Naval wrote his rules for getting rich at thirteen. Early childhood programming that guided him toward financial freedom.
“These were principles that I came up with for myself when I was really young, around 13, 14. And I’ve been carrying them in my head for 30 years and I’d been sort of living them.” The mental software worked. He escaped immigrant poverty through systematic wealth creation.
One principle shaped his self-worth algorithm. “When I was young, one of my principles was, I knew I had to make money. It was my overwhelming desire. And one of the things I did was I said, ‘Okay, I’m never going to be worth more than what I think I’m worth.‘” This created ownership over his own value.
His principles compress decades of hard-won wisdom. “I use tweets to compress my own learnings. Your brain space is finite. You have finite neurons. You can think of these as pointers, addresses, mnemonics to help you remember deep-seated principles where you have the underlying experience to back it up.” Like efficient code, each principle does maximum work with minimum storage.
The famous tweetstorm created intellectual leverage. “That tweetstorm is a series of principles that I kind of wrote for myself in my head when I was 13 and I was trying to figure out how to make money.” His private mental models became public compound interest.
He targets evolutionary truths over temporary tactics. “We’re trying to lay down principles that are timeless, as opposed to giving you the winning lottery ticket numbers from yesterday.” What survives gets selected for. Principles that work across decades contain deeper truth.
Naval warns against academic principle-collecting. “If you start from the general, and stay at the level of the general—and just read books of principles and aphorisms and almanacs and so on—you’re going to be like that person that went to university: overeducated, but they’re lost.” Principles without specific experience become empty signaling.
Real principles emerge from first-principles thinking. “You can get it from first principles, and every piece of what you know is like a Lego block that just fits in and forms a steel frame.” This steel frame creates unshakeable judgment that compounds over time.