在竞技场上In the Arena
但与此同时，在我人生的这个阶段，我想读高密度的作品。你可以把它叫作"抖音病"或"推特一代"，但这其实也是对时间的尊重。我们已经有了大量的数据，也有了一些知识。现在我们想要的是智慧，是那些可以挂靠到我们头脑中已有信息之上的普遍原理。
我们确实想读高密度的作品，但我认为，叔本华的作品就是密度非常高的。
我最喜欢的作者全都是高密度型的。多伊奇是密度极高的，博尔赫斯密度很高，特德·姜密度很高，早期的尼尔·斯蒂芬森密度也很高（后来他就变成了高产量、高密度、什么都高）。
但最好的作者尊重读者的时间，叔本华正是这类作者。
大多数书应该略读，少数书值得细嚼
Nivi：要说知识哲学的最新进展——也就是人们所说的认识论（epistemology）——你基本上可以跳过所有东西，直接去看戴维·多伊奇。
Naval：我觉得没错。如果你只是想了解认识论，那就读戴维·多伊奇——句号。
话虽如此，对有些人来说，了解一下历史背景、各种反驳意见，以及他思想的来龙去脉，还是很有帮助的。
现有的知识理论——比如确证的真信念理论或知识的归纳理论——已经深深地嵌入我们心中，这既来自学校教育，也来自日常经验。
归纳法看起来理应成立：你每天看到日出，太阳明天就会照常升起。这似乎就是常识。
太多人相信这套东西了，以至于如果你直接去读多伊奇，你会看到他逐一驳倒这些理论，但你自己对这些理论并没有坚实的把握，于是你可能还会想象某个反例的存在。
很久以前我第一次读多伊奇时，并没有真正读懂。我把它当成其他任何一位物理学家写的书来读。我会读保罗·戴维斯、卡洛·罗韦利和多伊奇，并且用同样的思考深度、时间和尊重来对待它们。
结果证明我错了。
事实证明，多伊奇其实是在一个深得多的层面上思考。他有许多彼此连贯、咬合在一起的理论，它们构成了一套世界哲学，其中每个部分都相互印证。
先读别人、而不是直接跳到多伊奇，可能也有帮助，但我一定会从多伊奇开始。然后，如果你对某些地方拿不准，就去读一些其他人的著作，再回到多伊奇重新读一遍，这时你就会看到他如何回应那些问题。
多伊奇本人会把你引向波普尔。他会说："哦，我只是在重复波普尔。"
这话并不完全属实。我觉得波普尔要难亲近得多，更难读，文风也更不清晰。不过我想多伊奇和布雷特·霍尔在这里都会不同意我——他们觉得波普尔非常明晰，而我觉得他很难读。
不知什么原因，我觉得多伊奇更容易读，也许是因为波普尔花了更多时间阐述核心观点。波普尔是写给哲学家看的，而多伊奇不是写给哲学家的，甚至不是写给科学家的，也不是写给你的。我的感觉是，多伊奇是写给他自己看的。他只是在阐述自己的想法，以及这些想法是如何彼此相连的。
我也认为，只读认识论部分并不能从多伊奇那里获得最大价值，尽管那绝对是每个人都该起步的地方。那就是《无穷的开始》(The Beginning of Infinity)的前三章。
讽刺的是，在《无穷的开始》里，开头几章和最后几章是最容易、最好读的。中间部分则很难啃，因为它讲的是量子计算、量子物理、进化论等等。
我认为人们正是在这里感到吃力，因为它确实需要——不一定要求数学或科学背景，但至少要能自如地理解科学概念和原理。而且他在为一个多重宇宙理论做强有力的论证，而大多数人在这场争论里并没有切身利益。他们没有想得那么远。他们并不执着于量子力学的观测坍缩理论，因为他们并不真正关心量子力学。它不影响他们的日常生活。
读遍多伊奇所有著作，我的收获是看到了他的理论是如何浑然一体的。每一个部分都触及并依赖于另一个部分。
实际上，他提出了量子计算理论，并在试图找到办法证伪他的多重宇宙理论——一个量子物理理论——时，把丘奇–图灵猜想扩展成了丘奇–图灵–多伊奇猜想。要做到这一点，他必须发明量子计算，因为要设计出如何证伪多重宇宙理论的实验，他必须——在他的头脑中——设想一个通用人工智能（AGI），钻进这个 AGI 的大脑里问："如果这个 AGI 在观察某个东西，它会不会坍缩？"
"但现在我需要钻进它的脑子里。"
"可是，我怎样才能钻进一个量子 AGI 的脑子？你甚至要怎样造出一个量子 AGI？我们根本没有量子计算机！"
"好吧，我们需要量子计算机。"
于是他提出了量子计算理论，这一理论开创了量子计算这一领域。
这就是量子物理与量子计算密不可分的例证。
好的产品难以改动
Naval：我觉得跨学科地读多伊奇非常有用。即使在他谈论模因（meme）和模因理论时——那源于进化论，却直接跨越到认识论、猜想与批判。
而且它的适用范围远远超出他对财富的定义——即你能实现的物理变换的集合。这个定义同时涵盖了资本和知识，并且清楚地表明知识是更大的组成部分。然后它可以被带入商业，应用到你的日常生活中。它适用于国家的财富，也适用于个人的财富。
所以有很多部分是相互关联的。
他说，好的解释难以改动。所以当你回看一个好解释时，你会说："嗯，它怎么可能是别的样子？这是这件事唯一可能的运作方式。"
所有这些不同的部分以某种方式彼此契合、相互约束，从而涌现出某种你未曾预料到的性质、复杂性或结果——某个能干净利落地解释一切的解释。
这不只适用于好的解释，也适用于产品开发。
去看看 iPhone：这颗光滑、完美、美丽的宝石。从第一代到现在，它的外形其实没有多大变化。一切都围绕着那一块屏幕、多点触控、内置电池、让它能装进口袋、握在手中顺滑——本质上是在塑造一台真正个人化、可放进口袋的计算机的柏拉图式理想形态。
所以这个产品难以改动。苹果和它的竞争对手们都在 16 代 iPhone 上尝试过改动它，却始终无法在实质上改变它。他们能改进零部件，提升一些底层能力；但从实质上讲，这个外形难以改动。他们设计对了。
有一句名言，我记得出自安托万·德·圣-埃克苏佩里，他说机翼之所以完美，"不是因为无可增添，而是因为无可删减。"
那个机翼就是难以改动的东西。
等我们找出能把飞船送上火星的正确设计时，我敢打赌，在很长一段时间里，无论从总体还是细节上看，那个东西都将难以改动，直到出现某种突破性技术。
基本的内燃机设计在电池足够好之前一直难以改动，然后我们造出了电动汽车。而现在，电动汽车也成了难以改动的东西。
事实上，现在一些设计师抱怨说，在现代社会，产品和物件开始长得全都一样。这是因为 Instagram 吗？为什么会这样？
嗯，至少在汽车这件事上，它们看起来都像是经过风洞设计的，因为那是最高效的设计。它们之所以都看起来圆润流畅，是因为它们都经过风洞测试，都在寻找能以最小阻力切开空气的形态。所以它们最终确实长得一样，因为那种设计在效率不打折扣的情况下难以改动。
优秀的作者写作时密度和相互关联性如此之高，以至于他们的作品在本质上是分形的。你会在自己准备好接收知识的层次上遇见知识。
