Money

Money is simply a tool to organize humans around ideas.

There's the idea of earning income, the idea of consumption, the idea of private property. These are just stories we tell ourselves and choose to live within.

Ignore for a moment the gap between rich and poor. Can't we agree that it's better to live in a world of airplanes & bathrooms versus the Black Death & no electricity?

The crumpled paper in your wallet only costs a few pennies to produce, yet it represents the most important and powerful force in the history of the universe—compound growth.

Money flows like water. It's not so much the static quantity that matters, but rather the velocity and the acceleration. These metrics tell you how quickly you're marshaling resources towards your ideas.

Movement doesn't always happen overnight within our broken, inefficient, all-too-human systems. But inherited wealth can easily be squandered in less than a generation...trust me, I've squandered a fair bit.

If your bank account is shrinking, perhaps you're investing in a lifestyle that you hope will create value in the future. Unless you're a criminal, a growing bank account usually means you're creating value somehow.

You can easily play with money. Hopefully betting on sports or drinking at the craps table in Vegas converts your cash into a memorable experience. Or maybe you're not thinking about money at all. That's OK. You do you!

But if you need to eat, you're going to go buy food.

When I was scaling Shuffle speed dating from $4,000 to $85,000 in monthly revenue, we could have discounted our tickets to $0, or even paid people to fill certain events. But we never did this.

Customers who had to fill out our ugly forms and input their credit card details were serious about participating. They were committed to showing up, even if it was only $20 and Uber made far more than us on each event in Seattle.

Paul Graham may be the most successful philosopher since Adam Smith in extending free-market theory. His motto is elegant and profound: "Make something people want."

My definition goes in reverse too. If you properly coordinate enough humans, money will follow.