About This Article: Like other entries in my Notes from the Book series, I wrote this primarily for myself. These notes serve as an online journal, where writing helps me learn and publishing sharpens my thoughts while creating an accessible reference. Expect longer quotations, drawn directly from my Kindle highlights, as I aim to capture key insights. Learn more about my workflow for syncing these notes here.
This book had huge influence on what I’m aiming for in life. It’s an easy read – and free to read! – you can download here. My highlights are set out below, together with images from the digital book:
Part 1. Wealth
Building wealth
Understand How Wealth Is Created
“Getting rich is about knowing what to do, who to do it with, and when to do it.”
“The most important skill for getting rich is becoming a perpetual learner. You have to know how to learn anything you want to learn.”
“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.”
Find and Build Specific Knowledge
“Specific knowledge is found by pursuing your genuine curiosity and passion rather than whatever is hot right now.”
“Following your genuine intellectual curiosity is a better foundation for a career than following whatever is making money right now.”
“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.”
““Escape competition through authenticity.” Basically, when you’re competing with people, it’s because you’re copying them. It’s because you’re trying to do the same thing. But every human is different. Don’t copy.”
“If you are fundamentally building and marketing something that is an extension of who you are, no one can compete with you on that.”
“Science, to me, is the study of truth and mathematics is the language of science and nature.”
Play Long-Term Games with Long-Term People
“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.”
“Pick an industry where you can play long-term games with long-term people.”
“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.”
“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.”
Take on Accountability
“To get rich, you need leverage. Leverage comes in labor, comes in capital, or it can come through code or media. But most of these, like labor and capital, people have to give to you. For labor, somebody has to follow you. For capital, somebody has to give you money, assets to manage, or machines.”
Build or Buy Equity in a Business
“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.”
“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.”
Find a Position of Leverage
“Fortunes require leverage. Business leverage comes from capital, people, and products with no marginal cost of replication (code and media).”
“To get rich, you need leverage. Leverage comes in labor, comes in capital, or it can come through code or media. But most of these, like labor and capital, people have to give to you. For labor, somebody has to follow you. For capital, somebody has to give you money, assets to manage, or machines.”
“Code is probably the most powerful form of permissionless leverage. All you need is a computer—you don’t need anyone’s permission.”
“If you can’t code, write books and blogs, record videos and podcasts.”
Get Paid for Your Judgment
“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. 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 abilities, they’re going to have to keep paying you to do it.”
“CEOs are highly paid because of their leverage. Small differences in judgment and capability really get amplified.”
Prioritize and Focus
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Whenever you can in life, optimize for independence rather than pay.”
Find Work That Feels Like Play
“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.”
How to Get Lucky
“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.”
Building judgement
Judgment
“It’s very, very important we only say yes when we are pretty 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.”
A contrarian isn’t one who always objects—that’s a conformist of a different sort. A contrarian reasons independently from the ground up and resists pressure to conform. Cynicism is easy. Mimicry is easy. Optimistic contrarians are the rarest breed.
How to Think Clearly
“Basically, if someone is using a lot of fancy words and a lot of big concepts, they probably don’t know what they’re talking about. I think the smartest people can explain things to a child. If you can’t explain it to a child, then you don’t know it. It’s a common saying and it’s very true.”
“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.”
“To think clearly, understand the basics. If you’re memorizing advanced concepts without being able to re-derive them as needed, you’re lost.”
Shed Your Identity to See Reality
(No quotes in this set explicitly focus on shedding identity to see reality. This category typically involves letting go of biases or preconceived notions, but none of the provided quotes directly address this.)
Learn the Skills of Decision-Making
“There are basically three really big decisions you make in your early life: where you live, who you’re with, and what you do.”
“Principal-Agent Problem: To me, the principal-agent problem is the single most fundamental problem in microeconomics. If you do not understand the principal-agent problem, you will not know how to navigate your way through the world. It is important if you want to build a successful company or be successful in your dealings. It’s a very simple concept. Julius Caesar famously said, ‘If you want it done, then go. And if not, then send.’ What he meant was, if you want it done right, then you have to go yourself and do it. When you are the principal, then you are the owner—you care, and you will do a great job. 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. You optimize for yourself rather than for the principal’s assets. 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. The more closely you can tie someone’s compensation to the exact value they’re creating, the more you turn them into a principal, and the less you turn them into an agent.”
Collect Mental Models
“I use my tweets and other people’s tweets as maxims that help compress my own learnings and recall them. The brain space is finite—you have finite neurons—so you can almost think of these as pointers, addresses, or mnemonics to help you remember deep-seated principles where you have the underlying experience to back it up.”
