How to Get Rich (Without Getting Lucky)
Naval's canonical tweetstorm. Information-dense, intended to be timeless. Each line is meant to be a pointer to an hour of conversation. Verbatim ordering from Almanack pp31–37.
The tweets (verbatim sequence)
- Seek wealth, not money or status. Wealth = assets that earn while you sleep; money = transfer of time/wealth; status = social ranking.
- Understand ethical wealth creation is possible. If you secretly despise wealth, it will elude you.
- Ignore people playing status games. They gain status by attacking wealth-creators.
- You're not going to get rich renting out your time. Own equity.
- Give society what it wants but doesn't 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.
- Play iterated games. All returns 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.
- 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: cannot be trained for; if it could, society could replace you.
- Specific knowledge is found by pursuing genuine curiosity, not whatever is hot.
- Building specific knowledge will feel like play to you but look like work to others.
- When specific knowledge is taught, it's through apprenticeships, not schools.
- Specific knowledge is often highly technical or creative. Cannot be outsourced or automated.
- Embrace accountability; take business risks under your own name. Society rewards with responsibility, equity, leverage.
- "Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand, and I will move the earth." — Archimedes.
- Fortunes require leverage. Business leverage = capital, people, products with no marginal cost of replication.
- Capital = money. To raise it, apply specific knowledge with accountability and demonstrate good judgment.
- Labor = people working for you. Oldest, most fought-over form. Impresses parents; don't chase it.
- Capital and labor are permissioned leverage. Everyone is chasing capital; someone has to give it. Everyone wants to lead; someone has to follow.
- Code and media are permissionless leverage — leverage behind the newly rich. Works while you sleep.
- An army of robots is freely available — packed in data centers for heat/space efficiency. Use it.
- If you can't code, write books and blogs, record videos and podcasts.
- Leverage is a force multiplier for your judgment.
- Judgment requires experience but can be built faster by learning foundational skills.
- There is no skill called "business." Avoid business magazines and classes.
- Study microeconomics, game theory, psychology, persuasion, ethics, 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.
- 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. Those are 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 it wasn't what you were seeking in the first place. But that's for another day.
The mnemonic that summarises it
"Productize Yourself" — see Productize Yourself.
Hidden caveat
Naval explicitly says: "This is hard. This is why I say it takes decades — not to execute, but the better part of a decade may be figuring out what you can uniquely provide."
Related
- Specific Knowledge, Accountability, Three Forms of Leverage, Judgment — the four levers.
- Long-Term vs Status Games, Compound Interest (Life) — the game and the horizon.
- Four Types of Luck — why "without getting lucky" doesn't mean "without luck."
Sources: [Almanack pp31-37, original Twitter tweetstorm by @Naval]