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Have strong motivations to beat the tough reality.

Money is made on information.
- Be careful of information sources, people around you.
- Pay ppl well, smarter than you in technical areas.

Invest w limited & manageable risks in sth w lasting assets after the initial investment return, not just profits.

Be smarter than money; Dictate it to make more money.

Copy heroes; negotiate like Trumps, invest like Buffet.

#obstacles for non-abundant asset columns

- fear: Everyone wants to go to heaven, but no one wants to die. Don't be afraid of losing.
- cynicism: Cynics criticize, and winners analyze.
- busy laziness: "how can I afford it?"
- bad habits: pay yourself first then pay others with pressures
- arrogance: What I know makes me money. What I don’t know loses me money.

Tip: a great property manager > a real estate agent

#6

What to learn? Know a little about a lot.
The higher specialized, the more trapped. But if so, then unionize.

- Leadership: If you’re not a good leader, you’ll get shot in the back, just like they do in business.
- Management of cash flow, systems, people.
- Sales & marketing: Communicate with human beings.
- Be both a good teacher and good student.
- Give, and you shall receive. Not the other way around.

#5
Rich invent money with the most timely information. Seize an opportunity created by a market.

Now, the working-hard-to-earn method would feel riskier and harder. Time is one of your greatest assets.

It is not gambling if you know what you’re doing.
To do so, you need to be financially intelligent:
- Find an opportunity that everyone else missed.
- Raise money.
- Organize smarter people than you are.

#4
Tax system violates their initial purpose of punishing rich for more money, eventually levied on middle class & poor.

Rich find a way to escape the BS; corporates.
To fight confidently, you have to be right with a right knowledge; financial IQ, a combination of accounting, investing, understanding markets, laws (tax advantages, protection from lawsuits).

Earn, spend, THEN pay taxes. Don't live on post-taxes.

#3
Keep your day job, but it's meaningless unless you use it to invest in income-generating assets:
• Businesses, NOT requiring my presence. Managed or run by other people. If I have to work there, it’s not a business, but a job.
• Stocks, Bonds, Notes (IOUs)
• Income-generating real estate
• Royalties from IP like patents.
• Anything with value, producing income / appreciates & having a ready market

#2
Keep your money by investing in assets that go into your pocket, and repeat.

Income statement (income & expense) & Balance sheet (asset & liability)
= cash flow that tells how a person handles their money

Middle class acquire liabilities they think are assets. When their income grows, expense grows.
- bigger home, bigger expense
- income (for companies), taxes (for government), mortgage (for banks)

#E

Perfection is not when there is no more to add, but no more to take away.

- Identify the few critical tasks that contribute most (80/20) to income.
- Schedule them with very short and clear deadlines (Parkinson's Law).
= Only 2 mission-critical tasks per day. NO DISTRACTION from start to end for each task.

Batch to reduce setup cost.
Check emails at 12pm, 4pm.
Empower others to act without interrupting you.

Doing unrealistic thing is easier than doing realistic thing. Therefore, don't overestimate competitions.There is just less competition for bigger goals.

Love <> Indifference, Happiness <> Boredom.
Excitement is the more practical synonym for happiness.

Specify what you want to have, be, and do, as detailed as possible and make them actionable NOW. + Dreamlining Sheet

#6

When confused about how many features you need in MVP, simplify.
MVP to "begin" the learning process and to test fundamental business hypotheses.

MVP can be a video, concierge MVP.

A ready-made road map AFTER tons of MVP iterations. Once having it, you might get acquired too.

Public marketing launch once the product has proved itself with real customers.

Commit to MVP iterations. Don't give up.

#4
Task VS Relationship Conflicts

Be a Disagreeable Giver.
Frame a dispute as debate, "Can we debate?"

Have a good fight on How, not Why.

Help them see the limits of their understanding by asking them to unpack the mechanisms -> Ask basic, fundamental questions.

#
Most people will choose unhappiness over uncertainty.

Conquering Fear = Defining Fear.
- assess 0-10 & temporary/permanent impact/risk

Most of the time you can survive with the worst case you imagine. It would be probably better than you think.

#
Prevent Work for Work's sake.

Possession&Time: Too much & too often of them becomes what you don't want.

Focus on being productive instead of busy.

If it's important to you, do it now. Timing is never right.

Far more lucrative and fun to leverage your strength than fixing weakness.

Relative income is a real metric, esp in hour, not year.

Be equally aggressive in removing distress and finding eustress.

#intro
Author's life lol how he quit ordinary paths and failed so many times but also succeeded and found a way for cheat codes

#5

Leaps of faith: Acting as if these assumptions are true.
Confirm that your LOF questions are based in reality.

Success theater
: growing through fund-raising from investors or lots of paid advertising do NOT develop a value-creating product

You cannot understand your business problem unless you go and see for yourself firsthand, not on your whiteboard.

