Part I: Wealth

Building Wealth

“I like to think that if I lost all my money and you dropped me on a random street in any English-speaking country, within five or ten years I’d be wealthy again because it’s just a skillset I’ve developed that anyone can develop.”

This type of systems thinking is quite inspiring. The idea is that you don’t get rich by getting lucky; you have a system in place that lets you achieve the same goal with repeatable success. That matters because a system can be passed on — to your children, and to other people in general — which strikes me as a noble pursuit.

  • Productize Yourself: “Yourself” has uniqueness. “Productize” has leverage. “Yourself” has accountability. “Productize” has specific knowledge. “Yourself” also has specific knowledge in there. So all of these pieces, you can combine them into these two words.
    • If you want to be wealthy, you want to figure out which one of those things you can provide for society that it does not yet know how to get but it will want and providing it is natural to you, within your skill set, and within your capabilities.
    • Then, you have to figure out how to scale it because if you only build one, that’s not enough. You’ve got to build thousands, or hundreds of thousands, or millions, or billions of them so everybody can have one.
  • Specific Knowledge: Figure out what you were doing as a kid or teenager almost effortlessly. Something you didn’t even consider a skill, but people around you noticed. Your mother or your best friend growing up would know. The specific knowledge is sort of this weird combination of unique traits from your DNA, your unique upbringing, and your response to it. It’s almost baked into your personality and your identity. Then you can hone it. Specific knowledge is found much more by pursuing your innate talents, your genuine curiosity, and your passion. It’s not by going to school for whatever is the hottest job; it’s not by going into whatever field investors say is the hottest.
  • Escape competition through authenticity: Basically, when you’re competing with people, it’s because you’re copying them. It’s because you’re trying to do the same thing. But every human is different. Don’t copy. If you are fundamentally building and marketing something that is an extension of who you are, no one can compete with you on that.
  • Perpetual Learner: It’s much more important today to be able to become an expert in a brand-new field in nine to twelve months than to have studied the “right” thing a long time ago. You really care about having studied the foundations, so you’re not scared of any book. It’s much better to be at 9/10 or 10/10 on foundations than to try and get super deep into things. You do need to be deep in something because otherwise you’ll be a mile wide and an inch deep and you won’t get what you want out of life. You can only achieve mastery in one or two things. It’s usually things you’re obsessed about.
  • Play long-term games with long-term people: Compound interest applies to more than just compounding capital. Compounding capital is just the beginning. Compound interest also happens in your reputation. When you find the right thing to do, when you find the right people to work with, invest deeply. Sticking with it for decades is really how you make the big returns in your relationships and in your money.
  • 99% of effort is wasted: The reason I say this is not to make some glib comment about how 99 percent of your life is wasted and only 1 percent is useful. I say this because you should be very thoughtful and realize in most things (relationships, work, even in learning) what you’re trying to do is find the thing you can go all-in on to earn compound interest. I’m not saying don’t do the 99 percent, because it’s very hard to identify what the 1 percent is. What I’m saying is: when you find the 1 percent of your discipline which will not be wasted, which you’ll be able to invest in for the rest of your life and has meaning to you — go all-in and forget about the rest.
  • Accountability: Accountability is a double-edged thing. It allows you to take credit when things go well and to bear the brunt of the failure when things go badly. Clear accountability is important. Without accountability, you don’t have incentives. Without accountability, you can’t build credibility. But you take risks. You risk failure. You risk humiliation. You risk failure under your own name.
  • Owning a piece of equity in a business: It’s ownership versus wage work. 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. Without ownership, when you’re sleeping, you’re not earning. When you’re retired, you’re not earning. When you’re on vacation, you’re not earning. And you can’t earn nonlinearly. 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.
  • On Developing Skills That Are Uniquely You: 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. You’re more likely to have skills society does not yet know how to train other people to do. 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 get rewarded by society for giving it what it wants and doesn’t know how to get elsewhere.
  • Leverage = Labor + Capital (permissioned) + Media & Code (permissionless, e.g. products with no marginal cost of replication).
