11 Lessons I've Learnt
This is a letter to a younger me. He learned all of this the slow way.
Wealth & Freedom
1. Build wealth that works while you sleep. Learn how the economy works. Learn how a corporation makes money. Then own index funds. Save. Buy. Hold. Finally, borrow against them until you die. The principle is the same whether you start with a little or a lot. Run your own numbers in the FIRE calculator.
Learn the difference between wealth and expense. The house you live in and the car you drive are not wealth. They take money out of your pocket. Wealth puts money back in while you do nothing. Only wealth buys freedom.
Why corporations, not land or Bitcoin? Land is scarce, but it costs money to hold and produces nothing on its own. Bitcoin is scarce too, but scarcity isn’t value. As long as stock prices aren’t quoted in Bitcoin, it creates nothing by itself. Corporations are productive engines. They adapt. They innovate. They compound human ingenuity into earnings. That grows while you sleep.
Copyrights, patents, and software count too.
2. Don’t mistake scarcity for value. Gold and silver feel scarce. They’re scarce only for now. Technology makes scarce things abundant — just look into space. Aluminum was once precious. Today it wraps sandwiches. Expect the same fate for anything whose only virtue is being hard to get.
3. Don’t play the status game. Buy things for their value, not for what they say about you. No Tesla unless the value justifies the price. Often, not even a new car. Status is the most expensive thing you can buy. It never pays off.
Health & Vitality
4. Treat your body as the one asset you can’t replace. Work out almost every day. Sleep eight hours. I take 3 mg of melatonin at night, and it helps me sleep. I use two clocks to wake me up. Skipping dinner worked for me. A carnivore diet did not. Beans, vegetables, nuts, and oats did. I keep my routine in an app I built, and the science that convinced me is in Why We Sleep.
Relationships
5. Be present in the small work. Be active. Do the chores. Do them single-mindedly — no music, no videos in the background. Undivided attention improves the work and relaxes your mind.
6. Give your kids quality time, and regulate before you reason. A chaotic or rigid child can’t hear logic. Connect first. Calm them. Then redirect. A regulated child can hear you. A flooded one can’t. Dan Siegel’s “Name It to Tame It” sheet says it better than I can. I put the whole method into No-Drama Discipline so I can find it mid-argument.
Peace of Mind
7. Never violate the law. Not once.
8. Trade feeds for books — and for nothing at all. Social media has terrible information density. Books pay you far more per hour. Leave room to simply think. Leave room to be bored. Boredom is where ideas come from. I keep short guides to the books that changed my thinking — on sleep, intelligence, physics, and history — so the ideas don’t fade.
Learning & Life Building
9. Live abroad, at least once. You’ll see how differently people live and think. That loosens the rigidity in your own mind. You connect more easily across difference. You become more valued for novelty. And you’re hedged if things go wrong in the country you happen to live in.
10. Be optimistic. Think long-term. Hard, wonderful things become possible once you build consistently. Compounding works on money. It also works on skills and wisdom.
11. Keep learning. Keep redefining who you are. Never let yourself be limited by where or when you were born. Not by what you’ve done or haven’t. Not by what you have or lack. For now, the only real limits are physics and your biology. Everything else is negotiable.