the almanack of naval - 01
Making money is not a thing you do—it’s a skill you learn.
Getting rich is about knowing what to do, who to do it with, and when
to do it. It is much more about understanding than purely hard work.
Hard work matters, and you can’t skimp节省 on it. But
it has to be directed in the right way.
You will get rich by giving society what it wants but does not
yet know how to get. At scale.
The internet has massively broadened the possible space of
careers. Most people haven’t figured this out yet.
Play iterated games. All the returns in life, whether in wealth,
relationships, or knowledge, 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 is knowledge you cannot be trained for.
If society can train you, it can train someone else and replace you.
★Specific knowledge is found by pursuing your genuine
curiosity and passion rather than whatever is hot right now.
Specific knowledge is often highly technical or creative. It
cannot be outsourced外包 or automated.
Building specific knowledge will feel like play to you but will
look like work to others.
When specific knowledge is taught, it’s through
apprenticeships见习期, not schools.
Embrace accountability, and take business risks under your own name. Society
will reward you with responsibility, equity, and leverage.
Fortunes require leverage. Business leverage comes from
capital, people, and products with no marginal cost of
replication (code and media).
Capital means money. To raise money, apply your specific
knowledge with accountability and show resulting good judgment.
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.
Judgment requires experience but can be built faster by
learning foundational skills.
There is no skill called “business.” Avoid business magazines
and business classes. (？？？)
Study microeconomics, game theory, psychology, persuasion,
ethics, mathematics, and computers.
Reading is faster than listening. Doing is faster than watching.
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 is for another day.
(当你终于富有，你可能会意识到这不是你最初想要的。但那是另外一回事了。)
Summary: Productize Yourself
“Yourself” has uniqueness. “Productize” has leverage. “Yourself” has accountability.
“Pro-ductize” has specific knowledge. “Yourself” also has specific knowledge in there.
So all of these pieces, you can combine them into these two words.
If you’re looking toward the long-term goal of getting wealthy, you should ask yourself,
“Is this authentic可靠的 to me? Is it myself that I am projecting?” And then,
“Am I productizing it? Am I scaling it? Am I scaling with labor or
with capital or with code or with media?” So it’s a very handy, simple mnemonic /nɪ'mɒnɪk/好记的.
If I do my job right, if I create value for society, society says, “Oh,
thank you. We owe you something in the future for the work
you did in the past. Here’s a little IOU. Let’s call that money.”
