You will get rich by giving society what it wants but does not yet know how to get. At scale.

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.

Learn to sell. Learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable.

Specific knowledge is found by pursuing your genuine curiosity and passion rather than whatever is hot right now.

Leverage is a force multiplier for your judgment.

Reading is faster than listening. Doing is faster than watching.

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.

Become the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until this is true.

This is hard. This is why I say it takes decades—I’m not saying it takes decades to execute, but the better part of a decade may be figuring out what you can uniquely provide.

Technology democratizes consumption but consolidates production. The best person in the world at anything gets to do it for everyone.

So, technology is the set of things, as Alan Kay said, that don’t quite work yet

Once something works, it’s no longer technology. Society always wants new things.

And if you want to be wealthy, you want to figure out which one of those things you can provide for society that it does not yet know how to get but it will want and providing it is natural to you, within your skill set, and within your capabilities.

Examples of what your specific knowledge could be:

The specific knowledge is sort of this weird combination of unique traits from your DNA, your unique upbringing, and your response to it.

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

“Escape competition through authenticity.”

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

The most important skill for getting rich is becoming a perpetual learner.

Intentions don’t matter. Actions do. That’s why being ethical is hard.

when you find the 1 percent of your discipline which will not be wasted, which you’ll be able to invest in for the rest of your life and has meaning to you—go all-in and forget about the rest. [10]

We live in an age of infinite leverage, and the economic rewards for genuine intellectual curiosity have never been higher. [11] Following your genuine intellectual curiosity is a better foundation for a career than following whatever is making money right now. [11]

If it entertains you now but will bore you someday, it’s a distraction. Keep looking.

Follow your intellectual curiosity more than whatever is “hot” right now. If your curiosity ever leads you to a place where society eventually wants to go, you’ll get paid extremely well.

You’re more likely to have skills society does not yet know how to train other people to do. If someone can train other people how to do something, then they can replace you. If they can replace you, then they don’t have to pay you a lot. You want to know how to do something other people don’t know how to do at the time period when those skills are in demand. [1]

Forget rich versus poor, white-collar versus blue. It’s now leveraged versus un-leveraged.

means. We live in an age of leverage. As a worker, you want to be as leveraged as possible so you have a huge impact without as much time or physical effort.

A leveraged worker can out-produce a non-leveraged worker by a factor of one thousand or ten thousand. With a leveraged worker, judgment is far more important than how much time they put in or how hard they work.

What you want in life is to be in control of your time. You want to get into a leveraged job where you control your own time and you’re tracked on the outputs.

Selling doesn’t necessarily just mean selling to individual customers, but it can mean marketing, it can mean communicating, it can mean recruiting, it can mean raising money, it can mean inspiring people, it could mean doing PR. It’s a broad umbrella category.

Earn with your mind, not your time.

I also understand the technology business. I understand how to recruit developers, how to write code, and how to build a good product, and I understand how to raise money from venture capitalists, how to return it, and how all of that works.”

Each level has increasing leverage, increasing accountability, increasingly specific knowledge. You’re adding in money-based leverage on top of labor-based leverage. Adding in code-based leverage on top of money and labor allows you to actually create something bigger and bigger and get closer and closer to owning all the upside, not just being paid a salary.

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. If you value yourself at one hundred dollars an hour, that’s basically throwing one hundred

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.

Figure out what you’re good at, and start helping other people with it. Give it away. Pay it forward. Karma works because people are consistent. On a long enough timescale, you will attract what you project. But don’t measure—your patience will run out if you count.

thanks to the internet, we’re going back to an age where more and more people can work for themselves. I would rather be a failed entrepreneur than someone who never tried. Because even a failed entrepreneur has the skill set to make it on their own. [14]

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

The way to get out of the competition trap is to be authentic, to find the thing you know how to do better than anybody. You know how to do it better because you love it, and no one can compete with you. If you love to do it, be authentic, and then figure out how to map that to what society actually wants. Apply some leverage and put your name on it. You take the risks, but you gain the rewards, have ownership and equity in what you’re doing, and just crank it up.

You do have to put in the hours, and so I think you have to put yourself in the position with the specific knowledge, with accountability, with leverage, with the authentic skill set you have, to be the best in the world at what you do.

You have to enjoy it and keep doing it, keep doing it, and keep doing it. Don’t keep track, and don’t keep count because if you do, you will run out of time. [78]

My definition of wisdom is knowing the long-term consequences of your actions. Wisdom applied to external problems is judgment.

Picking the direction you’re heading in for every decision is far, far more important than how much force you apply.