你不必全都理解。这就是学习的本质。你读一遍，理解了 20%。再回头读一遍，理解了 25%。配合着听一期布雷特·霍尔的播客，现在你理解了 28%。再去 Grok 或 ChatGPT 问一些问题，深入钻研某个部分，现在你理解了 31%。
一切知识都是作者与观察者或读者之间的交流，双方都必须处于一定的水平才能吸收它。当你准备好接收不同的部分时，你就会接收到不同的部分；但无论你处在什么水平，你总能从中有所收获——只要你至少能进行交流、能读懂这门语言。
找到最简单有效的方案
Nivi：我们都见过 SpaceX 火箭的猛禽（Raptor）发动机的图片，如果你看看它的各个迭代版本，会发现它们从容易改动走向了难以改动。因为最新版本已经没有多少零件可以让你摆弄了。
早期版本有上百万个不同的零件，你可以改变它的厚度、宽度、材料等等。而现在的版本几乎不剩什么零件能让你动手了。
Naval：复杂性理论中有个观点：每当你在大自然中发现一个运转良好的复杂系统，它通常都是一个非常简单的系统或事物被反复迭代后的产物。
我们最近在人工智能研究中正看到这一点——你只是拿非常简单的算法，往里面灌越来越多的数据。它们就越来越聪明。
反过来就行不通了。当你设计一个非常复杂的系统，然后试图把它做成一个能运转的大型系统时，它只会散架。里面的复杂性太多了。所以很多产品设计就是在你自己的设计上不断迭代，直到找到那个简单且管用的东西。而往往你已经在它周围添加了并不需要的东西，于是你必须回头，从噪音中把简单性重新提取出来。
你可以在个人计算领域看到这一点：macOS 用起来仍然比 iOS 难不少。iOS 更接近操作系统的柏拉图式理想形态。不过，基于大语言模型（LLM）的操作系统也许更接近——直接用自然语言对话。
最终，你必须删减东西才能让它规模化，猛禽发动机就是这样的例子。当你弄清楚什么管用，就会意识到什么是多余的，然后就能移除零件。
这也是马斯克的伟大指导原则之一，他基本上是在说：优化一个系统是最后才做的事。在你开始琢磨怎样让某样东西更高效之前，你要做的第一件事是质疑需求。
你会问："这个需求到底为什么存在？"
乔根森的新书里提到的埃隆式方法之一是：你首先要去追查这个需求。不是问哪个部门提出了这个需求，而是需求必须来自某个具体的人。
是谁说了"这就是我想要的"？
你回头去问："你真的需要这个吗？"
你删掉这个需求。一旦删掉了那些不必要的需求，剩下的需求就变少了。现在你面对的是零件，你要尽可能多地去掉零件，只保留那些满足绝对必要需求的零件。
在那之后，也许你才开始考虑优化：琢磨怎样才能最有效地制造这个零件、把它装到最合适的位置。最后，你才可能进入成本效率、规模经济之类的话题。
把一个伟大产品从 0 带到 1的最关键人物，是那个能独自把整个问题装进脑子里、做出权衡取舍、并理解每个部件为何会在那个位置的人——通常就是创始人。
他们不一定要亲自设计每个部件、参与制造或了解所有来龙去脉，但他们必须能够理解：这个零件为什么在这里？如果零件 A 被移除，零件 B、C、D、E 及其需求和考量会怎么样？
关键就在于对整件产品的全局观。
你在猛禽发动机的设计中也能看到这一点。埃隆举过一个例子，我觉得很好——他当时想让特斯拉电池上方的那层玻璃纤维垫生产得更高效。
于是他来到那条耗时过长的生产线上，放下睡袋，就住在了线边。他们试图优化那个把玻璃纤维垫粘到电池上的机器人，想要更高效地完成粘贴或加快这条线的速度。他们确实做到了——设法改进了一点，但速度仍然慢得令人沮丧。
最后他问："这个需求从哪来的？我们为什么要在电池上面放玻璃纤维垫？"
电池团队的人说："其实是出于降噪考虑，你得去找噪音与振动团队谈谈。"
于是他去找噪音与振动团队。
他问："我们这里为什么要有这些垫子？噪音和振动问题是什么？"
对方说："不不——根本没有什么噪音和振动问题。它们在那里是因为热量，防止电池着火。"
然后他回到电池团队："我们需要这个吗？"
对方说："不需要。这里不存在着火问题，也不是隔热问题。那已经过时了。那是噪音和振动问题。"
他们各自都在按照自己受训的方式、按照一贯的做法行事。他们做了安全测试，也通过在上面放麦克风追踪噪音做了测试，最后他们认定不需要这个部件，于是把它删掉了。
在非常复杂的系统和复杂的设计中，这种情况经常发生。
有意思的是——每个人都说自己"是个通才"，这是他们逃避成为专才的方式。但你真正想成为的其实是博学家（polymath）——一个能把每一门专长都学到至少 80/20 水平的通才，这样他们才能做出明智的取舍。
Nivi：我建议大家获得这种博学能力——成为一个能掌握任何专长的通才——的方法是：如果你要学点什么，如果你要上学，就去学习那些覆盖面最广的理论。
Naval：我会进一步概括为：去学物理。
一旦你学了物理，你就在研究现实是如何运作的。如果你有扎实的物理底子，你可以掌握电气工程、计算机科学、材料科学、统计学和概率论，还可以掌握数学，因为数学也是其中一部分——它是应用性的。
我见过的几乎所有领域里最优秀的人都有物理背景。如果你没有物理背景，别灰心。我就是一个半途而废的物理背景。你仍然可以通过其他途径到达那里，但物理训练你与真实世界互动，而且它极其严苛，会把你身上所有漂亮的虚假想法统统打掉。
而如果你身处社会科学领域，你可以抱有一大堆荒诞不经的信念。即使你掌握了社会科学中使用的某些深奥数学，你可能也只有 10% 的真实知识，其余 90% 都是虚假知识。
物理的好消息是，你可以学相当基础的物理。你不必一路深入到夸克、量子物理之类的东西。你只要学基本的球沿斜面滚下就够了，这其实是一个很好的底子。
但我认为任何 STEM 学科都值得学习。如果你已经没有选择学什么的余地，或者你已经过了那个阶段，那就去找人组队。其实，最优秀的人不一定只学物理。他们是动手派（tinkerers），是建造者，他们在动手造东西。动手派总是处在知识的前沿，因为他们总在用最新的工具和最新的零件去建造酷炫的东西。
所以，是那个在无人机成为军事装备之前就组装竞速无人机的人，是那个在机器人成为军事装备之前就造格斗机器人的人，是那个因为想让家里有一台电脑、又不满足于去学校用那里的电脑而自己组装个人电脑的人。这些人最懂事物，也以最快的速度推进着知识。
Nivi: Welcome back to the Naval Podcast. I’ve pulled out some tweets from Naval’s Twitter from the last year, and we’re just going to go through them.
