My Note
My highlights
448 highlights from Kindle. These are the lines I stopped at.
But I don’t take his perspectives, maxims, and thoughts seriously because of the business stuff. There are lots of miserable “successful” people out there. Be careful about modeling those, as you will get all the bathwater with the baby.
I take Naval seriously because he: Questions nearly everything Can think from first principles Tests things well Is good at not fooling himself Changes his mind regularly Laughs a lot Thinks holistically Thinks long-term And…doesn’t take himself too goddamn seriously.
the JOBS Act
I’ve learned a few things, and some principles. I try to lay them out in a timeless manner, where you can figure it out for yourself. Because at the end of the day, I can’t quite teach anything. I can only inspire you and maybe give you a few hooks so you can remember. [77]
Making money is not a thing you do—it’s a skill you learn.
It’s not really about hard work. You can work in a restaurant eighty hours a week, and you’re not going to get rich.
Getting rich is about knowing what to do, who to do it with, and when to do it.
It is much more about understanding than purely hard work. Yes, hard work matters, and you can’t skimp on it. But it has to be directed in the right way.
If you don’t know yet what you should work on, the most important thing is to figure it out. You should not grind at a lot of hard work until you figure out what you should be working on.
The tweetstorm tries to be information-dense, very concise, high-impact, and timeless. It has all the information and principles, so if you absorb these and you work hard over ten years, you’ll get what you want. [77]
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.
Ignore people playing status games. They gain status by attacking people playing…
You’re not going to get rich renting out your time. You must own equity—a piece of a business—to…
You will get rich by giving society what it wants but does not yet know…
Pick an industry where you can play long-term games with…
Play iterated games. All the returns in life, whether in wealth, relationships, or knowledge,…
Pick business partners with high intelligence, energy, and,…
Learn to sell. Learn to build. If you can do both, you will…
Arm yourself with specific knowledge, accountability,…
Specific knowledge is knowledge you cannot be trained for. If society can train you, it can train…
Specific knowledge is found by pursuing your genuine curiosity and passion rather than…
Building specific knowledge will feel like play to you but will look…
Specific knowledge is often highly technical or creative. It cannot be…
Embrace accountability, and take business risks under your own name. Society will reward you with…
Fortunes require leverage. Business leverage comes from capital, people, and products with no marginal cost of…
Capital means money. To raise money, apply your specific knowledge with accountability and show…
Labor means people working for you. It’s the oldest and most fought-over form of leverage. Labor leverage will impress your parents,…
Capital and labor are permissioned leverage. Everyone is chasing capital, but someone has to give it to you. Everyone is trying to…
Code and media are permissionless leverage. They’re the leverage behind the newly rich. You can create software and media…
If you can’t code, write books and blogs, record…
Leverage is a force multiplier for…
Judgment requires experience but can be built faster by learning…
There is no skill called “business.” Avoid business magazines and…
Study microeconomics, game theory, psychology, persuasion, ethics,…
Set and enforce an aspirational personal hourly rate. If fixing a problem will save less than…
If outsourcing a task will cost less than your hourly…
Work as hard as you can. Even though who you work with and what you work on are more…
Become the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until this is true.
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.
Summary: Productize Yourself
Your summary says “Productize yourself”—what does that mean? “Productize” and “yourself.” “Yourself” has uniqueness.
“Productize” has leverage. “Yourself” has accountability. “Productize” has specific knowledge. “Yourself” also has specific knowledge in there. So all of these pieces, you can combine them into these two words.
If you’re looking toward the long-term goal of getting wealthy, you should ask yourself, “Is this authentic to me? Is it myself that I am projecting?” And then, “Am I productizing it? Am I scaling it? Am I scaling with labor or with capital or with code or with media?” So it’s a very handy, simple mnemonic. [78]
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. [10]
Wealth is the thing you want. Wealth is assets that earn while you sleep.
So, my definition of wealth is much more businesses and assets that can earn while you sleep. [78]
Technology democratizes consumption but consolidates production. The best person in the world at anything gets to do it for everyone.
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.
Then, you have to figure out how to scale it because if you only build one, that’s not enough. You’ve got to build thousands, or hundreds of thousands, or millions, or billions of them so everybody can have one.
There’s such a thing as “a natural” in sales. You run into them all the time in startups and venture capital. When you meet someone who is a natural at sales, you just know they’re amazing. They’re really good at what they do. That is a form of specific knowledge.
Specific knowledge cannot be taught, but it can be learned.
When I talk about specific knowledge, I mean figure out what you were doing as a kid or teenager almost effortlessly. Something you didn’t even consider a skill, but people around you noticed. Your mother or your best friend growing up would know.
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.
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.
all of this stuff feels like play to me, but it looks like work to others.
Well, if you’re not already good at it or if you’re not really into it, maybe it’s not your thing—focus on the thing that you are really into.
Specific knowledge is found much more by pursuing your innate talents, your genuine curiosity, and your passion. It’s not by going to school for whatever is the hottest job; it’s not by going into whatever field investors say is the hottest.
