Apply specific knowledge, with leverage, and eventually you will get what you deserve.

If you can’t code, write books and blogs, record videos and podcasts.

Having a million-dollar net worth doesn’t make you a genius, and having less than a million-dollar net worth doesn’t make you a fool.

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 can be taught through apprenticeships or self-taught. It’s high paying because society has not yet figured out how to teach or automate it. It tends to be creative or technical.

You will get rich by giving society what it wants but does not yet know how to get. At scale.

By the time people realize that they have enough money, they’ve lost their time and their health.

The ultimate purpose of money is so that you do not have to be in a specific place at a specific time doing anything you don’t want to do.

In almost any salaried job, even at one that’s paying a lot per hour like a lawyer, or a doctor, you’re still putting in the hours, and every hour you get paid. So, what that means is when you’re sleeping, you’re not earning. When you’re retired, you’re not earning. When you’re on vacation, you’re not earning. And you can’t earn non-linearly.

There are no get-rich-quick schemes. That’s just somebody else trying to get rich off of you.

Set and enforce an aspirational hourly rate. If fixing a problem will save less than your rate, ignore it. If outsourcing a task will cost less than your rate, outsource it. Get comfortable disappointing people whose expectations will eat your life up, one hour at a time.

You can spend your life however you want, but if you want to get rich, it has to be your number one overwhelming desire.

You retire by saving up enough money, becoming a monk, or by finding work that feels like play to you.

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

The first thing you realize when you make a bunch of money is that you’re still the same person.

We spend so much time in relationships. The average relationship probably lasts a couple years. 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.

I was very selfish with my time and I probably had the most productive year of my life.

I don’t believe in work time. I just believe in time and you can spend it doing whatever you want to do.

Time is the ultimate currency and I should have been more tight fisted with it.

I think most of life is about searching, it’s not about doing. People spend too much time doing and not enough time thinking about what they should be doing.

Say no to more things to protect your time because it’s very precious. On your dying day, you will give everything you have for another day.

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.

Ruminating on the past is largely a waste of time. It’s illusory.

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

My only schedule is my daily morning workout, and even that I’m not perfect on it, but other than that I try to be as unscheduled as possible because I want to be free.

I think it’s really worth – whenever you can in life, if you have the choice – optimizing for independence rather than optimizing for pay.

What you want to do in life is, you want to be in control of your time, so you want to get into a leveraged job, and then you want to get into one where you control your own time and you’re tracked on the outputs.

If they pay you what you’re worth, then you can get your time back, and if you get your time back, then you can be hyperefficient

I have no time for short-term things: dinners with people I won’t see again, tedious ceremonies to please tedious people, traveling to places that I wouldn’t go to on vacation.

Success is the enemy of learning. It can deprive you of the time and the incentive to start over. Beginner’s mind also needs beginner’s time.

Be ruthless about not scheduling things. You will have to disappoint people, but when they want your time, that’s their problem, not yours.

I don’t have time is just saying it’s not a priority

The best way to read is to: Pick up a lot of books. Start reading them all. Put down any book instantly that doesn’t grab you. And just keep going until you find something that speaks to you.

The real education begins in the library, it begins with books. If you can learn to like to read, you never need to go to school.

At any given time I’m reading somewhere between ten and 20 books. I’m flipping through them. If the book is getting a little boring, I’ll skip ahead.

Sometimes I’ll start reading a book in the middle because some paragraph caught my eye and I’ll just continue from there.

I feel no obligation whatsoever to finish the book. If at some point I decide the book is boring, or if it’s got pieces of it that are incorrect so now I can’t trust the rest of the information in there, I just delete it.

Sometimes people wrap long books around simple ideas.

I no longer track books read or even care about books read. It’s about understanding concepts.

Read what you love until you love to read.

Free education is abundant, all over the Internet. It’s the desire to learn that’s scarce. Cultivate that desire by reading what you want.

The genuine love for reading itself, when cultivated, is a superpower.

Politics is the exercise of power without merit.

A good conference is a vacation that you take with really smart friends.

We are going from bread and circuses to cannabis and video games to psychedelics and VR.

If you can’t delete an email without flinching or responding, you won’t scale.

Politics is sports writ large — pick a side, rally the tribe, exchange stories confirming bias, hurl insults and threats at the other side.

It is the mark of a charlatan to explain a simple concept in a complex way.

On meditation: It’s self-therapy. Instead of paying a therapist to sit there and listen to you, you’re listening to yourself.

We’re basically monkeys on a small rock orbiting a small backwards star in a huge galaxy, which is in an absolutely staggeringly gigantic universe, which itself may be part of a gigantic multiverse.