A book by Eric Jorgenson

Part I: Wealth

1. Building Wealth

Understand How Wealth Is Created

You should not grind at a lot of hard work until you figure out what you should be working on.
Society will pay you for creating things it wants. But society doesn’t yet know how to create those things.
Provide society something they want – at scale.

Find and Build Specific Knowledge

Build a specific knowledge around your interest.
Very often, specific knowledge is at the edge of knowledge. It’s also stuff that’s only now being figured out or is really hard to figure out. If you’re not 100 percent into it, somebody else who is 100 percent into it will outperform you.
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.
The most important skill for getting rich is becoming a perpetual learner.
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 / have a passion for.

Play Long-Term Games with Long-Term People

Take on Accountability

Leverage comes in labor, comes in capital, or it can come through code or media (book, blog, art, videos etc.).
Add code-based leverage on top of money and labor.

Build or Buy Equity in a Business

Find a Position of Leverage

the economic rewards for genuine intellectual curiosity have never been higher.
Knowledge only you know or only a small set of people knows is going to come out of your passions and your hobbies
If you have hobbies around your intellectual curiosity, you’re more likely to develop these passions.
If your curiosity ever leads you to a place where society eventually wants to go, you’ll get paid extremely well.
your outputs are highly connected, it’s going to be very hard to create wealth and make wealth for yourself in that process.
Learn to sell, learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable.

Get Paid for Your Judgment

Get paid for knowledge and judgment. Let computer monkey-do the work for you.
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.
CEOs are highly paid because of their leverage.

Prioritize and Focus

No one is going to value you more than you value yourself. Set a very high personal hourly rate and spend to save time at that rate.
Being anti-wealth will prevent you from becoming wealthy because you will not have the right mindset for it, you won’t have the right spirit, and you won’t be dealing with people on the right level.
Three big decisions you make in your early life – where you live, who you are with, and what you do.
To win at a status game, you have to put somebody else down. That’s why you should avoid status games in your life— they make you into an angry, combative person.

Find Work That Feels Like Play

I would rather be a failed entrepreneur than someone who never tried.
Retirement is when you stop sacrificing today for an imaginary tomorrow.
Do something you love. You enjoy it so much, it’s not about the money.
The way to get out of the competition trap is to be authentic, to find the thing you know how to do better than anybody.
Lusting for money is bad for us because it is a bottomless pit. It’s a fallacy to think it turns off at some number.
The best way to stay away from this constant love of money is to not upgrade your lifestyle as you make money.
It’s good to be in a smaller company early because there’s less of an infrastructure to prevent early promotion.
the single most important thing about a company is the alumni network you’re going to build.

How to Get Lucky

To get rich without getting lucky, we want to be deterministic. We don’t want to leave it to chance.
Become the best at what you do. Refine what you do until this is true. Opportunity will seek you out. Luck becomes your destiny.
The worst outcome in this world is not having self-esteem. If you don’t love yourself, who will?

Be Patient

Apply specific knowledge with leverage and eventually, you will get what you deserve.
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.
The only way to truly learn something is by doing it.
Your real résumé is just a catalog of all your suffering. It’s all going to be around the sacrifices you made, the hard things you did.
Money buys you freedom in the material world.

2. Building Judgment

Judgment

You don’t get rich by spending your time to save money. You get rich by saving your time to make money.
Wisdom is knowing the long-term consequences of your actions. Wisdom applied to external problems is judgment.

How to Think Clearly

“Clear thinker” is a better compliment than “smart.” If you can’t explain it to a child, then you don’t know it.
The really smart thinkers are clear thinkers. They understand the basics at a very, very fundamental level.
Part of making effective decisions boils down to 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.
the moment of suffering— when you’re in pain— is a moment of truth.
You can only make progress when you’re starting with the truth.
To see the truth, you have to get your ego out of the way because your ego doesn’t want to face the truth.
What we wish to be true clouds our perception of what is true. Suffering is the moment when we can no longer deny reality.
What you feel tells you nothing about the facts— it merely tells you something about your estimate of the facts.
It’s only after you’re bored you have great ideas. It’s never going to be when you’re stressed, or busy, running around or rushed. Make the time.

