What I Wish Someone Had Told Me About the World

Mindset

• Life is a single-player game. You are born alone. You are going to die alone. All of your interpretations are alone. All your memories are alone.

• Accept uncertainty, randomness, and chance; unknowns are an ever-present part of life.

• Think about odds. Pursuing things where a range of potential outcomes are acceptable is the smart way to proceed.

• Play long-term games. The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand exponential functions.

• Wisdom is knowing the long-term consequences of your actions.

• The power law is everywhere in the world. Focus on the 20% that can give you 80% of the return.

• The purpose of the margin of safety is to render the forecast unnecessary.

• Happiness = Reality - Expectation.

• Tension is who you think you should be. Relaxation is who you are.

• A little inefficiency is wonderful.

• The essence of influence and communication is to leverage the selfish genes of human beings.

• Predicting what the world will look like fifty years from now is impossible. But predicting that people will respond to greed, fear, risk, uncertainty, and social persuasion in the same way is a bet I'd take.

• Stability is destabilizing. Calm plants the seeds of crazy. (eg, financial system stock market). An excess of something gives rise to its opposite.

Wealth

• Wealth is unseen. It's the money that hasn't been spent. Wealth is having assets that earn while you sleep (eg, equity).

• Less ego, more wealth.

• Money relies more on psychology than finance.

• The most powerful factor in the compound interest formula is the Initial Principal.

• Tails, you win.

• You can take risks, but not the risk that can wipe you out.

• Don't risk what you have and need for what you don't have and don't need.

• The price of investment is volatility, fear, doubt, uncertainty, and regret. It's the admission fee worth paying. Nothing is free.

• Bubble and recession feed on themselves.

• Save like a pessimist, invest like an optimist.

• Saving = Income - Ego. You can spend less if you desire less, and you will desire less if you care less about what others think of you.

• Save money for no reason and keep saving, to hedge against all the surprises that can happen in your life.

• Earn with your mind, not your time.

• You will get rich by giving society what it wants but doesn't yet know how to get. At scale.

• If you can outsource something or not do something for less than your hourly rate, outsource it or don't do it.

• The best way to stay away from the constant love of money is not to upgrade your lifestyle as you make money.

• The only way to win the social comparison battle is to not fight to begin with, to accept that you might have enough, even if it's less than those around you.

• Expensive stuff won't bring admiration and respect to you, but kindness, empathy, and humility will do.

Career

• Escape competition through authenticity. Find the things you genuinely love to do and feel like playing.

• What you work on and who you work with are more important than how hard you work.

• Competition might be good for the whole but it's bad for the individual.

• Pursuing your genuine curiosity and passion rather than whatever is hot right now.

• Productize yourself. Productize means scale (leverage capital, people, code, or media). Yourself means being authentic. No one can beat you in being yourself.

• P(at least a success) = 1 - P(failures)**n, you need to increase the number of trials to maximize the success rate.

Clear Thinking

• If you can't decide, the answer is no.

• The more desire I have for something to work out a certain way, the less likely I am to see the truth.

• Creating identities and labels locks you in and keeps you from seeing the truth.

• You should lean into things with short-term pain but long-term gain.

• What generates the emotion is the big gap between expectations and reality.

• Your brain's first job is to make sure you don't die, unless the stakes are high enough.

• The real world is a never-ending chain of absurdity, confusion, messy relationships, and imperfect people.

• Plan like a pessimist, dream like an optimist.

• The more perfect you try to become, the more vulnerable you generally are.

• The safest way to try to get what you want is to try to deserve what you want.

• There are no points awarded for difficulty.

• Disagreement has less to do with what people know and more to do with what they've experienced.

Entrepreneurship

• The best story wins. Telling a story that catches people's attention and gets them to nod their heads is the one who tends to be rewarded.

• Business leverages capital, people, and product with no marginal cost of replication (code and media).

• If you are an entrepreneur, don't enter into a market that is competitive or it's easy for newcomers to enter. Look for a niche market where you can become the monopoly.

• Technology is a better way to do things. Globalization is copying things that work, and technology is building new things.

• Scarcity determines the distribution of wealth.

• Maximizing efficiency often compromises fairness to some degree – a tradeoff that must be carefully balanced.

• Sales = Traffic * Conversion Rate * Order Value * Repeat Conversion Rate

• Customer loyalty is a function of the value you provide, minus the value offered by competitors, plus any switching costs involved.