Learn About Money

When it comes to persuading people, the trust often matters more than the content of your ideas, and you get people to trust you by demonstrating that you're all on the same team.

Although counterintuitive, admitting your errors upfront shows that you're human and can actually be a brilliant move.

Elon Musk uses decision trees to make big decisions (a tool that uses a tree-like graph or model of decisions and their possible consequences, outcomes, and resources). They are particularly useful for avoiding stupid risks and big bets that aren’t likely to succeed.

Most became a billionaire by making unlikely big bets, as their expected return statistically was much higher than safer bets.

One of the best ways to get information is not from just being better at searching Google, it’s from learning how to build a network and get the information you need through that network. 

This network should include people’s lessons learned and hacks, topics that are too sensitive to talk about because they make someone look bad, and tacit knowledge (knowledge that people have but aren’t able to articulate).

Elon Musk (Founder Of Spacex, Tesla Motors And Contributor To Paypal): Musk, at 12 years old, taught himself to code and sold a game he made for $500. When he moved to Canada, he worked odd jobs including tending vegetables, shoveling out grain bins, and cleaning out gunk from a boiler room in a lumber mill.

In university, Elon sold computer parts to make extra cash and turned his 10 bedroom fraternity home into a nightclub on the weekends and charged a cover. Since then, he’s built several companies, including SpaceX, Tesla Motors, PayPal, and zip2.

“It’s important to be willing to make mistakes. The worst thing that can happen is you become more memorable.”

Recessions are really "depressions," but the term "depression" seems too terrifying. After the Great Depression, economists began to use the word "recession" instead.

The 2007-09 recession involved a financial crisis, high unemployment, and falling prices, and was named the Great Recession. Our current recession is still without a name.

A standard measurement for a recession is two-quarters of consecutive GDP contraction. But the official arbiter of recessions and recoveries, the Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), prefers domestic production and employment indicators instead. Other signs of the recession include:

• Declines in real (inflation adjusted) manufacturing, wholesale-retail trade sales, and industrial production.
• Extended declines in production, employment, real income, and other indicators.

 “....Of course, it is no use being a good storyteller if your product or idea is rubbish. But it is not enough to create a great product; you also have to work out how to let people know about it.”  - Richard Branson

Once you have ideas, you want to put your ideas to work. If you do that, you can start creating value. When we create value, we generate income.

During the pandemic for example, most restaurant owners had to focus on other ideas to generate income. Building wealth is not easy. We need a constant supply of ideas.

It is anything that will increase your wealth without personal labor.

• Businesses. This is a broad asset class. You can buy dividend-stocks on the market, and then the companies will pay you a share of the profit. You can start your own business. You can buy into other private businesses.
• Bonds. When you invest in bonds, you collect interest just like your bank is collecting on a mortgage.
• Books. A good book will generate cash for a long time.

Assets that don't generate cash, but might increase in value.

• Land. A piece of land generates cash when you rent or lease it.
• Collectibles such as art or watches.