A principal is an owner. An agent is an employee. The principal's incentives differ from the agent's incentives. The business owner wants what's best for the business and what will make the business successful. The agent wants what will look good to the principal or make them personally the most money. If you're an employee, your most important task is to think like a principal. Train yourself to think like a principal. Ask "What would the founder do?" If you think like a principal, it's a matter of time until you become that.

Principal-Agent Problem

Everyone has a personal moral code. When you are in business long enough, you'll realise that much of it is about trust. You don't want to reevaluate every discussion or continually look over your shoulder.  When you are ethical, you'll attract other long-term players and force people that live on lies out of your network. In the short run, being unethical pays, but in the long run, you will get paid. Everyone will want to deal with you. You will have trust and reputation.

Ethics is something you do

Find out what is unique to you that you're good at and apply leverage. Ask if what you do is authentic to you. And then, ask if you are productising it. Are you scaling it with labour or capital or code or media? So, making money is not a skill. It is who you are, done a million times.

Productize yourself

Anybody who wants to be entrepreneurial and wants to reliably improve their ability to create wealth is patient and looking at it from a long-term view. Pay attention to who is getting leverage off of the work you're doing. Look who's above you and above them and see how they're taking advantage of your time and work and how they're applying leverage. People naturally do this when they move up the corporate ladder. You want to manage capital, products, media and community.

Working for yourself

When you become wealthy, you'll realise that you were not really looking for it in the first place. You're still the same person. If you're happy, you're happy. If you're unhappy, you will still be unhappy.  Most importantly, you can't buy a fit body, a calm mind, and a house filled with love. You have to earn it.  Many external battles happen because the internal state is out of control. But when you're naturally internally peaceful, you'll be more loving without expecting anything in return, which will take care of the external relationships.

Work on your internal state

Envy can motivate you to find the right thing. If you're doing work that you don't like, envy can motivate you to find something better. But it can also eat you if you let it follow you your entire life.

Envy cuts both ways

You generally will do better in a smaller organisation as you will have more accountability and your work will be more visible. You're likely to try different things, which can help you discover what you're uniquely good at.  The long-term goal is to work for ourselves. People working under us are essentially robots. People working above you is someone to learn from and improve upon. If someone is below you, it's because you're teaching them. If you're not teaching them, then you don't need a human, but a robot.

Discover what you're good at

If there was a quick way to get rich, it's already been exploited. If someone is selling you a get rich quick schemes such as crypto or an online business or seminar, that's often their scheme to get rich by making money off you. If anyone is giving advice on how to get rich and they're also making money off it, it's suspect. It's like learning how to become fit from a fat person. You can't take advice from an economist on Bitcoin or a business journalist on the latest company that's IPOing. They're critics and don't know enough about making money.

Get rich quick schemes

<ul><li>People often don't understand what specific knowledge is or how to get it. </li><li>People don't understand what accountability consists of. It means you have to be willing to fail publicly. You have to let people criticise you.</li><li>Don't refuse to do things just because other's can't. Work with the hand you're dealt with. Then use it to fix the world.</li></ul>

How to get rich: Common failures

Compilation of ideas from Naval Ravikant's tweetstorm on wealth creation in the modern era

Discover what you're good at

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