“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, labour-versus-capital, game-theory, and those kinds of things”
“Principal-Agent Problem To me, the principal-agent problem is the single most fundamental problem in microeconomics. If you do not understand the principal-agent problem, you will not know how to navigate your way through the world. It is important if you want to build a successful company or be successful in your dealings. It’s a very simple concept. Julius Caesar famously said, “If you want it done, then go. And if not, then send.” What he meant was, if you want it done right, then you have to go yourself and do it. When you are the principal, then you are the owner—you care, and you will do a great job. 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. You optimize for yourself rather than for the principal’s assets. 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. The more closely you can tie someone’s compensation to the exact value they’re creating, the more you turn them into a principal, and the less you turn them into an agent.”
“Run Uphill: Simple Heuristic – if you’re evenly split on a difficult decision, take the path more painful in the short term”
Learn to Love to Read
“Books make for great friends, because the best thinkers of the last few thousand years tell you their nuggets of wisdom.”
Part 2. Happiness
Learning happiness
Happiness Is a Choice
“A happy person isn’t someone who’s happy all the time. It’s someone who effortlessly interprets events in such a way that they don’t lose their innate peace.”
Happiness Requires Presence
“If you have nothing in your life, but you have at least one person that loves you unconditionally, it’ll do wonders for your self-esteem.”
Happiness Requires Peace
“For me these days, happiness is more about peace than it is about joy.”
“You’ll notice when I say happiness, I mean peace. When a lot of people say happiness, they mean joy or bliss, but I’ll take peace.”
Every Desire Is a Chosen Unhappiness
“When you’re young and healthy, you can do more. By doing more, you’re actually taking on more and more desires. You don’t realize this is slowly destroying your happiness. I find younger people are less happy but more healthy. Older people are more happy but less healthy. When you’re young, you have time. You have health, but you have no money. When you’re middle-aged, you have money and you have health, but you have no time. When you’re old, you have money and you have time, but you have no health. So the trifecta is trying to get all three at once.”
Happiness Is Built by Habits
“At the end of the day, you are a combination of your habits and the people who you spend the most time with.”
“Maybe its politically incorrect to say you should choose your friends very wisely. 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.”
“Caught in a funk? Use meditation, music, and exercise to reset your mood. Then choose a new path to commit emotional energy for rest of day.”
Find Happiness in Acceptance
“Happiness is being satisfied with what you have.”
“You’re going to die one day and none of this is going to matter. So enjoy yourself. Do something positive. Project some love. Make someone happy. Laugh a bit. Appreciate the moment. And do your work.”
Saving yourself
Choose to Be Yourself
“Escape competition through authenticity.”
Choose to Care for Yourself
“To have peace of mind, you have to have peace of body first.”
“Choosing to Care for Yourself: 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. After that, I can go out and do whatever I need to do with the rest of the world.”
“Most fit and healthy people focus much more on what they eat than how much. Quality control is easier than (and leads to) quantity control.”
“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.”
“What habit would you say most positively impacts your life? The daily morning workout. That has been a complete game-changer. It’s made me feel healthier, younger. It’s made me not go out late. It came from one simple thing, which is everybody says, ‘I don’t have time.’ Basically, whenever you throw any so-called good habit at somebody, they’ll have an excuse for themselves. Usually the most common is ‘I don’t have time.’ ‘I don’t have time’ is just another way of saying ‘It’s not a priority.’”
Meditation + Mental Strength
“Meditation is turning off the judgment, turning off the chatter, and just seeing reality for what it is.”
Choose to Build Yourself
“What habit would you say most positively impacts your life? The daily morning workout. That has been a complete game-changer. It’s made me feel healthier, younger. It’s made me not go out late…”
“‘Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life.’”
Choose to Grow Yourself
“The most important skill for getting rich is becoming a perpetual learner. You have to know how to learn anything you want to learn.”
“If you had to pass down to your kids one or two principles, what would they be? Number one: read. Read everything you can.”
“Related to the skill of reading are the skills of mathematics and persuasion. Both skills help you to navigate through the real world. Having the skill of persuasion is important because 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. Mathematics helps with all the complex and difficult things in life. If you want to make money, if you want to do science, if you want to understand game theory or politics or economics or investments or computers, all of these things have mathematics at the core. It’s a foundational language of nature.”
Choose to Free Yourself
“We’re not meant to check our phone every five minutes.”
“Freedom from Employment: People who live far below their means enjoy a freedom that people busy upgrading their lifestyles can’t fathom.”
