Shaan shares 10 years of accumulated money wisdom from a personal notebook, organized around three core mindset shifts: from hard work to smart work, from being far from money to hanging out with it, and from taking small swings to waiting for fat pitches. The episode covers how to find the right thing to work on, how to build mentors and peers, and why intensity — not strategy — is the real differentiator.
Speakers: Shaan Puri (host)
Introduction: 10 Years of Money Wisdom [00:00:00]
Shaan: For the past 10 years I’ve been keeping this little notebook — a scratch pad I call the Money Wisdom Reminders to Self. Basically, any time I heard something, read something, or learned something that was wise about wealth, I would write it down. I put all the notes in here, and today I’m going to read you a bunch of the things that are in this notebook.
I feel like I can do that here because in most places you can’t really talk about money. Money is sort of this tacky, taboo thing you’re not supposed to discuss. Everybody has to pretend they don’t care about money — but we all do, which is weird. You have to treat it like the silent fart in the room. Pretend you don’t care about it, pretend it’s not there. But it’s there.
This channel, luckily, is different. This is a place where we come and talk about business, talk about money, talk about mindset, and a bunch of different things that are interesting to us. The only people who click on this channel are people who care about those things. So it’s like when you go to the gym — you can flex and talk about your pecs because the other people there care about that sort of stuff. It’s understood.
So this is the Money Wisdom channel. I think in the next 15 or so minutes I’ll be able to go through a bunch of the nuggets — the golden nuggets — I had written down. Let’s go.
The Rich Aren’t Just Lucky [00:01:45]
Shaan: The first one: the rich aren’t just lucky.
Pretend we took all the money that existed and redistributed it evenly — everybody gets, say, a hundred thousand dollars to start. Ten years later, I think most of the rich people would be rich again. Because wealth building is a skill, and it can be learned.
For most people, you want to learn this skill but you don’t really know where to start. So I’ll give you these three shifts — I call them big-small shifts. Let me explain what a big-small shift is with a quick story.
A man wants to learn golf. He goes out, buys a set of clubs, goes to the driving range, starts hitting balls. The ball’s going left, going right, some are going center — he can’t really control it. He just started.
He’s like, I need to build this skill but I don’t know how. He sees a coach teaching a kid right next to him at the driving range. He walks over, tells the coach he’d love to learn. Coach says, happy to work with you, first lesson tomorrow morning.
He shows up the next morning. The coach — maybe 24 years old, just graduated college, not the best in the world, just the guy standing next to him — teaches him a few things. He’s hitting it a bit better, but not much. The ball’s still going left and right. The man thinks, yeah, this coach sucks. I need a real coach.
So he says, I’m going to hire the best. Who is the best? He finds a professional golfer to be his coach. This coach gives him some instructions and within a few minutes he’s hitting the ball straight. It’s going great.
He says, all right, I’m ready to play tomorrow. Full 18 holes. Let’s go.
He shows up the next day ready to hit it straight again, but things are different. It’s slicing left, slicing right. He’s getting frustrated. And the worst part — the thing that’s frustrating him most — is that the coach isn’t saying anything. He expects the coach to jump in and fix it, but the coach is just watching.
Finally he turns around and says, Coach, are you going to do something? You’re just going to stand there? I’m way off, I gotta change something.
The coach just smiles. “You think you’re way off, but you’re really only two millimeters off.”
He says, “Coach, no offense, I know you’re the expert, but I’m pretty sure I’m off by more than two millimeters. The ball went 100 yards into the lake.”
The coach says, “Yeah, I understand the outcome looks far off — but you’re only off by two millimeters. You just need a two millimeter shift. When your golf club hits the ball and it’s two millimeters angled in the wrong direction, it completely changes the trajectory. A small shift in the angle here takes you in a completely different direction.”
So the coach shows him a couple of tweaks — watch where you’re hitting, look at the face of the club. He makes the adjustment, takes a swing, nails it.
I heard this story first from Tony Robbins. I don’t know if it’s real or made up, but I love the idea because it rang true to me. Most things in life — even if you’re far off in your outcome — you’re actually only a small shift in your approach away from getting it right. Because that’s what changes your trajectory.
So here are the three two-millimeter shifts that I think most people need to make. After all the money wisdom I collected, everything kind of bucketed into these three shifts.
Shift 1: Hard Work to Smart Work [00:07:00]
Shaan: Shift number one: hard work to smart work.
Growing up, we’re all told hard work is the key to success. Our teachers tell us, our parents tell us. But we’ve got to ask — is this really true?
