Tweetstorm

This may be old news to some, but the Tweetstorm (a series of related Tweets) by Naval Ravikant is something I like to go back to as a guide. Naval is a venture capitalist and co-founder of the company AngelList, who invested in the early stages of big companies like Uber, FourSquare and Twitter. He has an interesting perspective on success, and he is very good at simplifying things to make them easier to understand and less daunting to attempt. I have learnt a lot from his interviews on podcasts and even his own podcast where he explains his tweet storms in 5-minute bite size episodes. He has good advice on most aspects of life and just listening to his opinions has helped me change my perspective and think more deeply on particular topics. Below I’m going to go over his Tweetstorm he made in 2018 about “How to Get Rich (without getting lucky)”. You can find him at @Naval on Twitter and I’d recommend following him and even checking out his podcast.

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.

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

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.

Wealth creation by acquiring a piece of a business and owning assets where they make you money while you sleep is a focus of mine. Changing my perspective from working for someone to eventually working for myself to obtain financial freedom has helped determine my views and actions to take to get there. Having this kind of mindset has helped me with my goal setting.

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

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

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

The first of these three tweets makes me think about what society may need and just doesn’t know it yet frequently. Although none of my ideas have been worth pursuing just yet, I feel that constantly being in this mind set opens the possibility of coming across something that may be worth pursuing. I’m only just discovering the potential of the internet and I feel that there is so much more to learn.

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

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

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

The idea of compound interest in all aspects of life is something I’m getting used to, but feel is very important for me to grow as a person. It’s easy to understand from an investment point of view, but it also bares fruit in work and relationships. The hard part is not seeing immediate results and so it is very easy to give up at the beginning. I’m trying to carry the dollar-cost-averaging analogy throughout all aspects of my life, knowing consistency and commitment are important.  

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

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.

Specific knowledge is found by pursuing your genuine curiosity and passion rather than whatever is hot right now.

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

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

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

These tweets on specific knowledge have helped guide me to what to learn about next. They also make feel like it’s okay to dive into a specific topic for a bit and once I’m comfortable with it, move on to the next one. There is so much to learn out there and I always feel like I make more progress when I spend time on something I’m genuinely interested in as opposed to something someone recommends or advises you to learn. I need to work on selling myself and reaching out to people I could be an apprentice for. I have made up barriers preventing me from reaching out to people and I need to get over them.

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

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

“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 is something I’ve been thinking about more lately. It’s not something I can confidently apply to finances and future businesses just yet but being aware of it and wanting to learn more about it makes me excited. I feel like I can use it to my advantage, but understand there are risks involved, which is why I want to learn more about it first.

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

Labor 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.

Capital and labor are permissioned leverage. Everyone is chasing capital, but someone has to give it to you. Everyone is trying to lead, but someone has to follow you.

Code and media are permissionless leverage. They're the leverage behind the newly rich. You can create software and media that works for you while you sleep.

An army of robots is freely available - it's just packed in data centers for heat and space efficiency. Use it.

If you can't code, write books and blogs, record videos and podcasts.

These tweets helped me understand that my thinking is still a bit dated and there are better ways to gain leverage than capital and labor. Coding is something I’ve always put off and been meaning to learn. It is a daunting subject, but I think the best way for me to just start is to understand how it works. Build a foundation and go from there, even if I don’t know how to do it completely, understanding how it’s done and how long it takes can still be beneficial. Now the game plan is to learn about coding and focus on the things in the last tweet.

Leverage is a force multiplier for your judgement.

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

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

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

I refer to this study list when thinking about my next book to read. I find most of these subjects interesting but haven’t done enough reading about mathematics and computers. Naval recommends reading about the things you enjoy before moving on to more difficult topics. This is the stage I’m currently in and hopefully soon I’ll be reading about mathematics and computers.

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

You should be too busy to “do coffee," while still keeping an uncluttered calendar.

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.

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.

These are good reminders as I tend to get lazy but tell myself I’m being productive. I do more watching than doing and I feel like I’m making progress. Although I may have learnt something, actually doing it will make it stick and I may learn more in the process. I fall into YouTube traps and I’m working on my self-control.  

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

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

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

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.

I like this tweetstorm because it’s inspirational, but pragmatic. The tweets aren’t written in a way that makes you feel inferior to him and he simplifies the ideas enough to make them easily retainable. Naval points out some mistakes in my thinking when it comes to making money and acquiring wealth. We all want to do it, but we may be going about it the wrong way. Thinking about these things differently can help us change directions and possibly get there quicker than our previous path. It’s a combination of working hard and smart by using the resources we have available to us. I intend to refer back to this tweetstorm every once and a while, just to make sure I’m on the right path of wealth creation.