Umarbek

Seek wealth, not money or status. Wealth is having assets that earn while you sleep. Money is how we transfer time and wealth. Status is your place in the social hierarchy.

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 society 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.

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.

Code and media are permissionless leverage. They're the leverage behind the newly rich. You can create software and media that works for you while you sleep.

Play iterated games. All the returns in life, whether in wealth, relationships, or knowledge, come from compound interest.

Pick business partners with high intelligence, energy, and, above all, integrity.

Arm yourself with specific knowledge, accountability, and leverage.

No one can compete with you on being you.

Escape competition through authenticity.

The most important skill for getting rich is becoming a perpetual learner.

Set and enforce an aspirational personal hourly rate. If fixing a problem will save less than your hourly rate, ignore it. If outsourcing a task will cost less than your hourly rate, outsource it.

Become the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until this is true.

There are no get-rich-quick schemes. Those are just someone else getting rich off you.

When you're finally wealthy, you'll realize it wasn't what you were seeking in the first place.

Productize yourself. "Yourself" has uniqueness. "Productize" has leverage.

Technology democratizes consumption but consolidates production. The best person in the world at anything gets to do it for everyone.

Intentions don't matter. Actions do. That's why being ethical is hard.

99% of effort is wasted.

If you don't own a piece of a business, you don't have a path towards financial freedom.

We live in an age of infinite leverage, and the economic rewards for genuine intellectual curiosity have never been higher.

If it entertains you now but will bore you someday, it's a distraction. Keep looking.

The less you want something, the less you're thinking about it, the less you're obsessing over it, the more you're going to do it in a natural way.

Follow your intellectual curiosity more than whatever is "hot" right now. If your curiosity ever leads you to a place where society eventually wants to go, you'll get paid extremely well.

If they can train you to do it, then eventually they will train a computer to do it.

Forget rich versus poor, white-collar versus blue. It's now leveraged versus un-leveraged.

Forget 10x programmers. 1,000x programmers really exist, we just don't fully acknowledge it.

Forty hour work weeks are a relic of the Industrial Age. Knowledge workers function like athletes—train and sprint, then rest and reassess.

Earn with your mind, not your time.

The one thing you have to avoid is the risk of ruin.

We waste our time with short-term thinking and busywork. Warren Buffett spends a year deciding and a day acting. That act lasts decades.

Value your time at an hourly rate, and ruthlessly spend to save time at that rate. You will never be worth more than you think you're worth.

Wealth creation is an evolutionarily recent positive-sum game. Status is an old zero-sum game. Those attacking wealth creation are often just seeking status.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

Spend more time making the big decisions. There are basically three really big decisions you make in your early life: where you live, who you're with, and what you do.

Figure out what you're good at, and start helping other people with it. Give it away. Pay it forward. Karma works because people are consistent.

An old boss once warned: "You'll never be rich since you're obviously smart, and someone will always offer you a job that's just good enough."

I would rather be a failed entrepreneur than someone who never tried. Because even a failed entrepreneur has the skill set to make it on their own.

Retirement is when you stop sacrificing today for an imaginary tomorrow. When today is complete, in and of itself, you're retired.

Whether in commerce, science, or politics—history remembers the artists.

I'm always "working." It looks like work to others, but it feels like play to me. And that's how I know no one can compete with me on it.

The punishment for the love of money is delivered at the same time as the money. As you make money, you just want even more, and you become paranoid and fearful of losing what you do have.

The winners of any game are the people who are so addicted they continue playing even as the marginal utility from winning declines.

In 1,000 parallel universes, you want to be wealthy in 999 of them. You don't want to be wealthy in the fifty of them where you got lucky.

Ways to get lucky: Hope luck finds you. Hustle until you stumble into it. Prepare the mind and be sensitive to chances others miss. Become the best at what you do. Refine what you do until this is true. Opportunity will seek you out. Luck becomes your destiny.

