Seek Wealth, Not Money or Status
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you probably known evolved from his Twitter account, and we're gonna be talking about his epic Tweetstorm on how to get rich without getting lucky. We're going to go through most of the tweets in detail, given the ball a chance to expand on them and just generally riff on the topic. You'll probably throw in some ideas that he hasn't even published before you. No, no ball from his Twitter account. He's also the co founder of Angel Lists and the Opinions. He's a prolific tech investor and companies like Twitter, uber and many more. And I'm the co founder of Evangelist With the Ball, and I also co authored the venture hacks blood with him back in the day. Yeah, we how to get me Sweet Storm definitely hit a nerve. A lot of people say it was helpful. Reach cross aisles and people outside and tech industry people in all walks of life, people who 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 a thing that you really want wealth, his assets that earn while you sleep. Wealth is the factory that, with robots is 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 than 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 well is because it buys your freedom. You don't have to wear a tire like a collar around your neck, so you don't have to wake up at 7 a.m. And rush to work and sitting commute traffic so you don't have to waste away your entire life grinding all the productive hours into a way to a soldier's job that doesn't fulfill you.

So the purpose of wealth, its freedom, it's nothing more than that. It's like two by four coats or drive Ferraris or sail yachts or jet around the world, your Gulf stream. 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 going to get that unless you really want it and the entire world wants it in. The entire world is working hard at it, and to some extent of this competitive, it's a positive sum game. But there are competitive elements to it, because if they find that amount of resource is right now in society, and to get the resource is, 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 debased because people steal the Io use. The government prints extra. Io used people real edge under I O U's, but maybe what money is trying to be. It is trying to be a reliable IOU from society that you are owed something for something. You are someone who gave you the money did in the past,

and we can transfer these I'll use around. So really money is how we transfer Well, they're fundamentally two huge games in life that people play. One is the money game because money is not gonna solve all your problems. But it's gonna solve all your buddy problems. So I think that people know that they realize that. So they want to make money, but the same time, many of them deep down believe that they can't make it. They don't want any wealth creation toe happen, so they sort of virtue signal by attacking the whole enterprise. But saying, Well, making money is evil. You shouldn't do it bottle block. 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 created to positive sum. Game status, on the other hand, is a zero sum game every old game. We've been playing it since monkey Tribes, and it's hierarchal who's number one? Who's number two, whose number three and four number three to move to number two. Number two has to move out of that slot. So status 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 sentimentally 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 of much better predictor of survival than wealth. This you couldn't have wealth before the farming age before farmers because he couldn't store things. Hunter gatherers carried everything on their backs, so 100 gatherers lived entirely in status based societies. Farmers started going toe 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 attack which 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 journalists,

represents the people, and therefore I am more important. The problem is that by playing these status games to win that 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 in the people that you like up, and they're always gonna exist. There's no way around it but just realize that most of times when you're trying to create wealth, you're actually getting attacked by someone else and they're trying to look like a goody two shoes. But really, what they're doing is they're tryingto up their own status at your expense. They're just playing a different game, and it's the worst king. It's a zero sum game instead of a positive sum game.

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