Inspiration All the Way Down
Nivi: Here’s actually my first question. You told me that you got an early copy of the Elon book from Eric Jorgenson. Anything surprising in there?
Naval: I’m only about 20% of the way through. It’s really good. It’s just Elon in his own words. And I think what’s striking is just the sense of independence, agency, and urgency that just runs throughout the whole thing.
I don’t think you necessarily learn a step-by-step process by reading these things; you can’t emulate his process. It’s designed for him. It’s designed for SpaceX, it’s designed for Tesla. It’s contextual, but it’s very inspiring just to see how he doesn’t let anything stand in his way, how maniacal he is about questioning everything, and how he just emphasizes speed and iteration and no-nonsense execution.
And so that just makes you want to get up and run and do the same thing with your company. And to me, that’s what the good books do. If I listen to a Steve Jobs speech, it makes me want to be better. If I read Elon on how he executes, it makes me want to execute better, and then I’ll figure out my own way.
The details don’t necessarily map, but more importantly, I think just the inspiration is what drives.
Nivi: That’s pretty interesting because I think people look to you as inspirational—yes, obviously—but also laying out principles that people actually do follow.
Naval: I keep my principles high level and incomplete. Partially because it just sounds better and it’s easier to remember, but also just because it’s more applicable. One of the problems I have with the How to Get Rich content is people ask me highly specific questions on Twitter in 140 or 280 characters, and I just don’t have enough context to respond.
These things require context. That’s why I liked Airchat. That’s why I liked Clubhouse. That’s why I liked spoken format. Back when I used to do Periscopes, when people would ask me a question, then I could ask a follow-up question back to them and they could ask me another question and we could dig through and try to get to the meat of what they were asking.
And then I could say, “Well, given the information that I have, if I were in your shoes, I would do the following thing.” But most of these situations are highly contextual, so it’s hard to copy details from other people. It’s the principles that apply. And so that is why I keep my stuff very high level.
And in fact, I think Eric Jorgenson, the author, has done a good job of trying to break out the little quotable bits and put them in their own standalone sentences. So he is pulling tweets out of Elon’s work.
But I don’t know. I just do my style. Elon does his; he inspires in his own way. Maybe I inspire someone in my own way. I get inspired by him. I get inspired by others—inspiration all the way down.
But when it comes to execution, you’ve got to do it yourself.
Life is Lived in the Arena
Naval: Life is lived in the arena. You only learn by doing. And if you’re not doing, then all the learning you’re picking up is too general and too abstract. Then it truly is Hallmark aphorisms. You don’t know what applies where and when.
And a lot of this kind of general principles and advice is not mathematics. Sometimes you’re using the word rich to mean one thing. Other times you’re using it to mean another thing. Same with the word wealth. Same with the word love or happiness. These are overloaded terms. So this is not mathematics.
These are not precise definitions. You can’t form a playbook out of them that you can just follow like a computer. Instead, you have to understand what context to apply them in. So the right way to learn is to actually go do something, and when you’re doing it, you figure something out about how it should be done.
Then you can go and look at something I tweeted or something you read in Deutsch or something you read in Schopenhauer or something you saw online and say, “Oh, that’s what that guy meant. That’s the general principle he’s talking about. And I know to apply it in situations like this, not mechanically, not 100% of the time, but as a helpful heuristic for when I encounter this situation again.”
You start with reasoning and then you build up your judgment. And then when your judgment is sufficiently refined, it just becomes taste or intuition or gut feel, and that’s what you operate on. But you have to start from the specific.
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. They try to apply things in the wrong places. What Nassim Taleb calls the Intellectual Yet Idiots, IYIs.
Nivi: One of the tweets I was going to bring up is exactly that. From June 3rd:
“Acquiring knowledge is easy, the hard part is knowing what to apply and when.
That’s why all true learning is ‘on the job.’
Life is lived in the arena.”
Naval: I like that tweet.
Actually, I just wanted to tweet, “Life is lived in the arena” and that was it. I wanted to just drop it right there. But I felt like I had to explain just a little bit more because “The Man in the Arena” is a famous quote, so I wanted to unpack a little bit from my direction. But this is a realization that I keep having over and over.
If You Want to Learn, Do
Naval: I recently started another company. It’s a very difficult project. In fact, the name of the company is The Impossible Company. It’s called Impossible, Inc. What’s interesting is that it’s driven me into a frenzy of learning. And not necessarily even motivated in a negative way, but I’m more inspired to learn than I have been in a long time.
So I find myself interrogating Grok and ChatGPT a lot more. I find myself reading more books. I find myself listening to more technical podcasts. I find myself brainstorming a lot more. I’m just more mentally active. I’m even willing to meet more companies outside of investing because I’m learning from them.
And just being active makes me want to naturally learn more and not in a way that it’s unfun or causes me to burn out. So I think doing leads to the desire to learn and therefore to learning. And of course there’s the learning from the doing itself. Whereas I think if you’re purely learning for learning’s sake, it gets empty after a little while. The motivation isn’t the same.
We’re biomechanical creatures. My brain works faster when I’m walking around. And you would think, “No, energy conservation—it should work slower,” but it’s not the case. Some of the best brainstorming is when you are walking and talking, not just sitting and talking.
