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.
You will get rich by giving society what it wants but does not yet know how to get. At scale.
An army of robots is freely available — it’s just packed in data centers for heat and space efficiency. Use it.
Leverage is a force multiplier for your judgment.
Judgment requires experience but can be built faster by learning foundational skills.
Technology democratizes consumption but consolidates production. The best person in the world at anything gets to do it for everyone.
Technology is the set of things that don’t quite work yet. Once something works, it’s no longer technology. Society always wants new things.
Most of life is a search for who and what needs you the most.
Society, business and money are downstream of technology, which is itself downstream of science. Science applied is the engine of humanity.
You really care about having studied the foundations, so you’re not scared of any book. If you go to the library and there’s a book you cannot understand, you have to dig down and say, “What is the foundation required for me to learn this?” Foundations are super important.
Basic arithmetic and numeracy are way more important in life than doing calculus. Similarly, being able to convey yourself simply using ordinary English words is far more important than being able to write poetry, having an extensive vocabulary, or speaking 7 different languages.
Knowing how to be persuasive when speaking is far more important than being an expert digital marketer or click optimizer.
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. They’ve stuck with the business and shown themselves (in a visible and accountable way) to be high-integrity people.
This is also true when you’re working with individual people. If you’ve worked with somebody for 5 or 10 years and you still enjoy working with them, obviously you trust them, and the little foibles are gone. All the normal negotiations in business relationships can work very simply because you trust each other — you know it will work out.
Intentions don’t matter. Actions do. That’s why being ethical is hard.
Obviously, nothing is ever completely wasted because it’s all a learning moment. You can learn from anything. But for example, when you back to school, 99% of the term papers you did, books you read, exercises you did, things you learned, they don’t really apply. You might have read geography and history you never reuse. You might have studied a language you don’t speak anymore.
Of course, these are learning experiences. You did learn. You learned the value of hard work; you might have learned something that went deep into your psyche and became a piece of what you’re doing now. But at least when it comes to the goal-oriented life, only about 1% of the efforts you made paid off.
Another example is all the people you dated until you met your husband or wife. It was wasted time in the goal sense. Not wasted int he exponential sense, not wasted in the learning sense, but definitely wasted in the goal sense.
So to get these things, you have to build credibility, and you have to do it under you own name as much as possible, which is risky. So, accountability is a double-edged thing. It allows you to take credit when things go well and to bear the brunt of the failure when things go badly.
Clear accountability is important. Without accountability, you don’t have incentives. Without accountability, you can’t build credibility. But you take risks. You risk failure. You risk humiliation. You risk failure under your own name.
Essentially, you’re working for somebody else, and that person is taking on the risk and has the accountability, the IP, and the brand. They’re not going to pay you enough. They’re going to pay you the bare minimum they have to, to get you to do their job. That can be a high bare minimum, but it’s still not going to be true wealth where you’re retired but still earning.
I only really want to do things for their own sake. That is one definition of art. Whether is’s business, exercise, romance, friendship, whatever, I think the meaning of life is to do things for their own sake. Ironically, when you do things for their own sake, you create your best work. Even if you’re just trying to make money, you will actually be the most successful.
It 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.
Humans evolved in societies where there was no leverage.
I would love to be paid purely for my judgment, not for any work. I want a robot, capital, or computer to do the work, but I want to be paid for my judgment.
CEOs are highly paid because of their leverage. Small differences in judgment and capability really get amplified.
You will never be worth more than you think you’re worth.
If you get into a relative mindset, you’re always going to hate people who do better than you, you’re always going to be jealous or envious of them. They’ll sense those feelings when you try and do business with them. When you try and do business with somebody, if you have any bad thoughts or any judgments about them, they will feel it. Humans are wired to feel what other person deep down inside feels. You have to get out of a relative mindset.
Karma works because people are consistent. ON a long enough timescale, you will attract what you project. But don’t measure — your patience will run out if you count.
An old boss once warned: “You’ll never be rich since you’re obviously smart, and someone will always offer you a job that’s just good enough.”
Retirement is when you stop sacrificing today for an imaginary tomorrow. When today is complete, in and of itself, you’re retired.
The punishment for the love of money is delivered at the same time as the money. As you make money, you just want even more, and you become paranoid and fearful of losing what do have. There’s no free lunch.
The winners of any game are the people who are so addicted they continue playing even as the marginal utility from winning declines.
