11 Lessons I've Learnt
I’m 43. Here is a letter to a younger version of me. If any of it is useful to you, take it; if not, leave it.
Wealth & Freedom
1. Build wealth that works while you sleep. Learn how the economy works. Understand, at a basic level, how a corporation makes money. Then own pieces of good ones. Buy, borrow against, hold until you die — the principle is the same whether you start with a little or a lot.
Learn the difference between wealth and expense. A house you live in and a car you drive are not wealth; they take money out of your pocket. Wealth is the thing that puts money back in while you do nothing. Only wealth buys freedom.
Why corporations and not land or Bitcoin? Land is scarce but costly to hold and produces nothing on its own. Bitcoin is genuinely scarce, but scarcity isn’t value — as long as prices aren’t quoted in it, it creates nothing by itself. Corporations are productive engines: they adapt, innovate, and compound human ingenuity into earnings. That’s what grows while you sleep.
2. Don’t mistake scarcity for value. Gold and silver feel scarce, but they’re only scarce for now — technology eventually makes scarce things abundant. Aluminum was once precious; today it’s foil. Assume the same fate may await 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, and it’s never paid off.
Health & Vitality
4. Treat your body as the one asset you can’t replace. Workout almost every day. Sleep eight hours. Skipping dinner has worked well for me. A carnivore diet did not — what worked was beans, vegetables, nuts, and oats. Find what your body actually responds to, not what’s fashionable.
I also take 3 mg of melatonin at night, which helps me sleep. Figure out your own routine with a doctor — bodies differ, and what helps me may not help you.
Relationships
5. Be present in the small work. Be active. Do the chores. Do them single-mindedly, without music or videos running in the background. The undivided attention is the point — both for the work and for the people who notice you giving it.
6. Give your kids quality time, and regulate before you reason. When a child is chaotic or rigid, don’t lead with logic. Connect and calm them first, 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.
Peace of Mind
7. Never violate the law, or your own morals. Not once. The short-term gain is never worth the long-term cost — to your sleep, your name, or your sense of who you are.
8. Spend less time on feeds, more time on books — and on nothing. Social media has terrible information density. Books reward you far more per hour. Leave room to simply think, and even to be bored. Boredom is where ideas come from.
Learning & Life Building
9. Live abroad, at least once. You’ll see how differently people live and think, which loosens the rigidity in your own mind. You become more of a global citizen — easier to connect across difference, more valued for novelty, and better hedged if things go wrong in the country you happen to live in.
10. Be optimistic, and think long-term. A lot of hard, wonderful things become possible once you start building consistently. Compounding works on more than money.
11. Keep learning. Keep redefining who you are. Never let yourself be limited by where or when you were born, by what you’ve done or haven’t, by what you have or lack. For now, the only real limit is your biology. Everything else is negotiable.