Business

The Wealthy: Pursue high quality, hard to fool. The Middle Class: Pursue cost-performance, nitpick every detail. The Idiots: Act purely on instinct, easily fooled. Instinct includes: being greedy for cheap deals, being emotional, fear of missing out (FOMO), loving to get a bargain… Live streaming sales primarily relies on short video traffic driving. What kind of short video is more attractive? A middle-aged person crying over a bankruptcy/liquidation clearance… This perfectly matches the greed and emotional nature of the common people. ...

Warren Buffett spends a year deciding and a day acting. That act lasts decades.

The business world has many people playing zero sum games and a few playing positive sum games searching for each other in the crowd. Wealth creation is an evolutionarily recent positive-sum game. Status is an old zero-sum game. Those attacking wealth creation are often just seeking status.

Analyzing from the perspective of game theory, the contributions of employees to companies follow a parabolic curve, while wage levels continue to rise. This is why internet companies have a retirement age of 35. +++

The unlucky ones who were eliminated by competition have no voice; you cannot see their journey of heart and their thoughts. +++

The less you want something, the less you’re thinking about it, the less you’re obsessing over it, the more you’re going to do it in a natural way. The more you’re going to do it for yourself. You’re going to do it in a way you’re good at, and you’re going to stick with it. The people around you will see the quality of your work is higher.

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. Now, the problem is becoming good at whatever “it” is. It moves around from generation to generation, but a lot of it happens to be in technology.

The most interesting and the most important form of leverage is the idea of products that have no marginal cost of replication. This is the new form of leverage. This was only invented in the last few hundred years. It started with the printing press. It accelerated with broadcast media, and now it’s really blown up with the internet and with coding. Now, you can multiply your efforts without involving other humans and without needing money from other humans.

Whenever you can in life, optimize for independence rather than pay. If you have independence and you’re accountable on your output, as opposed to your input— that’s the dream. A leveraged worker can out-produce a non-leveraged worker by a factor of one thousand or ten thousand. With a leveraged worker, judgment is far more important than how much time they put in or how hard they work. +++

If I do my job right, if I create value for society, society says, “Oh, thank you. We owe you something in the future for the work you did in the past. Here’s a little IOU. Let’s call that money.”

Wealth is the thing you want. Wealth is the factory, the robots, cranking out things. Wealth is the computer program that’s running at night, serving other customers. Wealth is even money in the bank that is being reinvested into other assets, and into other businesses. Even a house can be a form of wealth, because you can rent it out, although that’s probably a lower productivity use of land than some commercial enterprise. So, my definition of wealth is much more businesses and assets that can earn while you sleep.

Leverage comes in labor, comes in capital, or it can come through code or media.

If you don’t own a piece of a business, you don’t have a path towards financial freedom. If you don’t own a piece of a business, you don’t have a path towards financial freedom.

Ownership versus wage work. If you are paid for renting out your time, even lawyers and doctors, you can make some money, but you’re not going to make the money that gives you financial freedom. You’re not going to have passive income where a business is earning for you while you are on vacation. Without ownership, your inputs are very closely tied to your outputs. In almost any salaried job, even one paying a lot per hour like a lawyer or a doctor, you’re still putting in the hours, and every hour you get paid. ...

You should to know the problem exactly.

Make something people want . . . There’s nothing more valuable than an unmet need that is just becoming fixable. If you find something broken that you can fix for a lot of people, you’ve found a gold mine.

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. Ignore people playing status games. They gain status by attacking people playing wealth creation games. 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. You will get rich by giving society what it wants but does not yet know how to get. At scale. ...

Big goals are easier to achieve than small ones because problems cannot completely block your view of the big picture. Successful people always know how to put themselves in a “necessary” situation; without achieving their goals, they will never be happy. When you set limits for yourself, you will try to reach those limits. You should not only take responsibility for your failures but also for your successes. If you believe that success is unrepeatable, you lose the opportunity to improve your self-worth. A person who gives 110% effort and actively eliminates all excuses is bound to succeed. You need a good coach, someone who can maximize your potential using their own experience. The first person to focus on their weaknesses will not gain wealth. Whether it’s passive defense or active offense in a competition makes a world of difference. Many people have lost the joy of life and the opportunity to become wealthy by trying too hard to eliminate their weaknesses. The price you must pay to acquire wealth is time. But this is not comparable to the time you earn through wealth. Wealth allows you to think calmly about the meaning of life without financial concerns. +++

Energy tips build self-confidence by keeping a success diary every day. Our self-confidence determines whether we dare to take risks. Without taking risks, growth is impossible. Overall, our thoughts, the education we receive, and the environment around us are not conducive to cultivating our self-confidence. A healthy self-assessment means confidence. Keeping a success diary makes you aware of how excellent you are. When writing a diary, you learn to focus on your strengths. After some time, you will start to discover your strengths and think: I can write this into my success diary. Our expectations determine what we will achieve. Our self-confidence again determines our expectations. +++

Build your career upon your greatest passion. Use your hobby to make money. Take the time to analyze what you are truly interested in and where your talents lie, and only then can you pursue a job that you are both passionate about and can earn money from.