I got rich in Silicon Valley from my equity compensation. I bounced around various companies and startups. Two of them were successful and had public offerings. Of those two, one was spectacularly successful.

Sure, luck played a role. But my pure grit and tenacity also played a role. Taking on hard bugs and solving them played a role: I solved a lot of hard bugs that others couldn't solve. Spending Saturday afternoons at the library reading books on topics like software program management and phase locked loops played a role. Having some talent at hiring and managing people helped. Spending my teenage years writing clever little programs in 6502 assembly language on my Commodore 64 instead of smoking weed and partying helped. Having a strong knack for math and computer science helped. Living simply and reinvesting my profits helped.

In my 20s, I couldn't understand why people at my same wealth level in Silicon Valley were often driving $100K cars and engaging in other types of ostentatious spending displays. I was constantly surprised by the people making lots of money who didn't really have any clue how money works. Wall Street has its own game to separate you from your wealth, and they'll do it if you don't understand how the Warren Buffets of the world value equities and read balance sheets.

You have to get up and out and play the game to win. If you play, you'll lose a lot of games. When you lose, don't lose the lesson. There is a secret message embedded in every failure. Figure out the message, get up and go at it again. Sometimes, you'll suffer a humiliating failure a few more times before you get the lesson.

Of course, someone who is too lazy to go play the game will ascribe success to "luck." And the person who just can't "get" the secret messages embedded in their failures will ascribe success to "luck."

I've been dirt poor. For a whole year at the university, I slept on a camping pad on the floor because I couldn't even afford a real mattress, much less a bed. I've also been middle class, and now I'm rich. It's clear that being rich is better than being middle class, and being middle class is better than being poor, but being rich has its own problems. Even if you don't advertise your wealth, malicious actors smell it on you and try to separate you from it. Rich people sometimes say things like, "My only real friends are the ones who were my friends before I got rich." I get that mindset completely.

Money lubricates a lot of things in life, but it doesn't completely solve very many issues. The one single thing that I appreciate the most about money is that I'm no longer obliged to sell my own time just to survive. I spent my afternoon today, a weekday, taking a walk in the park, meeting a friend for a late lunch, going to the gym and then reading a book. In my previous life, I would have been stuck at work and wouldn't have done any of those things.

I read through the list and agreed with every item. Some are very broad, and I'd add some caveats if I were discussing them in detail. The one that made me think the hardest was "Ignore people playing status games. They gain status by attacking people playing wealth creation games." That's true, but sizing people up and figuring out what "game" they're playing is part of being successful.