#1

More money will not solve your problem.

Your life is controlled by fear and greed. If you don’t first handle them, and you get rich, you’ll only be a "highly paid slave".

Money is an illusion, like the carrot for the donkey. People believe money is real. Stop chasing it, your paychecks.

Work to learn, even for free. Stop working for money. And use your brain.
You can later make money work for you.

#intro

The poor dad was the more highly educated dad.
Broke is temporary. Poor is eternal.
Thoughts shape your lives.
Exercise your brain to be stronger. It will make money. Avoid mental laziness.

Learn to "manage risk"
House is a liability, and if your house is your largest investment, you’re in trouble.

You don't have to be a multi-millionaire to achieve the following lifestyle:

DEAL framework to be a NEW RICH
- Definition: Life style design
- Elimination: selective ignorance & low-information diet -> Time
- Automation: Income
- Liberation: Location

Employees shall apply as DEL A.

#1
the shorter your sleep, the shorter your life span.

If we still have to keep sleeping one-thirds of our lives despite all the disadvantages we get in survival opportunities (work, eat, socialize) throughout the evolution, it means it's compensating with tremendous benefits it provides.

In fact, there's no single biological function that doesn't benefit from a good night's sleep.

P.S. I like his writing style.

Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop -> minimize the total time through the loop

But reverse-order thinking:

Figure out what to learn -> what to measure -> what to build

#4 Experiment

Identify the elements of the plan that are assumptions rather than facts

1. Value hypothesis
: whether a product really delivers value to customers once they are using it
- avoid survey. They don't assess themselves objectively
2. Growth hypothesis
: how new customers will discover a product & how will it spread?

Measure what the customers actually did with MVP, not your task completion progress

#3

Just learning is an excuse -> Validated Learning

Work = value OR waste
: value to learn what customers want. Else, waste.

Systematically collect real data from customers and figure out the right things to build

Don't waste resources to make ourselves "look" successful

Can this product be built? (X)
Should this product be built?
Can we build a sustainable business around this set of products & services?

#2
Startup = a human institution designed to create a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty
-> Anyone creating a new product/business under conditions of extreme uncertainty is an entrepreneur, regardless of org size

Company's only sustainable path = continuous innovation (requires experiments)

It's a job of leadership to create conditions that enable employees to run experimentation.

#1

"Just do it" attitude doesn't work. Still gotta manage, but in an entrepreneurial way.

Minimize the waste of resources: time, passion, skills

The goal of a startup = "figure out" the right thing to build.

Driving a car vs rocket launch -> drive a startup. React quickly and make constant adjustments while knowing the destination: world-changing business.

Vision -> Strategy (pivot) -> Product (optimization)

# intro

Lean Startup = a new approach to "creating" "continuous" "innovation"

It’s the boring stuff that matters the most. Startup success is not a consequence of good genes or being in the right place at the right time.

# 5 principles
1. Entrepreneurs are everywhere.
2. Entrepreneurship is management.
3. Validated learning
4. Build-Measure-Learn
5. Innovation accounting.

#3-2
Best forecasters in tournaments were those who update their views frequently.
How much rethinking is necessary? Just a few more, but it's unusual.

Few evidences are enough for conclusions but not for revising them.

Change opinions, when facts change. Odds are based on facts.

To be right in a long run, you have to be wrong A LOT in short runs.

When forming an opinion, look for conditions to prove it false.

Different entrepreneurs: Built-to-sell model vs $100 model
: separate from owner's identity
= Freedom is what you define

In some cases: With limited hours to spend on the business, she had to make them count.

45-minute every morning pre-internet-access: make business move forward, not just maintain it

Business health check: monitor with 1-2 key metrics monthly or bi-weekly

Take your skills, activities, and passions to a higher level to create better returns

# hub-and-spoke model = HQ & franchise branches
: The goal for each outpost is to support the work of the home base, not usually the outpost itself.

# partnership or joint venture
: 1+1=3+
+ 1-page agreement

# outsourcing
- can only hire contractors

# affiliate program: high commission -> higher-quality partners

Scaling: horizontal vs vertical. But optional.

Tweaks
# Increase in traffic (attention), conversion (A/B testing with Google Optimizer) with a focus on where users come from, avg sales price (upsell, cross-sell, sales after sale)
# Sell more to existing customers

Service to product, product to service.

a price increase filters some customers away while making up for the loss with higher overall income

No money, no business.

make sure that your recurring activities are as directly tied to making money as possible

Spend the least possible and make the most possible.
- Spend only on things that have a direct relationship to sales

Pricing
- based on the benefits, not based on your efforts.
- a LIMITED range of prices (eg. flight tickets)
= not asking if they want it. which one they want to buy
- recurring