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3 Money Tips You Didn't Learn in School

2026-01-25 · Short · Ali · recording, 1:32 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Money and investing · mode: List of tips or lessons · tags: His own numbers

In a Short, Ali gives three money tips school does not teach: money only comes from solving other people's problems, income scales with the pain of the problem and the wealth of the person, and skills differ in income potential because value to the free market is not value to society.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Three financial tips school probably didn't teach you

  • ★★ Ali's first money tip: short of printing money like a bank or the Fed, or stealing it and going to jail, the only way to make money is for someone to give it to you in exchange for solving one of their problems. — 00:00:00 · person, problem, solution
  • ★★ Ali advises thinking of yourself as a problem-hunting machine, someone who gets paid to solve problems, rather than someone with a job or a salary. — 00:00:21 · person, problem, solution
  • ★★ Ali's second tip: the money you make is directly proportional to how painful the problem you solve is and how much money the person you solve it for has, so build skills for more painful problems or serve richer people. — 00:00:29
  • ★★★ Ali's third tip: skills differ in income potential; nursing and firefighting are not high-income skills, while using AI, coding, selling and copywriting, skills that help businesses make more money, are far more likely to bring financial freedom. — 00:00:44 · work optional

  • ★★★ Ali calls it an unfortunate fact of life that your value to society is not very correlated with your value to the free market: to get rich you have to optimise for the latter. — 00:01:18

    “your value to society is actually not very correlated with your value to the free market”

Threads in this video

  • refine · Which skills should you learn now? — Ali's third tip: skills differ in income potential; nursing and firefighting are not high-income skills, while using AI, coding, selling and copywriting, skills that help businesses make more money, are far more likely to bring financial freedom. (00:00:44)
  • refine · How do you reach financial freedom? — Ali calls it an unfortunate fact of life that your value to society is not very correlated with your value to the free market: to get rich you have to optimise for the latter. (00:01:18)

Mentioned

Central: high-income skills · person, problem, solution

Also: work optional

Also centred on high-income skills: 5 High Income Skills for Students to Learn in 2026 · If I Wanted to Make $10,000 as a Student, I'd Do This · If I was a student again, I’d do this · I learned to earn unlimited money

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