The number one thing clouding us from being able to see reality is we have preconceived notions of the way it should be.

the moment of suffering—when you’re in pain—is a moment of truth. It is a moment where you’re forced to embrace reality the way it actually is. Then, you can make meaningful change and progress.

What you feel tells you nothing about the facts—it merely tells you something about your estimate of the facts.

It’s only after you’re bored you have the great ideas. It’s never going to be when you’re stressed, or busy, running around or rushed. Make the time. [7]

Self-serving conclusions should have a higher bar.

Almost all biases are time-saving heuristics. For important decisions, discard memory and identity, and focus on the problem.

praise specifically, criticize generally.

It’s almost always possible to be honest and positive. [71]

Collect Mental Models

The smaller the company, the more everyone feels like a principal. The less you feel like an agent, the better the job you’re going to do.

Simple heuristic: If you’re evenly split on a difficult decision, take the path more painful in the short term.

you generally want to lean into things with short-term pain, but long-term gain.

The genuine love for reading itself, when cultivated, is a superpower. We live in the age of Alexandria, when every book and every piece of knowledge ever written down is a fingertip away. The means of learning are abundant—it’s the desire to learn that is scarce.

read and read and read. If I have some fundamental “ah-ha” insight or concept, Twitter forces me to distill it into a few characters. Then I try and put it out there as an aphorism. Then I get attacked by random people who point out all kinds of obvious exceptions and jump down my throat. Then I think, “Why did I do this again?” [4]

Just funny 😂

Explain what you learned to someone else. Teaching forces learning.

If you’re a perpetual learning machine, you will never be out of options for how to make money. You can always see what’s coming up in society, what the value is, where the demand is, and you can learn to come up to speed. [74]

One is our attention span has gone through the floor because we’re hit with so much information all the time. We want to skip, summarize, and cut to the chase.

When solving problems: the older the problem, the older the solution.

I leaning towards disagreement. Many math problems needed modern tools to be solved

Everything is perfect exactly the way it is. It is only in our particular minds we are unhappy or not happy, and things are perfect or imperfect because of what we desire.

There are no external forces affecting your emotions—as much as it may feel that way.

We think of ourselves as fixed and the world as malleable, but it’s really we who are malleable and the world is largely fixed.

A rational person can find peace by cultivating indifference to things outside of their control.

We spend so much time and effort trying to change the external world, other people, and our own bodies—all while accepting ourselves the way we were programmed in our youths. We accept the voice in our head as the source of all truth. But all of it is malleable, and every day is new.

It’s always the next thing, then the next thing, the next thing after that, then the next thing after that creating this pervasive anxiety.

Today, the way we think you get peace is by resolving all your external problems. But there are unlimited external problems. The only way to actually get peace on the inside is by giving up this idea of problems. [77]

My most surprising discovery in the last five years is that peace and happiness are skills.

Many distinctions between people who get happier as they get older and people who don’t can be explained by what habits they have developed. Are they habits that will increase your long-term happiness rather than your short-term happiness? Are you surrounding yourself with people who are generally positive and upbeat people? Are those relationships low-maintenance? Do you admire and respect but not envy them?

We don’t always get what we want, but sometimes what is happening is for the best. The sooner you can accept it as a reality, the sooner you can adapt to it.

I have another hack I use for minor annoyances. When they happen, a part of me will instantly react negatively. But I’ve learned to mentally ask myself, “What is the positive of this situation?”

Be yourself, with passionate intensity.

Your goal in life is to find the people, business, project, or art that needs you the most.

To make an original contribution, you have to be irrationally obsessed with something.

We evolved for scarcity but live in abundance. There’s a constant struggle to say no when your genes always want to say yes. Yes to sugar. Yes to staying in this relationship. Yes to alcohol. Yes to drugs. Yes, yes, yes. Our bodies don’t know how to say no.

Sugar makes you hungry. Sugar signals to your body, “There’s this incredible food resource in the environment we’re not evolved for,” so you rush out to get sugar. The problem is the sugar effect dominates the fat effect. If you eat a fatty meal and you throw some sugar in, the sugar is going to deliver hunger and fat is going to deliver the calories and you’re just going to binge. That’s why all desserts are large combinations of fat and carbs together.

World’s simplest diet: The more processed the food, the less one should consume.

Walking meetings: • Brain works better • Exercise & sunlight • Shorter, less pleasantries • More dialogue, less monologue • No slides • End easily by walking back

Like everything in life, if you are willing to make the short-term sacrifice, you’ll have the long-term benefit.

An emotion is our evolved biology predicting the future impact of a current event. In modern settings, it’s usually exaggerated or wrong.

