Seek Wealth, Not Money or Status

you probably known evolved from his Twitter account and we're gonna be talking about his epic tweets storm on how to get rich without getting lucky we're going to go through most of the tweets in detail giving the ball a chance to expand on them and just generally riff on the topic he'll probably throw in some ideas that he hasn't even published before you know navall from his twitter account he's also the co-founder of angel lists and opinions he's a prolific tech investor in companies like Twitter uber and many more and I'm the co-founder evangelist navall and I also co-authored the venture hacks blog with him back in the

day yeah me how to get my street storm definitely hit a nerve a lot of people say it was helpful reach cross aisles and people outside of tech industry people in all walks of life people do want to know how to solve their money problems and everyone vaguely knows that they want to be wealthy but they don't have a good set of principles to do it by what's the difference between wealth money and status wealth is the thing that you really want wealth is assets that earn while you sleep wealth is the factory that with the robots as cranking out things wealth is the computer program that's running at night that's serving other customers wealth is even

money in the bank that is being reinvested into other assets and into other businesses even a house can be a form of wealth because you can rent it out although that's probably a lower use of productivity but land and actually doing some commercial enterprise so my definition of wealth is much more businesses and assets that can earn while you sleep but really the reason you want wealth is because it biases your freedom so you don't have to wear attire like a collar around your neck so you don't have to wake up at 7 a.m. and rush to work and sit and commute traffic so you don't have to waste away your entire life

grinding all the productive hours into a way into a soulless job that doesn't fulfill you so the purpose of wealth is freedom it's nothing more than that it's like to buy fur coats or drive Ferraris or sail yachts or jet around the world in your Gulfstream that stuff gets really boring and really stupid really fast it's really just so that you are your own sovereign individual you're not gonna get that unless you really want it and the entire world wants it and the entire world working hard at it and to some extent it is competitive it's a positive sum game but there are competitive elements to it because there's a finite amount of

resources right now in society and to get the resources to do what you want you have to stand out money is how we transfer wealth money is social credits it is the ability to have credits and debits on other people's time if I do my job right if I create value for society Society says oh thank you we owe you something in the future for the work that you did in the past here's a little IOU let's call that money and that money gets the base because people steal the IOU is the government prints extra IOU used people renege on their IO used but really what money is trying to be it is trying to be a reliable Iowa you from society that you are owed something for

something you or someone who gave you that money did in the past and we can transfer these IOUs around so really money is how we transfer wealth there are fundamentally two huge games in life that people play one is the money game because money's not gonna solve all your problems but it's gonna solve all your money problems so I think that people know that they realize that they want to make money but at the same time many of them deep down believe that they can't make it they don't want any wealth creation to happen so they sort of virtue signal by attacking the whole enterprise by saying well I'm making money is evil and you shouldn't do it

but I'll Bluff but what they're trying to do is they're actually playing the other game to the status game they're trying to be high status in the eyes of other people watching by saying well I don't need money we don't want money and then status is just your ranking in the social hierarchy so wealth is not a zero-sum game everybody in the world can have a house because you have a house doesn't take away from my ability to have a house if anything the more houses that are built the easier it becomes to build houses the more we know about building houses and just the more people that can have houses so wealth is a very positive sum game we create things

together we're starting this endeavor to create this hopefully piece of art that explains what we're doing at the end of it something brand new will be create it's a positive sub-game status on the other hand is a zero-sum game it's a very old game we've been playing it since monkey tribes and it's hierarchical who's number one who's number two who's number three and for a number three to move to number two number two has to move out of that slot so status is zero-sum game politics is an example of a status game even sports is an example of a status game to be the winner there must be a loser

I don't fundamentally love status games they play an important role in our society so we figure out who's in charge but fundamentally you play them because they're necessary evil the problem is an evolutionary basis like if you go back thousands of years status is a much better predictor of survival than wealth is you couldn't have wealth before the farming age before farmers because you couldn't store things hunter-gatherers carried everything in their backs so hunter-gatherers lived entirely in status based societies farmers started going to wealth based societies and the modern industrial economies are much more heavily wealth based societies but

there's always a subtle competition going on between status and wealth for example when journalists attacked rich people or they attack the technology industry they're really bidding for status they're saying no the people are more important and I the journalist represents the people and therefore I am more important the problem is that by playing these status games to win at a status game you have to put somebody else down that's why you should avoid status games in your life because they make you into an angry combative person you're always fighting to put other people down to put yourself and the people that you like up and they're