Here is the summarised note on the Naval’s expanded points from his “How to Get Rich” tweetstorm (Read expanded series here).

Let’s get to it.

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.

• Wealth is assets that earn while you sleep: businesses, products, media, robots, investments, land. Wealth is for freedom, not conspicuous consumption.
• Money is how we transfer wealth; it’s the social credits and debits of other people’s time. Money isn’t going to solve all your problems, but it’s going to solve your money problems.
• Status is your rank in a social hierarchy like politics or sports. It’s a zero-sum game: to be a winner, there must be a loser. Status is an old game that predicted survival in the hunter-gatherer days, before we had technologies for creating wealth.
• People creating wealth will always be attacked by people still playing status games.

Understand that ethical wealth creation is possible (Make Abundance for the World)

If you secretly despise wealth, it will elude you.

• Wealth isn’t about taking something from somebody else—it’s about creating abundance for the world.
• Everyone can be rich: if wealth were finite, we would still be sitting around in caves.
• In the first world, it’s better to be poor today than it was to be the richest man 200 years ago.
• Thought experiment: if everyone today was an engineer, in 20 years, children would be retired in riches from the moment they were born.

Free Markets Are Intrinsic to Humans

• Free markets are intrinsic to the human species. We’re the only animals who cooperate across genetic boundaries.
• One way we cooperate is by keeping track of credits and debits in voluntary exchanges.
• Free markets like this are beautiful games that keep food on our shelves—and can make us all wealthier and wealthier.
• But too many takers and not enough makers will plunge a society into ruin.
• Takers attack wealth creation with status games that drag everyone down to their level.

You’re not going to get rich renting out your time.

Own equity—a piece of a business—to gain your financial freedom.

• You won’t get rich renting out your time, because your inputs are too closely tied to your outputs. You’re not earning while you’re sleeping.
• Renting out your time means someone else will get the wealth from your time. They’re going to pay you the bare minimum to do your job.
• Renting out your time also mean you’re replaceable and not as creative as you could be. So you must own equity to gain your financial freedom.
• You get equity for work where your inputs don’t match your outputs. You could do an hour of work and it could have a huge effect—or you could do 1,000 hours of work and it could have no effect.
• You must have high creativity and leverage to decouple your inputs and outputs.

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

• Give society what it wants, but doesn’t know how to get—at scale.
• Figure out what new product or technology you can provide that’s natural to you.
• Then figure out how to scale it so everyone on the planet can have your product.

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

• Pick an industry where you can play long-term games with long-term people. Long-term players make each other rich.
• Short-term players make themselves rich.

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

• The Internet has massively broadened the possible space of careers, by allowing you to scale any niche obsession.
• Before the Internet there was no way to find all the people in the world who were interested in your obsession. Now you can.
• Escape competition through authenticity—when you’re competing with people it’s because you’re copying them.
• No one can compete with you on being you. Before the Internet, this was useless advice—now it’s a career.

Play iterated games.

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

• All returns in life come from compound interest over many turns of long-term games—and they usually come at the end.
• People are fair with each other when they know there will be more turns of the game. Friction goes down with each turn, so you can do bigger and bigger things together.

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

• Pick business partners with high intelligence, energy and integrity.
• They need intelligence or they’ll head in the wrong direction. They need energy because the world is full of smart, lazy people. And they need integrity or you’ll have a smart and hard working crook, who’ll eventually cheat you.
• People may be energetic on some tasks but not on others. Put them on the right tasks.
• Integrity is what someone does, despite what they say they do.

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

• Partner with rational optimists. They know the downsides but they keep their chin up.
• Don’t partner with cynics and pessimists, their beliefs are self-fulfilling.
• Pessimists don’t have an action bias nor do they want to lead, follow or get out of the way.
• It made sense to be pessimistic in the past. But modern society is far safer, with limited downside and unlimited upside. Adapting for modern society means overriding your natural pessimism.
• Worst of all is the nitpicker.

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

• Learn to sell, learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable.
• Selling is anything from one-on-one sales to marketing, recruiting, fundraising, PR, and more.
• Building is anything from engineering to design, manufacturing, logistics, procurement, operations, and more.
• When one person can both sell and build, they can create entire industries. Examples include Marc Andreessen, Steve Jobs, and Elon Musk.
• It’s easier to be a builder who learns sales, than a seller who learns building.
• Being a builder helps you stand out when you’re starting out, but it can be exhausting to stay current. Sales skills scale better over time and can be self-fulfilling.

Arm yourself with specific knowledge, accountability, and leverage.

