage—the maximum leverage possible. [1]
Coding, writing books, recording podcasts, tweeting, YouTubing—these kinds of things are permissionless. You don’t need anyone’s permission to do them, and that’s why they are very egalitarian. They’re great equalizers of leverage. [78] Every great software developer, for example, now has an army of robots working for him at nighttime while he or she sleeps, after they’ve written the code, and it’s cranking away. [78]
If you have specific knowledge, you have accountability and you have leverage; they have to pay you what you’re worth. If they pay you what you’re worth, then you can get your time back—you can be hyper-efficient. You’re not doing meetings for meetings’ sake, you’re not trying to impress other people, you’re not writing things down to make it look like you did work. All you care about is the actual work itself. When you do just the actual work itself, you’ll be far more productive, far more efficient. You’ll work when you feel like it—when you’re high-energy—and you won’t be trying to struggle
...more
Real estate agent is a job with input and output disconnected. Building any product and selling any product fits this description. And fundamentally, what else is there? Where you don’t necessarily want to be is a support role, like customer service. In customer service, unfortunately, inputs and outputs relate relatively close to each other, and the hours you put in matter. [10] Tools and leverage create this disconnection between inputs and outputs. The higher the creativity component of a profession, the more likely it is to have disconnected inputs and outputs. If you’re looking at
...more
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
I think every human should aspire to being knowledgeable about certain things and being paid for our unique knowledge. We have as much leverage as is possible in our business, whether it’s through robots or computers or what have you. Then, we can be masters of our own time because we are just being tracked on outputs and not inputs.
Just from being marginally better, like running a quarter mile a fraction of a second faster, some people get paid a lot more—orders of magnitude more. Leverage magnifies those differences even more. Being at the extreme in your art is very important in the age of leverage. [2]
Value your time at an hourly rate, and ruthlessly spend to save time at that rate. You will never be worth more than you think you’re worth.
you can hire someone to do it for less than your hourly rate, hire them. That even includes things like cooking. You may want to eat your healthy home cooked meals, but if you can outsource it, do that instead. [78]
Set a very high hourly aspirational rate for yourself and stick to it. It should seem and feel absurdly high. If it doesn’t, it’s not high enough. Whatever you picked, my advice to you would be to raise it. Like I said, for myself, even before I had money, for the longest time I used $5,000 an hour. And if you extrapolate that out into what it looks like as an annual salary, it’s multiple millions of dollars per year. Ironically, I actually think I’ve beaten it. I’m not the hardest working person—I’m actually a lazy person. I work through bursts of energy where I’m really motivated with
...more
Be optimistic, be positive. It’s important. Optimists actually do better in the long run. [10]
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.
If you’re going to live in a city for ten years, if you’re going to be in a job for five years, if you’re in a relationship for a decade, you should be spending one to two years deciding these things. These are highly dominating decisions. Those three decisions really matter.
What are one or two steps you’d take to surround yourself with successful people? Figure out what you’re good at, and start helping other people with it. Give it away. Pay it forward. Karma works because people are consistent. On a long enough timescale, you will attract what you project. But don’t measure—your patience will run out if you count. [7] An old boss once warned: “You’ll never be rich since you’re obviously smart, and someone will always offer you a job that’s just good enough.”
What you really want is freedom. You want freedom from your money problems, right? I think that’s okay. Once you can solve your money problems, either by lowering your lifestyle or by making enough money, you want to retire. Not retirement at sixty-five years old, sitting in a nursing home collecting a check retirement—it’s a different definition. 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
...more
I’m always “working.” 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]
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 to keep upgrading your lifestyle as you make money. But if you can hold your lifestyle fixed and hopefully make your money in giant lump sums as opposed to a trickle at a time, you won’t have time
...more
If you’re not getting promoted through the ranks, it gets a lot harder to catch up later in life. It’s good to be in a smaller company early because there’s less of an infrastructure to prevent early promotion. [76]
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 skilled in a field, you will notice when a lucky break happens in your field, and other people who aren’t attuned to it won’t notice. So, you become
...more
To get rich without getting lucky, we want to be deterministic. We don’t want to leave it to chance. [78]
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.
You cannot hide anything from yourself. Your own failures are written within your psyche, and they are obvious to you. If you have too many of these moral shortcomings, you will not respect yourself. The worst outcome in this world is not having self-esteem. If you don’t love yourself, who will?
Be Patient One thing I figured out later in life is generally (at least in the tech business in Silicon Valley), great people have great outcomes. You just have to be patient. Every person I met at the beginning of my career twenty years ago, where I looked at them and said, “Wow, that guy or gal is super capable—so smart and dedicated”…all of them, almost without exception, became extremely successful. You just had to give them a long enough timescale. It never happens in the timescale you want, or they want, but it does happen. [4]
Everybody wants to get rich immediately, but the world is an efficient place; immediate doesn’t work. You do have to put in the time. You do have to put in the hours, and so I think you have to put yourself in the position with the specific knowledge, with accountability, with leverage, with the authentic skill set you have, to be the best in the world at what you do. You have to enjoy it and keep doing it, keep doing it, and keep doing it. Don’t keep track, and don’t keep count because if you do, you will run out of time. [78]
The only way to truly learn something is by doing it. Yes, listen to guidance. But don’t wait. [3]
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.
