How To Get Rich Without Being Lucky !

Naval Ravikant , the famous angel investor ,had a very insightful tweet-storm on this topic.

1. 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.

   Not so easy , we humans are wired deeply to seek status.

Understand that ethical wealth creation is possible. If you secretly despise wealth, it will elude you.

But how to do it ? One way is to create value for someone in exchange for cash. Your soul will get it.Then your brain will eventually catch up.

3. Ignore people playing status games. They gain status by attacking people playing wealth creation games.

There would be people around you who are mostly driven by their desire to achieve status, they may fight you, would try t derail you. Just ignore them , keep creating value for others- for society, for the company or organisation you work for.

4.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.

Keep in mind that you may not become wealthy by working for others. You may become rich in a job but to create real wealth you need to either own a business or you need to invest in a business run by someone passionate.

5.You will get rich by giving society what it wants but does not yet know how to get. At scale.

You may create some niche service or product , but it won’t take you far ! Scale is equally important as finding a gap. Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook are few examples.

 6. Pick an industry where you can play long term games with long term people.

Try to avoid working with the people or an industry where people have short term vision, the people who want to get rich quick.

An industry having long runway is the key for long term success.

7.The Internet has massively broadened the possible space of careers. Most people haven’t figured this out yet.

Heard about YouTube stars, Netflix disrupting age-old TV industry, Amazon taking over traditional retail – don’t worry you’re not late. Game has just begun.

8 Play iterated games. All the returns in life, whether in wealth, relationships, or knowledge, come from compound interest.

Choose a field suitable with  your aptitude . Don’t divert too much. Try to become world-class in your chosen field.

9.Pick business partners with high intelligence, energy, and, above all, integrity.

10.Don’t partner with cynics and pessimists. Their beliefs are self-fulfilling.

11.Learn to sell. Learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable.

12.Arm yourself with specific knowledge, accountability, and leverage.

Specific knowledge is knowledge that you cannot be trained for. If society can train you, it can train someone else, and replace you.

13.Building specific knowledge will feel like play to you but will look like work to others.

14.Specific knowledge is often highly technical or creative. It cannot be outsourced or automated.

15.When specific knowledge is taught, it’s through apprenticeships, not schools.

16.Embrace accountability, and take business risks under your own name. Society will reward you with responsibility, equity, and leverage.

Have skin in the game.

The most accountable people have singular, public, and risky brands: Oprah, Trump, Kanye, Elon.

17.“Give me a lever long enough, and a place to stand, and I will move the earth.” — Archimedes

Fortunes require leverage. Business leverage comes from capital, people, and products with no marginal cost of replication (code and media).

Leverage = ability to scale:

• Through capital
• By building a team (Labor leverage)
• With software
• With media

18.Capital leverage means money. To raise money, apply your specific knowledge, with accountability, and show resulting good judgment.

19.Labor leverage means people working for you. It’s the oldest and most fought-over form of leverage. Labor leverage will impress your parents, but don’t waste your life chasing it.

20. Leverage is a force multiplier for your judgement.

21.Judgement requires experience, but can be built faster by learning foundation skills.

Experiment, build , fail fast, learn fast.

22.There is no skill called “business.” Avoid business magazines and business classes.

23.Study microeconomics, game theory, psychology, persuasion, ethics, mathematics, and computers.

24.Reading is faster than listening. Doing is faster than watching.

Reading is must but taking action is more important, get your hands dirty.

25.Set and enforce an aspirational personal hourly rate. If fixing a problem will save less than your hourly rate, ignore it. If outsourcing a task will cost less than your hourly rate, outsource it.

26.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.

27.Become the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until this is true.

28.There are no get rich quick schemes. That’s just someone else getting rich off you.

29.Apply specific knowledge, with leverage, and eventually you will get what you deserve.

30.When you’re finally wealthy, you’ll realize that it wasn’t what you were seeking in the first place. But that’s for another day.