Very often, specific knowledge is at the edge of knowledge. It’s also stuff that’s only now being figured out or is really hard to figure out. If you’re not 100 percent into it, somebody else who is 100 percent into it will outperform you. And they won’t just outperform you by a little bit—they’ll outperform you by a lot because now we’re operating the domain of ideas, compound interest really applies and leverage really applies. [78]
The internet has massively broadened the possible space of careers. Most people haven’…
You can go on the internet, and you can find your audience. And you can build a business, and create a product, and build wealth, and make people happy just uniquely…
everyone is the best at something—being…
Another tweet I had that is worth weaving in, but didn’t go into the “How to Get Rich” tweetstorm, was very simple: “Escape competition through authenticity.” Basically, when you’re competing with people, it’s because you’re copying them. It’s because you’re trying…
If you are fundamentally building and marketing something that is an extension of who you are, no one can compete with you on that. Who’s going to compete with Joe Rogan or Scott Adams? It’s impossible. Is somebody else going to come along and write a better Dilbert? No. Is someone going to compete with Bill…
The best jobs are neither decreed nor degreed. They are creative expressions of continuous…
The most important skill for getting rich is becoming a perpetual learner. You have to know how to learn…
You really care about having studied the foundations, so you’re not…
If you go to the library and there’s a book you cannot understand, you have to dig down and say, “What is the foundation required for me to learn this?…
Basic arithmetic and numeracy are way more important in life than doing calculus. Similarly, being able to convey yourself simply using ordinary English words is far more important than being able to write poetry, having an extensive…
Knowing how to be persuasive when speaking is far more important than being an expert digital…
Foundations are key. It’s much better to be at 9/10 or 10/10 on foundations than to try and…
You do need to be deep in something because otherwise you’ll be a mile wide and an inch deep and you won’t get what you want out of life. You can only achieve mastery in one or two things.…
Compounding in business relationships is very important. Look at some of the top roles in society, like why someone is a CEO of a public company or managing billions of dollars. It’s because people trust them.
They are trusted because the relationships they’ve built and the work they’ve done has compounded. They’ve stuck with the business and shown themselves (in a visible and accountable way) to be high-integrity people.
Compound interest also happens in your reputation. If you have a sterling reputation and you keep building it for decades upon decades, people will notice.
Your reputation will literally end up being thousands or tens of thousands of times more valuable than somebody else who was very talented but is not keeping the compound interest in reputation going.
I love working with Elad because I know when the deal is being done, he will bend over backward to give me extra. He will always round off in my favor if there’s an extra dollar being delivered here or there. If there’s some cost to pay, he will pay it out of his own pocket, and he won’t even mention it to me. Because he goes so far out of his way to treat me so well, I send him every deal I have—I try to include him in everything. Then, I go out of my way to try and pay for him. Compounding in those relationships is very valuable. [10]
Intentions don’t matter. Actions do. That’s why being ethical is hard.
When you find the right thing to do, when you find the right people to work with, invest deeply. Sticking with it for decades is really how you make the big returns in your relationships and in your money. So, compound interest is very important. [10]
99% of effort is wasted.
But at least when it comes to the goal-oriented life, only about 1 percent of the efforts you made paid off.
The reason I say this is not to make some glib comment about how 99 percent of your life is wasted and only 1 percent is useful. I say this because you should be very thoughtful and realize in most things (relationships, work, even in learning) what you’re trying to do is find the thing you can go all-in on to earn compound interest.
When you’re dating, the instant you know this relationship is not going to be the one that leads to marriage, you should probably move on. When you’re studying something, like a geography or history class, and you realize you are never going to use the information, drop the class. It’s a waste of time. It’s a waste of your brain energy.
I’m not saying don’t do the 99 percent, because it’s very hard to identify what the 1 percent is. What I’m saying is: 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]
Embrace accountability and take business risks under your own name. Society will reward you with responsibility, equity, and leverage.
So to get these things, you have to build credibility, and you have to do it under your own name as much as possible, which is risky.
It allows you to take credit when things go well and to bear the brunt of the failure when things go badly. [78]
Clear accountability is important. Without accountability, you don’t have incentives.
Without accountability, you can’t build credibility.
But you take risks. You risk failure. You risk humiliation. You risk failure under your own name.
The people who have the ability to fail in public under their own names actually gain a lot of power.
But when you put your name out there, you take a risk with certain things. You also get to reap the rewards. You get the benefits. [78]
The risk here would be you would probably be the last one to get your capital back out.
You’d be the last one to get paid for your time.
The time that you put in, the capital you put into the company, these are at risk. [78]
Realize that in modern society, the downside risk is not that large. Even personal bankruptcy can wipe the debts clean in good ecosystems. I’m most familiar with Silicon Valley, but generally, people will forgive failures as long as you were honest and made a high-integrity effort.
There’s not really that much to fear in terms of failure, and so people should take on a lot more accountability than they do. [78]
If you don’t own a piece of a business, you don’t have a path towards financial freedom.
It’s ownership versus wage work. If you are paid for renting out your time, even lawyers and doctors, you can make some money, but you’re not going to make the money that gives you financial freedom. You’re not going to have passive income where a business is earning for you while you are on vacation. [10]
This is probably one of the most important points. People seem to think you can create wealth—make money through work. It’s probably not going to work. There are many reasons for that.
Owning equity in a company basically means you own the upside. When you own debt, you own guaranteed revenue streams and you own the downside. You want to own equity. If you don’t own equity in a business, your odds of making money are very slim.
You have to work up to the point where you can own equity in a business. You could own equity as a small shareholder where you bought stock. You could also own it as an owner where you started the company. Ownership is really important. [10]
Everybody who really makes money at some point owns a piece of a product, a business, or some IP.
That can be through stock options if you work at a tech company. That’s a fine way to start. But usually, the real wealth is created by starting your own companies or even by investing. In an investment firm, they’re buying equity. These are the routes to wealth. It doesn’t come through the hours. [78]
Following your genuine intellectual curiosity is a better foundation for a career than following whatever is making money right now. [11]
Knowledge only you know or only a small set of people knows is going to come out of your passions and your hobbies, oddly enough. If you have hobbies around your intellectual curiosity, you’re more likely to develop these passions. [1]
If it entertains you now but will bore you someday, it’s a distraction. Keep looking.
I only really want to do things for their own sake. That is one definition of art. Whether it’s business, exercise, romance, friendship, whatever, I think the meaning of life is to do things for their own sake.
Ironically, when you do things for their own sake, you create your best work.