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.
What making money will do is solve your money problems. It will remove a set of things that could get in the way of being happy, but it is not going to make you happy. I know many very wealthy people who are unhappy. Most of the time, the person you have to become to make money is a high-anxiety, high-stress, hard-working, competitive person. When you have done that for twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years, and you suddenly make money, you can’t turn it off. You’ve trained yourself to be a high-anxiety person. Then, you have to learn how to be happy. [11]
Let’s get you rich first. I’m very practical about it because, you know, Buddha was a prince. He started off really rich, then he got to go off in the woods. In the old days, if you wanted to be peaceful inside, you would become a monk. You would give up everything, renounce sex, children, money, politics, science, technology, everything, and you would go out in the woods by yourself. You had to give everything up to be free inside. Today, with this wonderful invention called money, you can store it in a bank account. You can work really hard, do great things for society, and society will give
...more
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]
Hard work is really overrated. How hard you work matters a lot less in the modern economy. What is underrated? Judgment. Judgment is underrated. [1] Can you define judgment? 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] In an age of leverage, one correct decision can win everything. Without hard work, you’ll develop neither judgment nor leverage. You have to put in the time, but
...more
How to Think Clearly “Clear thinker” is a better compliment than “smart.” Real knowledge is intrinsic, and it’s built from the ground up. To use a math example, you can’t understand trigonometry without understanding arithmetic and geometry. Basically, if someone is using a lot of fancy words and a lot of big concepts, they probably don’t know what they’re talking about. I think the smartest people can explain things to a child. If you can’t explain it to a child, then you don’t know it. It’s a common saying and it’s very true.
Richard Feynman very famously does this in “Six Easy Pieces,” one of his early physics lectures. He basically explains mathematics in three pages. He starts from the number line—counting—and then he goes all the way up to precalculus. He just builds it up through an unbroken chain of logic. He doesn’t rely on any definitions. The really smart thinkers are clear thinkers. They understand the basics at a very, very fundamental level. I would rather understand the basics really well than memorize all kinds of complicated concepts I can’t stitch together and can’t rederive from the basics. If you
...more
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
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. What we wish to be true clouds our perception of what is true. Suffering is the moment when we can no longer deny reality. Imagine we’re going through something difficult like a breakup, a job loss, a business failure, or a health problem, and our friends are advising us.
...more
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
What you feel tells you nothing about the facts—it merely tells you something about your estimate of the facts.
It’s actually really important to have empty space. If you don’t have a day or two every week in your calendar where you’re not always in meetings, and you’re not always busy, then you’re not going to be able to think. You’re not going to be able to have good ideas for your business. You’re not going to be able to make good judgments. I also encourage taking at least one day a week (preferably two, because if you budget two, you’ll end up with one) where you just have time to think. It’s only after you’r...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Very smart people tend to be weird since they insist on thinking everything through for themselves.
“Tension is who you think you should be. Relaxation is who you are.” —Buddhist saying You absolutely need habits to function. You cannot solve every problem in life as if it is the first time it’s thrown at you. We accumulate all these habits. We put them in the bundle of identity, ego, ourselves, and then we get attached to them. “I’m Naval. This is the way I am.”
There are two attractive lessons about suffering in the long term. It can make you accept the world the way it is. The other lesson is it can make your ego change in an extremely hard way.
Learn the Skills of Decision-Making The classical virtues are all decision-making heuristics to make one optimize for the long term rather than for the short term. [11]
Radical honesty just means I want to be free. Part of being free means I can say what I think and think what I say. They’re highly congruent and integrated. Theoretical physicist Richard Feynman famously said, “You should never, ever fool anybody, and you are the easiest person to fool.” The moment you tell somebody something dishonest, you’ve lied to yourself. Then you’ll start believing your own lie, which will disconnect you from reality and take you down the wrong road.
Yes. Decision-making is everything. In fact, someone who makes decisions right 80 percent of the time instead of 70 percent of the time will be valued and compensated in the market hundreds of times more.
If you can be more right and more rational, you’re going to get nonlinear returns in your life. 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] The more you know, the less you diversify.
I use my tweets and other people’s tweets as maxims that help compress my own learnings and recall them. The brain space is finite—you have finite neurons—so you can almost think of these as pointers, addresses, or mnemonics to help you remember deep-seated principles where you have the underlying experience to back it up.
Mental models are really just compact ways for you to recall your own knowledge. [78]
In the intellectual domain, compound interest rules. When you look at a business with one hundred users growing at a compound rate of 20 percent per month, it can very, very quickly stack up to having millions of users. Sometimes, even the founders of these companies are surprised by how large the business scales. [10]
If you can’t decide, the answer is no. If I’m faced with a difficult choice, such as: 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. And the reason is, modern society is full of options. There are tons and tons of options. We live on a planet of seven billion people, and we are connected to everybody on the internet. There are hundreds of thousands of careers available to you. There are so many choices. You’re biologically not built to realize how many
...more