Which is why for a while I tried to hack the walking podcast thing because I really enjoy walking and talking and my brain works better. And so the same way I think doing and learning go hand in hand. And so if you want to learn, do.
In Most Difficult Things in Life, the Solution is Indirect
Naval: Like in most interesting, difficult things in life, the solution is indirect.
That was part of the How to Get Rich tweetstorm, which is, if you want to get rich, you don’t directly just go for the money. I suppose you could like a bankster, but if you’re building something of value and you’re using leverage and you’re taking accountability and you’re applying your specific knowledge, you’re going to make money as a byproduct.
And you’re going to create great products, going to productize yourself and create money as a byproduct. The same way, if you want to be happy, you minimize yourself and you engage in high flow activities or engage in activities that take you out of your own self and you end up with happiness.
By the way, this is true in seduction as well. You don’t seduce a woman by walking up and saying, “I want to sleep with you.” That’s not how it works. Same with status. The overt pursuit of status signals low status, it’s a low-status behavior to chase status because it reveals you as being lower in the status hierarchy in the first place.
It’s not the fact that everything has to be pursued indirectly. Many things are best pursued directly. If I want to drive a car, I get in and I drive the car. If I want to write something, then I just sit down and write something. But the things that are either competitive in nature or they seem elusive to us—part of the reason for that is that those are the remaining things that are best pursued indirectly.
When You Truly Work for Yourself
Nivi: From April 2nd: “When you truly work for yourself, you won’t have hobbies, you won’t have weekends, and you won’t have vacations, but you won’t have work either.”
Naval: This is the paradox of working for yourself, which every entrepreneur or every self-employed person is familiar with, which is that when you start working for yourself, you basically sacrifice this work-life balance thing.
You sacrifice this work-life distinction. There’s no more nine-to-five. There’s no more office. There’s no one who’s telling you what to do. There’s no playbook to follow. At the same time, there’s nothing to turn off. You can’t turn it off. You are the business. You are the product. You are the work. You are the entity, and you care.
If you’re doing something that’s truly yours, you care very deeply, so you can’t turn it off. And that’s the curse of the entrepreneur. But the benefit of the entrepreneur is that if you’re doing it right, if you’re doing it for the right reasons or the right people in the right way, and if you can set aside the stress of not hitting your goals, which is real and hard to set aside, then it doesn’t feel like work.
And that’s when you’re most productive. You are basically only measured on your output. And you’re only held up to the bar that you raised for yourself. So it can be extremely exhilarating and freeing. And this is why I said a long time ago that a taste of freedom can make you unemployable.
And so this is exactly that taste of freedom. It makes you unemployable in the classic sense of nine-to-five and following the playbook and having a boss. But once you have broken out of that, once you’ve walked the tight rope without a net, without a boss, without a job—and by the way, this can even happen in startups in a small team where you’re just very self-motivated. You get what look like huge negatives to the average person that you don’t have weekends, you don’t have vacations, and you don’t have time off, you don’t have work-life balance. But, at the same time, when you are working, it doesn’t feel like work. It’s something that you’re highly motivated to do and that’s the reward.
And net-net, I do think this is a one-way door. I think once people experience working on something that they care about with people that they really like in a way they’re self-motivated, they’re unemployable. They can’t go back to a normal job with a manager and a boss and check-ins and nine-to-five and “Show up this day, this week, sit in this desk, commute at this time.”
Nivi: I think there’s a hidden meaning in the tweet too, which I’m guessing is intentional. It starts off with “When you truly work for yourself,” which I’m guessing most people are going to take that to mean “You’re your own boss.” But the other way that I read it is that you are working for yourself.
So your labor is an expression of who and what you are. It’s self-expression. And that’s not an easy thing to figure out.
Find Your Specific Knowledge Through Action
Naval: I ultimately think that everyone should be figuring out what it is that they uniquely do best—that aligns with who they are fundamentally, and that gives them authenticity, that brings them specific knowledge, that gives them competitive advantage, that makes them irreplaceable. And they should just lean into that. And sometimes you don’t know what that is until you do it.
So this is life lived in the arena. You are not going to know your own specific knowledge until you act and until you act in a variety of difficult situations. And then you’ll either realize, “Oh, I managed to navigate these things that other people would’ve had a hard time with,” or someone else will point out to you. They’ll say, “Hey, your superpower seems to be X.”
I have a friend who has been an entrepreneur a bunch of times. And, what I always notice about him is that he may not necessarily be the most clever or the most technical, and he is very hardworking, that’s why I don’t want to say he isn’t hardworking. He’s actually super hardworking. But what I do notice is he’s the most courageous.
So he just does not care what’s in the way. Nothing gets him down. He’s always laughing or smiling. He’s always moving through it. And this is the kind of guy that a hundred years ago you would’ve said, “Oh, he’s the most courageous. Go charge that machine gun nest.”
He would’ve been good for that. But in an entrepreneurship context, he’s the one who can keep beating his head against the sales wall and just calling hundreds of people until finally one person says yes. So he’ll call 400 people and get 399 nos. And he’s fine with one “Yes.” And that’s enough.
Then he can start iterating and learning from there. So that’s his specific knowledge. It is knowledge. It’s a capability that he knows that he’s okay with it. There’s an outcome on the other side that he’s willing to go for and that’s a superpower. Now, maybe if he can develop that a little further or combine it with something else, or maybe even just apply it where it’s needed, that makes him somewhat irreplaceable.
And so you find your specific knowledge through action—by doing—and when you are working for yourself, you’ll also naturally tend to pick things and do things in a way that aligns with who you are and what your specific knowledge is.
You Have to Enjoy It a Lot
Naval: For example, if you look at marketing, marketing is an open problem. People try to solve marketing in different ways. Some people will create videos, some people will write or tweet. Some people will literally stand outside with a sandwich board. Some people will go make a whole bunch of friends and just throw parties and spread by word of mouth.
Now, it may be the case that for your business, one of those is much better than others, but the most important thing is picking a business that is congruent with whichever one you like to do. So for example, I have a lot of friends approach me and say, “Hey, let’s start a podcast together.” And I’m like, “Do you genuinely enjoy talking? Do you genuinely enjoy talking a lot?”
Because if you don’t, you’re not going to enjoy the process of podcasting. You’re not going to be the best at it. And they’re just trying to market. And so they start a podcast, they do two or three episodes, and then eventually they drop off.