    • 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.
    • If you have specific knowledge, you have accountability and you have leverage; they have to pay you what you’re worth. If they pay you what you’re worth, then you can get your time back — you can be hyper-efficient. You’re not doing meetings for meetings’ sake, you’re not trying to impress other people, you’re not writing things down to make it look like you did work. All you care about is the actual work itself.
    • When you do just the actual work itself, you’ll be far more productive, far more efficient. You’ll work when you feel like it — when you’re high-energy — and you won’t be trying to struggle through when you’re low energy. You’ll gain your time back.
  • Learn to sell, learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable: These are two broad categories, and their specific definitions can vary. Building can include design; it can include development; it can include manufacturing, logistics, procurement; and it can even be designing and operating a service. The other side of it is sales. Selling doesn’t necessarily just mean selling to individual customers, but it can mean marketing, communicating, it can mean recruiting, it can mean raising money, it can mean inspiring people, or great PR.
  • Get paid for your judgement: Choosing what kinds of jobs, careers, or fields you get into and what sort of deals you’re willing to take from your employer will give you much more free time. Then, you don’t have to worry too much about time management. I would love to be paid purely for my judgment, not for any work. I want a robot, capital, or computer to do the work, but I want to be paid for my judgment. Demonstrated judgment — credibility around the judgment — is so critical. Warren Buffett wins here because he has massive credibility. He’s been highly accountable. He’s been right over and over in the public domain. He’s built a reputation for very high integrity, so you can trust him. People will throw infinite leverage behind him because of his judgment. Nobody asks him how hard he works. Nobody asks him when he wakes up or when he goes to sleep. They’re like, “Warren, just do your thing.”
  • Prioritize and focus: Always factor your time into every decision. How much time does it take? It’s going to take you an hour to get across town to get something. If you value yourself at one hundred dollars an hour, that’s basically throwing one hundred dollars out of your pocket. Are you going to do that? Another way of thinking about something is, if you can outsource something or not do something for less than your hourly rate, outsource it or don’t do it.
  • Advice for younger people: Spend more time making the big decisions. There are basically three really big decisions you make in your early life: where you live, who you’re with, and what you do. We spend very little time deciding which relationship to get into. We spend so much time in a job, but we spend so little time deciding which job to get into. Choosing what city to live in can almost completely determine the trajectory of your life, but we spend so little time trying to figure out what city to live in. If you’re going to live in a city for ten years, if you’re going to be in a job for five years, if you’re in a relationship for a decade, you should be spending one to two years deciding these things. These are highly dominating decisions.
  • Ways to get lucky:
    • Hope luck finds you.
    • Hustle until you stumble into it.
    • Prepare the mind and be sensitive to chances others miss.
    • Become the best at what you do. Refine what you do until this is true. Opportunity will seek you out. Luck becomes your destiny. It starts becoming so deterministic, it stops being luck. The definition starts fading from luck to destiny. To summarize the fourth type: build your character in a certain way, then your character becomes your destiny.
  • On Honesty: I think you just have to be very careful about doing things you are fundamentally not going to be proud of, because they will damage you. Not in some cosmic, karma kind of way, but I believe deep down we all know who we are. You cannot hide anything from yourself. Your own failures are written within your psyche, and they are obvious to you. If you have too many of these moral shortcomings, you will not respect yourself. The worst outcome in this world is not having self-esteem. If you don’t love yourself, who will?
  • On Patience: It takes time — even once you have all of these pieces in place, there is an indeterminate amount of time you have to put in. If you’re counting, you’ll run out of patience before success actually arrives. Everybody wants to get rich immediately, but the world is an efficient place; immediate doesn’t work. You do have to put in the time. You do have to put in the hours, and so I think you have to put yourself in the position with the specific knowledge, with accountability, with leverage, with the authentic skill set you have, to be the best in the world at what you do. You have to enjoy it and keep doing it. Don’t keep track, and don’t keep count because if you do, you will run out of time.

