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 8: Give Society What It Doesn’t Know How to Get
Society will pay you for creating what it wants, but doesn’t know how to get, and delivering it at scale.
Give society what it wants, but doesn’t know how to get—at scale.
We discussed that you won’t get rich renting out your time. But you will get rich if you give the world what it wants but doesn’t know how to get, especially if you can do it in a way that scales.
Everything that you take for granted around you was, at one time, technology. Lightbulbs, Alarm Clocks, Electricity, Coffee Maker, etc. Today, we think of technology as things with advanced silicon chips–but technology is really just anything that doesn’t quite work yet. Once something works, it’s no longer technology.
Figure out what product you can provide.
If you want to be wealthy, you’ll need to figure out something you can provide to the world that it doesn’t yet know how to get, but it will want.
Iconically, Steve Jobs did this with the iPod and later the iPhone. We were all happy with a CD that held 12 songs; he gave us an entire music library in our hand. We were happy with flip-phones, but he showed us how much we wanted a smart phone. Apple has done this process again and again, so well, and at such a large scale that they’re now one of the most valuable companies in the world.
Using some creativity and careful observation, you’ll need to determine what people currently use and how they wish it to be better. This could be a physical product, an app, a website, a database, book, organization system, entertainment, etc.
Learn how to scale.
It is the entrepreneur’s job to try to bring the high end to the mass market.
- Rich people had black town cars, but Uber gave everyone that same access.
- Rich people had vacation homes, AirBnB made it available to everyone.
- In the 1960’s airline flights were only for business and first class passengers, companies like Southwest & Frontier & Spirit scaled to make it affordable for way more people.
You don’t have to start from scratch.
Some of the best companies and greatest inventions weren’t entirely new concepts, they were the adaptations and iterations. Don’t get stuck trying to think of something entirely original. Look at what the rich and wealthy have or do, and find a way to scale it for the masses.
Next week we’ll cover chapter 9, and discuss how the internet has broadened career possibilities.
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