Some of the most successful people I’ve seen in SV had breakouts very early in their careers. They got promoted to VP, director, or CEO, or started a company that did well fairly early. If you’re not getting promoted through the ranks, it gets a lot harder to catch up later in life. It’s good t be in a smaller company early because there’s less of an infrastructure to prevent early promotion.
For someone who is early in their career, the single most important thing about a company is the alumni network you’re going to build. Think about who you will work with and what those people are going on to do.
I think business networking is a complete waste of time. And I know there are people and companies popularizing this concept because it serves them and their business model well, but the reality is tif you’re building something interesting, you will always have more people who will want to know you.
If someone is talking a lot about how honest they are, they’re probably dishonest. When someone spends too much time talking about their own values or they’re talking themselves up, they’re covering for something.
Not in some cosmic, karma kind of way, but I believe deep down we all know who we are. You cannot hide anything from yourself. Your own failures are written within your psyche, and they’re obvious to you. If you have too many of these moral shortcomings, you will not respect yourself. The worst outcome in this world is not having self-esteem. If you don’t love yourself, who will?
I think you just have to be very careful about doing things you are fundamentally not going to be proud of, because they will damage you. The first time someone acts this way, I will warn them. By the way, nobody changes. Then I just distance myself from them. I cut them out of my life. I just have this saying inside my head: “The closer you want to get to me, the better your values have to be.”
One thing I figured out later in life is generally, great people have great outcomes. You just have to be patient. Every person I met at the beginning of my career 20 years ago, where I looked at them and said, “Wow, that guy is super capable — so smart and dedicated”… all of them, almost without exception, became extremely successful.
Everybody wants to get rich immediately, but the world is an efficient place; immediate doesn’t work. You do have to put in the time. You do have to put in the hours, and so I think you have to put yourself in the position with the specific knowledge, with accountability, with leverage, with the authentic skill set you have, to be the best in the world at what you do.
You have to enjoy it and keep doing it, keep doing it, and keep doing it. Don’t keep track, and don’t keep count because if you do, you will run out of time.
The most common bad advice I hear is: “You’re too young.” Most of history was built by young people. They just got credit when they were older. The only way to truly learn something is by doing it. Yes, listen to the guidance. But don’t wait.
Karma is just you, repeating your patterns, virtues, and flaws until you finally get what you deserve.
Your real resume is just a catalog of all your suffering. If I ask you to describe your real life to yourself, and you look back from your deathbed at the interesting things you’ve done, it’s all going to be around the sacrifices you made, the hard things you did.
However, anything you’re given doesn’t matter. You have to do hard things anyway to create your own meaning in life.
You don’t get rich by spending your time to save money.
You get rich by saving your time to make money.
My definition of wisdom is knowing the long-term consequences of your actions. Wisdom applied to external problems is judgment.
“Clear thinker” is a better compliment than “smart.”
Part of making effective decisions boils down to dealing with reality. How do you make sure you’re dealing with reality when you’re making decisions?
By not having a strong sense of self or judgments or mind presence. The “monkey mind” will always respond with this regurgitated emotional response to what it thinks the would should be. Those desires will cloud your reality.
The number one thing clouding us from being able to see reality is we have preconceived notions of way it should be.
The good news is, the moment of suffering — when you’re in pain — is a moment of truth. It is a moment where you’re forced to embrace reality the way it actually is. Then, you can make meaningful change and progress. You can only make progress when you’re starting with the truth.
The hard thing is seeing the truth. To see the truth, you have to get your ego out of the way because your ego doesn’t want to face the truth. The smaller you can make your ego, the less conditioned you can make your reactions, the less desires you can have about the outcome you want, the easier it will be to see reality.
It’s only after you’re bored you have the great ideas. It’s never going to be when you’re stressed, or busy, running around or rushed. Make the time.
Our egos are constructed in our formative years — our first two decades. They get constructed by our environment, our parents, society. The, we spend the rest of our life trying to make our ego happy. We interpret anything new through our ego: “How do I change the external world to make it more how I would like it to be?”
I used to identify as libertarian, but then I would find myself defending positions I hadn’t really thought through because they’re a part of the libertarian canon. If all your beliefs line up in a neat little bundles, you should be highly suspicious.
Self-serving conclusions should have a higher bar.
Almost all biases are time-saving heuristics. For important decisions, discard memory and identity, and focus on the problem.
Tell everyone. Start now. It doesn’t have to be blunt. Charisma is the ability to project confidence and love at the same time. It’s almost always possible to be honest and positive.
