- Seek wealth, not money or status. Wealth is having assets that earn while you sleep. Money is how we transfer time and wealth, while status is your rank 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. You must do this 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.
- Play iterated games. All the returns in life, whether in wealth, relationships, or knowledge, come from compound interest.
- 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 you cannot be trained for. If society could train you, it could 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 you’re accountable for your work, you’ll get more leverage. Embrace accountability and take business risks under your own name. Society will reward you with responsibility, equity, and leverage.
- Leverage is key to wealth. Labor and capital have limits, but code and media are the ultimate leverage.
- You should be too busy to do coffee while still keeping an uncluttered calendar.
- Set and enforce an aspirational hourly rate. If fixing a problem will take less than your hourly rate, pay someone else to do it.
- 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 judgment to leverage. A well-judged decision with leverage can make you rich overnight.
- Be patient. Become the kind of person who deserves wealth and wealth will find you.
- Play the long game.
- When it comes to wealth creation, avoid competition. The best entrepreneurs are not competing, they are creating.
- The ultimate goal is not just wealth, but freedom. Freedom to do what you want, when you want, with whom you want, for as long as you want.