- 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 that 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 how to build. Learn how to sell.
If you can do both, you will be unstoppable.
- Arm yourself with:
• Specific knowledge
• Accountability
• Leverage
- Specific knowledge is knowledge that 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.
• When specific knowledge is taught, it’s through apprenticeships, not schools.
• 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.
The most accountable people have singular, public, and risky brands:
• @Oprah
• @elonmusk
• @realDonaldTrump
- “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
• 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
• Write blogs
• Record videos
• Record podcasts
- Leverage is a force multiplier for your judgement.
- Judgement 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
• Mathematics
• Psychology
• Computers
• Persuasion
• Ethics
- 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.
That's 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 that it wasn't what you were seeking in the first place.
But that's for another day.