You have to put in the time, but the judgment is more important. The direction you’re heading in matters more than how fast you move, especially with leverage. Picking the direction you’re heading in for every decision is far, far more important than how much force you apply. Just pick the right direction to start walking in, and start walking. ...
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. ...
If someone can train other people how to do something, then they can replace you. If they can replace you, then they don’t have to pay you a lot. You want to know how to do something other people don’t know how to do at the time period when those skills are in demand.
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. ...
One form of leverage is labor—other humans working for you. It is the oldest form of leverage, and actually not a great one in the modern world. [1] I would argue this is the worst form of leverage that you could possibly use. Managing other people is incredibly messy. It requires tremendous leadership skills. You’re one short hop from a mutiny or getting eaten or torn apart by the mob. [78] Money is good as a form of leverage. It means every time you make a decision, you multiply it with money. [1] Capital is a trickier form of leverage to use. It’s more modern. It’s the one that people have used to get fabulously wealthy in the last century. It’s probably been the dominant form of leverage in the last century. You can see this by looking for the richest people. It’s bankers, politicians in corrupt countries who print money, essentially people who move large amounts of money around. If you look at the top of very large companies, outside of technology companies, in many, many large old companies, the CEO job is really a financial job. 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. The final form of leverage is brand new—the most democratic form. It is: “products with no marginal cost of replication.” This includes books, media, movies, and code. Code is probably the most powerful form of permissionless leverage. All you need is a computer—you don’t need anyone’s permission. ...
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.
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. ...
Mental models are concepts that represent your understanding of how something in the world works. Think of driving a car: What do you expect when you press down on the right-side pedal? If the car slows down, you’ll be surprised—that pedal is supposed to be the accelerator. The accuracy of your model of the world determines your expectations, decisions, behavior, and—in the long run—your results. ...
You should to know the problem exactly.
There is a difference between (A) what an MBA does to help you prove your abilities to others . (B) what getting an MBA actually does to improve your abilities. They are two different things.
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.
It’s not really about hard work. You can work in a restaurant eighty hours a week, and you’re not going to get rich. Getting rich is about knowing what to do, who to do it with, and when to do it. It is much more about understanding than purely hard work. Yes, hard work matters, and you can’t skimp on it. But it has to be directed in the right way. ...
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. ...
作者提出一个论点，引用海量实例证明自己的观点，然后用自己的观点去论证世界上各种各样的现象。一旦觉得自己已经明白了这个论点，我就不再读下去了。这样的书太多了，我称其为伪科学畅销书。 ...
举例来说，我买了一辆新车，现在等着提车。我自然会很关注这件事，每天晚上都上论坛查看、研究相关信息。我为什么要这样做？只是一辆普普通通的车，不会给我的生活带来什么实质性改变。我知道，只要车一到手，我就不会再关注它了。问题的关键在于，我沉迷于对外物的“欲望”。我对外部事物会带给我幸福和快乐的执念其实是一种痴念。 ...
而现实是，生活就是一场单人游戏。人独自出生，独自死亡，独自解读人世间的一切。你的记忆只属于你一个人。你出生前无人在意，你离开人世后也无人在意，你存在于人世间只是短短几十年，人生就是一场单人游戏。 ...
我认为，生活本身没有那么难，是我们自己把生活变难了。我在生活中努力摆脱“应该”这个词。当“应该”在脑海中出现时，其背后隐藏的是负罪感或社会规训。如果做一件事是因为“应该”，那就表示你内心是不想这么做的，而违背自己的心意会让你变得痛苦不堪。因此，我努力在生活中减少“应该”做的事。 ...
我认为，赚钱很关键的一点就是知名度和信誉度，也就是说，大家要知道你、信任你，这样人们便会通过你达成某些交易。前面举了潜水员的例子，由于你的潜水技能非常出色，知名度很高，寻宝的人会主动来找你，并分给你一些宝藏，以换取你的技能。 ...
为自己独特的产出成果负责（而不是像打工一样为投入的时间负责），这才是最理想的状态。