How to get rich (without getting lucky)

The art of growing wealth—slow, steady, and sure

Naval Ravikant is one of the people I learned the most from.

He's a multimillionaire with an interesting mindset about life and business.

A few years ago, he wrote a thread on how to get rich.

A lot of creators used the ideas in this thread to get digital freedom.

I'm one of those creators (by no means the richest).

But these ideas changed my life, so in this email, I want to share Naval's 10 best ideas on how to get rich (without getting lucky).

It's quite a long letter so make sure you grab a cup of black coffee :)

Let's dive into it.

1. Seek Wealth, Not Status

Smart people don’t chase money or fame.

They focus on building real wealth.

Status is a zero-sum game.

This means that someone else needs to lose for you to win.

If I'm the #14 football player in the world, then I need to beat 13 players in order to become number 1.

Their rank has to drop so mine can go up.

But wealth works differently.

It’s a positive-sum game — everyone can win.

I don’t need to lose for you to succeed.

You can create something valuable, help a lot of people, and earn money doing it.

Take the iPhone.

It changed the world and made Apple rich.

Everyone won.

So remember this:

Status games are zero-sum.

For you to win, someone else has to lose.

But wealth creation games are positive-sum.

Everyone can win by creating value.

So start playing wealth creation games and ignore status games.

Build cool stuff, help a lot of people, and get rich doing it.

This is how you disconnect your time from your income.

2. Specific Knowledge

You need specific knowledge to get rich.

Specific knowledge is something that society wants but doesn’t know how to get.

That's why you can't be trained for it.

If it were easy to teach, it wouldn't be specific knowledge.

You get rich by giving specific knowledge to society at scale.

Specific knowledge is found by pursuing:

• Your talents

• You passions

• Your curiosity

You find it by doing what you naturally love to do.

Observe what you spend your time on and what you're naturally good at.

It will feel effortless to you but it will look effortful to others.

To develop specific knowledge:

• Analyze your skills

• Combine your skills

• Follow your curiosity

• Observe your actions

• Double down on your strengths

Once you have specific knowledge you can sell it on scale.

Double down on your unique strengths.

This gives you the best chance to get specific knowledge.

3. Build Leverage

To sell on scale, you need leverage.

Leverage is about getting a bigger outcome from the same input.

Levers are force multipliers.

It helps you to get more without doing more.

This is how some people can accomplish 10x, 100x, or 1,000,000x what others can.

There are 4 types of leverage:

• People (people that work for you)

• Money (money that works for you)

• Content (articles, podcasts, books)

• Code (software that works for you)

Code and content are best because they're permissionless.

You don't need others for it.

So how do you build leverage?

Create things that scale.

I can't code.

So let me explain how you can build leverage with content:

• Pick a niche

• Solve problems

• Post daily content

• Give a lot of free value

• Create a valuable lead magnet

• Turn your knowledge into products

• Build up your email list to sell on scale

There's more to it, but this is basically the 80/20 of it.

You simply need to learn to write, build and sell.

It's also important to get better at writing because writing is the foundation of all content.

• Books

• Videos

• Tweets

• Articles

• Images

• Threads

• Podcasts

• Carousels

• Newsletters

The better you can write, the more leverage you'll build.

And the more leverage you build, the bigger your outcomes will be.

If you want to learn how to write world-class content that grows your audience and gets you more customers, check out 7 Days Your First Dollar Mastery.

But leverage alone isn't enough, you also need good judgment.

4. Judgment

Once you have leverage, judgment becomes the most important.

So what is judgment actually?

Naval calls it wisdom applied to external problems.

It's about knowing the long-term consequences of your actions and acting accordingly.

Most people worry about how fast they go.

But your direction is much more important.

Judgment is about getting the direction right.

Leverage is about how hard you can push.

Judgment is about where you push.

Here are some ways to improve your judgment

• Keep your life simple

• Collect mental models

• Design your diet and info diet

• Control your interpretations of events

• Focus on the long-term consequences

• Prioritize understanding, not memorization

• Make hard decisions instead of easy decisions

• Focus on first-principles, always question everything else

• Control your emotions, a calm mind makes better decisions

This should improve your judgment.

Which will drastically improve your outcomes.

5. Take Accountability

Accountability is about taking risks under your own name.

It gives you skin in the game.

And it's how you build up your reputation.

Accountability is a double-edged sword.

If you fail under you own name, you get the critique.

But if you win under your own name, you get the credits.

However, it's alright if you fail as long as you try your best and act with high integrity.

It's not about being perfect.

It's about trying your best and acting with high integrity.

When you do this, you'll eventually get rewarded.

6. Find Work That Feels Like Play

Competition is an illusion.

We all have our own unique strengths and weaknesses.

No one can compete with you on being you.

You don't need to become the best in the world at everything.

You need to become the become version of your authentic self.

When you're doing what you love to do in a way that's true to who you are, you stop competing and start creating.

If you love what you do, you also won't be jealous of others.

Because you're already doing what you are meant to do.

"The goal is not to retire. The goal is to find work that feels like play to you but looks like work to others."

It's the work that feels almost effortless to do.

It’s sustainable. It’s energizing. And it compounds.

And as a result, you spend a lot of time doing it and you have no problem staying consistent with it.

Which is why it will pay off massively in the long-term.

7. Pick The Right Business Partners

Relationships can either ruin or change your life.

Both in real life and business.

That's why it's important that you select the right people.

Naval looks at 3 things to determine if someone is the right fit:

You need all 3 for a successful business relationship.

If any of these things is lacking, it won't work.

• Low energy → laziness

• Low integrity → betrayal

• Low intelligence → incompetence

Find people with high energy, high integrity, and high intelligence.

They make the best business partners.

8. Limit Your Desires

You can't be happy if you have too many desires.

Because happiness is the state in which you feel like nothing is missing in your life.

And desires imply that you don't have something.

Because if you had it, you wouldn't desire it.

That's why desires reduce your happiness until you attain them.

And this is the problem with constantly wanting more.

It's good to be ambitious.

But you shouldn't randomly pick up desires.

You should be mindful about it.

Because the more desires you have, the more you think is missing in your life, and the unhappier you'll be.

That's why you need to get clear on what you want to achieve.

Don't fall for the trap of blindly wanting more.

The fewer desires you have, the happier you'll be.

Because not wanting something is as good as having it.

So only pick desires that are worth suffering for.

9. Hard Work Isn't Enough

You need to work hard to get rich.

But you need more than just hard work.

Don't let hustle culture brainwash you.

Grinding 24/7 won't make you successful.

You need to figure out what's worth working on first.

After that, you need to select the right people to work with.

Only once you've done this, you should work as hard as possible.

10. Stay Off The Hedonic Treadmill

Most people never enjoy freedom because they upgrade their lifestyle as their income increases.

But freedom is far more valuable than a fancy car or watch.

That's why it's important to live below your means.

You can still get nice stuff.

But prioritize freedom first.

When you're free, you can get the stuff while still keeping full control over your time.

Because you don't just want money.

You want the most valuable thing that money can give you.

Which is freedom.

• Freedom to control your time

• Freedom to control your work

• Freedom to control your location

So prioritize freedom.

That's it for this newsletter my friend.

Let me know if you liked this longer one or if you prefer shorter ones.

I'm thinking of doing 6 short emails per week and 1 long newsletter like this so I'd love to hear your opinion.

Enjoy your weekend!

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