Building Judgment

Naval Ravikant’s guidance on building judgment involves understanding long-term consequences of actions, clear thinking through fundamental knowledge, and facing reality without bias. He advises on decision-making by using mental models, experiencing to reinforce knowledge, and choosing paths with long-term gains. Ravikant emphasizes reading selectively, focusing on impactful books, and learning by teaching. He suggests building a solid foundational understanding, particularly from classics and originals, and aligning solutions to the age of problems, with older solutions for older problems.

You don’t get rich by spending your time to save money. You get rich by saving your time to make money.

  • Definition of Judgement: knowing the long-term consequences of your actions. Wisdom applied to external problems is judgment. They’re highly linked; knowing the long-term consequences of your actions and then making the right decision to capitalize on that. 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.
  • How to think clearly: Understand the basics at a very fundamental level. I would rather understand the basics really well than memorize all kinds of complicated concepts I can’t stitch together and can’t re-derive from the basics. If you can’t re-derive concepts from the basics as you need them, you’re lost. You’re just memorizing.
  • Dealing with reality: The number one thing clouding us from being able to see reality is we have preconceived notions of the way it should be.
    • One definition of a moment of suffering is “the moment when you see things exactly the way they are,” or “suffering is the moment when we can no longer deny reality.”
    • The more desire I have for something to work out a certain way, the less likely I am to see the truth.
    • The good news is, the moment of suffering — when you’re in pain — is a moment of truth. It is a moment where you’re forced to embrace reality the way it actually is. Then, you can make meaningful change and progress. You can only make progress when you’re starting with the truth.
    • It’s really important to be able to un-condition yourself, to be able to take your habits apart and say, “Okay, this is a habit I probably picked up when I was a toddler trying to get my parent’s attention. Now I’ve reinforced it and reinforced it, and I call it a part of my identity. Does it still serve me? Does it make me happier? Does it make me healthier? Does it make me accomplish whatever I set out to accomplish?”
  • The skills of decision making: The classical virtues are all decision-making heuristics to make one optimize for the long term rather than for the short term.
    • During decision-making, the brain is a memory prediction machine. Mental models help us to do that memory prediction better.
    • The brain is finite, so you have to use pointers, addresses, or mnemonics to help you remember deep-seated principles where you have the underlying experience to back it up.
    • If you don’t have the underlying experience, then it just reads like a collection of quotes. It’s cool, it’s inspirational for a moment, maybe you’ll make a nice poster out of it. But then you forget it and move on. Mental models are really just compact ways for you to recall your own knowledge.
    • If you are faced with a difficult decision and can’t decide, then the answer is no. When you choose something, you get locked in for a long time. Starting a business may take ten years. You start a relationship that will be five years or maybe more. You move to a city for ten to twenty years. These are very, very long-lived decisions. It’s very, very important we only say yes when we are pretty certain.
    • If you have two choices to make, and they’re relatively equal choices, take the path more difficult and more painful in the short term. What’s actually going on is one of these paths requires short term pain. And the other path leads to pain further out in the future. And what your brain is doing through conflict avoidance is trying to push off the short-term pain. By definition, if the two are even and one has short-term pain, that path has long term gain associated. With the law of compound interest, long-term gain is what you want to go toward. As you know, most of the gains in life come from suffering in the short term so you can get paid in the long term.
  • Learn to love to read: “I don’t want to read everything. I just want to read the 100 great books over and over again.” I think there’s a lot to that idea. It’s really more about identifying the great books for you because different books speak to different people.
    • Books usually have one point to make, they make it, and then they give you example after example after example and they apply it to explain everything in the world. Once I feel like I’ve gotten the gist, I feel very comfortable putting the book down.
    • Explain what you learned to someone else. Teaching forces learning.
    • I have people in my life I consider to be very well-read who aren’t very smart. The reason is because even though they’re very well-read, they read the wrong things in the wrong order. They started out reading a set of false or just weakly true things, and those formed the axioms of the foundation for their worldview. Then, when new things come, they judge the new idea based on a foundation they already built. Your foundation is critical.
    • The best way to have a high-quality foundation is to stick to science and to stick to the basics. The moment you start wandering outside of these solid foundations you’re in trouble because now you don’t know what’s true and what’s false. Another way to do this is to read originals and read classics.
    • When solving problems: the older the problem, the older the solution. If you’re trying to learn how to drive a car or fly a plane, you should read something written in the modern age because this problem was created in the modern age. If you’re talking about an old problem like how to keep your body healthy, how to stay calm and peaceful, what kinds of value systems are good, how you raise a family, the older solutions are probably better. Any book that survived for two thousand years has been filtered through many people.

