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Hey there!

It's Sunday, which means that it's time for an email packed with some great content, just for you.

What I've Made for You

This week, I finished a few books.

Here are my book notes:

Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Taleb

The Almanack of Naval Ravikant by Eric Jorgenson

Both books are great. Especially the Almanack of Naval Ravikant.

Some Takeaways from The Navalmanack

Small, bite-sized chunks of wisdom I'm collecting to share later.

You guys get a taste first.

• Both happiness and wealth creation are skills you can learn.

• Figure out what to work on first. Hard work only matters if it's pointed in the right direction. Hard work is overrated. Judgment is underrated. But you have to put in the time, nonetheless. Wisdom is knowing the long-term consequences of your actions. Judgment is wisdom applied to external problems as well as making the right decisions to capitalize on the consequences.

• To become wealthy, productize yourself. Be your unique self, productize, and get leverage (scale it) — best of all if you do so with permissionless leverage, like code or media. By having leverage you get outputs that are disproportionate to your inputs.

• Figure out how to learn anything you want to learn. It's more important today to be able to learn a field quickly than to have the right degree. You want specific knowledge. If they can train someone to do what you do, they can take your place.

• Have a fundamentally sound understanding first. It's better to understand the basics at a very fundamental level than to memorize complicated concepts than you can't rederive from the basics. If you can't rederive, you're memorizing.

• Play long-term games. "All the returns in life, whether in wealth, relationships, or knowledge, come from compound interest." Play positive-sum games. Zero-sum games like the status game will make you an angry and combative person.

• You won't get rich renting out your time. Build or buy equity in a business, product, or some IP.

• Follow your own intellectual curiosity. Don't go for whatever is hot right now.

• Money isn't bad for you, but the lust for money is. It's a bottomless pit. You'll never have enough. There's no magic number, which, when you reach it, you'll think that you have enough. A way to stay clear of this is to not upgrade your lifestyle as you earn more. Another thing that helps is valuing freedom.

• On networking: "Be a maker who makes something interesting people want. Show your craft, practice your craft, and the right people will eventually find you."

• "Your real résumé is just a catalog of all your suffering. If I ask you to describe your real life to yourself, and you look back from your deathbed at the interesting things you've done, it's all going to be around the sacrifices you made, the hard things you did."

• Don't rely on the standard operating procedures of your brain to make decisions. You want principles. Mental models. And you can't just memorize them, you have to understand them — have the underlying experience.

• Learn to love to read. It's a superpower. Don't feel obligated to finish a book. Feel free to jump around, speed read, skim, or skip it altogether.

• Read the greats. The classics. Once you've got your fundamentals, you can read anything. You don't want to be scared of any book in the library. If it feels hard; read it anyway. Read it until you get it.

• Happiness is the absence of desire.

• You should do what you want to do. Not what society wants you to do. There are pressures to become rich. Become attractive. All that. But you should do it for yourself, not because others want you to. Or you don't do them at all — you decide. Just think for yourself.

"Focus on signal over noise. Don't waste time on stuff that doesn't actually make things better." — Elon Musk

To your success. Regards, 

Christian Bager Bach Houmann