38 Weeks to Get Rich
Welcome to the “38 Weeks to Get Rich”, where each week we’ll break down a section from Naval’s iconic tweetstorm and interviews on the topics of wealth, freedom, money, status, and happiness.
The full PDF is available here.
What follows is my summary & key takeaways to help you digest the 127 page document.
Week 2: Make Abundance for the World
Wealth isn’t about taking something from somebody else—it’s about creating abundance for the world.
Ethical wealth creation makes abundance for the world.
There is a notion that making money is evil, but I propose that wealth can be created without stealing from someone else. We learned last week that creating wealth is a positive-sum game. That we can become wealthy by creating win-win situations.
Although some people would rather play zero-sum games (I win, you lose) that is different than what we’re promoting. Often that method of stealing doesn’t always look like theft. Instead, it looks like taxes, crony capitalism, or communism.
There are not a fixed, finite number of jobs; nor is there a fixed, finite amount of wealth. The global wealth has grown unfathomably from the time we humans lived in caves. That wealth has been created. Created by people, technology, productivity, hard work, etc. If wealth only happened by stealing, the richest among us would, at most, have the nicest cave and the best wooden club.
Everyone can be rich.
The reality is everyone can be rich. We can see that by observing that in any “First World” nation, nearly everyone is richer than anyone who was alive 200 years ago.
In 1821, no one had cars, or modern medicine, or electricity, or smart phones, or climate control, or WiFi. I would rather be a poor person in the US than a wealthy person in the early 1800’s. That’s because of wealth creation.
Fundamentally, everyone can be wealthy. All of our lives can improve with advances in technology and sciences. In fact, because of economies of scale, it gets easier to produce new technologies when everyone has access to them.
Everyone having more is not everyone having equal.
It’s worth noting that even though everyone’s life is better now than it was hundreds of years ago, that isn’t to say that everyone has an equal amount. For sure there are income inequalities, but what I want us to understand is that there is a way to create wealth (which we learned is similar but different to money) that helps everyone live better.
Over the next few weeks we’ll look at the role of free markets, luck, and how we spend time; as it pertains to wealth creation.
I look forward to sharing more next Friday.
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