“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.”

Building Wealth 💰

Getting rich is about knowing what to do, who to do it with, and when to do it, rather than just hard work.

If we don’t know what we should work on, we must figure it out BEFORE we start grinding.

The below tweet-storm has all the information and principles we need to get rich and get what we want in around 10 years:

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. (Summary: Productize Yourself)

Apply specific knowledge, with leverage, and eventually you will get what you deserve.
There are no get-rich-quick schemes. Those are just someone else getting rich off you.
Become the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until this is true.
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.
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.
You should be too busy to “do coffee” while still keeping an uncluttered calendar.
Reading is faster than listening. Doing is faster than watching.
Study microeconomics, game theory, psychology, persuasion, ethics, mathematics, and computers.
There is no skill called “business.” Avoid business magazines and business classes.
Judgment requires experience but can be built faster by learning foundational skills.
Leverage is a force multiplier for your judgment.
If you can’t code, write books and blogs, record videos and podcasts.
An army of robots is freely available—it’s just packed in data centers for heat and space efficiency. Use it.
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.
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.
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 means money. To raise money, apply your specific knowledge with accountability and show resulting good judgment.
Fortunes require leverage. Business leverage comes from capital, people, and products with no marginal cost of replication (code and media).
“Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand, and I will move the earth.” —Archimedes
Embrace accountability and take business risks under your own name. Society will reward you with responsibility, equity, and leverage.
Specific knowledge is often highly technical or creative. It cannot be outsourced or automated.
When specific knowledge is taught, it’s through apprenticeships, not schools.
Building specific knowledge will feel like play to you, but will look like work to others.
Specific knowledge is found by pursuing your genuine curiosity and passion rather than whatever is hot right now.
Specific knowledge is knowledge you cannot be trained for. If society can train you, it can train someone else and replace you.
Arm yourself with specific knowledge, accountability, and leverage.
Learn to sell. Learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable.
Don’t partner with cynics and pessimists. Their beliefs are self-fulfilling.
Pick business partners with high intelligence, energy, and, above all, integrity.
Play iterated games. All the returns in life, whether in wealth, relationships, or knowledge, come from compound interest.
The internet has massively broadened the possible space of careers. Most people haven’t figured this out yet.
Pick an industry where you can play long-term games with long-term people.
You will get rich by giving society what it wants but does not yet know how to get. At scale.
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.
Ignore people playing status games. They gain status by attacking people playing wealth creation games.
Understand that ethical wealth creation is possible. If you secretly despise wealth, it will elude you.
Money is how we transfer time and wealth. Status is your place in the social hierarchy.
Seek wealth, not money or status. Wealth is having assets that earn while you sleep.

Productising Ourselves 💪

If we want to be wealthy, we need to figure out what is authentic to us and how we can productise our skills and capabilities by providing society that it does not yet know how to get. Then, we have to figure out how to scale our product/service so that thousands, or hundreds of thousands, or millions, or billions of people can access it.

Find & Build Specific Knowledge 📖

We should think about something that we're doing as a kid/teenager almost effortlessly. Something we didn’t even consider a skill, but people around us noticed. For example:

• Sales skills

• Musical talents, with the ability to pick up any instrument

• An obsessive personality: diving into things and remembering them quickly

• Love for science fiction: maybe reading sci-fi and absorbing a lot of knowledge very quickly

• Playing a lot of games and understanding game theory well

• Gossiping, and digging into friend networks (can make one a good journalist)

The specific knowledge is a combo of unique traits from our DNA, upbringing, and our response to it. Something that heavily influenced our personality and our identity. Once we find it, we can hone it and then do something useful with it.

“No one can compete with you on being you. Most of life is a search for who and what needs you the most.”

Specific knowledge can be found by pursuing our innate talents, genuine curiosity, and passion. If we’re not 100% into it, somebody else who is 100% into it will easily outperform us. And they’ll outperform us significantly because now they’ll be getting compound interest and thus have more leverage.

Everyone is the best at something, if not at a specific skill or knowledge, then at being themselves. If we’re building and marketing something that is an extension of who we are, no one can compete with us.