Sharks eat well but live a life surrounded by sharks.

The closer you want to get to me, the better your values have to be.

Apply specific knowledge with leverage and eventually, you will get what you deserve.

People are oddly consistent. Karma is just you, repeating your patterns, virtues, and flaws until you finally get what you deserve.

Always pay it forward. And don't keep count.

The most common bad advice I hear is: "You're too young." Most of history was built by young people. They just got credit when they were older.

Money buys you freedom in the material world. It's not going to make you happy, it's not going to solve your health problems, it's not going to make your family great, it's not going to make you fit, it's not going to make you calm. But it will solve a lot of external problems.

Amazing how many people confuse wealth and wisdom.

There's no shortcut to smart.

You don't get rich by spending your time to save money. You get rich by saving your time to make money.

Hard work is really overrated. How hard you work matters a lot less in the modern economy. Judgment is underrated.

My definition of wisdom is knowing the long-term consequences of your actions. Wisdom applied to external problems is judgment.

In an age of leverage, one correct decision can win everything.

You have to put in the time, but the judgment is more important. The direction you're heading in matters more than how fast you move, especially with leverage.

"Clear thinker" is a better compliment than "smart."

Real knowledge is intrinsic, and it's built from the ground up.

The really smart thinkers are clear thinkers. They understand the basics at a very, very fundamental level.

The number one thing clouding us from being able to see reality is we have preconceived notions of the way it should be.

What we wish to be true clouds our perception of what is true. Suffering is the moment when we can no longer deny reality.

What you feel tells you nothing about the facts—it merely tells you something about your estimate of the facts.

It's actually really important to have empty space. If you don't have a day or two every week in your calendar where you're not always in meetings, and you're not always busy, then you're not going to be able to think.

Very smart people tend to be weird since they insist on thinking everything through for themselves.

A contrarian isn't one who always objects—that's a conformist of a different sort. A contrarian reasons independently from the ground up and resists pressure to conform.

Cynicism is easy. Mimicry is easy. Optimistic contrarians are the rarest breed.

Any belief you took in a package (ex. Democrat, Catholic, American) is suspect and should be re-evaluated from base principles.

To be honest, speak without identity.

We each have a contrarian belief society rejects. But the more our own identity and local tribe reject it, the more real it likely is.

The classical virtues are all decision-making heuristics to make one optimize for the long term rather than for the short term.

Self-serving conclusions should have a higher bar.

Almost all biases are time-saving heuristics. For important decisions, discard memory and identity, and focus on the problem.

Radical honesty just means I want to be free. Part of being free means I can say what I think and think what I say.

I never ask if "I like it" or "I don't like it." I think "this is what it is" or "this is what it isn't." —Richard Feynman

Praise specifically, criticize generally.

Charisma is the ability to project confidence and love at the same time. It's almost always possible to be honest and positive.

The more you know, the less you diversify.

I don't believe I have the ability to say what is going to work. Rather, I try to eliminate what's not going to work. I think being successful is just about not making mistakes.

Microeconomics and game theory are fundamental.

Ignore the noise. The market will decide.

If you cannot decide, the answer is no.

Simple heuristic: If you're evenly split on a difficult decision, take the path more painful in the short term.

Reading science, math, and philosophy one hour per day will likely put you at the upper echelon of human success within seven years.

The genuine love for reading itself, when cultivated, is a superpower. We live in the age of Alexandria, when every book and every piece of knowledge ever written down is a fingertip away. The means of learning are abundant—it's the desire to learn that is scarce.

Read what you love until you love to read.

Reading a book isn't a race—the better the book, the more slowly it should be absorbed.

I don't actually read a lot of books. I pick up a lot of books and only get through a few which form the foundation of my knowledge.

The number of books completed is a vanity metric. As you know more, you leave more books unfinished. Focus on new concepts with predictive power.

If they wrote it to make money, don't read it.

Explain what you learned to someone else. Teaching forces learning.