The year I generated the most wealth for myself was actually the year I worked the least hard and cared the least about the future. I was mostly doing things for the sheer fun of it. I was basically telling people, “I’m retired, I’m not working.” Then, I had the time for whatever was my highest valued project in front of me. By doing things for their own sake, I did them at their best. [74]
The less you want something, the less you’re thinking about it, the less you’re obsessing over it, the more you’re going to do it in a natural way. The more you’re going to do it for yourself. You’re going to do it in a way you’re good at, and you’re going to stick with it. The people around you will see the quality of your work is higher. [1]
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. [3]
If they can train you to do it, then eventually they will train a computer to do it.
Think about what product or service society wants but does not yet know how to get. You want to become the person who delivers it and delivers it at scale. That is really the challenge of how to make money.
You are waiting for your moment when something emerges in the world, they need a skill set, and you’re uniquely qualified. You build your brand in the meantime on Twitter, on YouTube, and by giving away free work. You make a name for yourself, and you take some risk in the process. When it is time to move on the opportunity, you can do so with leverage—the maximum leverage possible. [1]
One form of leverage is labor—other humans working for you. It is the oldest form of leverage, and actually not a great one in the modern world. [1] I would argue this is the worst form of leverage
Money is good as a form of leverage. It means every time you make a decision, you multiply it with money. [1]
It scales very, very well. If you get good at managing capital, you can manage more and more capital much more easily than you can manage more and more people. [78]
The final form of leverage is brand new—the most democratic form. It is: “products with no marginal cost of replication.” This includes books, media, movies, and code. Code is probably the most powerful form of permissionless leverage. All you need is a computer—you don’t need anyone’s permission. [1]
Forget rich versus poor, white-collar versus blue. It’s now leveraged…
The most interesting and the most important form of leverage is the idea of products that have no marginal cost of replication. This is the new form of leverage. This was only invented in the last few hundred years. It started with the printing press. It accelerated with broadcast media, and now it’s really blown up with the internet and with coding. Now, you can…
This newest form of leverage is where all the new fortunes are made, all the new billionaires. For the last generation, fortunes were made by capital. The people who made…
But the new generation’s fortunes are all made through…
Probably the most interesting thing to keep in mind about new forms of leverage is they are permissionless. They don’t require somebody else’s permission for you to use them or succeed. For labor leverage, somebody has to decide to follow you. For capital leverage,…
Coding, writing books, recording podcasts, tweeting, YouTubing—these kinds of things are permissionless. You don’t need anyone’s permission to do them, and that’s why they are very…
You’re never going to get rich renting…
Whenever you can in life, optimize for independence rather than pay. If you have independence and you’re accountable on your output, as opposed…
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…
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…
Forget 10x programmers. 1,000x programmers really exist, we just don’t fully acknowledge it. See @ID_AA_Carmack,…
Inputs don’t match outputs, especially for…
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…
If you do something incredible to move the needle on the business, they have to pay you. Especially if they don’t know how you did it because it’s innate to your obsession or your skill or your innate…
If you have specific knowledge, you have accountability and you have leverage; they have to pay you what you’re worth. If they pay you what you’re worth, then you can get your time back—you can be hyper-efficient. You’re not doing meetings for meetings’ sake, you’re not trying to impress other people, you’re not writing things…
When you do just the actual work itself, you’ll be far more productive, far more efficient. You’ll work when you feel like it—when you’re high-energy—and you won’t be trying to struggle through…
Forty hour work weeks are a relic of the Industrial Age. Knowledge workers function like athletes—train and…
Sales is an example—especially very high-end sales. If you’re a real estate agent out there selling houses, it’s not a great job, necessarily. It’s very crowded. But if you’re a top-tier real estate agent, you know how to market yourself and you know how to sell houses, it’s possible you could sell $5 million mansions in one tenth of the time while somebody else is struggling to…
Building any product and selling any product fits…
Where you don’t necessarily want to be is a support role, like customer service. In customer service, unfortunately, inputs and outputs relate relatively close to each…
The higher the creativity component of a profession, the more likely it is to have…
Learn to sell, learn to build. If you can do both, you will…
Earn with your mind, not your time.
Maybe you get paid ten dollars or twenty dollars an hour. You go to people’s houses, your boss demands you’re there at 8:00 a.m., and you repair your piece of the house. Here, you have zero leverage. You have some accountability, but not really, because your accountability is to your boss, not to the client. You don’t have any real specific knowledge, since what you’re doing is labor lots of people can do. You’re not going to get paid a lot. You’re getting paid minimum wage plus a little bit for your skill and your time.
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.
You start as a salaried employee. But you want to work your way up to try and get higher leverage, more accountability, and specific knowledge. The combination of those over a long period of time with the magic of compound interest will make you wealthy. [74]
The one thing you have to avoid is the risk of ruin.
Avoiding ruin means stay out of jail. So, don’t do anything illegal.
Stay out of total catastrophic loss.
Avoiding ruin could also mean you stay out of things that could be physically dangerous or hurt your body. You have to watch your health.
Stay out of things that could cause you to lose all of your capital, all of your savings.
Don’t gamble everything on one go. Instead, take rationally optimistic bets with big upsides. [78]
Choosing what kinds of jobs, careers, or fields you get into and what sort of deals you’re willing to take from your employer will give you much more free time. Then, you don’t have to worry as much about time management. I would love to be paid purely for my judgment, not for any work. I want a robot, capital, or computer to do the work, but I want to be paid for my judgment. [1]
every human should aspire to being knowledgeable about certain things and being paid for our unique knowledge.
we can be masters of our own time because we are just being tracked on outputs and not inputs.
Demonstrated judgment—credibility around the judgment—is so critical.
Judgment—especially demonstrated judgment, with high accountability and a clear track record—is critical. [78]
We waste our time with short-term thinking and busywork. Warren Buffett spends a year deciding and a day acting. That act lasts decades.
Just from being marginally better, like running a quarter mile a fraction of a second faster, some people get paid a lot more—orders of magnitude more. Leverage magnifies those differences even more. Being at the extreme in your art is very important in the age of leverage. [2]
Thanks to the internet, opportunities are massively abundant.
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.
