Seek Wealth, Not Money or Status

You probably known evolved from his Twitter account, and we're gonna be talking about his epic tweets storm on how to get rich without getting lucky. We're going to go through most of the tweets in detail, giving the ball a chance to expand on them and just generally riff on the topic. He'll probably throw in some ideas that he hasn't even published before. You know Navall from his Twitter account; he's also the co-founder of AngelList and opinions. He's a prolific tech investor in companies like Twitter, Uber, and many more, and I'm the co-founder evangelist Navall, and I also co-authored the Venture Hacks blog with him back in the day.

Yeah, me how to get my street storm definitely hit a nerve. A lot of people say it was helpful, reached across aisles and people outside of the tech industry, people in all walks of life. People do 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 the thing that you really want. Wealth is assets that earn while you sleep. Wealth is the factory with the robots that's 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 and 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 wealth is because it biases your freedom. So you don't have to wear a tie like a collar around your neck. So you don't have to wake up at 7 a.m. and rush to work and sit in commuter traffic. So you don't have to waste away your entire life grinding all the productive hours into a soulless job that doesn't fulfill you.

So, the purpose of wealth is freedom; it's nothing more than that. It's like to buy fur coats or drive Ferraris or sail yachts or jet around the world in your Gulfstream. 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 gonna get that unless you really want it, and the entire world wants it. The entire world is working hard at it, and to some extent, it is competitive; it's a positive sum game, but there are competitive elements to it because there's a finite amount of resources right now in society.

To get the resources to 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 the base because people steal the IOUs, the government prints extra IOUs, people renege on their IOUs. But really, what money is trying to be is trying to be a reliable IOU from society that you are owed something for something you or someone who gave you that money did in the past. We can transfer these IOUs around.

So, really, money is how we transfer wealth. There are fundamentally two huge games in life that people play. One is the money game because money's not gonna solve all your problems, but it's gonna solve all your money problems. So, I think that people know that; they realize that they want to make money, but at the same time, many of them deep down believe that they can't make it. They don't want any wealth creation to happen, so they sort of virtue signal by attacking the whole enterprise by saying, "Well, making money is evil and you shouldn't do it," but I'll bluff. What they're trying to do is they're actually playing the other game, 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."