Shed Your Identity to See Reality

Tension is who you think you should be. Relaxation is who you are.
Maybe you’re a competitive athlete, and you get injured badly, like Bruce Lee. You have to accept being an athlete is not your entire identity, and maybe you can forge a new identity as a philosopher.

Learn the Skills of Decision-Making

For important decisions, discard memory and identity, and focus on the problem.
The moment you tell somebody something dishonest, you’ve lied to yourself. Then you’ll start believing your own lie, which will disconnect you from reality and take you down the wrong road.
Praise specifically, criticize generally.
Importance of 10% better at judgment – If I manage $ 1 billion and I’m right 10 percent more often than somebody else, my decision-making creates $ 100 million worth of value on a judgment call.

Collect Mental Models

Mental models are really just compact ways for you to recall your own knowledge.
I don’t believe I have the ability to say what is going to work. Rather, I try to eliminate what’s not going to work. It’s about avoiding incorrect judgments.
we are fundamentally ignorant and very, very bad at predicting the future.
Black swans are extreme probabilities.
understand the principles of calculus— where you’re measuring the change in small discrete or small continuous events.
For you to believe something is true, it should have predictive power, and it must be falsifiable.
If you find yourself creating a spreadsheet for a decision with a list of yes’s and no’s, pros and cons, checks and balances, why this is good or bad… forget it. If you cannot decide, the answer is no.
Simple heuristic: If you’re evenly split on a difficult decision, take the path more painful in the short term. 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

The means of learning are abundant— it’s the desire to learn that is scarce.
When you’re reading a book and you’re confused, that confusion is similar to the pain you get in the gym when you’re working out.
But you’re building mental muscles instead of physical muscles. Learn how to learn and read the books.
To think clearly, understand the basics.
When solving problems: the older the problem, the older the solution.
Calm mind, a fit body, and a house full of love. These things cannot be bought. They must be earned.

Part II: Happiness

The three big ones in life are wealth, health, and happiness. We pursue them in that order, but their importance is reverse.

1. Learning Happiness

Don’t take yourself so seriously. You’re just a monkey with a plan.

Happiness Is Learned

Happiness is not something you inherit or even choose, but a highly personal skill that
We are highly judgmental survival-and-replication machines.
Happiness is the state when nothing is missing. When nothing is missing, your mind shuts down and stops running into the past or future to regret something or to plan something.
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 what’s there when you remove the sense that something is missing in your life.
Real happiness only comes as a side-effect of peace. Most of it is going to come from acceptance, not from changing your external environment.
A rational person can find peace by cultivating indifference to things outside of their control.

Happiness Is a Choice

Happiness is a choice you make and a skill you develop.

Happiness Requires Presence

You can literally destroy your happiness if you spend all of your time living in delusions of the future.
We crave experiences that will make us be present, but the cravings themselves take us from the present moment.
A lot of our unhappiness comes from comparing things from the past to the present.

Happiness Requires Peace

Happiness is more about peace than it is about joy.
A happy person isn’t someone who’s happy all the time.

Every Desire Is a Chosen Unhappiness

The fundamental delusion: There is something out there that will make me happy and fulfilled forever.
Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.
It’s way more important to perfect your desires than to try to do something you don’t 100 percent desire.

Success Does Not Earn Happiness

Happiness is being satisfied with what you have. Success comes from dissatisfaction. Choose.
Confucius says you have two lives, and the second one begins when you realize you only have one.
If you could just sit for thirty minutes and be happy, you are successful.
You can get almost anything you want out of life, as long as it’s one thing and you want it far more than anything else.
Today, the way we think you get peace is by resolving all your external problems. But there are unlimited external problems. The only way to actually get peace on the inside is by giving up this idea of problems.

Envy Is the Enemy of Happiness

Doing something because you “should” basically mean you don’t actually want to do it. It’s just making you miserable, so I’m trying to eliminate as many “shoulds” from my life as possible.
The enemy of peace of mind is expectations drilled into you by society and other people.
Training yourself to be happy is completely internal. There is no external progress, no external validation. You’re competing against yourself— it is a single-player game.
Perhaps one reason why yoga and meditation are hard to sustain is they have no extrinsic value. Purely single-player games.
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

Peace and happiness are skills. These are not things you are born with.
When working, surround yourself with people more successful than you. When playing, surround yourself with people happier than you.
At the end of the day, you are a combination of your habits and the people with who you spend the most time with.
The people who are the happiest and optimistic choose the right five chimps.
Being happy is to realize happiness is a skill you develop and a choice you make. You choose to be happy, and then you work at
Increase serotonin in the brain without drugs: Sunlight, exercise, positive thinking, and tryptophan.