Fast-forward to your wealthy self and pick some intermediate hourly rate.
Another way of thinking about something is, if you can outsource something or not do something for less than your hourly rate, outsource it or don’t do it.
If you can hire someone to do it for less than your hourly rate, hire them. That even includes things like cooking. You may want to eat your healthy home cooked meals, but if you can outsource it, do that instead. [78]
Set a very high hourly aspirational rate for yourself and stick to it. It should seem and feel absurdly high. If it doesn’t, it’s not high enough. Whatever you picked, my advice to you would be to raise it.
If you get into a relative mindset, you’re always going to hate people who do better than you, you’re always going to be jealous or envious of them. They’ll sense those feelings when you try and do business with them.
Humans are wired to feel what the other person deep down inside feels. You have to get out of a relative mindset. [10]
Literally, being anti-wealth will prevent you from becoming wealthy, because you will not have the right mindset for it, you won’t have the right spirit, and you won’t be dealing with people on the right level. Be optimistic, be positive. It’s important. Optimists actually do better in the long run. [10]
The business world has many people playing zero sum games and a few playing positive sum games searching for each other in the crowd.
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.
Status is a zero-sum game. It’s a very old game. We’ve been playing it since monkey tribes.
The problem is, to win at a status game, you have to put somebody else down. That’s why you should avoid status games in your life—they make you into an angry, combative person. You’re always fighting to put other people down, to put yourself and the people you like up.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
What is the most important thing to do for younger people starting out?
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.
If you’re going to live in a city for ten years, if you’re going to be in a job for five years, if you’re in a relationship for a decade, you should be spending one to two years deciding these things. These are highly dominating decisions. Those three decisions really matter.
You have to say no to everything and free up your time so you can solve the important problems. Those three are probably the three biggest ones. [1]
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. [7]
An old boss once warned: “You’ll never be rich since you’re obviously smart, and someone will always offer you a job that’s just good enough.”
Find Work That Feels Like Play
Humans evolved as hunters and gatherers where we all worked for ourselves.
It’s only at the beginning of agriculture we became more hierarchical.
now, 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]
Any end goal will just lead to another goal, lead to another goal. We just play games in life.
When you grow up, you’re playing the school game, or you’re playing the social game. Then you’re playing the money game, and then you’re playing the status game. These games just have longer and longer and longer-lived horizons. At some point, at least I believe, these are all just games. These are games where the outcome really stops mattering once you see through the game.
Then you just get tired of games. I would say I’m at the stage where I’m just tired of games. I don’t think there is any end goal or purpose. I’m just living life as I want to. I’m literally just doing it moment to moment.
What you really want is freedom. You want freedom from your money problems, right? I think that’s okay. Once you can solve your money problems, either by lowering your lifestyle or by making enough money, you want to retire. Not retirement at sixty-five years old, sitting in a nursing home collecting a check retirement—it’s a different definition.
Retirement is when you stop sacrificing today for an imaginary tomorrow. When today is complete, in and of itself, you’re retired.
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. A third is you’re doing something you love. You enjoy it so much, it’s not about the money. So there are multiple ways to retirement.
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. [77] Did your motivation to earn money drop after you become financially independent? Yes and no. It did in the sense the desperation was gone. But if anything, creating businesses and making money are now more of an “art.” [74]
Whether in commerce, science, or politics—history remembers the artists.
Art is creativity. Art is anything done for its own sake. What are the things that are done for their own sake, and there’s nothing behind them? Loving somebody, creating something, playing. To me, creating businesses is play. I create businesses because it’s fun, because I’m into the product. [77]
These are not 100 percent-or-nothing things. You can start moving more and more toward that goal in your life.
I’m glad I went down the road of technology and science, which I genuinely enjoy. I got to combine my vocation and my avocation.
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]
Money is not the root of all evil; there’s nothing evil about it. But the lust for money is bad. The lust for money is not bad in a social sense. It’s not bad in the sense of “you’re a bad person for lusting for money.” It’s bad for you.
Lusting for money is bad for us because it is a bottomless pit. It will always occupy your mind. If you love money, and you make it, there’s never enough. There is never enough because the desire is turned on and doesn’t turn off at some number. It’s a fallacy to think it turns off at some number.
As you make money, you just want even more, and you become paranoid and fearful of losing what you do have. There’s no free lunch.
You make money to solve your money and material problems. I think the best way to stay away from this constant love of money is to not upgrade your lifestyle as you make money. It’s very easy to keep upgrading your lifestyle as you make money. But if you can hold your lifestyle fixed and hopefully make your money in giant lump sums as opposed to a trickle at a time, you won’t have time to upgrade your lifestyle. You may get so far ahead you actually become financially free.
Another thing that helps: I value freedom above everything else. All kinds of freedom: freedom to do what I want, freedom from things I don’t want to do, freedom from my own emotions or things that may disturb my peace.
The winners of any game are the people who are so addicted they continue playing even as the marginal utility from winning declines.
The most successful class of people in Silicon Valley on a consistent basis are either the venture capitalists (because they are diversified and control what used to be a scarce resource) or people who are very good at identifying companies that have just hit product/market fit.
Those people have the background, expertise, and references those companies really want to help them scale.
Then, they go into the latest Dropbox or the latest Airbnb.
Some of the most successful people I’ve seen in Silicon Valley had breakouts very early in their careers. They got promoted to VP, director, or CEO, or started a company that did well fairly early.
If you’re not getting promoted through the ranks, it gets a lot harder to catch up later in life. It’s good to be in a smaller company early because there’s less of an infrastructure to prevent early promotion. [76]
For someone who is early in their career (and maybe even later), the single most important thing about a company is the alumni network you’re going to build. Think about who you will work with and what those people are going on to do. [76]
The last kind of luck is the weirdest, hardest kind, where you build a unique character, a unique brand, a unique mindset, which causes luck to find you.