It’s also much better to become an expert in a brand-new field in 9-12 months rather than to have studied the “right” thing a long time ago. But foundational knowledge is very important. E.g. being able to convey ourselves using simple, ordinary English words is far more important than being able to write poetry, having an extensive vocabulary, or speaking 7 different foreign languages. Knowing how to be persuasive when speaking is far more important than being an expert digital marketer or click optimiser.

“You can only achieve mastery in one or two things. It’s usually things you’re obsessed about.“

Play Long-Term Games with Long-Term People 🙋

Look for the right thing to do that has meaning to us and the right people to work with. Once we’re sure we've found them, we can start investing deeply in both. Sticking with these for decades is what brings big returns. Forget about the rest.

Take on Accountability 🏅

To get rich, we need leverage, which comes either in labour, capital, code, or media.

Labour and capital have to be given to us by other people, so we should focus on building credibility first, preferably under our own name (we can do this via code or media, for example).

Accountability (doing things under our own name) is a double-edged thing, which allows us to take credit when things go well and to bear the brunt of the failure when they don’t.

Build or Buy Equity in a Business 🧩

Working for other people is unlikely to give us the financial freedom we want. For example, no passive income where the business is earning for us while we’re on vacation.

Remember, when we’re working for someone else, they are the person taking on the risk and who has the accountability, the intellectual property, and the brand. They’re going to pay us the least amount of money they can for us to still do our job well.

As such, what we want is to own equity in a company as it allows us to own the upside. We can own equity as a small shareholder, where we buy stock or as a business owner.

Those who make big money typically own a piece of a product, a business, or some IP. That can be through stock options if we work at a tech company. But the real wealth is created by starting our own company or investing.

Find a Position of Leverage 📷

The most meaningful (and useful) kind of knowledge is the one that grows quietly inside us — through our weird hobbies and the things we do just because we’re obsessed with them. That’s where our edge is. Not in what can be taught, but in what we can’t help but learn.

If something feels fun now but we know it’ll bore us soon, it’s not it. We need to keep looking.

We should only want to do things that feel right - not for the outcome, not to impress, not for some future reward. Just… because it lights something up inside. That’s what art is. And ironically, that’s when our work shines the most… Even if we’re chasing money, doing it from that place of love is what actually makes it work.

When we stop obsessing about performing or earning money, when we’re just quietly doing our thing, the quality goes up. We last longer and people eventually notice.

In other words, our goal is to know how to do something others can’t easily teach or copy. That’s how we stay irreplaceable. When the world suddenly needs that thing, we’re already the ones who can do it. So while we wait, we build our voice, our name, our little corner of the internet. We must take creative risks and show up even when no one’s looking.

And if we want real leverage, skip managing people. Skip begging for money. Instead, build something that runs while we sleep, be it code, social media, or writing. Do things that we can scale. Stuff with no marginal cost. Remember, we don’t need permission to write, to build, to create. That’s our power.

True freedom is time. Owning our time so we can do the work that matters when our energy’s high, and resting when it’s not. No performative meetings, no productivity theatre. Just the work we care about. Apparently, it’s quite simple, too - if we want to matter in any space, then learn to build or learn to sell/market. Or even better, learn both. Then we’re unstoppable.

Prioritise and Focus ⚓️

“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. “

No one’s going to value us more than we value ourselves. That part is on us. Even if the world doesn’t see it yet, we should walk like we’re already there.

We can set an absurd hourly rate for ourselves and then act like it’s normal.

Time is our most expensive currency. If something costs us an hour, and our time is worth, let's say, £100, then would we really spend that hour doing something random and wasting our time? And yeah, even stuff like cooking counts. If someone can do it for less than what our time is worth, we should let them. Use that time for what only we can do. What moves the needle. What fills our soul. What puts our hearts on fire. If our rate doesn’t make us a little nervous, it's time to raise it.

In other words, we can’t carry anti-money energy and expect abundance. It won’t work. We have to be open and hopeful. We have to believe that things can go well, that people want to support us, that there’s enough for us and everyone else.

And when it comes to life’s big stuff - slow down. Where we live, who we’re with, and what we do… those 3 things shape everything, but most of us rush through them. Instead, we must spend more time thinking about them and making the right choices. These are the roots of our future.

Also: we don’t need to do everything. Say no, often. Clear space. Real clarity only shows up when we have some decent peace and quiet, when we’re not running.