It's not about "educated" vs. "uneducated." It's about "likes to read" and "doesn't like to read."

Study logic and math, because once you've mastered them, you won't fear any book.

Because most people are intimidated by math and can't independently critique it, they overvalue opinions backed with math/pseudoscience.

To think clearly, understand the basics. If you're memorizing advanced concepts without being able to re-derive them as needed, you're lost.

Twitter has made me a worse reader but a much better writer.

When solving problems: the older the problem, the older the solution.

You know that song you can't get out of your head? All thoughts work that way. Careful what you read.

A calm mind, a fit body, and a house full of love. These things cannot be bought. They must be earned.

The three big ones in life are wealth, health, and happiness. We pursue them in that order, but their importance is reverse.

Don't take yourself so seriously. You're just a monkey with a plan.

Maybe happiness is not something you inherit or even choose, but a highly personal skill that can be learned, like fitness or nutrition.

Today, I believe happiness is really a default state. Happiness is there when you remove the sense of something missing in your life.

Happiness is what's there when you remove the sense that something is missing in your life.

If you ever want to have peace in your life, you have to move beyond good and evil.

Nature has no concept of happiness or unhappiness. Nature follows unbroken mathematical laws and a chain of cause and effect from the Big Bang to now. Everything is perfect exactly the way it is.

The world just reflects your own feelings back at you. Reality is neutral. Reality has no judgments.

Happiness is a choice you make and a skill you develop.

There are no external forces affecting your emotions—as much as it may feel that way.

We think of ourselves as fixed and the world as malleable, but it's really we who are malleable and the world is largely fixed.

A rational person can find peace by cultivating indifference to things outside of their control.

Happiness, love, and passion…aren't things you find—they're choices you make.

The mind is just as malleable as the body. We spend so much time and effort trying to change the external world, other people, and our own bodies—all while accepting ourselves the way we were programmed in our youths.

We accept the voice in our head as the source of all truth. But all of it is malleable, and every day is new. Memory and identity are burdens from the past preventing us from living freely in the present.

At any given time, when you're walking down the streets, a very small percentage of your brain is focused on the present. The rest is planning the future or regretting the past.

We crave experiences that will make us be present, but the cravings themselves take us from the present moment.

I just don't believe in anything from my past. Anything. No memories. No regrets. No people. No trips. Nothing. A lot of our unhappiness comes from comparing things from the past to the present.

Anticipation for our vices pulls us into the future. Eliminating vices makes it easier to be present.

There's a great definition I read: "Enlightenment is the space between your thoughts."

What if this life is the paradise we were promised, and we're just squandering it?

A happy person isn't someone who's happy all the time. It's someone who effortlessly interprets events in such a way that they don't lose their innate peace.

The fundamental delusion: There is something out there that will make me happy and fulfilled forever.

Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.

One thing I've learned recently: it's way more important to perfect your desires than to try to do something you don't 100 percent desire.

When you're young, you have time. You have health, but you have no money. When you're middle-aged, you have money and you have health, but you have no time. When you're old, you have money and you have time, but you have no health. So the trifecta is trying to get all three at once.

Happiness is being satisfied with what you have. Success comes from dissatisfaction. Choose.

The problem with getting good at a game, especially one with big rewards, is you continue playing it long after you should have outgrown it.

To me, the real winners are the ones who step out of the game entirely, who don't even play the game, who rise above it.

There's a line from Blaise Pascal I read. Basically, it says: "All of man's troubles arise because he cannot sit in a room quietly by himself." If you could just sit for thirty minutes and be happy, you are successful.

Peace is happiness at rest, and happiness is peace in motion. You can convert peace into happiness anytime you want. But peace is what you want most of the time.

Today, the way we think you get peace is by resolving all your external problems. But there are unlimited external problems. The only way to actually get peace on the inside is by giving up this idea of problems.

The enemy of peace of mind is expectations drilled into you by society and other people.

