Wealth is assets that earn while you sleep to buy your freedom: the purpose of wealth is freedom and being a sovereign individual, not fur coats or Ferraris. Money is social credits and control over people’s time. While wealth is a positive-sum game as we create things together, status is a zero-sum game as it's hierarchical. To be the winner, there must be a loser. To win at a status game, you have to put somebody else down, and that’s why you should avoid status games in your life. People creating wealth will always be attacked by people playing status games. Ethical wealth creation makes abundance for the world and swords, guns, taxes, crony capitalism, communism are different methods to steal. There are more parasites than there are non-parasitical organisms. Everyone can be rich: a poor modern French person is richer than Louis XIV thanks to wealth creation. Capitalism is good but it gets hijacked by too many communist takers. We need symbiotes, not parasites. We need a free market, not monopolies nor communism nor cronyism.
You shouldn't make money out of luck but out of skill. Wealth stacks up one chip at a time, not all at once. Build a trusted, reliable, high-integrity, long-term thinking deal maker reputation so that strangers are more likely to approach you. Extreme people get extreme results. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. You won't get rich renting out your time but by owning equity. Seek a career where your inputs don’t match your outputs. Tools and leverage are what create this disconnection between inputs and outputs. Creativity is the highest leverage activity. People who are living far below their means enjoy a freedom that people busy upgrading their lifestyles just can’t fathom. The most dangerous things are heroin and a monthly salary because they are highly addictive. Society will pay you for creating what it wants and delivering it at scale. Entrepreneurship is creating something new from scratch, predicting that society will want it, and then figuring out how to scale it in a profitable self-sustaining way. Internet is a superpower that connects everybody and allows you to scale any niche obsession. Escape competition through authenticity.
Play long-term games with long-term people, we’re all baking the pie together. Every time you switch of industry or location or group, you're starting over from scratch. As trust goes up, friction goes down. Get traction and don't let go. Only partner with intelligent, energetic, and honest people for whom motivation comes intrinsically. Don’t partner with cynics and pessimists who have given up on themselves, partner with rational optimists. Optimism upside is unlimited.
Everything can be learned but the most interesting things cannot be taught. Specific knowledge is found by pursuing your innate talents, your genuine curiosity, and your passion. Build specific knowledge that feels like play to you. Specific knowledge is on the edge and highly creative or technical. Follow your obsession. Being good at both building and selling is a superpower. People who understand the underlying product and how to build it and can sell it, not the other way around. Read what you love until you love to read. The means of learning are abundant but the desire to learn is scarce. Mathematics and logic are the basis for understanding everything else. It’s better to read a great book slowly than to fly through a hundred books quickly. If you’re good with computers, if you’re good at basic mathematics, if you’re good at writing, if you’re good at speaking, and if you like reading, you’re set for life. Doing is better and faster than watching, reader is better and faster than listening.
People who are stamping their names on things aren’t foolish but confident. Without accountability, you don’t have incentives and can't build credibility. Accountability gives you leverage and credibility while making you less replaceable. Employees get the most security, but in exchange they don't have that much upsides. Labor and capital aren't the best leverages anymore, product and media are because they are permissionless. The best products tend to be targeted at the middle class. Creating wealth with product leads to more ethical wealth. If you care about ethics in wealth creation, it is better to create your wealth using code and media as leverage because then those products are equally available to everybody. Network effect businesses are natural monopolies. People who want to communicate on the Internet are forced to speak English because the largest community of people on the Internet speaks English.
In an age of nearly infinite leverage, judgment is the most important skill. Judgment is knowing the long-term consequences of your actions. Without experience, judgment is worse than useless because the real world is always far more complex than we can intellectualize. The thing that prevents you from seeing what’s actually happening are your emotions that cloud your judgment. Don't read investment books, study everything and philosophy in particular to become more stoic.
No one is going to value you more than you value you, set a high personal hourly rate, stick to it, and outsource everything costing less than that if possible: cooking, cleaning, gardening, etc. If you want wealth, make it your only priority and set a absurdly high hourly rate. What you work on and who you work with are more important than how hard your work. Raise the bar no matter how high it is and don't work more than 80 hours a week. Be impatient with actions and patient with results. Coffee breaks and meeting are good for building relationships but not to save time, cut both ruthlessly. Only accept meetings that are either life-and-death urgent or with a strict agenda and proof of work. You are not going to make it by networking, free your mind instead.
Keep redefining what you do until you’re the best in the world at it. Your objective and skills should converge to make you number one. Competition is besides the point and counterproductive: nobody can compete with you on being you. In entrepreneurship, the masses are never right. Adding more complexity to your decision-making process gets you a worse answer, pick the single biggest thing or two. Most advice is people giving you their winning lottery ticket numbers, listen to everyone but make up your own mind.
Wealth and money isn't what you actually seek, you seek a calm mind, a fit body, and a house full of love. Get rich quick schemes are just someone else getting rich off you. Don't trust people that are trying to make money off of you. Productize yourself, figure out what you’re uniquely good at and apply as much leverage as possible. Find three hobbies: one that makes you money, one that makes you fit, and one that makes you smarter.
Accountability means you have to be willing to let people criticize you. Don’t refuse to do things just because others can’t do them. Realize your philanthropic vision by running a business. Many non-profit efforts would be better off as for-profit financially sustainable companies. If you are working a 9-to-5 job at a big company and don't feel like starting your own yet, try to manage more capital, products, media, and communities instead of managing other people, or join a small organization to have more accountability and visibility overall. Long-term business is about trust and ethics as they are prerequisites for cooperative compounded interests. The longer your time horizon, the wiser you’re going to seem to everybody around you. Ruining your reputation is the same as getting wiped to zero. If you think and act like an owner, it’s only a matter of time until you become one. If you want to do something right, do it yourself, because other people just don’t care enough. When you do deals, it’s better to have the same incentives. If you’re an employee, your most important job is to think like a principal.
If someone is taking advantage of you in a negotiation because you want it badly, your best option is to turn it from a short-term game into a long-term game: make it a repeat game, bring reputation in the negotiation, include other people and the future. Contractors are less likely to rip you off if you have several projects and friends in the same situation. It’s better to have a few compounding relationships than many shallow ones. It takes just as much effort to create a small business as it does to create a large one: both owners are working 80 hours a week.
Price discrimination is important, you can charge people based on their propensity to pay by just throwing in a little extra for the highest payers. Price discrimination works because rich people are willing to pay more to signal they’re rich. Consumer surplus means people are willing to pay more than what companies charge.
To find the time to invest in yourself, rent your time to learn learn something that hasn't been figured out yet or find the part of regular jobs with the steepest learning curve to avoid repetition and automation. Develop a founder mentality by caring unlike most employees. Combine timeless skills like persuasion with timely skills like technology. The best engineers aren’t the hardest workers but to ones who ship that one critical product at just the right time. Specific knowledge comes on the job, not in a classroom.