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.

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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.

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Pick business partners with high intelligence, energy, and, above all, integrity. ↓ Don’t partner with cynics and pessimists. Their beliefs are self-fulfilling. ↓ Learn to sell. Learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable. ↓ Arm yourself with specific knowledge, accountability, and leverage.

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Specific knowledge is knowledge 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.

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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. ↓ “Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand, and I will move the earth.” —Archimedes

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Fortunes require leverage. Business leverage comes from capital, people, and 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 and blogs, record videos and podcasts. ↓ Leverage is a force multiplier for your judgment. ↓ Judgment 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, psychology, persuasion, ethics, mathematics, and computers.

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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.

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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. Those are 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 it wasn’t what you were seeking in the first place. But that is for another day.

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What’s the difference between wealth and money? Money is how we transfer wealth. Money is social credits. It is the ability to have credits and debits of other people’s time. If I do my job right, if I create value for society, society says, “Oh, thank you. We owe you something in the future for the work you did in the past. Here’s a little IOU. Let’s call that money.” Wealth is the thing you want. Wealth is assets that earn while you sleep. Wealth is the factory, the robots, cranking out things. Wealth is the computer program that’s running at night, serving other customers. Wealth is even money in the bank that is being reinvested into other assets, and into other businesses.

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Sales skills are a form of specific knowledge.

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No one can compete with you on being you. Most of life is a search for who and what needs you the most.

Society, business, & money are downstream of technology, which is itself downstream of science. Science applied is the engine of humanity. Corollary: Applied Scientists are the most powerful people in the world. This will be more obvious in the coming years.

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The best jobs are neither decreed nor degreed. They are creative expressions of continuous learners in free markets.

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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. You just have to set a very high personal hourly rate and you have to stick to it. Even when I was young, I just decided I was worth a lot more than the market thought I was worth, and I started treating myself that way. 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.

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Wealth creation is an evolutionarily recent positive-sum game. Status is an old zero-sum game. Those attacking wealth creation are often just seeking status.

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Status is a zero-sum game. It’s a very old game. We’ve been playing it since monkey tribes. It’s hierarchical. Who’s number one? Who’s number two? Who’s number three? And for number three to move to number two, number two has to move out of that slot. So, status is a zero-sum game. Politics is an example of a status game. Even sports are an example of a status game. To be the winner, there must be a loser. I don’t fundamentally love status games.

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What is the most important thing to do for younger people starting out?

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Spend more time making the big decisions. There are basically three really big decisions you make in your early life: where you live, who you’re with, and what you do. We spend very little time deciding which relationship to get into. We spend so much time in a job, but we spend so little time deciding which job to get into. Choosing what city to live in can almost completely determine the trajectory of your life, but we spend so little time trying to figure out what city to live in.

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What is your definition of retirement? Retirement is when you stop sacrificing today for an imaginary tomorrow. When today is complete, in and of itself, you’re retired.

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How do you get there? Well, one way is to have so much money saved that your passive income (without you lifting a finger) covers your burn rate. A second is you just drive your burn rate down to zero—you become a monk.

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A third is you’re doing something you love. You enjoy it so much, it’s not about the money. So there ar...This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.

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I’m always “working.” It looks like work to others, but it feels like play to me. And that’s how I 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]

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“If thoughts come, thoughts come. I’m not going to fight them. I’m not going to embrace them. I’m not going to think harder about them. I’m not going to reject them. I’m just going to sit here for an hour with my eyes closed, and I’m going to do nothing.” How hard is that? Why can you not do anything for an hour? What’s so hard about giving yourself an hour-long break? [74]

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I don’t believe in specific goals. Scott Adams famously said, “Set up systems, not goals.” Use your judgment to figure out what kinds of environments you can thrive in, and then create an environment around you so you’re statistically likely to succeed.

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Absolutely. I think that’s why the smartest and the most successful people I know started out as losers. If you view yourself as a loser, as someone who was cast out by society and has no role in normal society, then you will do your own thing and you’re much more likely to find a winning path. It helps to start out by saying, “I’m never going to be popular. I’m never going to be accepted. I’m already a loser. I’m not going to get what all the other kids have. I’ve just got to be happy being me.”

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If you had to pass down to your kids one or two principles, what would they be? Number one: read. Read everything you can. And not just the stuff that society tells you is good or even books that I tell you to read. Just read for its own sake. Develop a love for it. Even if you have to read romance novels or paperbacks or comic books. There’s no such thing as junk. Just read it all. Eventually, you’ll guide yourself to the things that you should and want to be reading.

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Related to the skill of reading are the skills of mathematics and persuasion. Both skills help you to navigate through the real world. Having the skill of persuasion is important because if you can influence your fellow human beings, you can get a lot done. I think persuasion is an actual skill. So you can learn it, and it’s not that hard to do so. Mathematics helps with all the complex and difficult things in life. If you want to make money, if you want to do science, if you want to understand game theory or politics or economics or investments or computers, all of these things have mathematics at the core. It’s a foundational language of nature.

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My old definition was “freedom to.” Freedom to do anything I want. Freedom to do whatever I feel like, whenever I feel like. Now, the freedom I’m looking for is internal freedom. It’s “freedom from.” Freedom from reaction. Freedom from feeling angry. Freedom from being sad. Freedom from being forced to do things. I’m looking for “freedom from,” internally and externally, whereas before I was looking for “freedom to.” [4]