If we want to be around great people, we can start by offering something real. Sharing what we’re good at. Giving it generously. Trusting the boomerang effect - what we send out, circles back.

Find Work That Feels Like Play ⚽️

What we all truly want is freedom from all money problems. Once we solve our money problems by making more than enough or by lowering our living standards, we feel ready to retire. This is when we can finally stop worrying whether we do enough today so that we can build a better future for ourselves. We can achieve this sense of freedom in 3 ways:

1. By having enough money saved so that our passive income covers our burn rate.

2. By driving our burn rate to zero (let’s say becoming a monk)

3. By doing something we truly love and enjoying it so much that we simply stop caring about the money.

We can get ourselves out of the competition by being authentic and having something that we’re better at than anyone else. If we have both of these things, then we can apply leverage and put our name on it.

The best way though is doing things for their own sake - not because of the reward, but simply because we cannot NOT do them - e.g. loving somebody, creating something, playing (creating a business can also feel like play for some). We need to find something that looks like work to others but feels like play for us - then it'll be extremely hard for the competition to beat us.

Another secret would be to not upgrade our lifestyle after we start earning more money if we want to achieve financial freedom. If we keep upgrading our lifestyle each time we start earning more money, we'll continuously need more and more money to keep it.

Finally, when it comes to careers, it’s better to start working at a smaller company early because it speeds up the promotion process and can get us to bigger, more meaningful roles quicker than big companies. If we don’t get promoted through the ranks, then it gets hard to catch up later in life.

How To Get Lucky ✨️

Luck can be blind - where one gets lucky because something happens out of their control - unexpected fortune, fate, etc.

Luck can also happen as a result of persistence, hard work, hustle and motion - where we create opportunities for ourselves, stirring things up, building up energy around ourselves that draws good things to come towards us.

A third way is when we get really good at spotting luck or situations that can bring us luck.

The last kind of luck is where we build a unique brand, mindset, and character, which causes luck to find us naturally.

So to get rich or successful without getting lucky requires us to be deterministic. Don’t leave it to chance but build our character in such a way that it becomes our destiny (reputation).

Certain people then will naturally gravitate towards us, giving us opportunities, simply because they'll be able to see that we're trustworthy and reliable due to the reputation we’ve built over the years. It simply takes time…

“Be a maker who makes something interesting people want. Show your craft, practice your craft, and the right people will eventually find you” - Naval Ravikant.

Be Patient 💁‍♀️

The only way to learn something well is by actually doing the thing. Listen to guidance but don’t wait too long to start.

Good things to people don’t happen overnight, it takes time. We have to put in the hours and to put ourselves in the position with the specific knowledge, accountability, leverage, authentic skillset, etc. to become the best we can at what we do.

But remember, being rich will not solve all problems - it will only solve money problems. It will also remove a set of things that could get in the way of being happy if money is required, but it won’t make us happy on its own.

A lot of wealthy people are unhappy, because in order to become rich they need to become high-anxiety, high-stress, hard-working, competitive people - so be careful.

We should aim to become able to save some money and live a little below our means as this will allow us to find certain freedom and give us time and energy to pursue our own internal peace and happiness.

Judgement ⚖

If we want to get rich in a deterministic and predictable way, our best bet is to stay on top of the technological advancements, design and art - and become exceptionally good at one particular thing.

Knowing the long-term consequences of our actions is essential. While putting in the time is important, judgment is what makes a real difference. The direction we’re heading in matters more than how fast we move, especially when we have leverage. Our objective here is to have sound judgement, pick the right direction to start walking in, and then start.

Think Clearly 💭

The really smart thinkers are clear thinkers - they understand the basics at a very fundamental level. Memorisation is not understanding and thus not as useful for success in life.

We have to be more selfish with our time, too - take AT LEAST one day a week to… just think. This is when great ideas come - not when we’re busy, stressed, running around or rushed.

“Very smart people tend to be weird since they insist on thinking everything through for themselves” - Naval Ravikant.

Shed Your Identity To See Reality 👀

Creating identities and labels might lock us in and keep us from seeing the truth. We should avoid them. Accept that our profession or family status is not our entire identity. We live in a dynamic system and our personalities, careers, teams, etc. all need redesigns so we can’t be trapped into one idea of who we are. We change as our world changes and we have more roles to play than one.

