![[y2mate.com - Joe Rogan Experience 1309  Naval Ravikant.mp3]]


This is a perfect place to close because it's relevant to us all. And it's the sort of framework that produces ideas like blockchains in the first place. I urge you to use Novalis framework as a means to evaluate your career what you are good at and what I have a very young child. I expect that my child will not get a university degree or at least not.

Classic sense of having to go spend four years at a university and get a stamp. I expect that he won't have a concept of a single career. I expect that he probably won't have a normal job. He'll be paid much more for his output because in knowledge work, which is what most work is these days and knowledge work.

If you do a great job versus a good job versus an okay job, the difference to your employer in terms of what it's worth is zero X, 10 X, a hundred X. We're used to tracking nine to five, because if someone's cutting down, would you watch them cut out of the, would that work for eight hours? Give or take they've cut down roughly the same amount of wood.

However, if they're sitting in front of a computer and they're writing code, or they're preparing a presentation or they're coming up with a new product or brand strategy, you know, they're writing an advertising campaign. If they're right, the right ads, You might have $100 million product in your hand, the right, the wrong ad slogan.

You may have a $10 product in your hands, or you might have a money losing product in your hands. So it's more and more work is going creative. And as it goes creative, you can't track the inputs. You have to track the outputs, almost everybody these days who makes a lot of money doing something they're essentially doing some kind of creative work that society does not yet know how to train people to do or how to replicate it.

Creative work by its nature is easily leveraged. So it's a force multiplied and it's something that's very hard to train people how to do. If I can train you how to do something, I don't have to pay you a lot because I can just replace you anytime I want. On the other hand, if you're a genius at something, you're doing something that I don't even know how the heck you do it, but you're creating new things.

I have to pay you what you're worth. So can you touch on that idea and kind of why you think. If you do think curiosity should govern a lot of what people do versus say, trying to fit within some widget. I am in the blockchains and cryptocurrencies because they're intellectually fascinating to me. I mean, yeah, maybe it might make some money along the way, but that's not my primary driver.

Actually given how early I got into blockchains, I didn't buy that many coins because it's not the token part. That's interesting to me, it's far more interesting to me to think about the repercussions and to understand the technology and to follow the code essentially down the rabbit hole. I think I got into it because of intellectual curiosity.

And so the nice thing about that is. That's its own reward. Even if I don't wanna make any money, it's not a reward. Second. That means I got into it before it was hot before everybody was getting into it. Right. If the returns are gone by the time everybody else gets into it. And these days, the markets move very, very quickly.

If you can figure out something that society will want. Before society itself and mass figures it out. That's when you get paid. And your only chance of doing that is if you're intellectually curious and intellectual curiosity, it's different for everybody. So I cannot prescribe it to anybody. I can't say, get into drones or get into VR because I don't know what's going to be hot and what's not in the moment.

I can tell you it's hot and I can make you the convincing argument that it's hot. Then at the same time, millions of other people are convinced that it's hot. And by the time you get there, it's going to be too crowded. The only way to really succeed at an extreme level. If you care about that and to enjoy yourself along the way is to just go deep into something.

And the nice thing about technology industry and by technology, I mean the broad tech industry, I include biology, technology, healthcare technology, all kinds of things is if you get obsessive about something that you are convinced is the future, and you're just into it for its own reward and merit first, you're going to outwork everybody else.

Because we'll be reading about it for fun when everybody else is doing it for work. And then second, you stick with it long enough for it to materialize when everybody else will give up. And third, when people show up, you'll just be the expert, just because you'll have thought about it at a different level, and then you'll get paid.

Now it's obviously risky. So you don't do this purely for career reasons, but I've at least found that a long-term basis that following my own intellectual curiosity has paid me better. Then trying to do what I thought would make me money. I think most of life these days, because now we operate in a world where there are 7 billion people and we have access to almost all of them.

And we have access to all of these countries and all of these markets and all these societies and all these nation states. And we're no longer living in tribes of 150 people with very limited opportunity because we have access to everything. I would say that there's no point in trying to imitate anybody else.

There's no point in trying to pick up skills from somebody else. What you really want to do is just figure out what you are uniquely the best in the world. That because you just love it and then just find out who or what needs that the most. And by the way, I think that even applies in dating and marriage and relationships and working and colleagues.