And they drop off because, first, they don’t enjoy podcasting. I don’t mean enjoy a little bit, you have to enjoy it a lot. If you’re going to be the top at it, you have to be almost psychopathic level at which you enjoy the thing. And so they’ll record a few episodes and then their readers or their listeners will pick up on, “Actually this person is just asking a bunch of questions, kind of flat-faced and doesn’t seem to really enjoy it, and is doing the podcast equivalent of looking at their watch.”
Whereas someone like Joe Rogan—he’s so immersed—he’s so into talking to all these weird people that he has on his podcast that the guy would be doing it even if he had no audience, and he was doing it when he had no audience, when he was on Ustream with just him and live streaming late at night on one random website.
So it’s no coincidence he’s the top podcaster. So when you’re marketing, you want to lean into your specific knowledge and into yourself. If you enjoy talking, then try podcasting. Maybe you enjoy talking in a more conversational tone, in which case you try a live network, like Twitter Spaces.
Maybe you enjoy writing. If you like long-form writing, Substack. If you like short-form writing, X. If you like really long-form writing, then maybe a bunch of blog posts that turn into a book. If you enjoy making videos, then maybe you use one of the latest AI models and you make some video and you overlay onto it.
But you have to do what is very natural to you. And part of the trick is picking a business where the thing that is natural to you lines up nicely or picking a role within that business or picking a co-founder in that business. It is a fit problem. It is a matching problem. And the good news is in the modern world, there are unlimited opportunities.
There are unlimited people, there are unlimited venues, there are unlimited forms of media. There’s just an unlimited set of things to choose from. So how are you going to find the thing that you’re really good at? You’re going to try everything and you’re going to try everything because you’re going to do. You’re going to be in the arena. You’re going to be trying to tackle and solve problems.
So the first time you do it, you might do a whole bunch of things you don’t enjoy doing, and you may not do them well, but eventually you’ll hone down on the thing that you really like to do and then you hopefully find that fit.
Pause, Reflect, See How Well It Did
Naval: We talked about in the past how “Become the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until this is true.” And Akira made a song out of it. Akira the Don, God bless him. And I think that’s absolutely true. You want to be the best in the world at what you do, but keep redefining what you do until that’s true. The only way that redefining is going to work is through the process of iteration, through doing. So, you need that carrot, you need that flag.
You need that reward at the end to pull you forward into doing, and you need to iterate. And iterate does not mean repetition. Iterate is not mechanical. It’s not 10,000 hours, it’s 10,000 iterations. It’s not time spent. It’s learning loops.
And what iteration means is you do something and then you stop and you pause and you reflect. You see how well that worked or did not work. Then you change it. Then you try something else. Then you pause, reflect, see how well it did. Then you change it and you try something else. And that’s the process of iteration, and that’s the process of learning. And all learning systems work this way.
So evolution is iteration where there’s mutation, there’s replication, and then there’s selection. You cut out the stuff that didn’t work. This is true in technology and invention where you’ll innovate, you’ll create a new technology and then you’ll try to scale it and either survive in the marketplace or it’ll get cut out.
This is true as David Deutsch talks about in the search for good explanations. You make a conjecture, that conjecture is subject to criticism, and then the stuff that doesn’t work is weeded out. And this is the true scientific method.
It’s all about finding what is natural for yourself and doing it by living life in the arena, high agency, process of iteration until you figure it out and then you are the best in the world at “it,” and “it” is just being yourself.
Blame Yourself for Everything, and Preserve Your Agency
Nivi: Let’s talk about one more tweet which I liked when I first saw it, or I might have retweeted it. I think people retweet things when they see something that they haven’t figured out how to say yet, but they knew in their head, but it’s just implicit—it hadn’t been made explicit.
I think that’s when people are like, “I need to retweet this.”
So this one was January 17: “Blame yourself for everything, and preserve your agency.”
From my end it’s like: Take responsibility for everything, and in the process of taking responsibility for something, you create and preserve the agency to go solve that problem. If you’re not responsible for the problem, there’s no way for you to fix the problem.
Naval: Just to address your point of how it was something you already knew, but phrased in a way that you liked. Emerson did this all the time. He would phrase things in a beautiful way and you would say, “Oh, that’s exactly what I was thinking and feeling, but I didn’t know how to articulate it.”
And the way he put it was he said, “In every work of genius, we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.” And I just love that line. It’s what I try to do with Twitter, which is I try to say something true, but in an interesting way.
And not only is this a true and interesting way to say it, but also it has to be something that really has emotional heft behind it. It has to have struck me recently and been important to me. Otherwise, I’m just faking it. I don’t sit around trying to think up tweets to write. It’s more that something happens to me, something affects me emotionally, and then I synthesize it in a certain way.
I test it. I’m like, “Is this true?” And if I feel like it’s true, or mostly true or true in the context that I care about, and if I can say it in some way that’ll help me stick in my mind, then I just send it out there. And it’s nothing new for the people who get it.
If it’s not said in an interesting way, then it’s a cliché, or if they’ve heard it too much, it’s a cliché. But if it’s said in an interesting way, then it may remind them of something that was important, or it might convert their specific knowledge, or might be a hook for converting their specific knowledge into more general knowledge in their own minds.
So I find that process useful for myself and hopefully others do too. Now, for the specific tweet, I just noticed this tendency where people are very cynical and they’ll say, “All the wealth is stolen,” for example, by banksters and the like, or crony capitalists or what have you, or just outright thieves or oligarchs.
“You can’t rise up in this world if you’re X.”
“You can’t rise up in this world if you’re a poor kid.”
“You can’t rise up in this world if you are from this race or ethnicity, if you were born in that country, or if you are lame or crippled or blind,” or what have you.
The problem with this is that yes, there are real hindrances in the world. It is not a level playing field, and fair is something that only exists in a child’s imagination and cannot be pinned down in any real way. But the world is not entirely luck. In fact, you know that because in your own life there are things that you have done that have led to good outcomes and you know that if you had not done that thing, it would not have led to that good outcome.
So you can absolutely move the needle, and it’s not all luck. And especially the longer the timeframe you’re talking about, the more intense the activity, the more iteration you take and the more thinking and choice you apply into it, the less luck matters. It recedes into the distance.
To give you a simple example, which most people won’t love because they’re not in Silicon Valley, but every brilliant person I met in Silicon Valley 20 years ago, every single one, the young brilliant ones, every single one is successful. Every single one. I cannot think of an exception. I should have gone back and just indexed them all based on their brilliance. By the way, that’s what Y Combinator does at scale, right? What a great mechanism.
So it works. If people stick at it for 20 years, it works. Now you might say, “Easy for you to say, man, that’s for the people in Silicon Valley.”
