Notes from Naval’s Periscope session on June 6, 2018:

INTRO

Check out Naval’s latest tweet storm on how to create wealth.

• Each tweet is written, so it can stand alone – this was deliberate, it makes the entire tweet storm randomly accessible
• This Periscope will be discussing that
• “Everyone pretends like they don’t want to make money, but in reality, everyone does want to make money”
• Money buys you freedom in the material world
• It won’t make you happy, but it will solve a lot of your external problems
• There are many people who are attached to not being happy/making money, so sometimes it’s difficult to talk about these topics
• These people don’t want to feel bad about their choices, so they tend to shut down these conversations
• “Everyone in the world can be happy, and everyone in the word can be wealthy”
• It’s just a matter of education, know-how, and effort

OWNERSHIP VS. WAGE WORK

• If you’re getting paid for renting out your time, you can make good money, but you won’t make the kind of money that can really give you freedom – the passive income that can make you money while you’re on vacation
• You want to own equity – “If you don’t own equity in a business, your odds of making money are slim” – Ownership is important

PRODUCTIZE YOURSELF

• If you can only remember two words from the tweet storm – PRODUCTIZE YOURSELF
• How you package yourself in a product > “Create a product out of whatever it is that you naturally and uniquely do really well”
• If you compete at being someone else, you won’t be the best in the world at it, and in turn you won’t get rewarded properly for it

COMPOUND INTEREST

• Compound interest – keeps adding on itself, so that you end up with thousands of times your original investment
• Compound business relationships – people trust you when you have shown yourself in a visible, and accountable way, to be a high integrity person. This can apply to your reputation, as it’s compounded over time
• If you’ve worked with the same person for a long enough time, the good relationship is compounded to a place where trust tends to dominate > “In the intellectual domain, compound interest rules”
• “When you find the right thing to do, and people to work with, invest deeply into that, and stick with it for decades” – THAT’S how you make the big bucks

HOW DO YOU ESCAPE THE 9-5?

• It’s difficult
• You get suck into being busy, and the job chews into all your time – it makes it hard to work on anything else
• Find a career/job/education where you will end up in a business where the inputs and outputs are disconnected
• 2000 years ago, the inputs and outputs were connected – effort=result
• Nowadays – we have knowledge worker jobs
• A good developer can write a good piece of code that will generate millions of dollars over the next few years > “Navigate towards a career where you’re tracked on the output”
• Sales is a good example, or product building etc.
• NOT a customer service role

CAN 7 BILLION PEOPLE ALL PRODUCTIZE THEMSELVES?

• Yes
• Assume everyone had maximum education and practical knowledge
• Naval thinks if this were the case, within 5 years everyone would be independently wealthy, robots would be doing the manual work, and we’d all be doing creative work
• Wealth is not a zero sum game – it’s a positive sum game
• 7 billion people can have 7 billion products

SKIN IN THE GAME: HIDDEN ASYMMETRIES IN DAILY LIFE

• Written by Nassim Taleb. The best book Naval has read in 2018

SALES SKILLS

• Sales skills are a form of specific knowledge
• You can be trained, but there’s such a thing as a natural, and it’s easy to identify one
• How to improve? – read Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini
• The book talks about strategies we can use to persuade people
• CLASSR
• Consistency – people want to be consistent with their past actions
• Liking – if someone likes you, they’re more likely to be persuaded by you, so be nice to people
• Authority – you’re more likely to listen to a doctor for medical advice than a non-doctor
• Scarcity – we want what’s scarce
• Social Proof – monkey see, monkey do
• Reciprocity – people always want to repay you
• “Persuasion is one of foundational skills that everyone should learn”

ADDITIONAL FOUNDATIONAL SKILLS PEOPLE SHOULD HAVE IN ADDITION TO PERSUASION

• Basic mathematics – probability and statistics are important for personal finance
• Basic accounting
• Calculus – understand rates of change, be able to measure the change in small discrete/continuous events

