Daniel's notes on The Almanack Of Naval Ravikant

How to Get Rich (Without Getting Lucky): - Seek wealth, not money or status. Wealth is having assets that earn while you sleep. Money is how we transfer time and wealth, Status is your place in the social hierarchy. - You're not going to get rich renting out your time. You must own equity-a piece of a business-to gain your financial freedom. - You will get rich by giving society what it wants but does not yet know how to get. At scale.

Society always wants new things. And if you want to be wealthy, you want to figure out which one of those things you can provide for society that it does not yet know how to get but it will want and providing it is natural to you, within your skill set, and within your capabilities.

You should be very thoughtful and realize in most things (relationships, work, even in learning) what you're trying to do is find the thing you can go all-in on to earn compound interest. When you fnd the 1 percent of your discipline which will not be wasted, which you'll be able to invest in for the rest of your life and has meaning to you--go all-in and forget about the rest.

Everybody who really makes money at some point owns a piece of a product, a business, or some IP. That can be through stock options if you work at a tech company. That's a fine way to start. But usually, the real wealth is created by starting your own companies or even by investing. In an investment firm, they're buying equity. These are the routes to wealth. It doesn't come through the hours.

Always factor your time into every decision. How much time does it take? It's going to take you an hour to get across town to get something. If you value yourself at one hundred dollars an hour, that's basically throwing one hundred dollars out of your pocket. Are you going to do that?

If someone is talking a lot about how honest they are, they're probably dishonest. That is just a little telltale indicator I've learned. When someone spends too much time talking about their own values or they're talking themselves up, they're covering for something.

Every person I met at the beginning of my career twenty years ago, where I looked at them and said, "Wow, that guy or gal is super capable so smart and dedicated"...all of them, almost without exception, became extremely successful. You just had to give them alone enough timescale. It never happens in the timescale you want, or they want, but it does happen.

INVERSION 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. I think being successful is just about not making mistakes. It's not about having correct judgment. It's about avoiding incorrect judgments.

PRINCIPAL-AGENT PROBLEM The smaller the company, the more everyone feels like a principal. The less you feel like an agent, the better the job you're going to do. The more closely you can tie someone's compensation to the exact value they're creating, the more you turn them into a principal, and the less you turn them into an agent.

There's the "five chimps theory" where you can predict a chimp's behavior by the five chimps it hangs out with the most. I think that applies to humans as well. Maybe it's politically incorrect to say you should choose your friends very wisely. But you shouldn't choose them haphazardly based on who you live next to or who you happen to work with. The people who are the most happy and optimistic choose the right five chimps.

You always have three options: you can change it, you can accept it, or you can leave it. What is not a good option is to sit around wishing you would change it but not changing it, wishing you could leave it but not leaving it and not accepting it. That struggle or aversion is responsible for most of our misery. The phrase I probably use the most to myself in my head is just one word: "accept."