--:-- Who is this advice targeted to? Is it for my Lyft driver? Is it for an internet entrepreneur? Is it for somebody who wants to start a YouTube channel? Because it comes from someone who's steeped in Silicon Valley and tech companies, it's always going to have a bias towards that. But I think it's good for anybody who wants to be entrepreneurial, anybody who wants to control their own life, anybody who wants to deterministically and reliably improve their ability to create wealth over time is patient and looking for the long haul. Certainly, if you're 80 years old, retired, running out of energy, you should probably just stay retired. But there are 80-year-olds who have a lot of energy and want to do new things and live for the future. It can obviously apply very easily to a young person, I would say 9, 10 years old and up. The most difficult one is probably middle-aged because when we're in our 30s, 40s, 50s, we already have a lot invested. We have a lot of obligations because those are the years where we're earning and people are relying upon us. We don't want to change because we don't want to admit defeat in what we've been doing to date. But that's where it can actually be the most fruitful. It may be the most difficult pivot. You have a nine to five job, you have a family relying upon you. And so it may seem like the things in this podcast are far too idealistic, but maybe it can inform your weekend projects. Maybe it can inform your self-reeducation that you do at night on the internet. Maybe it can inform what roles you take on in the company that you're at because they move you closer and closer to points of leverage, points of judgment or points where you're naturally good at and you're authentic. It might cause you to take on more accountability. Even applied piecemeals, these principles can directionally guide you regardless of what stage you are at in life short of retirement. And if you're in retirement, Just test them to see if they're true and then teach them to your kids or your grandkids. There's many different ways to participate. It should really apply to almost everybody who has a complete body, sound mind, and is looking to work. I think one way to apply the advice is to look at who is getting the leverage off of the work that you're doing. Look up the value chain, look at who's above you and who's above them, and see how they are taking advantage of the time and the work that you're doing and how they're applying leverage to it. People do that naturally in that they want to move up the corporate ladder, but that's mostly about managing other people. And what you really want to be doing is managing more capital, products, media, and community. People think about moving up the ladder in their organization, but they don't think that often about moving to a different organization or creating their own organization to get more leverage. In general, ceteris paribus, fancy Latin words for all other things equal. You will do better in a smaller organization than a larger one. You will have more accountability. It'll be more visible. You are more likely to be able to try on multiple things to find out the thing that you are uniquely good at. People are more likely to give you leverage through battlefield promotions. You're going to have more flexibility. There'll be more authenticity to how the company operates. A good progression for a career is start out in a large company and then progressively move to smaller and smaller ones. It's very hard to go from a small company to working a larger company. Larger companies tend to be more about politics and less about merit. They're more stable, but they're less innovative situations. The goal long-term is if we are all wealthy, is that we're all working for ourselves. And the people who are working for us are essentially robots. And today that's software robots in data centers executing code. Tomorrow it could be delivery bots, flying bots, mechanical bots that are carrying things around. This goes back to this idea of the best relationships are peer relationships. If there's someone above you, then that's someone to learn from. If you're not learning from them and improving, then there shouldn't be anybody above you. If there's somebody below you, it's because you're teaching them and enabling them. If you're not teaching them and enabling them, then get a robot underneath. You don't need a human being below you. This is utopian and it's a long ways off, but in the not too distant future, anybody who wants to work for themselves will be able to work for themselves. You may have to make other sacrifices. You may have to take on more risk. You may have to take on more accountability. You may have less steady income, but more and more, I think the younger generation is realizing that if they're going to work, they're going to work for themselves.
