The problem is that to win at a status game, you have to put somebody else down. That’s why you should avoid status games in your life because they m… - Naval Ravikant

The problem is that to win at a status game, you have to put somebody else down. That’s why you should avoid status games in your life because they make you into an angry combative person.

Humans evolved in societies where there was no leverage. If I was chopping wood or carrying water for you, you knew eight hours put in would be equal to about eight hours of output. Now we've invented leverage… As a worker, you want to be as leveraged as possible so you have a huge impact without as much time or physical effort.

A leveraged worker can out-produce a non-leveraged worker by a factor of one thousand or ten thousand. With a leveraged worker, judgment is far more important than how much time they put in or how hard they work.

For example, a good software engineer, just by writing the right little piece of code and creating the right little application, can literally create half a billion dollars' worth of value for a company. But ten engineers working ten times as hard, just because they choose the wrong model, the wrong product, wrote it the wrong way, or put it in the wrong viral loop, have basically wasted their time. Inputs don't match outputs, especially for leveraged workers.

What you want in life is to be in control of your time. You want to get into a leveraged job where you control your time and you're tracked on outputs.

Recover time and happiness by minimizing these three apps:

phone,
calendar,
and alarm clock.

What’s the biggest mistake you’ve made in your life and how did you recover? I’ve made a class of mistakes I would summarize the same way. The mistakes were obvious only in hindsight through one exercise, which is asking yourself: when you’re thirty, what advice would you give your twenty-year-old self? And when you’re forty, what advice would you give your thirty-year-old self? (Maybe if you’re younger, you can do it by every five years.) Sit down and say, “Okay, 2007, what was I doing? How was I feeling? 2008, what was I doing? How was I feeling? 2009, what was I doing? How was I feeling?” Life is going to play out the way it’s going to play out. There will be some good and some bad. Most of it is actually just up to your interpretation. You’re born, you have a set of sensory experiences, and then you die. How you choose to interpret those experiences is up to you, and different people interpret them in different ways. Really, I wish I had done all of the same things, but with less emotion and less anger. The most celebrated example would be when I was younger, I started a company. This company did well, but I didn’t do well, so I sued some of the people involved. It was a good outcome for me in the end, and everything worked out okay, but there was a lot of angst and a lot of anger. Today, I wouldn’t have the angst and the anger. I would have just walked up to the people and said, “Look, this is what happened. This is what I’m going to do. This is how I’m going to do it. This is what’s fair. This is what’s not.