noodlelover
Kraken
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- Oct 18, 2021
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Rich people often weave narratives of hard work and persistence to get you to like them, or buy their book, or buy their course, or invest in their company, or buy their companies products or services because you like or respect them.
Or if they are selling an informational product, they'll tell a story about how they're rich because they consumed informational products.
Poor people often have a bad model of reality that's keeping them poor, so their advice is equally worthless. I am a poor person, so my advice may be useless. I may also have some of the pieces of the puzzle figured out.
This advice is from years of trial and error, mistakes and learning.
Time - 12 hrs a day/Everyday/No Exceptions/No Breaks
Time is the first factor to becoming rich. What you do once you become rich, is different from the process of becoming rich. But to maximize output you want to maximize input. This means working at least twelve hours a day, everyday, no vacations, no days off, no breaks.
That means sacrifice, no browsing media, or forums (including this one) during those twelve hours. No having kids or a girlfriend, or taking care of aging parents or family. No dating. No sex.
Most people don't have what they want because they are unwilling to sacrifice what it would take for them to be successful. It's easier for other people, because they have advantageous you don't but if you are unwilling to sacrifice what it would take for you to be successful in your specific circumstance, you won't be.
Your ability to work consistently, without breaks, when you feel tired, when you didn't get enough sleep, through weekends, through holidays, when you're feeling insanely bored, when you get mental fatigue, when your brain's not giving you a solution is a skill that you can develop. The more you push and force yourself to do this, the more your brain will adapt to be capable.
One way to increase your brain's ability to do this is to intuitively believe you are capable. To do this, imagine yourself working 12 hours a day, everyday, without breaks, without days off, through holidays, with relentless focus. This is called mental practice.
Sometimes you need to spend time thinking about a solution to a problem, this should not be considered a break so long as your thought stays focused on the problem until you find a solution.
Leverage - Human Capital + Ai Capital
Ok. So you're working 12 hours a day, everyday, no exception. How do you leverage that time to get the most out of it?
The most important thing is paying other people to do things for you.
The Ultra Rich like Bezos and Elon Musk, have their parents invest in their first company, and then grow the company, their wealth and by extension their status with that initial investment until they can get more investors on board to pay more people to work more.
But if you don't have rich parents willing to invest in you, like most of us don't, you can build an early product and then get investors, by showing that products works and has a wide userbase.
Through practice, rich people develop the skill of bullshitting investors, of sounding very smart, very hard working, and very capable. They're still working the twelve hours a day, everyday in the beginning, but they're mostly bullshitting investors over and over and pushing their name out there on podcasts and other media to get more investors, with those twelve hours.
This is how the rich get more leverage, to get more 12 hours of brain processing per day, than one brain (their own), because they can pay for more brains with other people's money.
This may be something you're not willing to do, in which case you won't be as rich as those people.
All of these strategies are trade-offs. They have costs and benefits, and if the benefits aren't worth the costs to you, don't do them.
You can also do some, but not all of the strategies, and get some but not all of the benefits. However, if you don't have the results you want you're likely not paying a high enough price in terms of mental stress, boredom, fatigue, embarrassment, feeling like a fraud, imposter syndrome, self-hatred, and other negative emotions that are a result of taking these actions.
Leverage - Skill - 12 hrs a day - everyday - no exceptions
You need skill to leverage the most from your time. Without a high degree of skill, your time is non-competitive and you won't make poverty wages, you'll starve.
To develop skill, you should first of all be spending 12 hours a day, everyday, no exceptions, working. You should NEVER switch fields, or businesses, or products, because that is at least partially destroying your skill tree and starting over. It's like running an extremely competitive race and then stopping and walking backwards several miles.
Leverage - Skill - Avoiding Shining Object Syndrome
Shining object syndrome is when you get bored of what you're doing, and want to switch to building a new product or business type. This is how you kill your skill and everything you've built.
Another cause of shining object syndrome is realizing your vision is "impossible". This is likely an illusion. If there's people in your business type making good money, then it's possible to make good money and you shouldn't switch.
If there's no people in your business making good money, that doesn't mean it's impossible either, if logically or emotionally there's a benefit to your product, then keep iterating on it and avoid shining object syndrome.
Leverage - Skill - Avoiding Books
Like most of the advice in this essay, I've done what I believe is the wrong thing and paid a price in years for it. So yes, I've read many books and I am here now, telling you not to. The ROI (Return on Investment) isn't worth it compared to the skills + product development + product awareness, you would get from working directly on your product.
