The only way to get rich is to (1) value your time at a delusional dollar amount, (2) be obsessed with getting rich, and (3) give yourself no other option but to get rich.
Now, I know there are a few people in the back screaming that "money isn't everything!" or regurgitating a shallow "money doesn't buy happiness" they got from someone who doesn't understand money or happiness, but this letter is for those who didn't just click on this to get angry and completely waste their time.
This letter is for those who want to get unapologetically rich.
Not because you're a terrible and evil person, but because the only other option in your head is to be valued at what the market thinks you're worth, and that's terrifying.
For myself, I realized early in my life that I was not okay with breaking my back for 8-10 hours a day to make $80-$150,000 a year in a job where I own nothing doing work I don’t care about, especially when I can see as clear as day that there are people doing meaningful work who make 100x that amount while working a fraction of the time.
I may not have had the value to make that much when I was young, obviously, but I knew it was possible.
I knew that there was a series of decisions I could make that would lead to me having so much control over my money that it no longer dominated my mind, emotions, or time. People who endlessly moralize and spiritualize money can't fathom a life where they aren't bound to it.
While I can't tell you exactly what to do (I mean, I can, but reality’s outputs vary depending on the person), I can give you 3 ways to rewire your brain to the point of making the right decisions that lead to you getting rich.
In other words, I can install the beliefs in your mind that help you test the inputs that are much more likely to get reality to spit out wealth as a result.
The aspirational hourly rate
Set and enforce an aspirational hourly rate. If fixing a problem will save less than your rate, ignore it. If outsourcing a task will cost less than your hourly rate, outsource it... My aspirational rate was $5,000/hr.
— Naval Ravikant
This will baffle most people (it would surely baffle my past self), but I'm at a point where someone could offer me $5,000 for a one-on-one call and I wouldn't do it. Not because I couldn't use the money or I don’t want to help people, but because there is time, focus, and the obligation to deliver $5k worth of value on the line. That’s a big responsibility that demands that I prioritize it above other potentially more rewarding things.
It would be stupid for me to split my focus when I know exactly what to do to make more than that in an hour.
The purpose of setting an aspirational hourly rate is just that: to make better decisions and frame your mind to notice the opportunities that put you in a place of higher leverage.
Let's imagine you purchased a $50 item that was defective or broken. Would you go through the hour of trouble to return it? If so, you value your time at $50 an hour, if not less. That’s not a “bad” thing, but it shines the light of awareness on a more important fact: you aren't conscious of a problem you could be working on that would lead to you making $500 – or $5000 – within that same hour. If you were, it wouldn't make sense to spend that hour returning the item.
If your aspirational hourly rate doesn't feel impossible, it's too low.
Why?
Delusional goals rewire your brain.
Your brain is literally reshaping itself right now based on what you're learning and thinking about, this letter included. When you imagine a better future, it activates the same brain networks as if you were experiencing them. Every single moment of focused attention is a chance to rewire your brain in alignment with the person you want to become. That's one of many reasons doomscrollers and those who don't manage their inputs (mental or physical) are digging their own grave one moment at a time.
Beyond that, dopamine spikes more during goal pursuit than achievement. But that's where it gets dangerous. Visualizing your goals all day enhances learning, but only if you pair it with an optimal level of challenge from real-world scenarios. Being in the game. Otherwise, it just turns into mental masturbation: telling everyone about your goals to get a cheap dopamine hit but never actually doing anything about it.
The golden zone for challenge is about 85% difficulty. Not so high that you get anxious, but not so low that you get bored. The stress from the progressive overload of challenge releases norepinephrine, which enhances learning further and helps you adapt into that new state of mind.
So, you can't just think about your aspirational hourly rate and pray that you make more money.
You need to make difficult decisions with your rate in mind.
Start by not returning the item.
You’ll be fine.
Concentration of force is the only way to get rich
If you want to get rich, it needs to be your number one overwhelming desire.
At least until the actions of getting rich are so deeply engrained in your psyche that you don't need to expend much mental energy to perform them, like a professional basketball player who doesn't need to think about hitting 3 pointers on command.
