A guide to wealth and happiness

By Eric Jorgenson

Part I: Wealth

• 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. Yes, hard work matters, and you can’t skimp on it. But it has to be directed in the right way.
• If you don’t know what you should work on, the most important thing is to figure it out. You should not grind at a lot of hard work until you figure out what you should be working on.
• 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 soiciety what it wants but does not yet know how to get. At scale.
• 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. Building specific knowledge will feel like play to you but will look like work to others.
• Fortunes require leverage. Business leverage comes from capital, people, and products with no marginal cost of replication (code and media).
• Study microeconomics, game theory, psychology, persuasion, ethics, mathematics, and computers.
• Reading is faster than listening. Doing is faster than watching. You should be too buys to “do coffee” while still keeping an uncluttered calendar.
• Become the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until this is true.
• Productize Yourself
  • Am I scaling with labor or with capital or with code or with media?
• 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. Then, you have to figure out how to scale it.
• Specific knowledge - figure out what you were doing as a kid or teenager almost effortlessly. Something you didn’t even consider a skill, but people around you noticed.
  • Example: An obssessive personality: you dive into things and remember them quickly
• No one can compete with you on being you. Most of life is a search for who and what needs you the most.
• Knowing how to be persuasive when speaking is far more important than being an expert digital marketer or click optimizer. Foundations are key. It’s much better to be a 9/10 or 10/10 on foundations than to try and get super deep into things. You do need to be deep into sometjong because otherwise you’ll be a mile wide and an inch deep and you won’t get what you want out of life. You can pnly achieve mastery in one or two things. It’s usually things you’re obsessed about.
• 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 find 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.