Thread by @OrtegaTalks

.@naval's First Periscope "you can’t get rich by renting out your time. Is there really any other way to get rich? Yeah"

A THREAD:::👇👇👇

"You basically get rewarded by society for giving it what it wants, and it doesn’t know how to get elsewhere."

"A lot of people think you can go to school and you can study for how to make money, but the reality is, there’s no skill called “business.”

"What you’re actually trying to figure out is, what product or service does society want but does not yet know how to get? You want to become the person who delivers that and delivers it at scale."

"You want to know how to do something that other people don’t know how to do, at the time period when they want."

"You have to have a brand and a reputation. The most powerful brands and reputations in the world are our individual brands, like Oprah, Trump, Cher, single names, Naval."

"There are three broad classes of leverage. One form of leverage is going to be labor, which is the oldest form of leverage, which is other humans working for you."

"Then there’s capital, which is a more recent invention—it’s only about a few thousand years ago; it goes back to the agricultural age—and that’s money. If you have money as a form of leverage, that’s a good one."

"Then the final form of leverage is a brand new form of leverage. That’s the most democratic one. That is, products that have no marginal cost of replication. That would include books, it would include media, it would include movies, it would include code."

"If you just want to get rich over your life and you want to do it in a deterministic predictable way, what you would do is, you would basically stay on the bleeding edge of trends and you’d study technology and yes, design and art and you become really good at something."

"The maximum leverage would mean that you would have people working
for you. It would mean you would have a funding, you would have capital. It would mean that you’d be writing a book, it would mean that you’d be writing code and that you’d be building a media presence."

"I learned how to make money because it was a necessity. After it stopped being a necessity, I stopped caring about it."

"Fundamentally, I’m much more interested in solving problems than I am in making money."

"There is no end goal. The meaning-of-life question is a nonsense question.
Any end goal will just lead to another goal, lead to another goal. We just play games in life. You grow up, you’re playing the school game, you’re playing the social game."

"I don’t think there is any end goal or purpose. I’m just living life as I want to. I’m literally just doing it moment to moment."

"There’s basically three really big decisions that you make around that age. It’s where you live, who you’re with, and what you’re doing. Those are the three big decisions."

"We spend very little time deciding which relationship to get into. We spend so much time in a job, but we spend so little time deciding which job to get into."

"Choosing what city to live in can almost completely determine the trajectory of your life, but we spend so little time trying to figure out what city to live in."

"If you’re going to live in a city for ten years and if you’re going to be in a job for five years and if you’re in the relationship for a decade, you should be spending one to two years deciding on these things. These are highly dominating decisions."

"You literally have to free up your time because the world will assault you with its own agendas. You have to say no to everything and free up your time so you can solve the important problems."

"What do I suggest: start up while working, or quit and start up? It really depends on the circumstances, but the reality is, if you’re serious, you quit and start it up. It separates who’s serious from who’s not."

"The less you want something, the less you’re thinking about it, the less you’re obsessing over it, the more you’re going to do it in a natural way, the more you’re going to do it for yourself, the more you’re going to do in a way that you’re very good at it."

"I do everything for me. I don’t do anything for other people. None of us do. I think we all like to pretend like we’re doing everything for other people, but the reality is, we’re always just doing it for ourselves."

"Eat healthier, work out more. The biggest one would be, just have better emotional control. Do all the same things you were going to do anyway, but do them with less emotion."

"My biggest fear is that I’m going to die without having really lived. I think everybody has that fear at some core level."

"My definition of work? Work is a set of things you have to do that you don’t want to do."

"I don’t measure effectiveness at all. I don’t believe in self-measurement. I feel like this is a form of self- discipline, a form of self-punishment, it’s a form of self-conflict."

"Anything done with sufficient focus and lack of self, lack of talking to yourself, I think is meditative. You can turn anything into meditation. You can turn music into a meditation,a massage can be a meditation, chopping wood can be a meditation."

"What do I look for in people? In business, it’s intelligence, energy, and integrity. In relationships, it’s probably honesty, which is I guess integrity again, intelligence again. I guess the energy matters less in relationships."

"I just do whatever’s easiest. I don’t think life is that hard. I think we make it hard."

"One of the things I’m trying to get rid of is the word “should.” Whenever the word “should” creeps up in your mind, that’s guilt or social programming, and so just doing something because you should do it basically means that you don’t actually want to do it."

"Fall in love with reading. What is my next major goal? I don’t have goals. How many hours of sleep do I get? Not enough, probably five hours a night, six hours a night, but I don’t wake up to an alarm clock. It’s just when I naturally wake up."

"Schedules are so overrated. I wish I could have a completely unscheduled life; that would be something nice to shoot for."

"I don’t have a preconception of a perfect day, because if I did, then it would ruin the day that I was living. A few habits everyone should follow in day-to-day life? Work out, keep healthy food near you, that’s it."

"School is so overrated. Unless you’re going to be a surgeon or something and you need some highly specific trained knowledge, I don’t think it makes sense to hang out in school any longer than you need to."

"One trait that I’ve noticed in successful people? They read a lot. Not always, but most."

"What is freedom to me? It used to be freedom to do whatever I want, but that’s not realistic. Now I’m trying to cultivate more freedom from things. Freedom from obligations, freedom from emotions."

"The modern age is an age of leverage. We’re leveraged through machines, we’re leveraged through media, we’re leveraged through money, we’re leveraged through people working with us."

"Picking the direction that you’re heading in in every decision is far, far more important than what force you apply. Just pick the right direction to start walking in, and then start walking."