Be Brutally Honest 🧠

Criticism is useful, but never criticise a person - criticise the general approach or the class of ideas. But if we want to praise something that we accept to be real and good - then praise the person specifically. This way people’s egos and identities won’t work against us, but for us.

When it comes to blunt honesty - we have to tell people things as they are without holding back (but avoid being too blunt). Charisma is the ability to project confidence and love at the same time. We need to find the balance to be honest and positive at the same time.

Radical honesty is what makes us feel free.

Focus on Basics 🗯

We don’t need to learn geometry, trigonometry, calculus, or any other complicated things if we’re going into business, but we need to have a good basic knowledge of math, especially multiplying, dividing, compounding, probability, and statistics.

If We Can’t Decide, Then It’s a ‘NO’ ⚓

When we choose something (a career, a relationship, a place to live), we get locked in for a long time. So it’s very important that we only say “yes” to things that we are (very) certain are right for us.

If we’re evenly split on a difficult decision, the advice is to select the path that’s more painful in the short term. It typically means that the path has long-term gain associated with it. And with the law of compound interest, long-term gain is what we want.

Read More… 📕

Reading is still the most powerful way to build new mental models. Just one hour a day of science, math, or philosophy can completely shift the trajectory of our life in 7 years.

But reading isn’t a race. The better the book, the slower we should move through it. Let the ideas marinate. Let them change us.

That said, it’s not about what we read as much as that we read—consistently and attentively. Books, blogs, newsletters, even tweets - whatever pulls us toward new ideas, information, and learning. We have to read what excites us and makes us think. Just don’t stop reading.

The important thing here is to save the information in our memory and keep it long enough until it reshapes our thinking and changes us. The most effective way to lock the information in is to teach it. Say it out loud. Write it down. Explain it to someone else. If we can’t explain it, it means that we don’t know it well enough yet.

Don’t avoid difficult books. Confusion is part of the process. Complex ideas stretch the mind, and that stretch is how we grow. But it's important to ground ourselves in solid foundations first (think microeconomics, hard sciences). Be careful with content that feels fuzzy, confusing, or untrue. It’s easy to mistake noise for knowledge, and it can mess with our minds and our thinking. In other words, we shouldn't trust everything we’re reading but instead look for real arguments and real research unless we’re purposely reading fiction.

Starting with originals and classics is best. Learn from thinkers who shaped the foundation first and then build on that, and then we're ready to explore more experimental stuff. Once our roots are deep, we can branch out anywhere.

Finally, not all books are meant to be read from cover to cover. If we simply follow our curiosity, it's totally fine to skip around and only read the ideas that catch our attention. Naval Ravikant treats books like blog posts for a reason: it’s not about finishing, it’s about finding what we’re looking for.

Happiness Is Learned 👻

Happiness isn't about having positive thoughts constantly, but more about the absence of desire for external things. The fewer desires we have, the more accepting of our current state we are. This is what makes us feel happier.

The truth is, that reality is neutral. It has no judgment. It simply reflects our own feelings back to us. Our minds are what make us happy or unhappy based on what we desire.

Naval Ravikant explains his happiness as not suffering, not desiring, not thinking too much about the future or the past. To him, happiness means embracing the present moment and the reality as it is. Peace is what he prioritises for happiness, and this is what I found mentioned in a lot of other books as well.

Happiness is being satisfied with what we have, and it’s a skill we can develop. It is also a choice we make. We can increase our happiness over time as long as we accept the idea that we can do it. But we must prioritise it above everything else.

How to build the skill:

• Start by building good habits: stop drinking, quit sugar, and avoid social media - this will keep our mood more stable. Video games and caffeine, for example, can provide short-term satisfaction but can ruin our long-term happiness.

• Replace our thoughtless, bad habits with good ones and commit to becoming a happier person.

• Choose our friends wisely - don’t just hang out with people who are convenient and easily accessible.

• Avoid conflict and hanging out around people who constantly engage in one.

• Don’t keep too many secrets - the more we have them, the less happy we’ll feel.

• Spend more time a day engaging in things we’re interested in.

• Practice optimism and avoid things that bring us down (e.g. news, heavy movies)

• Get more sunlight, exercise, positive thinking, and tryptophan.