No one was born here. They all moved here. They moved here because they wanted to be where the other smart kids were and because they wanted to be high agency. So agency does work, but if you’re keeping track of the time period, you’re going to be disappointed.
You’ll give up too soon. So you need a higher motivator. That’s why Elon goes to Mars, and that’s why Sam wants to invent AGI. And that’s why Steve Jobs wanted to build, 50 years ago, in the eighties he was talking about building a computer that would fit in a book.
He was talking about the iPad. So it’s these very long visions that sustain you over the long periods of time to actually build the thing you want to build and get to where you want to get.
So a cynical belief is self-fulfilling. A pessimistic belief is like you’re driving the motorcycle, but you’re looking at the brick wall that you’re supposed to turn away from. You will turn into the brick wall without even realizing it.
So you have to preserve your agency. You have to preserve your belief that you can change things. You’re born with agency. Children are high-agency. They go get what they want. If they want something, they see it, they go get it. You have to preserve your agency. You have to preserve your belief that you can change things.
It Is Impossible to Fool Mother Nature
Naval: You have to take responsibility for everything bad that happens to you—and this is a mindset.
Maybe it’s a little fake, but it’s very self-serving. And in fact, if you can go the extra mile and just attribute everything good that happens to you to luck, that might be helpful too. But at some level, truth is very important. You don’t want to fake it.
From what I have observed, the truth of the matter is: People who work very hard and apply themselves and don’t give up and take responsibility for the outcomes on a long enough time scale, end up succeeding in whatever they’re focused on. And every success case knows this.
Richard Feynman used to say that he wasn’t a genius. He was just a boy who applied himself and worked really hard. Yeah, he was very smart, obviously. But that was necessary, but not sufficient. We all know the trope of the smart, lazy guy.
And I like to harass all of my friends—including Nivi—that one of the problems I notice with these guys is you’re just operating way below potential. Your potential is so much higher than where you are. You have to apply some of that into kinetic.
And ironically that will raise your potential because we’re not static creatures.
We’re dynamic creatures. And you will learn more. You will learn by doing. So just stop making excuses and get in the ring.
Nivi: You also like Schopenhauer. What have you learned from Schopenhauer, or is there anything surprising in his work?
Naval: Schopenhauer is not for everybody and there are many different Schopenhauers. He wrote quite a bit, and you could read his more obscure philosophical texts, like The World as Will and Idea, where he was writing for other philosophers. Or you could read his more practical stuff like On the Vanity of Existence.
He was one of the few people in history who wrote unflinchingly. He wrote what he believed to be true. He wasn’t always correct, but he never lied to you—and that comes across. He thought about things very deeply.
He didn’t care that much what people thought of him. All he knew was, “What I am writing down I know to be true.”
He also didn’t put on any airs. He didn’t use fancy language; he didn’t try to impress you.
People call him a pessimist. I don’t think that’s entirely fair. I think his worldview could be interpreted as pessimistic, but I just read him when I want to read a harsh dose of truth.
What Schopenhauer did uniquely for me is that he gave me complete permission to be me. He just did not care at all what the masses thought, and his disdain for common thinking comes out.
Now, I don’t necessarily share that—I’m a little bit more of an egalitarian than he was. But he really gives you permission to be yourself. So if you’re good at something, don’t be shy about it. Accept that you’re good at something.
And that was hard for me because we all want to get along. If you want to get along in a group, you don’t want to stand out too much. It’s the old line: The tall poppy gets cut.
But if you’re going to do anything exceptional, you do have to bet on yourself in some way. And if you’re exceptional at something, that does require you acknowledging that you’re exceptional at it—or at least trying to be—and not worrying about what other people think.
Now, you don’t want to be delusional either. Anyone who has been in the investing business is constantly hit by people who say, “I’m so great at something,” and they’re a little delusional. No, you don’t get to say you’re exceptional at something. Other people get to say you’re exceptional at something, and your mom doesn’t count.
Feedback from other people is usually fake. Awards are fake. Critics are fake. Kudos from your friends and family are fake. They might try to be genuine, but it’s lost in such a sea of fakeness that you’re not going to get real feedback.
Real feedback comes from free markets and nature. Physics is harsh: either your product worked, or it didn’t. Free markets are harsh: either people buy it, or they don’t. But feedback from other people is fake.
You can’t get good feedback from groups because groups are just trying to get along. Individuals search for truth, groups search for consensus. A group that doesn’t get along decoheres. It falls apart. And the larger the group, the less good feedback you’re going to get from it.
You don’t want to necessarily rely on feedback from your mom or your friends or your family, or even from award ceremonies and award systems.
If you’re optimizing your company to end up on the cover of a magazine, or to win an industry award, you’re failing.
You need customers. That’s your real feedback. You need feedback from nature.
Did your rocket launch?
Did your drone fly?
Did your 3D printer print the object within the tolerances that it was supposed to, in the time it was supposed to, in the cost budget that it was supposed to?
It’s very easy to fool yourself. It’s very easy to be fooled by others.
It is impossible to fool Mother Nature.
The Best Authors Respect the Reader’s Time
Nivi: Unlike Schopenhauer, you are an industrial philosopher. Like an industrial designer, your philosophy is designed for the masses. People suggest you read the great books—Aristotle and Wittgenstein and all the supposedly great philosophers.
I’ve read almost all that stuff, and I’ve gotten very little value from it. Where I have gotten value is the philosophizing of people on Twitter, like you. Anybody who wants to read philosophy, I would just tell them to skip it and go read David Deutsch.
Naval: You’re not wrong. I can’t stand any of the philosophers you talked about. I don’t like Plato either.
Every other piece of philosophy I’ve picked up and put down relatively quickly because they’re just making very obscure arguments over minutiae and trying to come up with all-encompassing theories of the world. Even Schopenhauer falls into that trap. When he tries to talk to other philosophers, he’s at his worst.
When I like him is in his shorter essays. That’s where he almost writes like he’s on Twitter. He would have dominated Twitter. He has high density of ideas—very well thought through; good, minimal examples and analogies. You can pick it up, read one paragraph, and you’re thinking for the next hour. I think I’m a better writer, a better thinker, and a better judge of people and character thanks to what I read from him.
Now, he’s writing from the early part of the 19th century. Whenever he wanders into topics that are scientific or medical or political, he’s obviously off base—that stuff doesn’t apply anymore. But when he’s writing about human nature, that is timeless.