You can do it just by breathing. Relaxed breathing tells your body you’re safe. Then, your forebrain doesn’t need as many resources as it normally does. Now, the extra energy can be sent to your hindbrain, and it can reroute those resources to the rest of your body.

Your body saying it’s cold is different than your mind saying it’s cold. Acknowledge your body saying it’s cold. Look at it. Deal with it. Accept it, but don’t mentally suffer over it. Taking a cold shower for two minutes isn’t going to kill you.

Meditation is intermittent fasting for the mind. Too much sugar leads to a heavy body, and too many distractions lead to a heavy mind. Time spent undistracted and alone, in self-examination, journaling, meditation, resolves the unresolved and takes us from mentally fat to fit.

Life-hack: When in bed, meditate. Either you will have a deep meditation or fall asleep. Victory either way.

Once they’re resolved, there will come a day when you sit down to meditate, and you’ll hit a mental “inbox zero.” When you open your mental “email” and there are none, that is a pretty amazing feeling.

Insight meditation lets you run your brain in debug mode until you realize you’re just a subroutine in a larger program.

The ability to singularly focus is related to the ability to lose yourself and be present, happy, and (ironically) more effective. [4]

I’m actually going back to my awareness level of OS, which is always calm, always peaceful, and generally happy and content. I’m trying to stay in awareness mode and not activate the monkey mind, which is always worried, frightened, and anxious. It serves incredible purpose, but I try not to activate the monkey mind until I need it. When I need it, I want to just focus on that. If I run it 24/ 7, I waste energy and the monkey mind becomes me. I am more than my monkey mind.

You are basically a bunch of DNA that reacted to environmental effects when you were younger. You recorded the good and bad experiences, and you use them to prejudge everything thrown against you. Then you’re using those experiences, constantly trying and predict and change the future.

These habitual reactions end up as runaway freight trains controlling your mood. We should control our own moods.

Meditation is turning off society and listening to yourself. It only “works” when done for its own sake. Hiking is walking meditation. Journaling is writing meditation. Praying is gratitude meditation. Showering is accidental meditation. Sitting quietly is direct meditation.

When we’re older, we’re a collection of thousands of habits constantly running subconsciously. We have a little bit of extra brainpower in our neocortex for solving new problems. You become your habits.

Impatience with actions, patience with results.

It takes a long time for markets to adopt products. It takes time for people to get comfortable working with each other. It takes time for great products to emerge as you polish away, polish away, polish away.

The current environment programs the brain, but the clever brain can choose its upcoming environment.

Science is, to me, the study of truth. It is the only true discipline because it makes falsifiable predictions. It actually changes the world. Applied science becomes technology, and technology is what separates us from the animals and allows us to have things like cell phones, houses, cars, heat, and electricity.

You’re fitting in to get along with the herd. That’s not where the returns are in life. The returns in life are being out of the herd.

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.

Related to the skill of reading are the skills of mathematics and persuasion. Both skills help you to navigate through the real world.

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.

Nature speaks in mathematics. Mathematics is us reverse engineering the language of nature,

The hardest thing is not doing what you want—it’s knowing what you want.

Don’t spend your time making other people happy. Other people being happy is their problem. It’s not your problem. If you are happy, it makes other people happy. If you’re happy, other people will ask you how you became happy and they might learn from it, but you are not responsible for making other people happy.

anger is a loss of control over the situation. Anger is a contract you make with yourself to be in physical and mental and emotional turmoil until reality changes. [1]

A taste of freedom can make you unemployable.

When we’re children, we’re pretty blank slates. We live very much in the moment. We essentially just react to our environment through our instincts. We live in what I would call the “real world.” Puberty is the onset of desire—the first time you really, really want something and you start long-range planning. You start thinking a lot, building an identity and an ego to get what you want.

To me, the mind should be a servant and a tool, not a master. My monkey mind should not control and drive me 24/ 7. I want to break the habit of uncontrolled thinking, which is hard.

A busy mind accelerates the passage of subjective time.

There is no endpoint to self-awareness and self-discovery. It’s a lifelong process you hopefully keep getting better and better at. There is no one meaningful answer, and no one is going to fully solve it unless you’re one of these enlightened characters.

The modern struggle: Lone individuals summoning inhuman willpower, fasting, meditating, and exercising… Up against armies of scientists and statisticians weaponizing abundant food, screens, and medicine into junk food, clickbait news, infinite porn, endless games, and addictive drugs.

things. Try everything, test it for yourself, be skeptical, keep what’s useful, and discard what’s not.

If wisdom could be imparted through words alone, we’d all be done here.