I look outside and I see the lawn guy mowing the lawn in the summer heat. He’s working hard. Go into any restaurant, go to the back of the kitchen, look at the line cooks. Those guys are working hard. Crazy hours, it’s hot, they’re on their feet all day, working Saturdays and Sundays. They work hard.
If hard work equals success, why isn’t my janitor driving a Bentley?
What you work on and who you work with is what matters. It matters a lot more than how hard you work. What you work on — the thing you actually choose to do — and who you work with will make a far bigger impact on your trajectory than just hard work. Hard work does help, but it’s maybe the fifth or sixth most important factor in my opinion. There’s sort of a minimum — you need to work hard enough — but beyond hard enough there’s not really a maximum you should be chasing. The goal is not to work as hard as you possibly can.
Shaan: So what should you actually work on? Naval Ravikant says it best: you want to find the thing that feels like play to you and looks like work to others. Keep dabbling until you find that.
At first you might say, well, what feels like play to me is watching Netflix. Okay — that feels like play to you, but it doesn’t look like work to others. You have to find the thing that is play to you and work to others.
For me, it’s business stuff. I’m a nerd. I love reading about and learning about businesses. If a company is going to go public, I’ll go read the S-1. I want to understand all the inner workings of the business. To most people, they see a 100-page PDF and think, you’re digging through this for what? Is your boss telling you to do this? No — I actually enjoy doing that. To others it would seem like work. That’s the sweet spot.
Or this podcast. Some people get really nervous about public speaking, or it seems like a lot of work — you’ve got to come up with an hour’s worth of stuff to say every two days about business, don’t you feel pressure? No. This feels like play to me.
For some people, that’s programming — a joy to some, a pain to others. For some people it’s writing. I love writing. Other people hate writing; they’ve got trauma from school, they can’t stand it. For my trainer, it’s exercise. After he trains me and four other people, he’s been in the gym six hours straight — where does he go when he’s done? Back to the gym, for his own workout. For him, being in the gym feels like play. To others it would feel exhausting.
Marie Kondo loves cleaning. She made that her thing. But that feels like work to me and most others.
So you’ve got to find that thing. Why does it matter? Because when it feels like play, you’ll do it a lot. Not just nine to five — you’ll do it five to nine too. Any available moment, your brain will go in that direction because you enjoy it so much. And because you enjoy it, you’ll keep doing it. You can do it for a long time even without immediate results.
There are many things we’ll do if we get immediate results. The things you’re willing to do even without immediate results — those lead to the big wins in the end.
You know what they call the guy who practices all the time and never gives up? They call him the best. And the best always gets paid, in any field. The best plumber gets paid the best. The best whatever-you-are gets paid the best. So you want to find the thing that feels like play to you, because it’ll help you become the best.
Shift 2: Hanging Out with Money [00:14:00]
Shaan: Shift number two: go from being far away from money to hanging out with money.
Pretend you want to get a six-pack. To get abs, you need to start thinking and acting like somebody who already has a six-pack. They make certain choices about how they eat. If you travel with someone who’s fit, they’ve got protein powder and resistance bands in their bag. They’ll pick a hotel based on the gym. They make decisions you don’t make because they have a different set of priorities and habits.
So you’ve got to think like a fit person, act like a fit person, then you become a fit person. Same goes for wealth. You’ve got to think like a wealthy person, act like a wealthy person, and then you become a wealthy person.
Most people get this wrong. They laugh about it: “Oh, so I should go buy a Ferrari because rich guys buy Ferraris?” Not really. You want to find their habits, not their extravagances. Not their indulgences — their habits. The small things they do on a day-to-day basis that make them who they are.
So you need to shift your way of thinking to match the type of person you want to become. How do you do that? How do you start thinking like a wealthy person? You’ve got to hang out with them. But how do you hang out with them if they’re not around you?
Shaan: There are three ways.
The first is peers. You want to find five people with the same dream as you. Do you know five people who have the same dream as you and are taking it as seriously as you — or more seriously? You want to find those people. Create a group chat, a weekly dinner. Move into a house together. Do whatever it takes.
When I wanted to get good at poker, I literally lived with a bunch of other people who were trying to get good at poker. All day we were playing poker, talking poker over meals, thinking about poker, asking each other questions, getting inspired by somebody else’s success, getting a little bitter about that guy’s success — but it made us work harder. You want an immersive environment where you’re going to get better. Living together is the best. Can’t do that? Get dinners together. Can’t do that? Group chat. Do whatever it takes.
The second is mentors. You’ve got your peers. Now you want mentors — somebody who’s already done it, who you can learn from. The trick is simple, and what most people do wrong is they go and ask someone to be their mentor.
