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October 30 - December 30, 2024
Getting rich is about knowing what to do, who to do it with, and when to do it.
Money is how we transfer wealth. Money is social credits. It is the ability to have credits and debits of other people’s time.
So, technology is the set of things, as Alan Kay said, that don’t quite work yet [correction:
if you want to be wealthy, you want to figure out which one of those things you can provide for society that it does not yet know how to get but it will want and providing it is natural to you, within your skill set, and within your capabilities.
Robert Cialdini,
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“Escape competition through authenticity.” Basically, when you’re competing with people, it’s because you’re copying them. It’s because you’re trying to do the same thing. But every human is different. Don’t copy. [78]
Intentions don’t matter. Actions do. That’s why being ethical is hard.
I say this because you should be very thoughtful and realize in most things (relationships, work, even in learning) what you’re trying to do is find the thing you can go all-in on to earn compound interest.
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 meaning to you—go all-in and forget about the rest. [10]
Embrace accountability and take business risks under your own name. Society will reward you with responsibility, equity, and leverage.
Clear accountability is important. Without accountability, you don’t have incentives. Without accountability, you can’t build credibility. But you take risks. You risk failure. You risk humiliation. You risk failure under your own name.
It’s ownership versus wage work. If you are paid for renting out your time, even lawyers and doctors, you can make some money, but you’re not going to make the money that gives you financial freedom. You’re not going to have passive income where a business is earning for you while you are on vacation. [10]
You have to work up to the point where you can own equity in a business.
Everybody who really makes money at some point owns a piece of a product, a business, or some IP.
But usually, the real wealth is created by starting your own companies or even by investing. In an investment firm, they’re buying equity.
The year I generated the most wealth for myself was actually the year I worked the least hard and cared the least about the future.
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 get rewarded by society for giving it what it wants and doesn’t know how to get elsewhere.
Whenever you can in life, optimize for independence rather than pay.
With a leveraged worker, judgment is far more important than how much time they put in or how hard they work.
See @ID_AA_Carmack, @notch, Satoshi Nakamoto, etc.
read about them
You want to get into a leveraged job where you control your own time and you’re tracked on the outputs.
The higher the creativity component of a profession, the more likely it is to have disconnected inputs and outputs.
Learn to sell, learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable.
Earn with your mind, not your time.
notice what is required from the developer: a very high level of accountability.
The developer takes on more risk, more accountability, has more leverage, and needs to have more specific knowledge.
You start as a salaried employee. But you want to work your way up to try and get higher leverage, more accountability, and specific knowledge. The combination of those over a long period of time with the magic of compound interest will make you wealthy. [74]
I would love to be paid purely for my judgment, not for any work. I want a robot, capital, or computer to do the work, but I want to be paid for my judgment. [1]
We waste our time with short-term thinking and busywork. Warren Buffett spends a year deciding and a day acting. That act lasts decades.
Always factor your time into every decision. How much time does it take? It’s going to take you an hour to get across town to get something. If you value yourself at one hundred dollars an hour, that’s basically throwing one hundred dollars out of your pocket. Are you going to do that? [78]
if you can outsource something or not do something for less than your hourly rate, outsource it or don’t do it.
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.
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.
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 good to be in a smaller company early because there’s less of an infrastructure to prevent early promotion. [76]
To get rich without getting lucky, we want to be deterministic. We don’t want to leave it to chance. [78]
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.
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.
Everybody wants to get rich immediately, but the world is an efficient place; immediate doesn’t work.
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]
Your real résumé is just a catalog of all your suffering.
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.
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]
That will give you the time and the energy to pursue your own internal peace and happiness.
I believe the solution to making everybody happy is to give them what they want.
You don’t get rich by spending your time to save money. You get rich by saving your time to make money.
My definition of wisdom is knowing the long-term consequences of your actions. Wisdom applied to external problems is judgment.
