The Algebra of Wealth: A Simple Formula for Success

For 99% of our species’s existence, most people didn’t live past 35. And the number-one killer was starvation,

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The system may need fixing; until then, you have to stand it.

Get the cheapest apartment you can stand, don’t furnish it, never spend any time in it, and practice saying “yes.”

The key to happiness is our expectations, and unrealistic expectations guarantee unrealized happiness.

Digital media was supposed to democratize this, but it’s only reinforced a winner-take-most economy. The top 3% of YouTube channels receive 85% of all views on the platform, and even if a creator reaches that threshold (about a million views per month), their passion generates just $15,000 in annual revenue.

There’s a lot of career and life advice about setting goals. Goals are fine, even necessary, and measurable targets can be important management tools in business. (Research suggests that the simple act of writing down your goals24 can have a profound effect on outcomes.) But your desire to reach a goal is not going to get you there.

The 1% go to different doctors, eat at different restaurants, shop at different stores. Wealth used to be a better seat. Now it’s an upgrade to a better life.

Success in any field brings with it power—the power of wealth, power over other people’s careers, the power to make change in the world. And power is a drug that downplays costs and magnifies rewards.

Wisdom, as described by Epictetus, is the ability “to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are external and not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control.” Or as Annie Proulx put it in Brokeback Mountain: “If you can’t fix it, you gotta stand it.”