The reality is life is a single-player game. You're born alone. You're going to die alone. All of your interpretations are alone. All your memories are alone. You're gone in three generations, and nobody cares.

Perhaps one reason why yoga and meditation are hard to sustain is they have no extrinsic value. Purely single-player games.

My most surprising discovery in the last five years is that peace and happiness are skills. These are not things you are born with.

When working, surround yourself with people more successful than you. When playing, surround yourself with people happier than you.

There's the "five chimps theory" where you can predict a chimp's behavior by the five chimps it hangs out with the most. I think that applies to humans as well.

The first rule of handling conflict is: Don't hang around people who constantly engage in conflict.

If you can't see yourself working with someone for life, don't work with them for a day.

When we get something, we assume the world owes it to us. If you're present, you'll realize how many gifts and how much abundance there is around us at all times.

The most important trick to being happy is to realize happiness is a skill you develop and a choice you make.

The more you judge, the more you separate yourself. You'll feel good for an instant, because you feel good about yourself, thinking you're better than someone. Later, you're going to feel lonely.

Tell your friends you're a happy person. Then, you'll be forced to conform to it. You'll have a consistency bias.

Recover time and happiness by minimizing your use of these three smartphone apps: phone, calendar, and alarm clock.

The more secrets you have, the less happy you're going to be.

Caught in a funk? Use meditation, music, and exercise to reset your mood. Then choose a new path to commit emotional energy for rest of day.

Hedonic adaptation is more powerful for man-made things (cars, houses, clothes, money) than for natural things (food, sex, exercise).

No exceptions—all screen activities linked to less happiness, all non-screen activities linked to more happiness.

A personal metric: how much of the day is spent doing things out of obligation rather than out of interest?

It's the news' job to make you anxious and angry. But its underlying scientific, economic, education, and conflict trends are positive. Stay optimistic.

Politics, academia, and social status are all zero-sum games. Positive-sum games create positive people.

First, you know it. Then, you understand it. Then, you can explain it. Then, you can feel it. Finally, you are it.

In any situation in life, you always have three choices: you can change it, you can accept it, or you can leave it.

You always have three options: you can change it, you can accept it, or you can leave it. What is not a good option is to sit around wishing you would change it but not changing it, wishing you could leave it but not leaving it and not accepting it. That struggle or aversion is responsible for most of our misery.

Here's a hot tip: There is no legacy. There's nothing to leave. We're all going to be gone. Our children will be gone. Our works will be dust. Our civilizations will be dust. Our planet will be dust. Our solar system will be dust.

You're going to die one day, and none of this is going to matter. So enjoy yourself. Do something positive. Project some love. Make someone happy. Laugh a little bit. Appreciate the moment. And do your work.

Doctors won't make you healthy. Nutritionists won't make you slim. Teachers won't make you smart. Gurus won't make you calm. Mentors won't make you rich. Trainers won't make you fit. Ultimately, you have to take responsibility. Save yourself.

I never met my greatest mentor. I wanted so much to be like him. But his message was the opposite: Be yourself, with passionate intensity.

No one in the world is going to beat you at being you.

The combinatorics of human DNA and experience are staggering. You will never meet any two humans who are substitutable for each other.

Your goal in life is to find the people, business, project, or art that needs you the most.

To make an original contribution, you have to be irrationally obsessed with something.

My number one priority in life, above my happiness, above my family, above my work, is my own health. It starts with my physical health. Second, it's my mental health. Third, it's my spiritual health.

Nothing like a health problem to turn up the contrast dial for the rest of life.

When everyone is sick, we no longer consider it a disease.

Dietary fat drives satiety. Dietary sugar drives hunger. The sugar effect dominates. Control your appetite accordingly.

Most fit and healthy people focus much more on what they eat than how much. Quality control is easier than (and leads to) quantity control.

World's simplest diet: The more processed the food, the less one should consume.