Here’s what you actually want to do: find somebody who’s already done it, ask them a specific question. “Hey, I’m dealing with this situation. I need to decide between A and B. Here’s what I’m thinking — could you give me any advice on how to think about this?” Whatever they say, go take massive action on it. Then follow up: “You told me that thing. Here’s what happened. It worked, or it really didn’t work. Here’s what I’m doing next.”
Repeat that three times with somebody and they’re informally your mentor. You never need to ask them to officially be in a relationship with you. It’ll just happen naturally by being someone who asks specific questions and actually takes action.
So don’t ask for their time — ask for their specific advice, take action, and follow up. You’ll have mentors.
The third way you hang out with money is to change your information diet. If you’re already listening to this podcast, congratulations — you’re already doing it. But ask people who’ve achieved what you want: what do you listen to, what do you follow, what do you read, what are your favorite YouTube channels?
My greatest teachers are people I’ve never met — people I follow on Twitter, books, podcasts, YouTube. They’ve made the biggest impact on me. You don’t necessarily have to physically hang out with everyone for them to make an impact.
We release two or three episodes a week, each about an hour. So you’re hearing us for two or three hours a week. That’s more than most people talk to their mom. That’s more than most people talk to their friends. Bringing this conversation into your world is changing the type of conversations you’re having. Change your conversations, you change your thinking. Change your thinking, you change your actions. Change your actions, you change your results. That’s how it goes.
Shaan: There’s one other thing about hanging out with wealth that I didn’t mention: when you literally get around people who’ve done what you want to do, it gives your imagination more food.
I remember the first time I went to a really rich person’s house. He’s got a chef. Someone just came over and did that for them. They travel once a month for a charity project they do. Those stories sounded awesome. It taught me how to figure out what to even want — what’s possible, what’s achievable. When you see it, it’s a lot more realistic than just thinking about it or hearing about it. Beliefs are good, but an experience is always better.
And it changes what you dream about. For me, I never cared about cars. But then I saw a rich person with a chef and I thought, screw the game — I want a chef. Healthy, tasty food being made by somebody else, saves you time? That’s unbelievable. So that’s the one other thing about hanging out with money.
Shift 3: From Small Swings to Fat Pitches [00:20:30]
Shaan: Shift number three: going from small swings to fat pitches.
The common mistake most people make is they take small swings. They take the first good offer that comes their way — the first good job, the first good deal. They start too many projects at once. I’ve definitely been guilty of that. They chase shiny objects: I’m doing this thing, oh there’s a new thing, go over there.
You can do anything, but you can’t do everything. This is a hard lesson to learn. You don’t have to do everything, though.
Warren Buffett — one of the wealthiest men in the world, one of the best investors ever — missed the entire internet wave. The last 20 years have been dominated by the tech industry, and he missed it. That’s all right. He still ended up doing great. Why? Because he understands Coke and Geico. His fat pitch was companies in his zone of competence — things he understood and was able to act on. You can get rich anyway. The beauty is you only have to get rich one way. You don’t have to get everything right. You just have to get one thing right.
Ted Williams — one of the greatest baseball hitters ever — was famous for waiting for the fat pitch. He’d map out the strike zone and say: dead center, I hit .400. On the edge of the strike zone, I’m only hitting .230. What made the difference between Ted, the greatest hitter ever, and the average or above-average hitter? The average hitter would swing at pitches where they’d average .230. Ted would only swing at pitches where he’d average .400. That was his strategy: wait for the fat pitch and only swing at those.
Buffett takes this even further for investing. He says, unlike baseball, there are no called strikes in investing. You can literally sit there and pass on 50 opportunities in a row, just waiting for your fat pitch.
When someone asked him what a fat pitch looks like, here’s what he said: “If you look at the stock exchange, the high for the last 12 months will be maybe 150% higher than the low. All you have to do is sit there and wait until there’s something really attractive that you understand, and you can forget about everything else. That’s a wonderful game to play. There’s almost nothing where the game is stacked in your favor like the stock market. But the problem is people start listening to everybody on TV, reading the paper, and they take this advantage — the ability to wait for something you really like that you really understand — and they turn it into a disadvantage. There’s no easier game than stocks, but you just have to be sure you don’t play it too often.”
That’s the mistake people make. They play too often, swing too many times, don’t wait for the fat pitch — and that’s why their returns go down.
Shaan: Here’s the thing though: the first 10 years of your career, you probably don’t even know what a fat pitch looks like even if it hit you in the face. So my advice for most people is in the first 10 years, just go work with the smartest, highest-energy, most resourceful people you can find. Go into emerging markets or exciting fields and try to do exciting work with exciting people.
Doing that — and reflecting consistently, looking back and asking what you should have been focused on — will train your gut to actually notice fat pitches. You’ll start to see: wow, there were all these opportunities coming my way that I didn’t recognize as being as good as they were.