Transition From Wealth to Happiness

Money buys you freedom in the material world. It’s not going to make you happy, it’s not going to solve your health problems, it’s not going to make your family great, it’s not going to make you fit, it’s not going to make you calm. But it will solve a lot of external problems. It’s a reasonable step to go ahead and make money.

What making money will do is solve your money problems. It will remove a set of things that could get in the way of being happy, but it is not going to make you happy. I know many very wealthy people who are unhappy. Most of the time, the person you have to become to make money is a high-anxiety, high-stress, hard-working, competitive person. When you have done that for twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years, and you suddenly make money, you can’t turn it off. You’ve trained yourself to be a high-anxiety person. Then, you have to learn how to be happy.

Let’s get you rich first. I’m very practical about it because, you know, Buddha was a prince. He started off really rich, then he got to go off in the woods. In the old days, if you wanted to be peaceful inside, you would become a monk. You would give up everything and go out in the woods by yourself. Today, with this wonderful invention called money, you can store it in a bank account. You can work really hard, do great things for society, and society will give you money for things it wants but doesn’t know how to get. You can save money, you can live a little below your means, and you can find a certain freedom.

That will give you the time and the energy to pursue your own internal peace and happiness. I believe the solution to making everybody happy is to give them what they want. Let’s get them all rich. Let’s get them all fit and healthy. Then, let’s get them all happy.

Part II: Happiness

Learning Happiness

Maybe happiness is not something you inherit or even choose, but a highly personal skill that can be learned, like fitness or nutrition.