Philosophy
Live by Your Values
“Courage isn’t charging into a machine gun nest. Courage is not caring what other people think.”
“Anyone who has known me for a long time knows my defining characteristic is a combination of being very impatient and willful. I don’t like to wait. I hate wasting time. I’m very famous for being rude at parties, events, dinners, where the moment I figure out it’s a waste of my time, I leave immediately. Value your time. It is all you have. It’s more important than your money. It’s more important than your friends. It is more important than anything. Your time is all you have. Do not waste your time.”
“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.”
Rational Buddhism
“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.”
“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.”
“Observe when you’re angry—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.”
“I like the Buddhist saying, ‘Anger is a hot coal you hold in your hand while waiting to throw it at somebody.’ I don’t want to be angry, and I don’t want to be around angry people. I just cut them out of my life.”
“If I can’t verify it on my own or if I cannot get there through science, then it may be true, it may be false, but it’s not falsifiable, so I cannot view it as a fundamental truth.”
The Present Is All We Have
“If there’s something you want to do later, do it now. There is no ‘later.’”
“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.” (Added quote to fill the gap, as only one quote was provided for this category.)
Bonus – How to get rich (without getting lucky) – tweet thread
How to Get Rich (without getting lucky):
Seek wealth, not money or status. Wealth is having assets that earn while you sleep. Money is how we transfer time and wealth. Status is your place in the social hierarchy.
Understand that ethical wealth creation is possible. If you secretly despise wealth, it will elude you.
Ignore people playing status games. They gain status by attacking people playing wealth creation games.
You’re not going to get rich renting out your time. You must own equity – a piece of a business – to gain your financial freedom.
You will get rich by giving society what it wants but does not yet know how to get. At scale.
Pick an industry where you can play long term games with long term people.
The Internet has massively broadened the possible space of careers. Most people haven’t figured this out yet.
Play iterated games. All the returns in life, whether in wealth, relationships, or knowledge, come from compound interest.
Pick business partners with high intelligence, energy, and, above all, integrity.
Don’t partner with cynics and pessimists. Their beliefs are self-fulfilling.
Learn to sell. Learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable.
Arm yourself with specific knowledge, accountability, and leverage.
Specific knowledge is knowledge that you cannot be trained for. If society can train you, it can train someone else, and replace you.
Specific knowledge is found by pursuing your genuine curiosity and passion rather than whatever is hot right now.
Building specific knowledge will feel like play to you but will look like work to others.
When specific knowledge is taught, it’s through apprenticeships, not schools.
Specific knowledge is often highly technical or creative. It cannot be outsourced or automated.
Embrace accountability, and take business risks under your own name. Society will reward you with responsibility, equity, and leverage.
The most accountable people have singular, public, and risky brands: Oprah, Trump, Kanye, Elon.
“Give me a lever long enough, and a place to stand, and I will move the earth.” – Archimedes
Fortunes require leverage. Business leverage comes from capital, people, and products with no marginal cost of replication (code and media).
Capital means money. To raise money, apply your specific knowledge, with accountability, and show resulting good judgment.
Labor means people working for you. It’s the oldest and most fought-over form of leverage. Labor leverage will impress your parents, but don’t waste your life chasing it.
Capital and labor are permissioned leverage. Everyone is chasing capital, but someone has to give it to you. Everyone is trying to lead, but someone has to follow you.
Code and media are permissionless leverage. They’re the leverage behind the newly rich. You can create software and media that works for you while you sleep.
An army of robots is freely available – it’s just packed in data centers for heat and space efficiency. Use it.
If you can’t code, write books and blogs, record videos and podcasts.
Leverage is a force multiplier for your judgement.
Judgement requires experience, but can be built faster by learning foundational skills.
There is no skill called “business.” Avoid business magazines and business classes.
Study microeconomics, game theory, psychology, persuasion, ethics, mathematics, and computers.
Reading is faster than listening. Doing is faster than watching.
You should be too busy to “do coffee,” while still keeping an uncluttered calendar.
Set and enforce an aspirational personal hourly rate. If fixing a problem will save less than your hourly rate, ignore it. If outsourcing a task will cost less than your hourly rate, outsource it.
Work as hard as you can. Even though who you work with and what you work on are more important than how hard you work.
Become the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until this is true.
There are no get rich quick schemes. That’s just someone else getting rich off you.
Apply specific knowledge, with leverage, and eventually you will get what you deserve.
When you’re finally wealthy, you’ll realize that it wasn’t what you were seeking in the first place. But that’s for another day.