Spend those first 10 years like that to hone your gut. Then you’ll be able to notice fat pitches when they come.
Shaan: Some common examples of what a fat pitch actually looks like:
Platform shifts — when the iPhone came out and the App Store launched, there was suddenly a new computer in everyone’s pocket and nobody had built apps yet. That was a fat pitch. Anybody who jumped on that early, like Instagram, did very well.
Law changes — any time there’s a regulatory change that creates opportunity.
New technological breakthroughs — like AI right now. People building on top of ChatGPT and GPT-4 — that’s a fat pitch.
Market panics — any time the market just panics and sells everything, everything’s on sale. That’s a good time to buy great companies.
Working at a generational company early — if you saw Facebook in 2004 to 2008 and could go in and be part of it, it almost doesn’t matter how much you make off it directly. You just want to be on that rocket ship. There are one or two of these every decade.
Asymmetric information — when somebody owns something but doesn’t realize what it’s worth. They have an asset but don’t fully understand it, or don’t have the right lens — but you do. This happens in real estate all the time. Somebody’s sitting on a building, renting it out for a certain amount, so they sell it at what seems like a fair price. But another guy comes in and says, I know I can get a new permit to zone this for multi-family and build more units. He’s selling at what he thinks is fair, but to me it’s a steal because I have asymmetric information.
Asymmetric information is when you know things others don’t. Asymmetric upside is when — say you invest in a startup — the most you can lose is your investment, but when they win they could return 100x or 1,000x. You can win a lot more than you can lose. Look for opportunities where you have either asymmetric information or asymmetric upside as a general rule of thumb.
Intensity Is the Strategy [00:25:00]
Shaan: The other part about fat pitches: when you find one, you’ve got to swing hard. Most people take weak half-swings. They make a couple of calls, send one email and don’t follow up, or even when given an opportunity they don’t follow through.
Don’t just look or bunt. Really swing.
Winners follow up. Winners double down on what’s working. Winners get on the next flight to go meet you in person. The way I say it: intensity is the strategy.
Most people want the magic strategy, the magic formula. But the hard thing to understand is that intensity is the strategy. Most of the time the strategy is pretty obvious, pretty cut-and-clear. It’s the intensity you bring to it that makes the big difference. Once you find a good strategy, you want to execute it violently — rather than waiting for the perfect magic formula or perfect strategy, which doesn’t exist.
Here’s an example of a hard swing. There’s a guy, Taylor Offer. He was the founder of a clothing company called FEAT, but back then he had a merch business — I think he was trying to sell socks. It was going okay, but he wanted to double down.
So he turns up the intensity. He thinks: I’m selling merch, I need distribution. What if I had the distribution of some of the most famous Vine and YouTube stars that existed? The top names at the time were Logan Paul, King Bach, guys like that. He says: how do I get them to work with me? I don’t even know these guys.
So he’s watching their videos and he notices that the apartment doors in the background all have the same handle. Three of the Viners must live in the same building. He hunts it down, finds the building, moves across the country, moves in. He knows how they like to work out, so he starts working out twice a day — this increases my odds of crossing paths with them. They do cross paths. He tells them what he’s doing, they get to know each other, eventually become friends, and they partner with him. He becomes the first guy to do merch with Logan Paul and sells millions of dollars of merch right off the bat.
He basically leapfrogged where he would have been with lower intensity — without being willing to double down.
I love that story because it’s an example of all three things I mentioned: working smarter not harder, moving toward the people you want to be near rather than waiting for them to come to you, and when you see a fat pitch, doubling down and swinging hard.
Shaan: If you remember one thing from this section, it’s this: intensity is a strategy. Winners don’t usually have a better strategy — they do the obvious things with more intensity than you do.
And the reality is you don’t even know what max intensity looks like until you see it. You need to go work with people who are real winners just to see it. Oh, that’s how they attack when they see an opportunity. That’s how they go at a problem.
I always say: you think the volume knob only goes up to 10. Then you meet somebody whose knob goes up to 15. And you’re like — now I know what level 15 looks like. Once you’ve seen it once, it’ll imprint in your brain.
Wrapping Up [00:27:30]
Shaan: So those are the three shifts:
Find what feels like play to you and looks like work to others.
Find a way to hang out with people who either have what you want or are chasing it as hard as you are.
Take a simple strategy and turn up the intensity.
This book probably has 50 other nuggets like that, but that’s all for today. If you like this on YouTube, leave a comment — I’d love to read them. I’ll respond to every single one from this video.
That’s it — that’s the money wisdom masterclass for today. Thanks.