“Peace is happiness at rest, and happiness is peace in motion. You can convert peace into happiness anytime you want. But peace is what you want most of the time. If you’re a peaceful person, anything you do will be a happy activity.”

Every Desire Is A Chosen Unhappiness 🚀

We know that we’re meant to have purpose and do something meaningful in our lives. To self-actualise. However, the idea that we’re going to change something in the outside world and that it will bring us peace, joy, and happiness is a fundamental delusion, which causes suffering. So we have to be careful here and choose our desires wisely - it’s better to perfect our desires than try to do something we don’t 100% desire.

Finding Happiness In Acceptance 🔑

We always have 3 choices in life, in any situation:

• Change it - if we want to change it, then it’s a desire. It will cause suffering until we succeed in changing it. Avoid picking too many of those, instead, focus on one at a time.

• Accept it - it’s about stepping back and seeing the grander scheme of things. The sooner we accept something, the sooner we can adapt to it, but it can be difficult to do.

• Leave it

“There is no legacy. There’s nothing to leave. We’re all going to be gone”. ”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 little bit. Appreciate the moment. And do your work.” - Naval Ravikant.

Choosing to Be Ourselves 💁‍♀️

Our goal in life should be to find people, businesses, projects, or art that need us the most. We should avoid building checklists and decision frameworks based on what other people are doing - we'll never be them, and we will never be good at being somebody else.

However, in order to make an original contribution, we must be irrationally obsessed with something that we connect with on a deeper level.

Taking Care of Ourselves 🧠

We should consciously choose to do more things that are good for us and avoid things that are not. For example, meditation is important as it’s like intermittent fasting for the mind (esp. transcendental, where we use repetitive chanting to create a white noise in our head to bury our thoughts, or closing our eyes and staying in silence for at least an hour a day). And so is the undistracted time spent alone, in self-examination, journaling, etc.

Naval recommends starting with one hour of meditation each morning for 60 days. This should help us get tired from listening to our thoughts and we should be able to resolve most of our issues by the end of it.

Our mind is a muscle and it can be trained and conditioned. If we give ourselves time and space to unpack our own mind, emotions, thoughts, and reactions, then we can start reconfiguring and rewriting the program we have to what we want instead.

Building Yourself 🧱

“The greatest superpower is the ability to change yourself”

How we choose to interpret our life experiences is up to us, and different people interpret their experiences in different ways, too. One of the most powerful things we can do for ourselves is be in an internal state of revolution - being always ready for a complete change. It’s not about saying that we’re going to try to do something or try to form a habit, but actually being ready to do these things. Sometimes telling other people about the changes we intend to make can help us strengthen our intentions and make them happen.

But the main point here is that if we really want to change - we change. We don’t try, intend, hope, plan - we just do. Why wait? We’re not getting any younger and we’re not gaining any more time. The biggest mistake is to be and do things that are not part of our mission.

Personal Growth 🌱

Growth is about setting systems that allow us to achieve our goals. We need to figure out what kinds of environments we can thrive in and then create an environment around us that maximises our chances to succeed.

“If there is something you want to do later, do it now. There is no “later.”

Reading helps us grow, too. We should read everything that interests us, not just popular books or things recommended by others. Even fantasy, novels, thrillers - there is no such thing as useless reading. Eventually, we'll find what we should and want to read.

Naval also highlights that we should learn persuasion, basic maths, statistics, and probability well. These skills can help us get further in life, too.

Personal Freedom 🪁

• Freedom from expectations

Other people’s expectations are not our problem and our lives are not meant to meet them. As long as we’re doing what we want, it’s not a waste of time. Life and our time is not and should never be about making other people happy.

• Freedom from anger

Anger is a loss of control over the situation and a punishment on its own. Accept it for what it is and control it.

• Freedom from employment

When we live far below our means, we can enjoy a freedom that people who keep upgrading their lifestyles can’t fathom. Once we control our own fate, we will no longer let anyone else tell us what to do. But it can also make us unemployable.

• Freedom from uncontrolled thinking

Uncontrollable thinking is bad for our happiness. We should seek more moments of silence and just being. The presence is all we have, we should learn to turn our “monkey mind” more often and to free ourselves from it.