SPECIFIC KNOWLEDGE

• Specific Knowledge – A combination of unique traits from your DNA, combined with your unique upbringing and your response to it
• Figure out what it was you were doing as a kid, almost effortlessly, that you didn’t even really consider a skill, but people around you would notice

PROGRAMMING

• Is not a commodity skill
• In the future, computers will not write code – coding is a general AI task
• It is not likely to be automated in our lifetimes
• The top coders in the world can make billions of dollars of value, while a not so good coder can well, create no value
• The spread is so large

WHAT WOULD NAVAL MAJOR IN TODAY IF HE WERE TO GO TO COLLEGE?

• Learn things in college that you can’t learn by yourself
• Mathematics, programing, physics, medicine etc.
• If you can learn STEM disciplines on your own, you may not need to go to school
• One of the advantages of a college education is an alumni network

DESIRES

• We all have many desires in life
• When you’re desires are split up, you create anxiety, and this forces you to lose focus
• Pick the one thing you care about more than anything, and ignore everything else
  • “If you’re going to make money, it has to be your number one desire”
  • “It’s very, very hard to be successful in business while trying to live a well rounded life”

DECISION MAKING

• Naval’s 3 decision making heuristics
• When faced with a difficult choice, if you can’t decide, the answer is no
• Modern society is filled with options – “We are biologically built to not realize how many choices there are, because we evolved in tribes of ~150 people, where if you pass up one choice, the second one never comes along”
• When you choose something, you often get locked in for a long time
• Only say yes when you’re pretty certain
• If you have to create a pro/con list – the answers no
• If you have 2 choices to make, and they’re relatively equal (it’s ⁵⁰⁄₅₀), take the path that’s more difficult and more painful in the short term
• Short term pain, means long term gain
• Our brain tends to overvalue the choice with short term happiness, and is trying to avoid the one with short term pain
• Lean into the pain
• “Most of the gains in life come from suffering in the short term, so you can get paid in the long term”
• “Hard choices, easy life. Easy choices, hard life.”
• In times of interpersonal conflict, make the choice that will leave you more equanimous (internally calm)
• Peace of mind is a precursor to happiness
• Happiness is one of those things that can’t be chased directly – if you do chase it, you’re chasing pleasure
• Pleasure is just a high, which you eventually come crashing down from
• “If you actually want to be happy and content, that comes from peace”

BE IMPATIENT AND WILLFUL

• Naval hates wasting time – he’ll often leave a dinner/party at a moments notice if he feels it’s a waste of time
• “The moment I figure out something is a waste of my time, I leave immediately”
• After looking back now, Naval realizes most of his past business trips were a waste of time
• “Business trips are almost never worth it”
• “Value your time, it’s all you have”

FAILURE

• “If you didn’t have failure, you’d never improve”
• Failure causes us to change, and through that, we get growth
• If you always got what you wanted, you’d probably be married to your high school sweetheart and be a manager at your first job

99% OF EFFORT IS WASTED

• Most of what you’ve learned in school, doesn’t really apply to your life now – sure you learned from it, but according to goal oriented life, only about 1% of the effort you put in pays off
• In most aspects of life, try to find the thing you can go all in on with compound interest
• In dating – the minute you think the relationship won’t lead to marriage, you should probably end it
• Be more conscious of what’s a waste of your time
• “When you find that 1%, go all in, and forget about the rest”

THE LAST TWEET IN NAVAL’S TWEET STORM

• “When you’re finally wealthy, you’ll realize that it wasn’t what you were seeking in the first place. But that’s for another day”
• Making money won’t make you happy
• Making money will solve your money problems – it removes a set of things that are in the way of making you happy
• Happiness comes from peace
• To be happy – “You truly have to believe that happiness is a choice you make and a skill you can develop” – It is NOT an intrinsic quality
• You can improve your happiness baseline, just like you can improve your fitness
• “The first step to being happier, is to believe you can be happier”