The only reason to read books is if the skill you're working on is bullshitting investors or potential clients to sound smart, then it's worth reading books in the field you want to sound smart in. However, if this is not a skill you need to develop, then don't read books. The chinless Andrew Tate was right about this all along, even though I scoffed at his advice.
It's not about what gives you benefits, it's about what gives you the most benefits, that's the only way you stay competitive in your niche.
Leverage - Skill - Directed Focus
To improve your skills the fastest as you are working, you need a positive/negative feedback mechanism for that skill. This feedback mechanism not only occurs through external data feedback, but also through your own perception of what you're doing, how well you are doing it, or how fast you are doing it. The perception itself is developed through time spent observing yourself doing the thing though this perceptual lens.
To illustrate this point let's take an example, you're a sales guy doing door to door sales. For a few hours, everyday for a week you may have most of your focus on the sound of your own voice, this will help you get better and better at sounding better. For another few hours, everyday you may have most of your focus on the emotional reaction of the person you're talking to.
Think of the areas of your action that don't have your focus as on auto-pilot. They may be improving very slowly or not at all, but the areas of your focus (which is limited) are the areas your skill is improving the fastest in.
If you have no specific focus you won't be improving much, so you always want to have something you're working on. If you're "Max skill" and there's nothing to work on, in something you're doing, then focus on speed.
Leverage - Skill - Spaced Repetition aka Interleaving Practice
To maximize skill acquisition and learning, you don't actually want to do the same task all day. You want to setup your schedule so that you're bouncing between different tasks you need to do for your product or service.
The fact that I know this from the scientific literature and reading, contradicts my point of not reading. But the ROI on these gold nuggets that you will occasionally find is much lower, than say not reading at all. You would have found more powerful gold nuggets, and many more of them, that are proven to work from your experience, specific to your niche, by only focusing on your working on your product or service.
Leverage - Skill - Avoiding "Practice" that's not working on your product or service
Any practice of any of your skills that's not directly working on your product or services is has a sub-optimal ROI compared to directly working on your product or services. This, like many things, is a mistake I've made.
Find a way to practice the skill you think you need while also working on your product or services to get the highest ROI.
If you think, this is a critical skill and I get very few opportunities to work on it, while working on my product or services, then create more opportunities to work on it while also working on your product or service. Let's say you do door to door yard work, but bush trimming is your weak point you need to get better at to charge more for and make more money, then look for and take on more clients that need bush trimming.
Let's say you're a youtuber but the first few thing you say including the hook, aren't strong, and that's your biggest bottleneck where you loose the most viewers. Then that's the skill you want to work on.
To spend more time on this skill, spending more time writing, and re-writing, or filming and re-filming the first five seconds over and over to better develop this skill, while also improving your product. This is important. Don't spend time "practicing" creating random intro's for possible videos, do it for the specific video you're creating. Always be working on your product, or service when you're working on your skills.
Leverage - Automation
Automation has a time and money cost and potential benefits. Often the time cost, vs saved makes it not worth it. For example, you spent three weeks automating something in python, that saves you twenty minutes a week. Before the automation script has made back the time it saved, some one changes an API, or it crashes, or it has bugs that need to be worked out, so you wind up spending more time on it.
Then later you realize you need more task flexibility in that specific task and you have to scrap the entire thing. You can perhaps tell I'm speaking from experience.
Generally, you want to avoid automation unless automating the task has a very low time cost itself. An hour or twenty minutes is usually safe. Can I automate this task in under an hour? If not, you're wasting too much time on it, and your business and product is evolving too quickly, that you likely won't need it anymore long before automating it would have paid itself off.
When it doubt, don't automate. However, do iteratively streamline your process. This may sound counter intuitive but automation lacks the adaptability and flexibility you need to run a successful business, and if there's a process you think you need to automate that no one else has a solution you can buy (Software or service you can buy), then it very likely isn't critical for your business.
Leverage - Out-Sourcing
Never outsource the critical skill that gives you a competitive edge. That is the skill you need to continue working on, no matter how good you are, to stay competitive with adapting markets.
Think of this critical skill as your magic sauce, something you need to continue improving by continuously iterating on your product or service.
Let's take Elon Musk for example, his critical skill is bullshitting investors. Had he hired some one to present his products on stage for him, he would not have made nearly as much money.
If you do choose to outsource, it should never be your critical skill that gives you the biggest competitive edge. That you should continue improving by working in the business, or on the business.
Also when you do outsource, expect low quality intelligence. This applies to Ai as well.
Investing
Once you start making money, invest some portion of your money in a diversified portfolio to protect it from inflation. This capital is useful to you because it helps you survive when you're not making money.