  • Happiness definition: I believe happiness is really a default state. Happiness is there when you remove the sense of something missing in your life. Happiness to me is mainly not suffering, not desiring, not thinking too much about the future or the past, really embracing the present moment and the reality of what is, and the way it is.
  • Happiness is a choice: You can very slowly but steadily and methodically improve your happiness baseline, just like you can improve your fitness. Happiness is a choice you make and a skill you develop.
  • Happiness requires presence: At any given time, when you’re walking down the streets, a very small percentage of your brain is focused on the present. The rest is planning the future or regretting the past. This keeps you from having an incredible experience. It’s keeping you from seeing the beauty in everything and from being grateful for where you are.
  • Happiness requires peace: Happiness is more about peace than it is about joy.
    • I don’t think peace and purpose go together. If it’s your internal purpose, the thing you most want to do, then sure, you’ll be happy doing it.
    • But an externally inflicted purpose, like “society wants me to do X,” I don’t think it will make you happy.
    • The enemy of peace of mind is expectations drilled into you by society and other people.
    • Peace is happiness at rest, and happiness is peace in motion. You can convert peace into happiness anytime you want. But peace is what you want most of the time. If you’re a peaceful person, anything you do will be a happy activity.
  • Every desire is a chosen unhappiness: Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want. I like to stay aware of it, because then I can choose my desires very carefully. I try not to have more than one big desire in my life at any given time, and I also recognize it as the axis of my suffering. It’s way more important to perfect your desires than to try to do something you don’t 100 percent desire.
    • When you’re young and healthy, you can do more. By doing more, you’re actually taking on more and more desires. You don’t realize this is slowly destroying your happiness. I find younger people are less happy but more healthy. Older people are more happy but less healthy.
    • When you’re young, you have time and health, but no money. When you’re middle-aged, you have money and health, but no time. When you’re old, you have money and time, but no health. So the trifecta is trying to get all three at once.
  • Success does not earn happiness: Happiness is being satisfied with what you have. Success comes from dissatisfaction. Choose. The problem with getting good at a game, especially one with big rewards, is you continue playing it long after you should have outgrown it. Survival and replication drive put us on the work treadmill. Hedonic adaptation keeps us there. The trick is knowing when to jump off and play instead. To me, the real winners are the ones who step out of the game entirely, who don’t even play the game, who rise above it.
  • Envy is the enemy of happiness: One day, I realized with all these people I was jealous of, I couldn’t just choose little aspects of their life. I couldn’t say I want his body, I want her money, I want his personality. You have to be that person. Do you want to actually be that person with all of their reactions, their desires, their family, their happiness level, their outlook on life, their self-image? If you’re not willing to do a wholesale, 24/7, 100 percent swap with who that person is, then there is no point in being jealous.
  • Happiness is built by habits: You can increase your happiness over time, and it starts with believing you can do it. You have to go through your life replacing your thoughtless bad habits with good ones, making a commitment to be a happier person.
    • Are you surrounding yourself with people who are generally positive and upbeat?
    • Are those relationships low maintenance?
    • Do you admire and respect but not envy them?
    • Don’t hang around people who constantly engage in conflict.
    • Dropping caffeine made me happier. It makes me more of a stable person.
    • Working out every day makes me a happier person.
    • Recover time and happiness by minimizing your use of these three smartphone apps: phone, calendar, and alarm clock.
    • The more secrets you have, the less happy you’re going to be.
    • Tell your friends you’re a happy person. Then, you’ll be forced to conform to it.
    • The more you judge, the more you separate yourself. You’ll feel good for an instant, because you feel good about yourself, thinking you’re better than someone. Later, you’re going to feel lonely. Then, you see negativity everywhere. The world just reflects your own feelings back at you.
    • Just being very aware in every moment. If I catch myself judging somebody, I can stop myself and say, “What’s the positive interpretation of this?”
    • Changing habits: Identify needs, triggers, and substitutes.
  • Find happiness in acceptance: In any situation in life, you always have three choices: you can change it, you can accept it, or you can leave it.
    • If you want to change it, then it is a desire. It will cause you suffering until you successfully change it. So don’t pick too many of those. Pick one big desire in your life at any given time to give yourself purpose and motivation. Why not two? You’ll be distracted. Even one is hard enough.
    • Acceptance is to be okay whatever the outcome is. It’s to be balanced and centered. It’s to step back and to see the grander scheme of things. Some hacks for accepting:
      • Stepping back and looking at previous bits of suffering I’ve had in my life — “previous breakup, failure, last time you had health issues.” Trace the growth and improvement that came from those experiences.
      • For minor things, one hack is to find the positive of the situation.
      • The biggest hack: embrace death. Keeping death on the forefront and not denying it is very important.

Saving Yourself

Doctors won’t make you healthy.
Nutritionists won’t make you slim.
Teachers won’t make you smart.
Gurus won’t make you calm.
Mentors won’t make you rich.
Trainers won’t make you fit.

Ultimately, you have to take responsibility. Save yourself.

Choosing to be yourself

  • All you should do is what you want to do. If you stop trying to figure out how to do things the way other people want you to do them, you get to listen to the little voice inside your head that wants to do things a certain way. Then, you get to be you.
  • No one in the world is going to beat you at being you. You’re never going to be as good at being me as I am. Certainly, listen and absorb, but don’t try to emulate. It’s a fool’s errand. Each person is uniquely qualified at something. They have some specific knowledge, capability, and desire nobody else in the world does, purely from the combinatorics of human DNA and development.
  • Your goal in life is to find the people, business, project, or art that needs you the most. There is something out there just for you. What you don’t want to do is build checklists and decision frameworks built on what other people are doing.