Become the best at what you do. Refine what you do until this is true. Opportunity will seek you out. Luck becomes your destiny.
To summarize the fourth type: build your character in a certain way, then your character becomes your destiny.
If you are a trusted, reliable, high-integrity, long-term-thinking dealmaker, when other people want to do deals but don’t know how to do them in a trustworthy manner with strangers, they will literally approach you and give you a cut of the deal just because of the integrity and reputation you’ve built up.
Your character and your reputation are things you can build, which will let you take advantage of opportunities other people may characterize as lucky, but you know it wasn’t luck. [78]
Nivi said, “In a long-term game, it seems that everybody is making each other rich. And in a short-term game, it seems like everybody is making themselves rich.”
How important is networking?
business networking is a complete waste of time.
the reality is if you’re building something interesting, you will always have more people who will want to know you.
Trying to build business relationships well in advance of doing business is a complete waste of time.
“Be a maker who makes something interesting people want. Show your craft, practice your craft, and the right people will eventually find you.” [14]
If someone is talking a lot about how honest they are, they’re probably dishonest. That is just a little telltale indicator I’ve learned. When someone spends too much time talking about their own values or they’re talking themselves up, they’re covering for something. [4]
Not in some cosmic, karma kind of way, but I believe deep down we all know who we are. You cannot hide anything from yourself. Your own failures are written within your psyche, and they are obvious to you. If you have too many of these moral shortcomings, you will not respect yourself. The worst outcome in this world is not having self-esteem. If you don’t love yourself, who will?
I think you just have to be very careful about doing things you are fundamentally not going to be proud of, because they will damage you. The first time someone acts this way, I will warn them. By the way, nobody changes. Then I just distance myself from them. I cut them out of my life. I just have this saying inside my head: “The closer you want to get to me, the better your values have to be.” [4]
great people have great outcomes. You just have to be patient.
“Wow, that guy or gal is super capable—so smart and dedicated”…all of them, almost without exception, became extremely successful. You just had to give them a long enough timescale. It never happens in the timescale you want, or they want, but it does happen. [4]
Apply specific knowledge with leverage and eventually, you will get what you deserve.
It takes time—even once you have all of these pieces in place, there is an indeterminate amount of time you have to put in. If you’re counting, you’ll run out of patience before success actually arrives.
Everybody wants to get rich immediately, but the world is an efficient place; immediate doesn’t work. You do have to put in the time.
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]
The most common bad advice I hear is: “You’re too young.” Most of history was built by young people.
They just got credit when they were older. The only way to truly learn something is by doing it. Yes, listen to guidance. But don’t wait. [3]
People are oddly consistent. Karma is just you, repeating your patterns, virtues, and flaws until you finally get what you deserve.
Always pay it forward. And don’t…
This is not to say it’s easy. It’s not easy. It’s actually really freaking hard. It is the hardest thing you will do. But it’s also rewarding. Look at the kids who are…
Your real résumé is just a catalog of all your suffering. If I ask you to describe your real life to yourself, and you look back from your deathbed at the interesting things you’ve done, it’s all going to be…
However, anything you’re given doesn…
You have your four limbs, your brain, your head, your skin—that’s all for granted. You have to do hard things anyway to create your own meaning in life. Making money is a fine thing to choose. Go struggle. It is hard. I’m not going to say it’s easy. It’s…
Money buys you freedom in the material world. It’s not going to make you happy, it’s not going to solve your health problems, it’s not going to make your family great, it’s not going to…
But it will solve a lot of external problems. It’s a reasonable step to go ahead…
What making money will do is solve your money problems. It will remove a set of things that could get in the way of being happy, but…
Most of the time, the person you have to become to make money is a high-anxiety, high-stress, hard-working, competitive person. When you have done that for twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years, and you suddenly make money, you can’t turn it off. You’ve trained yourself to be…
Let’s get you rich first. I’m very practical about it because, you know, Buddha was a prince. He started off really rich,…
Today, with this wonderful invention called money, you can store it in a bank account. You can work really hard, do great things for society, and society will give you money for things it wants but doesn’t know how to get. You can save money, you can…
That will give you the time and the energy to pursue your own internal peace and happiness. I believe the solution to making everybody…
Amazing how many people confuse wealth…
If you want to make the maximum amount of money possible, if you want to get rich over your life in a deterministically predictable way, stay on the bleeding edge of trends and study technology,…
You don’t get rich by spending your time to save money. You get rich by saving…
Hard work is really overrated. How hard you work matters a lot less in the modern economy. What is underrated?…
My definition of wisdom is knowing the long-term consequences…
Wisdom applied to external problems…
knowing the long-term consequences of your actions and then making the right decision to…
In an age of leverage, one correct decision can win everything. Without hard work, you’ll develop…
You have to put in the time, but the judgment is more important. The direction you’re heading in matters more than how fast…
Picking the direction you’re heading in for every decision is far, far more important than…
Just pick the right direction to start walking in, and…
“Clear thinker” is a better compliment…
Real knowledge is intrinsic, and it’s built from…
Basically, if someone is using a lot of fancy words and a lot of big concepts, they probably don’t know…
If you can’t explain it to a child, then you…
The really smart thinkers are clear thinkers. They understand the basics at a very, very fundamental level. I would rather understand the basics really well than memorize all kinds of complicated concepts I can’t stitch together and can’t rederive from the basics. If you can’t rederive concepts…
The advanced concepts in a field are less proven. We use them to signal insider knowledge, but we’d be better…
Clear thinkers appeal to their own…
By not having a strong sense of self or judgments or mind presence. The “monkey mind” will always respond with this regurgitated emotional response to what it thinks the world should be. Those desires will cloud your reality. This happens…
The number one thing clouding us from being able to see reality is we have preconceived notions…
One definition of a moment of suffering is “the moment when you see things…
The good news is, 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. You can…
The hard thing is seeing the truth. To see the truth, you have to get your ego out of the way because your ego doesn’t want to face the truth. The smaller you can make your ego, the less conditioned you can make your reactions, the less desires you can have…
What we wish to be true clouds our perception of what is true. Suffering is the moment when we…
The problem is their desire is colliding with reality and preventing them from seeing the truth, no matter how much you say it.