If you don’t have the underlying experience, then it just reads like a collection of quotes. It’s cool, it’s inspirational for a moment, maybe you’ll make a nice poster out of it. But then you forget it and move on. Mental models are really just compact ways for you to recall your own knowledge.
Least understood, but the most important principle for anyone claiming “science” on their side — falsifiability. It it doesn’t make falsifiable prediction, it’s not science. For you to believe something is true, it should have predictive power, and it must be falsifiable.
You’re biologically not built to realize how many choices there are. Historically, we’ve all evolved in tribes of 150 people. When someone comes along, they may be your only option for a partner.
When you choose something, you get locked in for a long time. Starting a business may take 10 years. You start a relationship that will be 5 years or maybe more. You move to a city for 10 to 20 years. These are very, very long-lived decisions. It’s very, very important we only say yes when we are pretty certain. You’re never going to be absolutely certain, but you’re going to be very certain.
If you cannot decide, the answer is no.
To think clearly, understand the basics. If you’re memorizing advanced concepts without being able to re-derive them as needed, you’re lost.
Twitter has made me a worse reader but a much better writer.
The 3 big ones are wealth, health, and happiness. We pursue them in that order, but their importance is reverse.
For some people I know, it’s a flow state. For some people, it’s satisfaction. For some, it’s a feeling of contentment. My definition keeps evolving. The answer I would have given you a year ago will be different than what I tell you now.
Today, I believe happiness is really a default state. Happiness is there when you remove the sense of something missing in your life. When nothing is missing, you mind shuts down and stops running into the past or future to regret something or to plan something.
The more I’ve read, the more I’ve learned, and the more I’ve experienced, every positive thought essentially holds within it a negative thought. It is a contrast to something negative. It’s all duality and polarity. If I say I’m happy, that means I was sad at some point. If I say he’s attractive, then someone else is unattractive. Every positive thought even has a seed of a negative thought within it and vice versa, which is why a lot of greatness in life comes out of suffering. You have to view the negative before you can aspire to and appreciate the positive.
Happiness to me is mainly not suffering, not desiring, not thinking too much about the future or the past, really embracing the present moment and the reality of what is, and the way it is.
Nature has no concept of happiness or unhappiness. Nature follows unbroken mathematical laws and a chain of cause and effect from the Big Bang to now. Everything is perfect exactly the way it is. It is only in our minds we are unhappy or not happy, and things are perfect or imperfect because of what we desire.
The world just reflects your own feelings back to you. Reality is neutral. Reality has no judgments. To a tree, there is no concept of right or wrong, good or bad. You’re, you have a whole set of sensory experiences and stimulations and then you die. How you choose to interpret them is up to you — you have that choice.
What you’re left with in that neutral state is not neutrality. I think people believe neutrality would be a very bland existence. No, this is the existence little children live. If you look at little children, on balance, they’re generally pretty happy because they are really immersed in the environment and the moment, without any thought of how it should be given their personal preferences and desires. I think the neutral state is actually a perfection state. One can be very happy as long as one isn’t too caught up in their own head.
At any given time, when you’re walking down the streets, a very small percentage of your brain is focused on the present. The rest is planning the future or regretting the past. This keeps you from having an incredible experience. It’s keeping you from seeing the beauty in everything and for being grateful for where you are. You can literally destroy your happiness if you spend all of your time living in delusions of the future.
What if this life is the paradise we were promised, and we’re just squandering it?
I think the most common mistake for humanity is believing you’re going to be made happy because of some external circumstance. I know that’s not original. That’s not new. It’s fundamental Buddhist wisdom — I’m not taking credit for it. I think I really just recognize it on a fundamental level, including in myself.
When you’re young, you have time & health but no money. When you’re middle age, you have money & health but not time. When you’re old, you have time & money but no health.
Happiness is being satisfied with what you have.
Success comes from dissatisfaction. Choose.
All your memories are alone. You’re gone in 3 generations, and nobody cares. Before you showed up, nobody cared. It’s all single player.
Do you admire and respect but not envy them?
If you can’t see yourself working with someone for life, don’t work with them for a day.
If you ask Behzad what’s his secret? He’ll just look up and say, “Stop asking why and start saying wow.”
First, you know it. Then, you understand it. Then, you can explain it. Then, you can feel it. Finally, you are it.
Whenever I get caught up in my ego battles, I just think of entire civilizations that have come and gone.
