Naval is only 47, so it’s not like he’s coming at this with 90 years or 100 years behind him. I think that is quite inspiring, that you can find that level of acceptance and peace and the ability to have fun and enjoy things, without necessarily having lived your whole life to have that perspective. PRODUCTS: In our environment, the final form of leverage is new: products with no marginal cost of repetition. Books, media, movies, and code are all examples of this. Permissionless leverage in the form of code is perhaps the most potent. You only need a computer to produce, and you don’t need anyone’s permission. Sales skills, for example, are a type of specialised knowledge. Every now and then, you’ll come across someone who is completely natural in their sales pitch. It’s safe to say they didn’t learn it in a classroom. Maybe it started in their childhood or in the schoolyard, or maybe it’s in their DNA. However, this does not rule out the possibility of improving your sales abilities. You can read Robert Cialdini, attend a sales training seminar, or go door to door selling. It’s tough, but it’ll teach you a lot in a short amount of time. Nobody can teach you specific information, but you can learn it. Instead, actively engage in conversations, listen to educational videos, and look up ways to build wealth while living a meaningful life. Don’t lose sight of the present, yet keep an eye on the future. More importantly, don’t inflate your lifestyle as you earn more money. Save and invest them to build a future out of the rat race, instead of upgrading your treadmill. Lesson 3: To become happy, learn how to be neutral and quiet. Spend more time making the big decisions: We waste our time with short-term thinking and busywork. Warren Buffett spends a year deciding and a day acting. That act lasts decades.

If a book doesn’t interest you at first, flip ahead, skim, or speed read. If it still doesn’t interest you after the first chapter, drop the book. Most books have one point to make. Once you get the gist of a book, put it down. 5. Understand Happiness is a Choice Almost all biases are time-saving heuristics. For important decisions, discard memory and identity, and focus on the problem.

1. Understand How to Create Wealth

Someone who manages money in a real estate fund could be the next step up. Dealing with a large number of developers and purchasing substantial volumes of home inventory might give them a lot of capital leverage. Follow your intellectual curiosity more than whatever is “hot” right now. If your curiosity ever leads you to a place where society eventually wants to go, you’ll get paid extremely well.[3] Probably for someone who is not used to Naval’s thought this book is going to be much breathtaking. In my case it was re-reading tweets and interviews I am familiar with. Despite that it is short and easy to read and ideal for skimming to find ideas and interesting points of view. Jorgenson did a good job of presenting the material as something homogeneous but sometimes it might feel repetitive or the criteria for grouping thoughts could be different in some cases.

The internet enables any niche interest, as long as you’re the best person at it to scale out. And the great news is because every human is different, everyone is the best at something— being themselves. My current favorite short story, sci-fi short story: probably “Understand” by Ted Chiang. It’s in a collection called Stories of Your Life and Others. “Story of Your Life” was made into a movie called Arrival. [1] My whole life people have defined entrepreneurship as “people who seek risk to grow a business.” Yet some of the best entrepreneurs and investors are the best at minimizing risk.By virtue of the trials and tribulations he encountered in business and decision-making, he was able to develop a pragmatic yet staggeringly original outlook on life. After years of experience (and prosperity) in the game that we call life, he eventually learned that things like success or happiness are learnable skills—that anyone can learn. Here, he lays out the foundations to build just that. I admire his ability to convey dense and provocative insights with such eloquence and concision and how he never runs out of new, subversive ideas. Humans evolved in societies where there was no leverage. If I was chopping wood or carrying water for you, you knew eight hours put in would be equal to about eight hours of output. Now we’ve invented leverage — through capital, cooperation, technology, productivity, all these means. We live in an age of leverage. As a worker, you want to be as leveraged as possible, so you have a huge impact without as much time or physical effort. LABOUR: Humans who work for you. This is the oldest form of leverage, and it isn’t very effective in today’s society. Managing others can be a nightmare because it necessitates exceptional leadership abilities. 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. Obviously they learned somewhere, but they didn’t learn it in a classroom setting. They learned probably in their childhood in the school yard, or they learned negotiating with their parents. Maybe some is a genetic component in the DNA.

This book is a form of leverage. Long ago, I would have had to sit in a lecture hall and lecture each of you personally. I would have maybe reached a few hundred people, and that would have been that.[78] 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 seven different foreign languages.Probably the most interesting thing to keep in mind about new forms of leverage is they are permissionless. They don’t require somebody else’s permission for you to use them or succeed. For labor leverage, somebody has to decide to follow you. For capital leverage, somebody has to give you money to invest or to turn into a product. The year I generated the most wealth for myself was actually the year I worked the least hard and cared the least about the future. I was mostly doing things for the sheer fun of it. 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.[74]