There Are No Get Rich Quick Schemes

We skipped one tweet because I wanted to cover all of the tweets on the topic of the long term. The tweet that we skipped was, "There are no get-rich-quick schemes; that's just someone else getting rich off you."

This goes back to the world being an efficient place. If there's an easy way to get rich, it's already been exploited. There are a lot of people who will sell you ideas and schemes on how to make money, but they're just always selling you some $79.95 course or some audio book or some seminar.

Which is fine; everyone needs to eat, people need to make a living. They might actually have really good tips, but if they're giving you actionable, high-quality advice that acknowledges that it's a difficult journey and will take a lot of time, then I think that's realistic. But if they're selling you some get-rich-quick scheme, whether it's crypto or whether it's an online business or seminar, they're just making money off you.

That's their get-rich-quick scheme. It's not gonna necessarily work for you. One of the things about this whole tweet storm and podcast is that we don't have ads on here; we don't charge for anything, we don't sell anything. Not because I don't want to make more money; it's always nice to make more money.

We're doing work here, but because it would completely destroy the credibility of the enterprise. If I'm saying, "Hey, I know how to get rich and I’m gonna sell that to you," it ruins it. When I was young and I was kind of studying up on the topic, one of my favorite books on the topic was actually called "How to Get Rich" by Felix Dennis, the founder of Maxim magazine, a billionaire who passed away.

He had a lot of crazy stuff in there, but he had some really good insights too. Whenever I read something by him or by the GoDaddy founder Bob Parsons, or say Andrew Carnegie, or you read stuff by people who are already very wealthy and they've clearly made their wealth in other fields—not by selling the "how to get rich" line—they have a credibility you just trust them.

They're not trying to make money off of you. They are obviously trying to win some status and some ego, right? You always have to have a motivation for doing something, but at least that is a cleaner reason. Why they're probably not lying: they're probably not fooling you; they're not selling you at some level.

Every founder has to lie to every employee of the company that they have, or they have to convince them that it's better for you to work for me than it is to do what I did and go work for yourself. So, I've always had a hard time with that, which is why the only honest path in my companies is I've recruited entrepreneurs and I tell them, "You're gonna get to be entrepreneurial in this company."

And the day you're ready to go start your own next thing, I'm gonna support you. I'm never gonna get in the way of you starting a company, but this can be a good place for you to learn how to build a good team and build a good culture, how to find product-market fit, to perfect your skills, and meet some amazing people while you figure out exactly what it is you're gonna do.

Because positioning, timing, deliberation are very important when starting a company. But what I've never been able to do is look them in the face and say, "You must be at your desk by 8:00 a.m." Because I'm not gonna be at my desk by 8:00 a.m. I want my freedom. Or say to them that, "You're great at being a director today and you'll be a VP tomorrow," you know, putting them into that career path track because I don't believe in it myself.

If anyone is giving advice on how to get rich and they're also making money off of it, they should have made their money elsewhere. Like, you don't learn how to be fit from a fat person; you don't learn how to be happy from a depressed person. So, you don't want to learn how to be rich from a poor person, but you also don't want to learn how to be rich from somebody who makes their money by telling people how to be rich.

It's suspect. Anytime you see somebody who's actually gotten rich following some guru's advice on getting rich, just remember that in any random process, if you run it long enough and if enough people participate in it, you will always get every single possible outcome with probability one.

There's a lot of random error in there. And then also, this is why you have to absolutely and completely ignore business journalists and economists, academics when they talk about private companies. I won't even name names, but like when a famous economist rails on Bitcoin or when a business journalist attacks the latest company that's IPO-ing, it's complete nonsense.

Those people have never built anything; they're professional critics. They don't know anything about making money; all they know is how to criticize and get page views, and you are literally becoming dumber by reading them. You are burning neurons.

I'll leave you with a quote from the same Taleb that I liked, where he said, "If you want to be a philosopher-king, first become a king and then become a philosopher, and not first become a philosopher and then become a king."

I'm glad you brought up Taleb because I was going to finish this by saying, just remember the title of his first book, which is "Fooled by Randomness." One of the reasons why we're a little vague in this podcast is because we're trying to lay down principles that are timeless, as opposed to just giving you the winning lottery ticket numbers from yesterday.