Choosing to care for yourself

  • My number one priority in life, above my happiness, above my family, above my work, is my own health. It starts with my physical health. Second, it’s my mental health. Third, it’s my spiritual health. Then, it’s my family’s health. Then, it’s my family’s wellbeing. After that, I can go out and do whatever I need to do with the rest of the world.
  • On Diet: Fat is what makes you satiated. Sugar makes you hungry. The problem is the sugar effect dominates the fat effect. If you eat a fatty meal and you throw some sugar in, the sugar is going to deliver hunger and fat is going to deliver the calories and you’re just going to binge. Most fit and healthy people focus much more on what they eat than how much. Quality control is easier than (and leads to) quantity control. World’s simplest diet: the more processed the food, the less one should consume.
  • On Exercise: “I don’t have time” is just another way of saying “It’s not a priority.” Because my physical health became my number one priority, then I could never say I don’t have time. I do not start my day until I’ve worked out. How you make a habit doesn’t matter. Do something every day. The people obsessing over whether to do weight training, tennis, Pilates, or high-intensity interval training are missing the point. The best workout for you is one you’re excited enough to do every day.
  • Meditation: Meditation is intermittent fasting for the mind. Too much sugar leads to a heavy body, and too many distractions lead to a heavy mind. Time spent undistracted and alone, in self-examination, journaling, meditation, resolves the unresolved and takes us from mentally fat to fit. Meditation isn’t hard. All you have to do is sit there and do nothing. Hiking is walking meditation. Journaling is writing meditation. Praying is gratitude meditation. Showering is accidental meditation. Sitting quietly is direct meditation.

Choosing to grow yourself

  • I don’t believe in specific goals. Scott Adams famously said, “Set up systems, not goals.” Use your judgment to figure out what kinds of environments you can thrive in, and then create an environment around you so you’re statistically likely to succeed. I want to live in a way that if my life played out 1,000 times, Naval is successful 999 times.
  • Stay with the basics and master the fundamentals.
  • I think almost everything that people read these days is designed for social approval. Read everything you can. Just read for its own sake. Develop a love for it.

Choosing to free yourself

  • The hardest thing is not doing what you want — it’s knowing what you want.
  • Advice to my younger self: “Be exactly who you are.”
  • Freedom from expectations — Courage isn’t charging into a machine gun nest. Courage is not caring what other people think. As long as you’re doing what you want, it’s not a waste of your time. But if you’re not spending your time doing what you want, and you’re not earning, and you’re not learning — what the heck are you doing?
  • Freedom from anger — Anger is a way to signal as strongly as you can to the other party you’re capable of violence. Anger is a loss of control over the situation. Anger is a contract you make with yourself to be in physical and mental and emotional turmoil until reality changes.
  • Freedom from employment — People who live far below their means enjoy a freedom that people busy upgrading their lifestyles can’t fathom.
  • Freedom from uncontrolled thinking — A big habit I’m working on is trying to turn off my “monkey mind.” To me, the mind should be a servant and a tool, not a master.

Easy choice now, hard life later. Hard choices now, easy life. Basically, if you are making the hard choices right now in what to eat, you’re not eating all the junk food you want, and making the hard choice to work out, your life long-term will be easy. The same is true of values, of saving up for a rainy day, and of how you approach your relationships. If you make the easy choices right now, your overall life will be a lot harder. One of the things Krishnamurti talks about is being in an internal state of revolution. You should always be internally ready for a complete change.

Philosophy

The meaning of life

  • It’s personal. You have to find your own meaning. Any piece of wisdom anybody else gives you, whether it’s Buddha or me, is going to sound like nonsense. Fundamentally, you have to find it for yourself, so the important part is not the answer, it’s the question. You just have to sit there and dig with the question. It might take you years or decades. When you find an answer you’re happy with, it will be fundamental to your life.
  • There is no meaning to life. There is no purpose to life. The reality is you’ve been dead for the history of the universe, 10 billion years or more. You will be dead for the next 70 billion years or so, until the heat death of the universe.

