Notes

Don’t spend your time trying to please others. Whether others are happy or not is their problem, not yours.

Being accountable for your unique output (rather than being accountable for the time spent, like an employee), this is the ideal state.

I took a risk. Same with crypto. Early on, I took a risk. But when you put your name out there, you take a risk with certain things. You also get to reap the rewards. You get the benefits.

Highly intelligent people are often unconventional. They insist on independent thinking and hands-on involvement to fully grasp the context and origins of things.

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.

Owning equity in a company basically means you own the upside. When you own debt, you own guaranteed revenue streams and you own the downside. You want to own equity. If you don’t own equity in a business, your odds of making money are very slim.

Your boss will always pay you just good enough.

Essentially, you’re working for somebody else, and that person is taking on the risk and has the accountability, the intellectual property, 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.

Time investment is necessary, so I believe what you need to do is cultivate expertise, responsibility, and influence, leverage the effect of leverage to gain a world-class skill set, and be the foremost in your professional field.

If one does not hold corporate equity, the correlation between personal input and returns will be extremely strong. For almost all salaried jobs, even high-paying professions like lawyers or doctors, time must be invested to earn the corresponding income. If you don’t hold company equity, you have no income while sleeping, no income after retirement, and no income during vacation. In short, the income is relatively fixed, making it impossible to achieve substantial breakthroughs.

The less desire you have for something, the fewer worries you will have, the less obsession you will have, and conversely, the more you will be able to go with the flow and follow your inner self. You will consistently continue doing it in the way you are best at, and the quality of your work will improve as a result.

You can go on the internet, and you can find your audience. And you can build a business, and create a product, and build wealth, and make people happy just uniquely expressing yourself through the internet.

You have to do it by yourself.

This is the result of being educated with standard answers since childhood. Even when the professor taught the Prisoner’s Dilemma, with all the formulas and mathematics already available, they still hesitate to consider whether gun control can be relaxed.

You’ve already thought of a fallback plan before you even start. Usually, there is no room for experimentation; you only have two choices—to do it or not to do it. If you approach things with a tentative mindset, they are highly likely to end in failure.

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.

There are no get-rich-quick schemes. Those are just someone else getting rich off you.

Money is how we transfer wealth. Money is social credits. It is the ability to have credits and debits of other people’s time.

This is a free-rider game. One party bears the corresponding cost, and both parties share the resulting benefits. Whether individual rationality and collective rationality conflict depends on the game’s rules. When A < 10, the collective should participate (or contribute). However, due to unequal income distribution, individuals are reluctant to contribute. To resolve this conflict, we should not deny individual interests (let the big pig press the button selflessly), but rather change the game’s rules (if the small pig doesn’t press, it eats a little less). Therefore, while free-riding, don’t forget to give something back to the other party. The willingness of the wealthy to be benevolent cannot exist without the approval (or “likes”) of the poor.

There is a clear lure. The path to the lure is one-way—you can enter, but you cannot exit (sunk cost). The harder you try to break free, the deeper you fall.