• Arm yourself with specific knowledge. The classic example of specific knowledge is investing. But it could be anything from judgment in running a fleet of trucks to weather forecasting. Very often it is at the edge of knowledge.
• Specific knowledge may come from your DNA. It may be soft skills learned in childhood. It may be something so new that nobody but you knows how to do it. It may be true on-the-job training where you’re pattern matching in highly complex environments.
• Specific knowledge can’t be trained. Otherwise it will be mass-produced and you will be paid the minimum possible wage to do it. *Specific knowledge can be learned by pursuing your genuine curiosity, talents and passion. Building specific knowledge will feel like play to you.
• Genuine curiosity is very important. Leverage and compound interest mean someone who is just slightly better than you will get paid 10x-1000x more than you. So you must be the best.

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 can be taught through apprenticeships or self-taught.
• It’s the highest paying knowledge because it involves things that society has not yet figured out how to broadly teach or automate.
• Specific knowledge tends to be creative or technical. It’s on the bleeding edge of technology, art and communication.
• Specific knowledge is highly specific to the individual, obsession, situation, and problem.
• You can’t be too deliberate about assembling specific knowledge. The best way is to follow your obsession, so you go deep enough into it to be the best.
• Build specific knowledge where you are a natural. Everyone is a natural at something.

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

• Taking on accountability is how you get a piece of the business. If you have high accountability, that makes you less replaceable so they have to give you a piece of the upside.
• Taking accountability for your actions is the same as taking an equity position in all of your work. You’re taking greater downside risk for greater upside.
• In modern business, the downside of accountability is not that large. Even personal bankruptcy can wipe your debts in good ecosystems. People will forgive failures, as long as you were honest and made a high integrity effort.
• Accountability is reputational skin in the game; it’s putting your personal reputation on the line, as skin in the game.
• We’re currently socially brainwashed to not take on accountability in a visible way.

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

• Embrace accountability and take business risks under your own name. Society will reward you with responsibility, equity, and leverage.
• Accountability lets you to take credit when things go well, but you will also bear the brunt of failure when things go badly.
• Take business risks under your own name. Kanye, Oprah, Trump and Elon have such high accountability that they could get rich just by stamping their name on products.
• A well-functioning team has clear accountability for each position. If you have a small team with clearly delineated responsibilities, you can keep a very high level of accountability.
• We’re socially hard wired not to fail in public. People who have the ability to fail in public under their own names gain a lot of power.

Labor and Capital Are Old Leverage

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

• Wealth requires leverage. Labor and capital are older forms of leverage that everyone is fighting over.
• Our brains aren’t evolved to comprehend new forms of leverage and just how much leverage is possible in modern society.
• Society overvalues labor leverage, which is people working for you. It is incredibly messy and competitive.
• You want the minimum amount of labor that allows you to use the other forms of leverage.
• Capital has been the dominant form of leverage in the last century. It scales very well: you can manage more capital much more easily than you can manage people.
• If you have specific knowledge in a domain and if you’re accountable, people will give you capital as a form of leverage.

Product and Media are New Leverage

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

• Product and media are the new leverage.
• Product leverage is where the new fortunes are made.
• Combining all three forms of leverage is a magic combination.
• Product and media leverage are permissionless.
• The robot army is already here—code lets you tell them what to do.

Product Leverage is Egalitarian

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.

• Product leverage is a positive-sum game.
• Status goods are limited to a few people.
• The best products tend to be targeted at the middle class.
• Creating wealth with product leads to more ethical wealth.
• You want to use the product that is used by the most people.
• Capital and labor are becoming permissionless.

Example: From Laborer to Entrepreneur

• The continuum from laborer to real estate tech company entrepreneur goes from low to high specific knowledge, accountability and leverage.
• Laborers get paid hourly. The owner of the house doesn’t know who they are and they can be replaced by machines or newly trained hires.
• General contractors pocket the profits of a job but they also eat the losses. They have laborers working for them and know how to organize projects.
• Property developers use loans to build new homes and sell them at a profit. They know where to buy, how much to spend, and what customers want. Their reputation is on the line if the project fails.
• Architects and REITs apply even more accountability, specific knowledge and leverage.
• Real estate tech companies like Opendoor, Trulia or Redfin apply the maximum leverage by combining all of the lower layers of the stack with a new product.

Judgment Is the Decisive Skill

Leverage is a force multiplier for your judgement. Judgement requires experience, but can be built faster by learning foundational skills.

