Just watch this:
How to Get Rich Without Getting Lucky
One of my favorite business gurus, Naval Ravikant, shared some very cool tips on Twitter that I felt were worth sharing here on my blog:
Wealth vs Money vs Status
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.
Ethical Wealth
Understand that ethical wealth creation is possible. If you secretly despise wealth, it will elude you.
What should you avoid?
- Ignore people playing status games. They gain status by attacking people playing wealth creation games.
- 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.
Basic Rule of Getting Rich
You will get rich by giving society what it wants but does not yet know how to get. At scale.
What should you do?
- Pick an industry where you can play long term games with long term people.
- 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 that 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. 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, not schools. Specific knowledge is often highly technical or creative. It cannot be outsourced or automated.
- Embrace accountability, and take business risks under your own name. Society will reward you with responsibility, equity, and leverage. The most accountable people have singular, public, and risky brands: Oprah, Trump, Kanye, Elon.
- Leverage :
“Give me a lever long enough, and a place to stand, and I will move the earth.” — Archimedes
Fortunes require leverage. Business leverage comes from capital, people, and products with no marginal cost of replication (code and media).
8.1 Capital: Capital means money. To raise money, apply your specific knowledge, with accountability, and show resulting good judgment.
8.2 People: Labor means people working for you. It’s the oldest and most fought-over form of leverage. Labor leverage will impress your parents, but don’t waste your life chasing it.
8.3 Products: Code & Media. The Internet has massively broadened the possible space of careers. Most people haven’t figured this out yet.
Types of Leverage
* Permissioned Leverage: Capital and labor are permissioned leverage. Everyone is chasing capital, but someone has to give it to you. Everyone is trying to lead, but someone has to follow you.
* Permissionless Leverage: Product (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. If you can’t code, write books and blogs, record videos and podcasts. - Learn Foundational Skills: Leverage is a force multiplier* for your judgement. Judgement 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.
[Read Point 3 again]. - You should be too busy to “do coffee,” while still keeping an uncluttered calendar.
- Play iterated games. All the returns in life, whether in wealth, relationships, or knowledge, come from compound interest.
Parting Note:
There are no get rich quick schemes. That’s just someone else getting rich off you.
Apply specific knowledge, with leverage, and eventually you will get what you deserve.
Foot note:
*Force Multiplier: In military science, Force multiplication or a force multiplier refers to a factor or a combination of factors that dramatically increases (hence “multiplies”) the effectiveness of an item or group, giving a given number of troops (or other personnel) or weapons (or other hardware) the ability to accomplish greater things than without it.
How to Prepare Yerba Mate
One of the habits I’ve taken up since I moved to Spain is that of drinking mate. Mate is a very popular drink in South American countries like Argentina and Uruguay.
I’ve made some amazing Argentinian friends here who have introduced me to the drink and the ritual associated with it. It’s important to say that mate is a social ritual beyond being a drink. You can drink it on your own but it also is an important social lubricant in those countries, with a well-defined ritual and dos and don’ts.
Mate is consumed from a traditional hollow gourd (sometimes also called guampa). This is a metal container that is filled with hot water and the yerba mate herbs. The tea is sipped through a metallic straw (called a bombilla). In a social setting, friends pass the drink from person to person refilling with hot water from a thermos when necessary!
It is made from the naturally caffeinated and nourishing leaves of the celebrated South American rainforest holly tree (Ilex paraguariensis). Mate contains caffeine, theophylline, and theobromine, well-known stimulants also found in tea, coffee and chocolate. I tend to use it mostly as a stimulant when I want to switch from coffee for a while.
Below is a very good video on how to prepare it.
My favorite brand of mate is Cruz de Malta.
Here’s the textual description for preparing a good yerba mate:
- Pour some yerba mate tea into your mate cup (until it is ¾ full)
- Close the cup with the palm of your hand and shake it to make the bigger pieces of the mate leaves sink down to the bottom.
- Make sure the mate is reclined in a 45-degree angle.
- Pour warm water onto the lower part of the yerba mate.
- The yerba is now getting wet and the infusion is starting to take place. Wait 30 seconds.
- Put mate straw into the wet yerba mate tea on the lower part of the contents.
- Pour in hot water softly. Never flood the cup as you want to keep repeating this process many times, thus you don’t want to wet all the mate at once.
Hope you enjoy, let me know what you think of it!
How to Know if an Electronic Product is Fake or Original?
When you buy products online, especially from Chinese websites like Aliexpress or Gearbest, you might be a bit doubtful of whether the products they sell are original.
This is especially the case for small electronic goods like camera batteries. The best way to determine whether a good is fake or not is to do the following.
First, before buying, closely inspect the wording of the seller’s description. Sometimes they will write the model number in the title and use the wording “original”, but in the finer print details further down below they will not include the brand or the words “genuine” and “original”. This would usually mean it’s not an original item.
After buying, closely inspect the packaging and item and compare it to the originals. If that seems to be the same (any differences should make you seriously doubt the authenticity of the product), you can check the weight of the product. This is usually a clear giveaway. For example, I have some original Sony and Canon camera batteries, and the fake ones I bought are just a few grames lighter, while all the originals are exactly the same weight.
Should You Deload When Training for Padel or Tennis?
A deload is a planned step back from the volume (sets x reps) or intensity (load on the bar) in your current program. The idea is to give your tissues and nervous system a chance to recover after a period of intense training.
For advanced lifters (or individual training styles like powerlifting) this is important because your tissues heal at different rates. Muscle tends to recover quickly from training sessions.
But other tissues like ligaments and tendons (which receive less blood supply and lack specialized cells that help remodel damaged tissue), recover much slower.
This is where most people get in trouble because ligaments and tendons won’t get sore like your muscles, but they receive just as much abuse from heavy training.
That’s why programs designed for advanced lifters plan in “deload cycles” to help reduce the stress on connective tissue and give it a chance to catch-up to muscle adaptations.
However, most of us are not advanced trainees, powerlifters, or following high-frequency (training 5-6x a week) programs that use heavy loads.
If you’re working out 3-4 times a week, the other 3-4 days should provide adequate recovery time for both your muscles and connective tissues.
Between vacations, travel for work, sickness, and family commitments, we’re often forced to take a few days off here and there over the year.
Take advantage of these opportunities. Train hard up to your event and then let the time off serve as your deload.
So bottom line: If you’re crushing it with high training frequency, then schedule in deloads — your all-important connective tissues will thank you.
But if you’re training less (3x/week or less), then you likely don’t need to worry too much.
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