The more desire I have for something to work out a certain way, the less likely I am to see the truth.
If I’m not hiding it from anybody, I’m not going to delude myself from what’s actually going on. [4]
It’s actually really important to have empty space. If you don’t have a day or two every week in your calendar where you’re not always in meetings, and you’re not always busy, then you’re not going to be able to think.
I also encourage taking at least one day a week (preferably two, because if you budget two, you’ll end up with one) where you just have time to think.
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]
Cynicism is easy. Mimicry is easy. Optimistic contrarians are the rarest breed.
We interpret anything new through our ego: “How do I change the external world to make it more how I would like it to be?” [8]
“Tension is who you think you should be. Relaxation is who you are.…
We accumulate all these habits. We put them in the bundle of identity, ego, ourselves, and then…
It’s really important to be able to uncondition yourself, to be able to take your habits apart and say, “Okay, this is a habit I probably picked up when I was a toddler trying to get my parent’s attention. Now I’ve reinforced it and reinforced it, and I call it a part of my identity. Does it still serve me? Does it make me happier?…
Any belief you took in a package (ex. Democrat, Catholic, American) is suspect and should be…
I try not to have too much I’ve pre-decided. I think creating identities and labels locks you in and…
To be honest, speak without…
I used to identify as libertarian, but then I would find myself defending positions I hadn’t really thought through because they’re a part of the libertarian canon. If all your beliefs line up into…
We each have a contrarian belief society rejects. But the more our own identity and local tribe reject it,…
Facebook redesigns. Twitter redesigns. Personalities, careers, and teams also need redesigns. There are no permanent…
The classical virtues are all decision-making heuristics to make one optimize for the long term rather…
Almost all biases are time-saving heuristics. For important decisions, discard memory and identity,…
Radical honesty just means I want to be free. Part of being free means I can say what I…
Richard Feynman famously said, “You should never, ever fool anybody, and you are the…
The moment you tell somebody something dishonest, you’ve…
Then you’ll start believing your own lie, which will disconnect you from reality and take…
never ask if “I like it” or “I don’t like it.” I think “this is what it is” or “…
It’s really important for me to be honest. I don’t go out of my way volunteering negative or nasty things. I would combine radical honesty with an old rule Warren Buffett has,…
If you have a criticism of someone, then don’t criticize the person—criticize the general approach or criticize the class of activities. If you have to praise somebody, then always try and find the person who is the best example…
Then people’s egos and identities, which we all have, don’t work against you.…
Tell everyone. Start now. It doesn’t have to be blunt. Charisma is the ability to project confidence and love at the same time. It’s almost always…
With modern technology and large workforces and capital, our decisions are leveraged more and more.
If you can be more right and more rational, you’re going to get nonlinear returns in your life. I love the blog Farnam Street because it really focuses on helping you be more accurate, an overall better decision-maker. Decision-making is everything. [4]
The more you know, the less you diversify.
Mental models are really just compact ways for you to recall your own knowledge. [78]
I don’t believe I have the ability to say what is going to work. Rather, I try to eliminate what’s not going to work. I think being successful is just about not making mistakes. It’s not about having correct judgment. It’s about avoiding incorrect judgments. [4]
Microeconomics and game theory are fundamental. I don’t think you can be successful in business or even navigate most of our modern capitalist society without an extremely good understanding of supply-and-demand, labor-versus-capital, game theory, and those kinds of things. [4]
Ignore the noise. The market will decide.
To me, the principal-agent problem is the single most fundamental problem in microeconomics.
Julius Caesar famously said, “If you want it done, then go. And if not, then send.”
When you are the agent and you are doing it on somebody else’s behalf, you can do a bad job. You just don’t care.
But you want arithmetic, probability, and statistics. Those are extremely important. Crack open a basic math book, and make sure you are really good at multiplying, dividing, compounding, probability, and statistics.
If it doesn’t make falsifiable predictions, it’s not science. For you to believe something is true, it should have predictive power, and it must be falsifiable. [11]
I think macroeconomics, because it doesn’t make falsifiable predictions (which is the hallmark of science), has become corrupted.
If you can’t decide, the answer is no.
If I’m faced with a difficult choice, such as: Should I marry this person? Should I take this job? Should I buy this house? Should I move to this city? Should I go into business with this person?
If you cannot decide, the answer is no. And the reason is, modern society is full of options. There are tons and tons of options. We live on a planet of seven billion people, and we are connected to everybody on the internet. There are hundreds of thousands of careers available to you. There are so many choices.
When you choose something, you get locked in for a long time. Starting a business may take ten years. You start a relationship that will be five years or maybe more. You move to a city for ten to twenty years. These are very, very long-lived decisions.
It’s very, very important we only say yes when we are pretty certain. You’re never going to be absolutely certain, but you’re going to be very certain.
If you find yourself creating a spreadsheet for a decision with a list of yes’s and no’s, pros and cons, checks and balances, why this is good or bad…forget it. If you cannot decide, the answer is no. [10]
Simple heuristic: If you’re evenly split on a difficult decision, take the path more painful in the short term.
By definition, if the two are even and one has short-term pain, that path has long-term gain associated. With the law of compound interest, long-term gain is what you want to go toward. Your brain is overvaluing the side with the short-term happiness and trying to avoid the one with short-term pain.
most of the gains in life come from suffering in the short term so you can get paid in the long term.
So you generally want to lean into things with short-term pain, but long-term gain.
Reading science, math, and philosophy one hour per day will likely put you at the upper echelon of human success within seven years.
The genuine love for reading itself, when cultivated, is a superpower.
The means of learning are abundant—it’s the desire to learn that is scarce. [3]
Read what you love until you love to read.
