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Started reading
July 17, 2023
Compound interest is a very powerful concept.
Compounding in business relationships is very important.
The people who have the ability to fail in public under their own names actually gain a lot of power.
but generally, people will forgive failures as long as you were honest and made a high-integrity effort. There’s not really that much to fear in terms of failure, and so people should take on a lot more accountability than they do. [78]
If you don’t own a piece of a business, you don’t have a path towards financial freedom.
Following your genuine intellectual curiosity is a better foundation for a career than following whatever is making money right now. [11]
By doing things for their own sake, I did them at their best. [74]
You get rewarded by society for giving it what it wants and doesn’t know how to get elsewhere.
Code is probably the most powerful form of permissionless leverage.
Whenever you can in life, optimize for independence rather than pay. If you have independence and you’re accountable on your output, as opposed to your input—that’s the dream. [10]
Inputs don’t match outputs, especially for leveraged workers.
What you want in life is to be in control of your time.
Learn to sell, learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable.
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.
No one is going to value you more than you value yourself.
Set a very high hourly aspirational rate for yourself and stick to it.
Optimists actually do better in the long run. [10]
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.
There are basically three really big decisions you make in your early life: where you live, who you’re with, and what you do.
Agreed
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.”
would rather be a failed entrepreneur than someone who never tried. Because even a failed entrepreneur has the skill set to make it on their own. [14]
Any end goal will just lead to another goal, lead to another goal. We just play games in life. When you grow up, you’re playing the school game, or you’re playing the social game. Then you’re playing the money game, and then you’re playing the status game. These games just have longer and longer and longerlived horizons.
I want to be off the hedonic treadmill. [1]
Me too
Retirement is when you stop sacrificing today for an imaginary tomorrow.
Art is creativity. Art is anything done for its own sake. What are the things that are done for their own sake, and there’s nothing behind them?
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]
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.
Think about who you will work with and what those people are going on to do. [76]
One of the things I think is important to make money is having a reputation that makes people do deals through you.
If someone is talking a lot about how honest they are, they’re probably dishonest.
Your own failures are written within your psyche, and they are obvious to you.
I think you just have to be very careful about doing things you are fundamentally not going to be proud of, because they will damage you. The first time someone acts this way, I will warn them. By the way, nobody changes. Then I just distance myself from them. I cut them out of my life. I just have this saying inside my head: “The closer you want to get to me, the better your values have to be.” [4]
Your real résumé is just a catalog of all your suffering.
Money buys you freedom in the material world.
In an age of leverage, one correct decision can win everything.
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 problem is their desire is colliding with reality and pre-venting them from seeing the truth, no matter how much you say
praise specifically, criticize generally.
If you have a criticism of someone, then don’t criticize the person—criticize the general approach or criticize the class of activities. If you have to praise somebody, then always try and find the person who is the best example of what you’re praising and praise the person, specifically.
The more closely you can tie someone’s compensation to the exact value they’re creating, the more you turn them into a principal, and the less you turn them into an agent. [12]
If you have two choices to make, and they’re relatively equal choices, take the path more difficult and more painful in the short term. What’s actually going on is one of these paths requires short-term pain. And the other path leads to pain further out in the future. And what your brain is doing through conflict-avoidance is trying to push off the short-term pain.
The means of learning are abundant—it’s the desire to learn that is scarce. [3]
Mathematics is a solid foundation.
If you’re a perpetual learning machine, you will never be out of options for how to make money. You can always see what’s coming up in society, what the value is, where the demand is, and you can learn to come up to speed. [74]
To think clearly, understand the basics. If you’re memorizing advanced concepts without being able to re-derive them as needed, you’re lost.
I’m sure you’re stuck on something right now—it’s page 332, you can’t go any further, but you know you should finish the book. So what do you do? You give up reading books for a while.
So True
Any book that survived for two thousand years has been filtered through many people. The general principles are more likely to be correct. I wanted to get back into reading these sorts of books. [6]
Happiness is the state when nothing is missing.
If you believe it’s a choice, you can start working on it. [77]
What it means is every second you have on this planet is very precious, and it’s your responsibility to make sure you’re happy and interpreting everything in the best possible way. [9]
