- 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 to sell. Learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable.Arm yourself with specific knowledge, accountability, and 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, Trump, Kanye, Elon.
- "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, 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 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, psychology, persuasion, ethics, mathematics, and computers.
- 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.