You almost have to read the stuff you’re reading, because you’re into it. You don’t need any other reason. There’s no mission here to accomplish. Just read because you enjoy it.
Reading a book isn’t a race—the better the book, the more slowly it should be absorbed.
I don’t actually read a lot of books. I pick up a lot of books and only get through a few which form the foundation of my knowledge.
I probably read one to two hours a day. That puts me in the top .00001 percent.
Real people, I think, read a minute a day or less. Making it an actual habit is the most important thing.
It almost doesn’t matter what you read. Eventually, you will read enough things (and your interests will lead you there) that it will dramatically improve your life.
Just like the best workout for you is one you’re excited enough to do every day, I would say for books, blogs, tweets, or whatever—anything with ideas and information and learning—the best ones to read are the ones you’re excited about reading all the time. [4]
I don’t believe in delayed gratification when there are an infinite number of books out there to read. There are so many great books.
Generally, I’ll skim. I’ll fast forward. I’ll try and find a part to catch my attention. Most books have one point to make. (Obviously, this is nonfiction. I’m not talking about fiction.) They have one point to make, they make it, and then they give you example after example after example after example, and they apply it to explain everything in the world.
Once I feel like I’ve gotten the gist, I feel very comfortable putting the book down. There’s a lot of these, what I would call pseudoscience bestsellers…People are like, “Oh, did you read this book?” I always say yes, but the reality is I read maybe two chapters of it. I got the gist.
If they wrote it to make money, don’t read it.
Explain what you learned to someone else. Teaching forces learning.
It’s not about “educated” vs. “uneducated.” It’s about “likes to read” and “doesn’t like to read.”
Read the greats in math, science, and philosophy. Ignore your contemporaries and news. Avoid tribal identification. Put truth above social approval. [11]
Study logic and math, because once you’ve mastered them, you won’t fear any book.
Learn how to learn and read the books.
The problem with saying “just read” is there is so much junk out there. There are as many different kinds of authors as there are people. Many of them are going to write lots of junk.
I have people in my life I consider to be very well-read who aren’t very smart. The reason is because even though they’re very well-read, they read the wrong things in the wrong order. They started out reading a set of false or just weakly true things, and those formed the axioms of the foundation for their worldview.
Because most people are intimidated by math and can’t independently critique it, they overvalue opinions backed with math/pseudoscience.
The best way to have a high-quality foundation (you may not love this answer), but the trick is to stick to science and to stick to the basics.
Mathematics is a solid foundation.
Similarly, the hard sciences are a solid foundation. Microeconomics is a solid foundation. The moment you start wandering outside of these solid foundations you’re in trouble because now you don’t know what’s true and what’s false. I would focus as much as I could on having solid foundations.
It’s better to be really great at arithmetic and geometry than to be deep into advanced mathematics.
Another way to do this is to read originals and read classics. If you’re interested in evolution, read Charles Darwin. Don’t begin with Richard Dawkins (even though I think he’s great). Read him later; read Darwin first.
If you want to learn macroeconomics, first read Adam Smith, read von Mises, or read Hayek. Start with the original philosophers of the economy. If you’re into communist or socialist ideas (which I’m personally not), start by reading Karl Marx. Don’t read the current interpretation someone is feeding you about how things should be done and run.
If you start with the originals as your foundations, then you have enough of a worldview and understanding that you won’t fear any book. Then you can just learn.
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]
To think clearly, understand the basics. If you’re memorizing advanced concepts without being able to re-derive them as needed, you’re lost.
Twitter has made me a worse reader but a much better writer.
When solving problems: the older the problem, the older the solution.
If you’re talking about an old problem like how to keep your body healthy, how to stay calm and peaceful, what kinds of value systems are good, how you raise a family, and those kinds of things, the older solutions are probably better.
Any book that survived for two thousand years has been filtered through many people. The general principles are more likely to be correct. I wanted to get back into reading these sorts of books. [6]
You know that song you can’t get out of your head? All thoughts work that way. Careful what you read.
A calm mind, a fit body, and a house full of love. These things cannot be bought. They must be earned.
The three big ones in life are wealth, health, and happiness. We pursue them in that order, but their importance is reverse.
Don’t take yourself so seriously. You’re just a monkey with a plan.
The answer that works for me is going to be nonsense to you, and vice versa. Whatever happiness means to me, it means something different to you. I think it’s very important to explore what these definitions are.
When nothing is missing, your mind shuts down and stops running into the past or future to regret something or to plan something.
In that absence, for a moment, you have internal silence. When you have internal silence, then you are content, and you are happy. Feel free to disagree. Again, it’s different for everybody.
People mistakenly believe happiness is just about positive thoughts and positive actions. The more I’ve read, the more I’ve learned, and the more I’ve experienced (because I verify this for myself), every positive thought essentially holds within it a negative thought.
Every positive thought even has a seed of a negative thought within it and vice versa, which is why a lot of greatness in life comes out of suffering. You have to view the negative before you can aspire to and appreciate the positive.
To me, happiness is not about positive thoughts. It’s not about negative thoughts. It’s about the absence of desire, especially the absence of desire for external things.
Happiness to me is mainly not suffering, not desiring, not thinking too much about the future or the past, really embracing the present moment and the reality of what is, and the way it is. [4]
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.
Real happiness only comes as a side-effect of peace. Most of it is going to come from acceptance, not from changing your external environment. [8]
A rational person can find peace by cultivating indifference to things outside of their control.
Happiness is a choice you make and a skill you develop.
The mind is just as malleable as the body. 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.
You can literally destroy your happiness if you spend all of your time living in delusions of the future. [4]
Looking outside yourself for anything is the fundamental delusion.
“Oh, I’ll be happy when I get that thing,” whatever it is. That is the fundamental mistake we all make, 24/7, all day long. [4]
The fundamental delusion: There is something out there that will make me happy and fulfilled forever.
Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.