When it comes to anything about human nature, I say go read the Lindy books—the older books, the ones that have survived the test of time. But if you want to develop specific knowledge, get paid for it, do something useful, then you want to stay on the bleeding edge. That knowledge is going to be more timely and obsolete more quickly.
Those two make sense. What doesn’t make sense to me is just reading stuff that’s not Lindy, or that’s not about human nature, but is old. I also shy away from stuff that’s low density in the learnings, like history books.
I like The Lessons of History by Will Durant because it’s a summarization of The Story of Civilization, which was his large 12-volume series. But I’m not going to go read the 12-volume series. I’ve read plenty of history. I know he’s referring to these kinds of things, so I’m not just taking his word for it on high-level concept.
But at the same time, at this point in my life, I want to read high-density works. You can call it the TikTok Disease or the Twitter generation, but it’s also just being respectful of our time. We already have a lot of data. We have some knowledge. Now we want wisdom. Now we want the generalized principles that we can attach to all of the other information we already have in our minds.
We do want to read high-density work, but I would argue that Schopenhauer is very high-density work.
All my favorite authors are very high density. Deutsch is extremely high density. Borges is very high density. Ted Chiang is very high density. The old Neal Stephenson was very high density (then he just got high volume, high density, high everything).
But the best authors respect the reader’s time, and Schopenhauer is very much in that vein.
Most Books Should Be Skimmed, A Few Should Be Devoured
Nivi: For the state of the art on the philosophy of knowledge, which people call epistemology, you can basically skip everything and jump straight to David Deutsch.
Naval: I think that’s right. If you just want to know epistemology, read David Deutsch—full stop.
That said, for some people it helps to know the history, the counterarguments, where he’s coming from.
The existing theories of knowledge—like the justified true belief theory or the inductive theory of knowledge—these are so deeply embedded into us, both by school learning, but also by everyday experience.
Induction seems like it should work: You watch the sunrise every day, the sun is going to rise tomorrow. That just seems like common sense.
So many people believe in that, that if you just read Deutsch, you would see him shooting down these things, but you yourself would not have those things on solid footing. So you might imagine some counterexample exists.
When I first read Deutsch a long time ago I didn’t quite get it. I treated it just like any other book that any other physicist had written. So I would read Paul Davies and Carlo Rovelli and Deutsch, and I would treat them with the same level of contemplation, time, and respect.
It turned out I was wrong.
It turned out that Deutsch was actually operating at a much deeper level. He had a lot of different theories that coherently hung together, and they create a world philosophy where all the pieces reinforce each other.
It might help to read others and not just skip to Deutsch, but I would definitely start with Deutsch. Then, if you’re not sure about it, I would read some of the others and then come back to Deutsch and try again, and then you’ll see how he addresses those issues.
Deutsch himself would refer you to Popper. He would say, “Oh, I’m just repeating Popper.”
Not quite true. I find Popper much less approachable, much harder to read, much less clear of a writer. Although I think here both Deutsch and Brett Hall would disagree with me—they find Popper very lucid; I find him very difficult to read.
For whatever reason, I find Deutsch easier to read, maybe because Popper spent a lot more time elucidating core points. Popper was writing for philosophers. Deutsch is not writing for philosophers. Deutsch is not even writing for scientists. Deutsch is not writing for you. I get the feeling Deutsch is writing for himself. He is just elucidating his own thoughts and how they all connect together.
I also don’t think you’re going to get maximal value out of Deutsch just reading the epistemology, although that is absolutely where everybody should start. That’s the first three chapters of The Beginning of Infinity.
Ironically, in The Beginning of Infinity, the first few chapters and the last few chapters are the easiest and the most accessible. The middle is a slog because that goes into quantum computation, quantum physics, evolution, et cetera.
That’s where I think people struggle because it does require—not necessarily a mathematical or scientific background but at least a comfort level with scientific concepts and principles. And he’s making a strong argument for the multiverse, which most people don’t have a dog in that fight. They haven’t thought that far ahead. They’re not wedded to the observer collapse theory of quantum mechanics because they don’t really care about quantum mechanics. It doesn’t impact their everyday life.
What I got out of reading all of Deutsch was I got to see how his theory all hangs together. Every piece touches upon and relies upon another piece.
He actually came up with the theory of quantum computation and extended the Church–Turing conjecture into the Church–Turing–Deutsch conjecture when he was trying to come up with a way to falsify his theory of the multiverse—which was a quantum physics theory. And to do that, he had to invent quantum computation, because to invent the experiment for how to falsify the multiverse theory he had to—in his mind—imagine an AGI, get inside the AGI’s brain and say, “If that AGI is observing something, does it collapse?”
“But now I need to be inside the brain.”
“Well, how do I get inside the brain of a quantum AGI? How do you even create a quantum AGI? We don’t have quantum computers!”
“Okay, we need quantum computers.”
So he came up with the theory of quantum computation, and that launched the field of quantum computing.
That’s an example of how quantum physics and quantum computing are inextricably linked.
Good Products Are Hard to Vary
Naval: I think reading Deutsch across all the different disciplines is very useful. Even when he talks about memes and meme theory—that comes from evolution, but crosses over straight into epistemology, conjecture, and criticism.
And it reaches far beyond his definition of wealth: the set of physical transformations that you can effect. That takes into account both capital and knowledge, and it clearly shows that knowledge is a bigger component. And then that can be brought into business and applied into your everyday life. It can apply to the wealth of nations and it can apply to the wealth of individuals.
So there are a lot of parts that interconnect together.
He says that good explanations are hard to vary. So when you look back on a good explanation, you say, “Well, how could it have been otherwise? This is the only way this thing could have worked.”
All these different parts fit together and constrain each other in such a way that there’s now some emergent property or some complexity or some outcome that you didn’t expect—some explanation that neatly explains everything.
That doesn’t just apply to good explanations. It applies to product development.
Good products are hard to vary.
Go look at the iPhone: this smooth, perfect, beautiful jewel. The form factor hasn’t really changed that much since the original one. It’s all around the single screen, the multi-touch, embedding the battery, making it fit into your pocket, making it smooth and sliding in your hand—essentially creating the Platonic ideal of the truly personal, pocketable computer.
So that product is hard to vary. Both Apple and its competitors have tried to vary it across 16 generations of iPhone and they haven’t been able to materially vary it. They’ve been able to improve the components and improve some of the underlying capabilities; but materially, the form factor is hard to vary. They designed the right thing.
There’s a famous saying, I think from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, where he says the airplane wing is perfect “not because there’s nothing left to add, but because there’s nothing left to take away.“
That airplane wing is hard to vary.