Live by your values. Not sure if these are defined as values, but it’s a set of things that I won’t compromise on and I live my entire life by. Much of finding great relationships, great coworkers, great lovers, wives, husbands, is finding other people where your values line up. If your values line up, the little things don’t matter. Generally, I find if people are fighting or quarreling about something, it’s because their values don’t line up.

  • Honesty is a core, core, core value: By honesty, I mean I want to be able to just be me. I never want to be in an environment or around people where I have to watch what I say. If I disconnect what I’m thinking from what I’m saying, it creates multiple threads in my mind. I’m no longer in the moment — now I have to be future-planning or past-regretting every time I talk to somebody. Anyone around whom I can’t be fully honest, I don’t want to be around.
  • Think long-term: All benefits in life come from compound interest, whether in money, relationships, love, health, activities, or habits. I only want to be around people I know I’m going to be around for the rest of my life. I only want to work on things I know have long-term payout.
  • No anger: Anger was good when I was young and full of testosterone, but now I like the Buddhist saying, “Anger is a hot coal you hold in your hand while waiting to throw it at somebody.” I don’t want to be angry, and I don’t want to be around angry people. I just cut them out of my life. I’m not judging them. I went through a lot of anger too.

Rational Buddhism

  • The rational part means I have to reconcile with science and evolution. I have to reject all the pieces I can’t verify for myself. For example, is meditation good for you? Yes. Is clearing your mind a good thing? Yes. Is there a base layer of awareness below your monkey mind? Yes. All these things I’ve verified for myself.
  • I don’t subscribe to anything fanciful because it was written down in a book. Try everything, test it for yourself, be skeptical, keep what’s useful, and discard what’s not.
  • Rational Buddhism, to me, means understanding the internal work Buddhism espouses to make yourself happier, better off, more present and in control of your emotions — being a better human being.

Life Formulas

These are notes to myself. Your frame of reference, and therefore your calculations, may vary. These are not definitions — these are algorithms for success.

Happiness = Health + Wealth + Good Relationships

Health = Exercise + Diet + Sleep

  • Exercise = High Intensity Resistance Training + Sports + Rest
  • Diet = Natural Foods + Intermittent Fasting + Plants
  • Sleep = No Alarms + 8-9 hours of sleep + Follow your circadian rhythms

Wealth = Income + Wealth × (Return on Investment)

  • Income = Accountability + Leverage + Specific Knowledge
    • Accountability = Personal Branding + Personal Platform + Taking Risks
    • Leverage = Capital + People + Code + Media (0 marginal cost)
    • Specific Knowledge = Knowing how to do something society can’t yet easily train others to do
  • Return on Investment = Buy-and-hold + Valuation + Margin of Safety
  • Be present above all else.
  • Desire is suffering. (Buddha)
  • Anger is a hot coal you hold in your hand while waiting to throw it at someone else. (Buddha)
  • If you can’t see yourself working with someone for life, don’t work with them for a day.
  • Reading (learning) is the ultimate meta-skill and can be traded for anything else.
  • All the real benefits in life come from compound interest.
  • Earn with your mind, not your time.
  • 99 percent of all effort is wasted.
  • Total honesty at all times. It’s almost always possible to be honest and positive.
  • Praise specifically, criticize generally. (Warren Buffett)
  • Truth is that which has predictive power.
  • Watch every thought. (Ask “Why am I having this thought?”)
  • All greatness comes from suffering.
  • Love is given, not received.
  • Enlightenment is the space between your thoughts. (Eckhart Tolle)
  • Mathematics is the language of nature.
  • Every moment has to be complete in and of itself.
  • Health, love, and your mission, in that order. Nothing else matters.