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How to Get Rich (without getting lucky) - by Naval Ravikant

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Joined: 01/18/2012

How to Get Rich (without getting lucky) - by Naval Ravikant

1. Seek wealth, not money or status. Wealth is having assets that earn while you sleep.

2. Money is how we transfer time and wealth. Status is your place in the social hierarchy.

3. Understand that ethical wealth creation is possible. If you secretly despise wealth, it will elude you.

4. Ignore people playing status games. They gain status by attacking people playing wealth creation games.

5. 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.

6. You will get rich by giving society what it wants but does not yet know how to get. At scale.

7. Pick an industry where you can play long term games with long term people.

8. The Internet has massively broadened the possible space of careers. Most people haven't figured this out yet.

9. Play iterated games. All the returns in life, whether in wealth, relationships, or knowledge, come from compound interest.

10. Pick business partners with high intelligence, energy, and, above all, integrity.

11. Don't partner with cynics and pessimists. Their beliefs are self-fulfilling.

12. Learn to sell. Learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable.

13. Arm yourself with specific knowledge, accountability, and leverage.

14. Specific knowledge is knowledge that you cannot be trained for. If society can train you, it can train someone else, and replace you.

15. Specific knowledge is found by pursuing your genuine curiosity and passion rather than whatever is hot right now.

16. Building specific knowledge will feel like play to you but will look like work to others.

17. When specific knowledge is taught, it’s through apprenticeships, not schools.

18. Specific knowledge is often highly technical or creative. It cannot be outsourced or automated.

19. Embrace accountability, and take business risks under your own name. Society will reward you with responsibility, equity, and leverage.

20. The most accountable people have singular, public, and risky brands: Oprah, Trump, Kanye, Elon.

21. “Give me a lever long enough, and a place to stand, and I will move the earth.” - Archimedes

22. Fortunes require leverage. Business leverage comes from capital, people, and products with no marginal cost of replication (code and media).

23. Capital means money. To raise money, apply your specific knowledge, with accountability, and show resulting good judgment.

24. 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.

25. 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.

26. 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.

27. An army of robots is freely available - it's just packed in data centers for heat and space efficiency. Use it.

28. If you can't code, write books and blogs, record videos and podcasts.

29. Leverage is a force multiplier for your judgement.

30. Judgement requires experience, but can be built faster by learning foundational skills.

31. There is no skill called “business.” Avoid business magazines and business classes.

32. Study microeconomics, game theory, psychology, persuasion, ethics, mathematics, and computers.

33. Reading is faster than listening. Doing is faster than watching.

34. You should be too busy to “do coffee," while still keeping an uncluttered calendar.

35. 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.

36. 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.

37. Become the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until this is true.

38. There are no get rich quick schemes. That's just someone else getting rich off you.

39. Apply specific knowledge, with leverage, and eventually you will get what you deserve.

40. 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.

__________________

I go in and I'm crisp, clean and my vocals are fucking coming out like music. - Anonymous MW student

- Autismus Terminus Finis (Root Cause/Cure of Autism Epidemic)

- Called Off My Wedding & Other Turn Tail Signs Of The American Male

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Joined: 06/23/2016
Awesome man

Great post .I think we should do this kind of posts more often here.First of all its great for the other guys and second its useful to write down the lessons you learned.I m gonna start writing down ideas from the next book i read.

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Joined: 12/12/2017
Naval did a 1 hour periscope

Naval did a 1 hour periscope expanding on the tweets, I'm watching it now:

https://www.pscp.tv/w/1lDGLaBmWRwJm

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Joined: 01/18/2012
Nice, anything to add? 

Nice, anything to add? 

__________________

I go in and I'm crisp, clean and my vocals are fucking coming out like music. - Anonymous MW student

- Autismus Terminus Finis (Root Cause/Cure of Autism Epidemic)

- Called Off My Wedding & Other Turn Tail Signs Of The American Male

Tap Or Click For Personal Coaching Information

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Joined: 12/12/2017
His main point in two

His main point in two words:
 
PRODUCTIZE YOURSELF
 
Create a product out of whatever it is that you naturally and uniquely do REALLY REALLY well.
 
1st word, productize: You are building a product. That product is a set of things that you uniquely know how to do. Something that society wants. Something that you can leverage and scale up. Products by their nature are leveraged.
 
2nd word, yourself: Focus on yourself. You don't compete at being somebody else. If you compete at being somebody else, you're not going to be the best in the world at it. If you're not the best in the world at it, you will not get rewarded properly for it. 
 
How do you package yourself in a product? It's hard. Could take decades. Could take a better part of a decade just to figure out what you uniquely provide.
 
Specific knowledge - what is this? Figure out what you were doing as a kid/teenager almost effortlessly, that you didn't even consider a skill, but people around you would notice. Your mom noticed, your best friend. Examples: sales skills. musical skills. an obsessive personality. a desire to dive into things and learn them very quickly. love for science fiction. reading. playing games - good at game theory. even gossiping, digging into your friend network (= journalist). Take the unique traits from your DNA plus your unique upbringing and your response to it. Take that which is baked into your personality and identity - then hone it. Naval loves to read, loves technology, get bored fast, doesn't wanna dig deep into 1 thing for 20 years => this maps well to venture investing. It's hard to get bored, there are new companies to research on a daily basis.
 
I have more notes, if you guys are interested, I can organize the whole thing and post it. Here are the topics covered:
 
productize yourself
compound interest beyond money (relationships, etc)
everyone on earth can productize
specific knowledge
book overview: Robert Cialdini - Influence 
dislike of current university model. what to do at uni
his 3 decision heuristics
Naval's defining characteristic: combo of being impatient and willful
money vs happiness