Tweets

• Seek wealth, not money or status.
• Understand ethical wealth creation is possible. If you despise wealth it will elude you.
• Ignore people playing status games. They gain status by attacking those playing wealth games.
• You won’t get rich renting out time. Own equity – a piece of business.
• Give society what it wants but does not yet know how to get.
• Pick business partners with high intelligence, energy, and integrity. Not cynics and pessimists.
• Learn to sell and learn to build.
• Arm yourself with specific knowledge, accountability, and leverage. Specific knowledge you cannot be trained for. If society can train you, they can replace you. It is found by pursuing genuine curiosity and passion rather than trends.
• Embrace accountability, and take business risks under your own name. Society will reward you with responsibility, equity, and 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 judgement.
• Labor leverage will impress your parents, but don’t waste life chasing it. Capital and labor are permissioned leverage. Everyone is chasing capital, but someone has to give it to you. Code and media are permissionless. If you can’t code, write books and blogs, record videos and podcasts.
• An army of robots is freely available. Use it.
• Leverage is a force multiplier for your judgement.
• 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 a coffee” while still keeping an uncluttered calendar.
• Set an 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. Become the best in the world at what you do and redefine it.

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?”

Technology is a set of things that don’t work yet. Once something works it is no longer technology.

Examples of what your specific knowledge could be:

• → Sales skills
• → Musical talents, with the ability to pick up any instrument
• → An obsessive personality: you dive into things and remember
• them quickly
• → Love for science fiction: you were into reading sci-fi, which
• means you absorb a lot of knowledge very quickly
• → Playing a lot of games, you understand game theory pretty
• well
• → Gossiping, digging into your friend network. That might
• make you into a very interesting journalist.

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.

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.

BE ACCOUNTABLE

It’s really important to be able to decondition 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? Does it make me healthier? Does it make me accomplish whatever I set out to accomplish?”

Any belief you took in a package (ex. Democrat, Catholic, American) is suspect and should be re-evaluated from base principles.

Almost all biases are time saving heuristics. Discard memory and identity and focus on the problem.

The Principal-Agent Problem is about the principal being the owner who cares and wants to put more effort in vs the agent who is hired for their knowledge but has no skin in the game. They can do a bad job and not care. You optimize for yourself rather than for the principal’s assets. The smaller the company the more people feel like principals.

If you can’t decide, the answer is no.

If you are evenly split on a difficult decision, take the path more painful in the short term. Short term pain is usually avoided by the brain even though it has 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.

When it comes to reading, make sure your foundation is very high quality. That way you won’t build an opinion about future information based on previous works. Stick to science and stick to the basics. Math, science, microeconomics.

If you want to read Macroeconomics start with Adam Smith, von Mises, or Hayek.

Happiness

We pursue wealth, health, and happiness in that order. Their importance is the reverse.

Happiness is a default state. It is there when you remove the sense of something missing in your life. When nothing is missing, your mind shuts down and stops running into the past or future to regret something or to plan something.

Every positive thought has the seed of a negative one attached. Tao Te Ching says it’s al about duality. If I’m happy, then I was sad at some point. If that person is attractive it means somebody else is unattractive. If you ever want to have peace in your life you must move beyond good and evil. Nature follows unbroken mathematical laws and a chain of cause and effect from the big bang until now. Reality is neutral. There are no external forces affecting your emotions.

• I have lowered my identity.
• I have lowered the chattering of my mind.
• I don’t care about things that don’t really matter.
• I don’t get involved in politics.
• I don’t hang around unhappy people.
• I really value my time on this earth.
• I read philosophy.
• I meditate.
• I hang around with happy people.
• You can very slowly but steadily and methodically improve your happiness baseline, just like you can improve your fitness.

“I just don’t believe in anything from my past. Anything. No memories, regrets, people, trips, nothing. A lot of unhappiness comes from comparing things from the past to the present.”

Happiness is more about peace than it is joy. Peace and purpose don’t go together. Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want. Every desire is a chosen unhappiness.

You’re a living creature. You locally reverse entropy.

It’s way more important to perfect your desires than to try to do something you don’t 100% desire.

• Survival and replication drive put us to work on the treadmill. Hedonic adaptation keeps us there. The trick is knowing when to jump off and play instead.

“All of man’s troubles arise because he can’t sit in a room quietly by himself.” – Blaise Pascal

Most of us try to find peace through war. When you start a business, in a way, you’re going to war. When you struggle with your roommates as to who should clean the dishes, you’re going to war. You’re struggling so you can have a sense of security and peace later. In reality, peace is not a guarantee. It’s always flowing.

Not drinking, eating sugar, and going on social media will keep your mood more stable. Playing video games will make you happier in the short term but not in the long. Dopamine feeding in uncontrollable ways. Caffeine is another one where you trade long term for the short term.

Be aware in every moment. If you catch yourself judging someone, look for the positive interpretation. Get more sunlight on your skin. Look up and smile.

The more you judge, the more you separate yourself. At first, you’ll feel good thinking you’re better than someone, but later you’ll feel lonely. Tell your friends you’re a happy person and you’ll create a consistency bias.

The more secrets you have, the less happy you’re going to be.

If you’re caught in a funk use meditation, music, and exercise to reset your mood. Then choose a new path to commit emotional energy for the rest of the day. ALL screen activities linked to less happiness.

A personal metric: how much of the day is spent doing things out of obligation rather than out of interest?

CHANGING HABITS:

• Pick one thing. Cultivate a desire. Visualize it.
• Plan a sustainable path.
• Identify needs, triggers, and substitutes.
• Tell your friends.
• Track meticulously.
• Self-discipline is a bridge to a new self-image.
• Bake in the new self-image. It’s who you are—now.

In any situation in life, you have 3 choices: you can change it, accept it, or leave it.

• If you want to change it, it is a desire. It will cause suffering until you do. Don’t pick too many. Pick one big desire in your life at any given time to give yourself purpose and motivation. Pick two and you’ll be too distracted.
• Accepting things you can’t change can be made easier by embracing the thought of death. Death is the most important thing that will ever happen to you. If you can look at it and acknowledge it, rather than running away, it’ll bring great meaning to your life. There is no legacy and probably no afterlife. Everything will turn to dust and our actions are futile. Acknowledge the futility and it will bring upon a great sense of peace because you realize this is all a game.

Saving Yourself

In terms of exercise, we’re probably meant to play instead of use the treadmill. Eat more of a paleo diet with veggies, small amounts of meat, and berries. Use all our senses equally instead of just the visual cortex. We shouldn’t be in shoes or wear cozy clothes. Cold exposure kickstarts the immune system. Shouldn’t be in clean and sterile environments. Smaller tribes and more family around us. Not meant to check our phones every 5 minutes (mood swings and anxiety). We evolved for scarcity but live in abundance. WHEN EVERYONE IS SICK WE NO LONGER CALL IT A DISEASE. 

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

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

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.

Philosophy

The second law of thermodynamics states entropy only goes up, which means disorder in the universe only goes up, which means concentrated free energy only goes down. Living things are locally reversing entropy because they have action. In the process, we globally accelerate entropy until the heat death of the universe. In that death, there’s no concentrated energy, and everything is at the same energy level. Therefore, we’re all one thing. Everything you make, or every complex system of artwork you create, accelerates us closer towards the heat death of the universe, and in theory, unifies us all.

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.