It applies in many aspects of life, rather than trying to change ourselves, to fit into the mold of wherever we happen to be. We should be more open to exploring and finding the place where we fit in perfectly. Isn't there missing us that grew up pretty poor household. I wanted to make money. It was really important to me, probably too important at the time when I said to a friend of mine, I said, I would sell sewage or apple cores to make money.

And luckily it didn't turn out that way because that would have been miserable and everything was, I wouldn't have done it. I wouldn't have stuck with it, but maybe because there's someone out there who loves apples. Right. And that person would have built the best apple farms that have obsessed over apples.

And it would have easily competed because I would've just been it for the money. It would be a terrible existence the entire way from me. So I was obsessed with just making sure that I got to make some money. Cause I just had zero. So I did get very analytical about the whole thing. And I had a framework back when.

It's 15 years old and I haven't really revisited the frameworks. I'm sure it's, it's terrible now. But the three things that I came up with, whether I said to make money, you need specific knowledge. You need leverage and you need accountability. And what I mean by those three is let me start with the simpler ones that leverage is just, you need a force multiplier, like Archimedes said, give me a lever long enough and a place to stand and I will move the earth and leverage me.

You know, when I'm sleeping, there are a hundred people working for me when I'm sleeping. There's a thousand servers and data centers working for me when I'm sleeping, there's $10 million with a capital being deployed. That's going into investments working for me. Those are examples of leverage. The reason why computing and books make so many people rich is because they're forms of leverage that are permission, right?

Going back to the idea of permission networks versus not. I can read a piece of code releases to the internet. If it's a useful piece of code, I can make a lot of money off of it because it's leveraged the code is working for me while I'm not. So to make money, you need leverage. No one gets rich running out there on time.

The second piece needs accountability. You need accountability because if you're not willing to put your name on it, if people can identify that you did it, they're not going to pay you for it. So the more faceless, the more widget, like the more of a large team you're disappearing into the less credit you get.

And without the credit, you, you're not going to get paid. That said the credit comes with risk. Accountability is not free. You're sticking your neck out there. It's why sales guys often north sales gals make more than engineers because they're sticking their necks out there some days they don't eat some days they eat.

And then the last piece is actually the hardest, which is specific. Specific knowledge is the knowledge that you have that lets you do something that other people do not know how to do and cannot be trained to do. If I can train you how to do something, give you a certificate. Now you're suddenly replaceable and I'm never going to have to pay you more than that exact job is worth.

And that job is always competitive and I'm always training other people that do it. So you're never going to get rich off of it. So then I was stuck with a problem that a young age, I was like, okay, I got to go into computers and tech, which I loved anyway. So that was easy because that's a free-for-all leverage.

Accountability means take risks, take responsibility, stick your neck out there. Do things, promise things to people that they don't think are doable, then deliver them. That's that I can do that. The last piece of the hardest, specific knowledge, what knowledge do I specifically have that nobody else does?

And the only way to build specific knowledge is you just have to love. And if you love doing something you're going to put in the hours and it took me decades to figure out what my specific knowledge was, but it turns out looking back in time. I now realize what my specific knowledge was. I didn't even know it at the time, but I was obsessed with a couple of things.

As a kid, I love to read and I love to read all kinds of stuff, including junk. But when I got into a topic. Dive down and read into it. So that helps me speed on new technologies and new spaces, very, very fast and played a lot of war games as a kid, which makes me actually pretty good at kind of broad strategy.

And I used to play a lot of role-playing games. They used to talk, which just talk by the way I used to get together with other kids. Just talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. So I'm a good time. So the combination of being good at reading good at talking and good a strategy, actually liking computers, puts me into the tech strategy business.

And that's kind of where I'm be entered my way too. And now I've found even within that, the pieces of it that I'd like to do, and I'm good. Turns out. I'm not good at managing people. I tried to do that for a long time. Cause I thought it was a form of leverage. I thought I could learn. It could be trained to do it.

It turns out I'm terrible at it because I never liked it in the first place. I'm not a people person. I don't like to hang around lots of people. So you kind of have to know your strengths and your weaknesses and double down, double down, double down on your strengths and then find the career in which those strengths.

And there's always one out there for you. What am I.