• Judgment is knowing the long-term consequences of your actions. In an age of infinite leverage, judgment is the most important skill.
• Once you have leverage, you want to slow down because correct decisions really matter. If you’re correct 10-20% more often than the other person, the compounding effects of your leverage will dwarf the competition.
• The people with the best judgment are among the least emotional. Emotions prevent you from seeing what’s really happening, until you can no longer resist the truth and you’re forced into suffering.
• A lot of the top investors often sound like philosophers because investing is a real-world multi-variate activity. So they need to study everything, not just investment books whose advantages have already been competed away.
• The more outraged someone is, the worse their judgment. You don’t want to hand them the keys to your car, let alone the keys to your company.

There’s No Actual Skill Called “Business”

• There’s no actual skill called “business”. It’s too broad; it’s like a skill called “relating to humans.”
• Instead, learn basic concepts from game theory, psychology, ethics, mathematics, computers, and logic.
• Doing is faster than watching: you will get much more skilled at “business” by running a lemonade stand than by reading business school case studies.
• The number of “doing” iterations drives the learning curve. You will learn more by running different experiments every day than by doing the same job over and over.
• We’re not evolved to bleed a little bit every day with failed iterations. We’re evolved for small victories all the time, but that’s where the herd is. If you’re willing to bleed a little bit every day, you may win big later.

The Foundations Are Math and Logic

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

• If you understand math and logic, you have the basis for understanding the scientific method. Once you understand the scientific method, you can separate truth from falsehood in other fields.
• Be careful when reading because so-called facts are often just opinions with a veneer of pseudoscience around them.
• It’s better to read a great book slowly than to fly through a hundred books quickly. Understanding comes through repetition and usage.
• The five most important skills are reading, writing, arithmetic, persuasion, and programming. If you’re good with computers, if you’re good at basic math, if you’re good at writing, if you’re good at speaking, and if you like to read, you’re set for life.

Read What You Love Until You Love to Read

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

• Read what you love until you love to read. Start with the books that interest you, no matter how unrefined they may seem.
• To avoid being seduced by lies, read the original scientific texts in a field. For example, instead of reading a business book, pick up Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations.
• If you understand the basics, especially in math and science, you will not be afraid of any book.
• The means of learning are abundant, the desire to learn is scarce. The beauty of the Internet is that the entire library of Alexandria is at your fingertips at all times.
• Children have a natural desire to learn: they’re always asking questions. But child-rearing and schools replace curiosity with compliance.

Be Too Busy to “Do Coffee”

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

• You should be too busy to “do coffee”, while still keeping an uncluttered calendar.
• People will meet with you when you have proof of work.
• Networking is overrated even early in your career.

Set an Aspirational Hourly Rate

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.

• Set and enforce an aspirational hourly rate.
• If fixing a problem will save less than your rate, ignore it. If outsourcing a task will cost less than your hourly rate, outsource it.
• You can penny-pinch your way to a basic sustenance. But you can’t penny pinch your way to wealth.
• My aspirational rate was $5,000/hr. Of course, I still ended up doing stupid things.
• You should be working on your product and getting product-market fit. And you should be exercising and eating healthy.
• That’s all you have time for while you’re on this mission.
• Your hourly rate should seem absurdly high.

Work As Hard As You Can

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.

• Work as hard as you can. Even though what you work on and who you work with are more important.
• Nobody really works 80 hours a week. Rather, people sprint as hard as they can when they’re inspired, then they rest.
• Inspiration is perishable. When you have it, just seize it.
• Impatience with actions, patience with results. Anything you have to do, just get it done. Then give up on the results and be patient because you’re dealing with complex systems.

Keep Redefining What You Do

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

• Keep redefining what you do until you’re the best in the world at what you do.
• Find founder-product-market fit.

Pick a Business Model With Leverage

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

• Ideally, you should pick a business model with network effects, low marginal costs and scale economies.
• Scale economies: the more you produce, the cheaper it gets. Making Widget 10,000 is cheaper than making Widget 1. This is a barrier to entry against competition.
• Zero marginal cost of reproduction: producing more is free. This is common in software and media products. It doesn’t cost me more when more people listen to this podcast.
• Network effects: each new user adds value to the existing users. Languages and money are universal examples of network effects.
• Network effect businesses are natural monopolies because the customers want to be where the other customers (or suppliers) are.
• Zero marginal cost businesses can pivot into network effect businesses. Since it doesn’t cost you anything to make more, you can create hooks for the users to add value to each other.

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

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.

References: image, nav.al/; extensive explanations are gotten from the podcasts on “Wealth” between Naval and Nivi podcast, link: here.