One thing I’ve learned recently: it’s way more important to perfect your desires than to try to do something you don’t 100 percent desire. [1]
By the time people realize they have enough money, they’ve lost their time and their health. [8]
Happiness is being satisfied with what you have. Success comes from dissatisfaction. Choose.
The problem with getting good at a game, especially one with big rewards, is you continue playing it long after you should have outgrown
Survival and replication drive put us on the work treadmill. Hedonic adaptation keeps us there. The trick is knowing when to jump off and play instead.
To me, the real winners are the ones who step out of the game entirely, who don’t even play the game, who rise above it.
Those are the people who have such internal mental and self-control and self-awareness, they need nothing from anybody else.
Blaise Pascal I read. Basically, it says: “All of man’s troubles arise because he cannot sit in a room quietly by himself.”
If you could just sit for thirty minutes and be happy, you are successful. That is a very powerful place to be, but very few of us get there. [6]
But peace is a very hard thing to come by. The irony is the way most of us try to find peace is through war.
You’re struggling so you can have some sense of security and peace later.
In reality, peace is not a guarantee. It’s always flowing. It’s always changing. You want to learn the core skill set of flowing with life and accepting it in most cases. [8]
You can get almost anything you want out of life, as long as it’s one thing and you want it far more than anything else.
I don’t think life is that hard. I think we make it hard.
I’m trying to get rid of is the word “should.”
Doing something because you “should” basically means you don’t actually want to do it.
The enemy of peace of mind is expectations drilled into you by society and other people.
Socially, we’re told, “Go work out. Go look good.” That’s a multi-player competitive game. Other people can see if I’m doing a good job or not. We’re told, “Go make money. Go buy a big house.” Again, external multiplayer competitive game. Training yourself to be happy is completely internal. There is no external progress, no external validation. You’re competing against yourself—it is a single-player game.
The reality is life is a single-player game. You’re born alone. You’re going to die alone.
All of your interpretations are alone. All your memories are alone. You’re gone in three generations, and nobody cares. Before you showed up, nobody cared. It’s all single player.
Exactly right. All the real scorecards are internal.
My most surprising discovery in the last five years is that peace and happiness are skills. These are not things you are born with.
You literally have to try all of these things until you find something that works for you.
But you shouldn’t choose them haphazardly based on who you live next to or who you happen to work with.
The people who are the most happy and optimistic choose the right five chimps. [8]
The first rule of handling conflict is: Don’t hang around people who constantly engage in conflict.
If you can’t see yourself working with someone for life, don’t work with them for a day.
The most important trick to being happy is to realize happiness is a skill you develop and a choice you make. You choose to be happy, and then you work at it.
No exceptions—all screen activities linked to less happiness, all non-screen activities linked to more happiness. [11]
A personal metric: how much of the day is spent doing things out of obligation rather than out of interest? [11]
Pick one thing. Cultivate a desire. Visualize it.
Pick one big desire in your life at any given time to give yourself purpose and motivation.
sometimes what is happening is for the best. The sooner you can accept it as a reality, the sooner you can adapt to it.
“What is the positive of this situation?”
Here’s a hot tip: There is no legacy. There’s nothing to leave. We’re all going to be gone.
Keeping death on the forefront and not denying it is very important.
All you should do is what you want to do.
No one in the world is going to beat you at being you.
Your goal in life is to find the people, business, project, or art that needs you the most. There is something out there just for you.
What you don’t want to do is build checklists and decision frameworks built on what other people are doing.
You’re never going to be them. You’ll never be good at being somebody else. [4]
My number one priority in life, above my happiness, above my family, above my work, is my own health.
It starts with my physical health. Second, it’s my mental health. Third, it’s my spiritual health. Then, it’s my family’s health. Then, it’s my family’s wellbeing.
When everyone is sick, we no longer consider it a disease.
Quality control is easier than (and leads to) quantity control. [11]
World’s simplest diet: The more processed the food, the less one should consume.
The daily morning workout. That has been a complete game-changer.
“I don’t have time” is just another way of saying “It’s not a priority.”
If something is your number one priority, then you will do it. That’s just the way life works.
If you’ve got a fuzzy basket of ten or fifteen different priorities, you’re going to end up getting none of them.
The important thing is to do something every day. It doesn’t matter what it is. The best workout for you is one you’re excited enough to do every day. [4]
if you are willing to make the short-term sacrifice, you’ll have the long-term benefit.
If you make the easy choices right now, your overall life will be a lot harder. [
most of our suffering comes from avoidance.
if you stop obsessing over your own story, you’ll realize we are really far up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and life is pretty good. [6]
Anyone around whom I can’t be fully honest, I don’t want to be around.
All benefits in life come from compound interest, whether in money, relationships, love, health, activities, or habits.
I only want to be around people I know I’m going to be around for the rest of my life. I only want to work on things I know have long-term payout.
I don’t know if these necessarily fall into the classical definition of values, but it’s a set of things I won’t compromise on and I live my entire life by. [4]
I think everybody has values. Much of finding great relationships, great coworkers, great lovers, wives, husbands, is finding other people where your values line up.
If your values line up, the little things don’t matter. Generally, I find if people are fighting or quarreling about something, it’s because their values don’t line up.
Meeting my wife was a great test because I really wanted to be with her, and she wasn’t so sure at the beginning. In the end, we ended up together because she saw my values.
As investor Charlie Munger says, “To find a worthy mate, be worthy of a worthy mate.” [4]
My wife is an incredibly lovely, family-oriented person, and so am I. That was one of the foundational values that brought us together.
The moment you have a child, it’s this really weird thing, but it answers the meaning-of-life, purpose-of-life, question. All of a sudden, the most important thing in the Universe moves from being in your body into the child’s body. That changes you. Your values inherently become a lot less selfish. [4]
If you eat, invest, and think according to what the “news” advocates, you’ll end up nutritionally, financially, and morally bankrupt.