The harder the workout, the easier the day.

One month of consistent yoga and I feel 10 years younger. To stay flexible is to stay young.

How you make a habit doesn't matter. Do something every day. It almost doesn't matter what you do. The best workout for you is one you're excited enough to do every day.

Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life.

An emotion is our evolved biology predicting the future impact of a current event. In modern settings, it's usually exaggerated or wrong.

Meditation is intermittent fasting for the mind. Too much sugar leads to a heavy body, and too many distractions lead to a heavy mind.

Life-hack: When in bed, meditate. Either you will have a deep meditation or fall asleep. Victory either way.

Meditation isn't hard. All you have to do is sit there and do nothing. Just sit down. Close your eyes and say, "I'm just going to give myself a break for an hour. This is my hour off from life. This is the hour I'm not going to do anything."

I learned a very important lesson from this: most of our suffering comes from avoidance.

The greatest superpower is the ability to change yourself.

To have peace of mind, you have to have peace of body first.

When you really want to change, you just change. But most of us don't really want to change—we don't want to go through the pain just yet.

Impatience with actions, patience with results.

I don't believe in specific goals. Scott Adams famously said, "Set up systems, not goals." Use your judgment to figure out what kinds of environments you can thrive in, and then create an environment around you so you're statistically likely to succeed.

The current environment programs the brain, but the clever brain can choose its upcoming environment.

If there's something you want to do later, do it now. There is no "later."

Science, to me, is the study of truth and mathematics is the language of science and nature.

For self-improvement without self-discipline, update your self-image.

Everyone's motivated at something. It just depends on the thing.

Grind and sweat, toil and bleed, face the abyss. It's all part of becoming an overnight success.

Nature speaks in mathematics. Mathematics is us reverse engineering the language of nature, and we have only scratched the surface.

The hardest thing is not doing what you want—it's knowing what you want.

Be aware there are no "adults." Everyone makes it up as they go along. You have to find your own path, picking, choosing, and discarding as you see fit. Figure it out yourself, and do it.

Advice to my younger self: "Be exactly who you are." Holding back means staying in bad relationships and bad jobs for years instead of minutes.

Courage isn't charging into a machine gun nest. Courage is not caring what other people think.

Value your time. It is all you have. It's more important than your money. It's more important than your friends. It is more important than anything. Your time is all you have. Do not waste your time.

Anger is a hot coal you hold in your hand while waiting to throw it at somebody.

Anger is its own punishment. An angry person trying to push your head below water is drowning at the same time.

People who live far below their means enjoy a freedom that people busy upgrading their lifestyles can't fathom.

Once you've truly controlled your own fate, for better or for worse, you'll never let anyone else tell you what to do.

A taste of freedom can make you unemployable.

A busy mind accelerates the passage of subjective time.

The modern struggle: Lone individuals summoning inhuman willpower, fasting, meditating, and exercising… Up against armies of scientists and statisticians weaponizing abundant food, screens, and medicine into junk food, clickbait news, infinite porn, endless games, and addictive drugs.

The real truths are heresies. They cannot be spoken. Only discovered, whispered, and perhaps read.

Before you can lie to another, you must first lie to yourself.

To find a worthy mate, be worthy of a worthy mate.

The older the question, the older the answers.

Everyone starts out innocent. Everyone is corrupted. Wisdom is the discarding of vices and the return to virtue, by way of knowledge.

If wisdom could be imparted through words alone, we'd all be done here.

There is actually nothing but this moment. No one has ever gone back in time, and no one has ever been able to successfully predict the future in any way that matters.

You're dying and being reborn at every moment. It's up to you whether to forget or remember that.

"Everything is more beautiful because we're doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now, and we will never be here again." —Homer, The Iliad

Inspiration is perishable—act on it immediately.

The democratization of technology allows anyone to be a creator, entrepreneur, scientist. The future is brighter.

Health, love, and your mission, in that order. Nothing else matters.