There are a number on the physical side. We have diets we are not evolved to eat. A correct diet should probably look closer to a paleo diet, mostly eating vegetables with a small amount of mean and berries.
I think the interplay between sugar and fat is really interesting. Fat is what makes you satiated. Fatty foods make you feel full. The easiest way to feel full is to go on a ketogenic diet, where you’re eating tons of bacon all the time, and you’re going to feel almost nauseous and not want to look fat any more.
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. That’s why all desserts are large combinations of fat and carbs together.
In nature, it’s very rare to find carbs and fat together.
I’m not an expert, and the problem is diet and nutrition are like politics: everybody thinks they’re an expert. Their identity is wrapped up in it because what they’ve been eating or what they think they should be eating is obviously the correct answer.
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.” What you really have to do is say whether it is a priority or not. If something is your number one priority, then you will do it.
What I did was decide my number one priority in life, above my happiness, above my family, above my work, is my own health.
I don’t give myself any time to hesitate. As soon as I hear the voice in my head telling me how cold it’s going to be, I know I have to walk in.
I learned a very important lesson from this: most of our suffering comes from avoidance. Most of the suffering from a cold shower is the tip-toeing your way in. Once you’re in, you’re in. It’s not suffering. It’s just cold. Acknowledge your body saying it’s cold. Look at it. Deal with it. Accept it, but don’t mentally suffer over it.
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.
If I saw a guy with a bad hair day, I would at first think “Haha, he has a bad hair day.” Well, why am I laughing at him to make me feel better about myself? And why am I trying to make me feel better about my own hair? Because I’m losing my hair, and I’m afraid it’s going to go away. What I find is 90% of thoughts I have are fear-based. The other 10% may be desire-based.
You don’t make any decisions. You don’t judge anything. You just accept everything.
When your mind quiets, you stop taking everything around you for granted. You start to notice the details. You think, “Wow, I live in such a beautiful place. It’s so great that I have clothes, and I can go to Starbucks and get a coffee anytime.”
Modern humans, we don’t live enough in our bodies. We don’t live enough in our awareness. We live too much in this internal monologues in our heads.
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.
The greatest superpower is the ability to change yourself.
We’re just saying to ourselves, “I’m going to guy myself some more time.” The reality is when our emotions want us to do something, we just do it. If you want to go approach a pretty girl, if you want to have a drink, if you really desire something, you just go do it.
When you say, “I’m going to do this,” and “I’m going to be that,” you’re really putting it off. You’re giving yourself an out. At least if you’re self-aware, you can think, “I say I want to do this, but I don’t really because if I really wanted to do it, I would just do it.”
Commit externally to enough people. If you want to quit smoking, all you have to do is go to everybody you know and say, “I quit smoking. I did it. I give you my word.”
Anything you have to do, just get it done. Why wait? You’re not getting any younger. Your life is slipping away. You don’t want to spend it waiting in line. You don’t want to spend it traveling back and forth. You don’t want to spend it doing things you know ultimately aren’t part of your mission.
If you view yourself as a loser, as someone who was cast out by society and has no role in normal society, then you will do your own thing and you’re much more likely to find a winning path. It helps to start out by saying, “I’m never going to be popular. I’m never going to be accepted. I’m already a loser. I’m not going to get what all the other kids have. I’ve just got to be happy being me.”
What is anger? Anger is a way to signal as strongly as you can to the other party you’re capable of violence. Anger is a precursor to violence.
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.
We live in what I would call the “real world.” Puberty is the onset of desire — the first time you really, really want something and you start long-range planning. You start thinking a lot, building an identity and an ego to get what you want.
If you walk down the street and there are a thousand people in the street, all thousand are talking to themselves in their head at any given point. They’re constantly judging everything they see. They’re playing back movies of things that happened to them yesterday. They’re living in fantasy worlds of what’s going to happen tomorrow. They’re just pulled out of base reality. That can be good when you do long-range planning. It can be good when you solve problems. It’s good for us as survival-and-replication machines.
It’s actually very bad for your happiness. The mind should be a servant and a tool, not a master. My monkey mind should not control and drive me 24/7.
The real truths are heresies. They cannot be spoken. Only discovered, whispered, and perhaps read.
What kind of silly God judges you for eternity based on some small period of time here?
I don’t believe in any short-term thinking or dealing. If I’m doing business with somebody and they think in a short-term manner with somebody else, then I don’t want to do business with them anymore. 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.