This holds true for anything you want to be successful at: concentration of force is the only way to become the person who achieves big goals. You need to be obsessed. You need to channel as much energy as possible into that goal.
But what about going out? Enjoying life? Being social? Chasing the western version of happiness (an impossibly sustained state of euphoria)?
Well, you're not going to create wealth because it's not your priority. And that's perfectly fine. You don't need to have the goal of getting rich, but many people do, and they're just as wrong as you about the meaning of life, and someone without that as their priority isn't going to accidentally get rich. A side goal of investing a few bucks in the stock market over the next 40 years is one way to enjoy a decent amount of money later in your life, but who in their right mind wouldn't want that much money, and more, 30 years earlier if they had the knowledge to do so?
Oh, by the way, getting rich as a priority doesn't make life worse, it makes it infinitely better.
Does a professional athlete have a terrible life? Probably not, they're doing what they love, most of the time. So why do you not apply the same logic to business? Can someone not have a good life while attempting to perform at the peak of their abilities in the domain they choose?
One could argue that happiness is the combination of progress being made and contribution to something greater than yourself, so when you aren't distracted from that progress and are solving valuable problems at scale (that's what entrepreneurship is), life is a thousand times more enjoyable than the average.
Yes, you'll still have to do things that life requires, but it will cause you pain to do so. That pain is how you orient your decision-making. Because the more you tolerate it, the less you act to change it.
To make this tangible, start by creating a list of things you don't do.
Things that are literally not worth your time. Coffee meetings. Returning stupid items. Scrolling because you're bored. Partying because you lack zest and proper stimulation. Texting everyone back on time (this one is especially stupid, because nobody is wired for people being able to access their attention at any time). Little todos that could be outsourced or ignored. When these decisions come up, firmly state, "I don't do that."
Then, create a list of things you will do.
Things that merge your real hourly rate with your aspirational hourly rate. Study information that drastically increases your earning potential. Practice skills that make you self-reliant. Starting a business. Joining a startup. Pushing for an executive role. Learning and building.
The more you think about your actions, the easier it is to see why you aren't rich.
Give yourself no other option but to succeed
The best decisions I've made always involved using my money as a forcing function to make more.
In other words, I invested in things I couldn't afford, and I learned to trust myself to make it back that much faster.
The first significant spike in my income occurred after I purchased an email marketing and product hosting software for $1,500. At the time, that money was precious to me. It deeply pained me to spend that money. I felt that spike of anxiety when I hit "purchase." But that pain drove me to attempt to make that money back as if my life depended on it. It forced me to learn how to make the most of it with marketing, copywriting, and funnel knowledge. With that one purchase, I didn't have to guess what "high-value" skills to learn. It was obvious that if I learned them, I would increase my earning potential.
The same thing happened when I consistently moved into various apartments. Each one more expensive than the next. Each one costing more than I was comfortable with. On the surface, it looked like I was just another victim of lifestyle creep. In reality, it was a real-world way of imposing a deadline on a challenge that I knew I could take on. I was physically putting myself in the environment of my future self, and I didn't have the option to stay in the life I no longer wanted.
Those 3 decisions – an aspirational hourly rate, concentration of force, and giving myself no other option but to succeed – created the perfect conditions to make more money than my younger self thought was possible.
None of those decisions involved obsessing over "what skill to learn" or "what business model to choose." I didn't have time to think about that. I had to learn it all.
Of course, it took a lot of failure and iteration, but this is social media, who talks about that stuff ;)? And while I'm not a proponent of getting rich quick, you'd be surprised how fast you can if you set the right conditions as outlined in this letter. In fact, I'd argue that you can learn any skill (and be better at it than 99% of people) in 2 weeks.
I'll save that for another letter.
Thank you for reading this one.
– Dan
If you want to learn the skills that prepare you for the future, consider joining the paid tier of my substack. It has a skill library with various AI prompts, writing strategies, marketing strategies, and a full one-person business course.The only way to get rich is to (1) value your time at a delusional dollar amount, (2) be obsessed with getting rich, and (3) give yourself no other option but to get rich.