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.
We don’t always get what we want, but sometimes what is happening is for the best. The sooner you can accept it as a reality, the sooner you can adapt to it.
One hack is stepping back and looking at previous bits of suffering I’ve had in my life.
I have another hack I use for minor annoyances. When they happen, a part of me will instantly react negatively. But I’ve learned to mentally ask myself, “What is the positive of this situation?”

2. Saving Yourself

Choosing to Be Yourself

To make an original contribution, you have to be irrationally obsessed with something.

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 well-being. After that, I can go out and do whatever I need to do with the rest of the world.
Any sensible diet avoids the combination of sugar and fat together.
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.
Ironically, fasting (from a low-carb/ paleo base) is easier than portion control. Once the body detects food, it overrides the brain.
World’s simplest diet: The more processed the food, the less one should consume.
The harder the workout, the easier the day.
If you’ve got a fuzzy basket of ten or fifteen different priorities, you’re going to end up getting none of them.
How you make a habit doesn’t matter. Do something every day. It almost doesn’t matter what you do.
if you are willing to make the short-term sacrifice, you’ll have the long-term benefit.
“Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life.”

Meditation + Mental Strength

An emotion is, predicting the future impact of a current event. In modern settings, it’s usually exaggerated or wrong.
Most of our suffering comes from avoidance.
Meditation is intermittent fasting for the mind.
Time spent undistracted and alone, in self-examination, journaling, meditation, resolves the unresolved and takes us from mentally fat to fit.
Choiceless Awareness or Nonjudgmental Awareness.
Practice learning to accept the moment you’re in without making judgments.
Transcendental meditation is where you’re using repetitive chanting to create white noise in your head to bury your thoughts.
Just sit there and close your eyes for at least one hour a day. You surrender to whatever happens— don’t make any effort whatsoever. You make no effort for something, and you make no effort against anything. If there are thoughts running through your mind, you let the thoughts run.

Choosing to Build Yourself

The greatest superpower is the ability to change yourself.
If you take a very long-term point of view and take the emotion out of it, I wouldn’t consider those things mistakes anymore.
To have peace of mind, you have to have peace of body first.
Impatience with actions, patience with results.
Inspiration is perishable. When you have inspiration, act on it right then and there.

Choosing to Grow Yourself

Set up systems, not goals.
I just want to be the most successful version of myself while working the least hard possible.

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.” Holding back means staying in bad relationships and bad jobs for years instead of minutes.
Courage isn’t charging into a machine gun nest. Courage is not caring what other people think.
Anger is a way to signal as strongly as you can to the other party, you’re capable of violence. Anger is a precursor to violence.

3. Philosophy

The Meanings of Life

What is the meaning and purpose of life?
- Answer 1: You have to find your own meaning.
- Answer 2: There is no meaning to life.
- Answer 3: Maybe there is a meaning to life, but it’s not a very satisfying purpose. You actually accelerate the heat death of the Universe.

Live by Your Values

What are your core values?
- Honesty
- No short-term thinking
- peer relationships – No hierarchy
- No anger

Rational Buddhism

How do you define wisdom? Understanding the long-term consequences of your actions.

The Present Is All We Have

There is actually nothing but this moment. No one has ever gone back in time, and no one has ever been able to successfully predict the future in any way that matters.
Inspiration is perishable— act on it immediately.

BONUS

Life Formulas I (2008)

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 + Circadian rhythms
Wealth = Income + Wealth * (Return on Investment)
Income = Accountability + Leverage + Specific Knowledge
Accountability = Personal Branding + Personal Platform + Taking Risk?
Leverage = Capital + People + Intellectual Property
Specific Knowledge = Knowing how to do something society cannot yet easily train other people to do
Return on Investment = “Buy-and-Hold” + Valuation + Margin of Safety

Naval’s Rules (2016)

Be present above all else.
Desire is suffering.
(Buddha) Anger is 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.