Final Thoughts - The missing puzzle pieces
Your competition knows all of this, and any other public concept. In addition to all of this, you still need a "secret sauce", but that's something you'll have to develop on your own.
Or if they are selling an informational product, they'll tell a story about how they're rich because they consumed informational products.
Poor people often have a bad model of reality that's keeping them poor, so their advice is equally worthless. I am a poor person, so my advice may be useless. I may also have some of the pieces of the puzzle figured out.
This advice is from years of trial and error, mistakes and learning.
Time - 12 hrs a day/Everyday/No Exceptions/No Breaks
Time is the first factor to becoming rich. What you do once you become rich, is different from the process of becoming rich. But to maximize output you want to maximize input. This means working at least twelve hours a day, everyday, no vacations, no days off, no breaks.
That means sacrifice, no browsing media, or forums (including this one) during those twelve hours. No having kids or a girlfriend, or taking care of aging parents or family. No dating. No sex.
Most people don't have what they want because they are unwilling to sacrifice what it would take for them to be successful. It's easier for other people, because they have advantageous you don't but if you are unwilling to sacrifice what it would take for you to be successful in your specific circumstance, you won't be.
Your ability to work consistently, without breaks, when you feel tired, when you didn't get enough sleep, through weekends, through holidays, when you're feeling insanely bored, when you get mental fatigue, when your brain's not giving you a solution is a skill that you can develop. The more you push and force yourself to do this, the more your brain will adapt to be capable.
One way to increase your brain's ability to do this is to intuitively believe you are capable. To do this, imagine yourself working 12 hours a day, everyday, without breaks, without days off, through holidays, with relentless focus. This is called mental practice.
Sometimes you need to spend time thinking about a solution to a problem, this should not be considered a break so long as your thought stays focused on the problem until you find a solution.
Leverage - Human Capital + Ai Capital
Ok. So you're working 12 hours a day, everyday, no exception. How do you leverage that time to get the most out of it?
The most important thing is paying other people to do things for you.
The Ultra Rich like Bezos and Elon Musk, have their parents invest in their first company, and then grow the company, their wealth and by extension their status with that initial investment until they can get more investors on board to pay more people to work more.
But if you don't have rich parents willing to invest in you, like most of us don't, you can build an early product and then get investors, by showing that products works and has a wide userbase.
Through practice, rich people develop the skill of bullshitting investors, of sounding very smart, very hard working, and very capable. They're still working the twelve hours a day, everyday in the beginning, but they're mostly bullshitting investors over and over and pushing their name out there on podcasts and other media to get more investors, with those twelve hours.
This is how the rich get more leverage, to get more 12 hours of brain processing per day, than one brain (their own), because they can pay for more brains with other people's money.
This may be something you're not willing to do, in which case you won't be as rich as those people.
All of these strategies are trade-offs. They have costs and benefits, and if the benefits aren't worth the costs to you, don't do them.
You can also do some, but not all of the strategies, and get some but not all of the benefits. However, if you don't have the results you want you're likely not paying a high enough price in terms of mental stress, boredom, fatigue, embarrassment, feeling like a fraud, imposter syndrome, self-hatred, and other negative emotions that are a result of taking these actions.
Leverage - Skill - 12 hrs a day - everyday - no exceptions
You need skill to leverage the most from your time. Without a high degree of skill, your time is non-competitive and you won't make poverty wages, you'll starve.
To develop skill, you should first of all be spending 12 hours a day, everyday, no exceptions, working. You should NEVER switch fields, or businesses, or products, because that is at least partially destroying your skill tree and starting over. It's like running an extremely competitive race and then stopping and walking backwards several miles.
Leverage - Skill - Avoiding Shining Object Syndrome
Shining object syndrome is when you get bored of what you're doing, and want to switch to building a new product or business type. This is how you kill your skill and everything you've built.
Another cause of shining object syndrome is realizing your vision is "impossible". This is likely an illusion. If there's people in your business type making good money, then it's possible to make good money and you shouldn't switch.
If there's no people in your business making good money, that doesn't mean it's impossible either, if logically or emotionally there's a benefit to your product, then keep iterating on it and avoid shining object syndrome.
Leverage - Skill - Avoiding Books
Like most of the advice in this essay, I've done what I believe is the wrong thing and paid a price in years for it. So yes, I've read many books and I am here now, telling you not to. The ROI (Return on Investment) isn't worth it compared to the skills + product development + product awareness, you would get from working directly on your product.
The only reason to read books is if the skill you're working on is bullshitting investors or potential clients to sound smart, then it's worth reading books in the field you want to sound smart in. However, if this is not a skill you need to develop, then don't read books. The chinless Andrew Tate was right about this all along, even though I scoffed at his advice.
