A collection of Naval Ravikant’s tweetstorms, discussions, and ideas woven into a digestible ebook. The ideas focus on wealth on happiness.
Some of my favourite ideas:
Tweetstorm about wealth creation:
“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 ethical wealth creation is possible. If you secretly despise wealth, it will elude you…
Ignore ppl playing status games. They gain status by attacking ppl playing wealth creation games…
You’re not going to get rich renting out your time. You must own equity…
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 ppl…
The internet has massively broadened the possible space of careers. Most ppl haven’t figured this out yet…
Play iterated games. All returns in life, whether in wealth, relationships, or knowledge, from compound interest…
Pick your 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 you cannot be trained for, 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 look like work to others… and is taught through apprenticeships, not school… 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.
Fortunes require leverage. Business leverage comes from capital, people, and products with no marginal cost of replication (code & media). 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…
Avoid business magazines and business classes. Study microeconomics, game theory, psychology, persuasion, ethics, math 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.
Become the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until this is true.
When you’re finally wealthy, you’ll realize it wasn’t what you were seeking in the first place. But that is for another day.”
Find a position of leverage:
“…the CEO job is really a financial job.”
“Capital 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.”
“…the most democratic form [of leverage]… 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.”
How to get lucky:
- Hope luck finds you.
- Hustle until you stumble into it.
- Prepare the mind and be sensitive to chances others miss.
- Become the best at what you do. Refine what you do until this is true. Opportunity will seek you out. Luck becomes your destiny.
An extreme example of this last form of luck, as described in the book, is the following: “suppose you’re the best person in the world at deep-sea diving. You’re known to take dives no one else will dare attempt. By sheer luck, someone finds a sunken treasure they cannot get. Their luck has just become your luck, as they’re going to come to you.”
Mental models
“Simple heuristic: if you’re evenly split on a difficult decision, take the path more painful in the short term.”
Wrapping up…
“Learn to love to read”
“Happiness is being satisfied with what you have”
And an incredibly long list of book recommendations that I’m working through slowly…
4/5.