It's not about what gives you benefits, it's about what gives you the most benefits, that's the only way you stay competitive in your niche.
Leverage - Skill - Directed Focus
To improve your skills the fastest as you are working, you need a positive/negative feedback mechanism for that skill. This feedback mechanism not only occurs through external data feedback, but also through your own perception of what you're doing, how well you are doing it, or how fast you are doing it. The perception itself is developed through time spent observing yourself doing the thing though this perceptual lens.
To illustrate this point let's take an example, you're a sales guy doing door to door sales. For a few hours, everyday for a week you may have most of your focus on the sound of your own voice, this will help you get better and better at sounding better. For another few hours, everyday you may have most of your focus on the emotional reaction of the person you're talking to.
Think of the areas of your action that don't have your focus as on auto-pilot. They may be improving very slowly or not at all, but the areas of your focus (which is limited) are the areas your skill is improving the fastest in.
If you have no specific focus you won't be improving much, so you always want to have something you're working on. If you're "Max skill" and there's nothing to work on, in something you're doing, then focus on speed.
Leverage - Skill - Spaced Repetition aka Interleaving Practice
To maximize skill acquisition and learning, you don't actually want to do the same task all day. You want to setup your schedule so that you're bouncing between different tasks you need to do for your product or service.
The fact that I know this from the scientific literature and reading, contradicts my point of not reading. But the ROI on these gold nuggets that you will occasionally find is much lower, than say not reading at all. You would have found more powerful gold nuggets, and many more of them, that are proven to work from your experience, specific to your niche, by only focusing on your working on your product or service.
Leverage - Skill - Avoiding "Practice" that's not working on your product or service
Any practice of any of your skills that's not directly working on your product or services is has a sub-optimal ROI compared to directly working on your product or services. This, like many things, is a mistake I've made.
Find a way to practice the skill you think you need while also working on your product or services to get the highest ROI.
If you think, this is a critical skill and I get very few opportunities to work on it, while working on my product or services, then create more opportunities to work on it while also working on your product or service. Let's say you do door to door yard work, but bush trimming is your weak point you need to get better at to charge more for and make more money, then look for and take on more clients that need bush trimming.
Let's say you're a youtuber but the first few thing you say including the hook, aren't strong, and that's your biggest bottleneck where you loose the most viewers. Then that's the skill you want to work on.
To spend more time on this skill, spending more time writing, and re-writing, or filming and re-filming the first five seconds over and over to better develop this skill, while also improving your product. This is important. Don't spend time "practicing" creating random intro's for possible videos, do it for the specific video you're creating. Always be working on your product, or service when you're working on your skills.
Leverage - Automation
Automation has a time and money cost and potential benefits. Often the time cost, vs saved makes it not worth it. For example, you spent three weeks automating something in python, that saves you twenty minutes a week. Before the automation script has made back the time it saved, some one changes an API, or it crashes, or it has bugs that need to be worked out, so you wind up spending more time on it.
Then later you realize you need more task flexibility in that specific task and you have to scrap the entire thing. You can perhaps tell I'm speaking from experience.
Generally, you want to avoid automation unless automating the task has a very low time cost itself. An hour or twenty minutes is usually safe. Can I automate this task in under an hour? If not, you're wasting too much time on it, and your business and product is evolving too quickly, that you likely won't need it anymore long before automating it would have paid itself off.
When it doubt, don't automate. However, do iteratively streamline your process. This may sound counter intuitive but automation lacks the adaptability and flexibility you need to run a successful business, and if there's a process you think you need to automate that no one else has a solution you can buy (Software or service you can buy), then it very likely isn't critical for your business.
Leverage - Out-Sourcing
Never outsource the critical skill that gives you a competitive edge. That is the skill you need to continue working on, no matter how good you are, to stay competitive with adapting markets.
Think of this critical skill as your magic sauce, something you need to continue improving by continuously iterating on your product or service.
Let's take Elon Musk for example, his critical skill is bullshitting investors. Had he hired some one to present his products on stage for him, he would not have made nearly as much money.
If you do choose to outsource, it should never be your critical skill that gives you the biggest competitive edge. That you should continue improving by working in the business, or on the business.
Also when you do outsource, expect low quality intelligence. This applies to Ai as well.
Investing
Once you start making money, invest some portion of your money in a diversified portfolio to protect it from inflation. This capital is useful to you because it helps you survive when you're not making money.
Final Thoughts - The missing puzzle pieces
Your competition knows all of this, and any other public concept. In addition to all of this, you still need a "secret sauce", but that's something you'll have to develop on your own.
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