When we figure out the proper design of the spacecraft to get to Mars, I will bet you that both at a high level and in the details for quite a long time, that thing will be hard to vary until there’s some breakthrough technology.
The basic internal combustion engine design was hard to vary until we got batteries good enough and then we created the electric car. And now the electric car is hard to vary.
In fact, there’s a complaint now among some designers that in modern society, products and objects are starting to look all the same. Is that because of Instagram? Why is that?
Well, at least in the car case, they all look like they’ve been through a wind tunnel design because that is the most efficient design. The reason they all look swoopy and streamlined is because they’re all going through a wind tunnel and they’re trying to find the thing that cuts through the air with minimal resistance. And so they do all end up looking the same because that design is hard to vary without losing efficiency.
Good writers write with such high density and interconnectedness that their works are fractal in nature. You will meet the knowledge at the level at which you are ready to receive it.
You don’t have to understand it all. This is the nature of learning. You read it, you got 20% of it. Then you go back through it, you got 25% of it. You listen to one of Brett Hall’s podcasts alongside it, now you got 28% of it. Now you go to Grok or ChatGPT, you ask it some questions, you dig in on some part, now you got 31% of it.
All knowledge is a communication between the author and the observer or the reader, and you both have to be at a certain level to absorb it. When you’re ready to receive different pieces, you will receive different pieces, but you’ll always get something out of it no matter what level you’re at, as long as you can even just communicate and read the language.
Find the Simplest Thing That Works
Nivi: We’ve all seen the pictures of the Raptor engine for the SpaceX rockets, and if you look at the various iterations, they go from easy-to-vary to hard-to-vary. Because the most recent version just doesn’t have that many parts that you can fool around with.
The earlier versions have a million different parts where you could change the thickness of it, the width of it, the material, and so on. The current version barely has any parts left for you to do anything with.
Naval: There’s a theory in complexity theory that whenever you find a complex system working in nature, it’s usually the output of a very simple system or thing that was iterated over and over.
We’re seeing this lately in AI research—you’re just taking very simple algorithms and dumping more and more data into them. They keep getting smarter.
What doesn’t work as well is the reverse. When you design a very complex system and then you try to make a functioning large system out of that, it just falls apart. There’s too much complexity in it. So a lot of product design is iterating on your own designs until you find the simple thing that works. And often you’ve added stuff around it that you don’t need, and then you have to go back and extract the simplicity back out of the noise.
You can see this in personal computing where macOS is still quite a bit harder to use than iOS. iOS is closer to the Platonic ideal of an operating system. Although an LLM-based operating system might be even closer—speaking in natural language.
Eventually, you have to remove things to get them to scale, and the Raptor engine is an example of that. As you figure out what works, then you realize what’s unnecessary and you can remove parts.
And this is one of Musk’s great driving principles where he basically says: Before you optimize a system, that’s among the last things that you do. Before you start trying to figure out how to make something more efficient, the first thing you do is you question the requirements.
You’re like, “Why does the requirement even exist?”
One of the Elon methods in Jorgenson’s new book is you first go and you track down the requirement. And not which department came up with the requirement; the requirement has to come from an individual.
Who’s the individual who said, “This is what I want.”
You go back and say, “Do you really need this?”
You eliminate the requirement. And then once you’ve eliminated the requirements that are unnecessary, then you have a smaller number of requirements. Now you have parts, and you try to get rid of as many parts as you can to fulfill the requirements that are absolutely necessary.
And then after that, maybe then you start thinking about optimization, and now you’re trying to figure out how can I manufacture this part and fit it into the right place most efficiently. And then finally, you might get into cost efficiencies and economies of scale and those sorts of things.
The most critical person to take a great product from zero to one is the single person—usually the founder—who can hold the entire problem in their head and make the trade-offs, and understand why each component is where it is.
And they don’t necessarily need to be the person designing each component, or manufacturing or knowing all the ins and outs, but they do need to be able to understand: Why is this piece here? And if Part A gets removed, then what happens to Parts B, C, D, E and their requirements and considerations?
It’s that holistic view of the whole product.
You’ll see this in the Raptor engine design. The example that Elon gives that I thought was a good one—he was trying to get these fiberglass mats on top of the Tesla batteries produced more efficiently.
So he went to the line where it was taking too long, put his sleeping bag down, and just stayed at the line. And they tried to optimize the robot that was gluing the fiberglass mats to the batteries. They were trying to attach them more efficiently or speed up that line. And they did—they managed to improve it a bit, but it was still frustratingly slow.
And finally he said, “Why is this requirement here? Why are we putting fiberglass mats on top of the batteries?”
The battery guy said, “It’s actually because of noise reduction, so you’ve got to go talk to the noise and vibration team.”
So he goes to the noise and vibration team.
He’s like, “Why do we have these mats here? What is the noise and vibration issue?”
And they’re like, “No, no—there’s no noise and vibration issue. They’re there because of heat, if the battery catches fire.”
And then he goes back to the battery team like, “Do we need this?”
And they’re like, “No. There’s not a fire issue here. It’s not a heat protection issue. That’s obsolete. It’s a noise and vibration issue.”
They had each been doing things the way they were trained to do—in the way things had been done. They tested it for safety, and they tested it by putting microphones on there and tracking the noise, and they decided they didn’t need it, and so they eliminated the part.
This happens a lot with very complex systems and complex designs.
It’s funny—everybody says “I’m a generalist,” which is their way of copping out on being a specialist. But really what you want to be is a polymath, which is a generalist who can pick up every specialty, at least to the 80/20 level, so they can make smart trade-offs.
Nivi: The way that I suggest people gain that polymath capability—being a generalist that can pick up any specialty—is if you are going to study something, if you are going to go to school, study the theories that have the most reach.
Naval: I would summarize that further and just say study physics.
Once you study physics, you’re studying how reality works. And if you have a great background in physics, you can pick up electrical engineering. You can pick up computer science. You can pick up material science. You can pick up statistics and probability. You can pick up mathematics because it’s part of it—it’s applied.
The best people that I’ve met in almost any field have a physics background. If you don’t have a physics background, don’t cry. I have a failed physics background. You can still get there the other ways, but physics trains you to interact with reality, and it is so unforgiving that it beats all the nice falsities out of you.
Whereas if you’re somewhere in social science, you can have all kinds of cuckoo beliefs. Even if you pick up some of the abstruse mathematics they use in social sciences, you may have 10% real knowledge, but 90% false knowledge.
The good news about physics is you can learn pretty basic physics. You don’t have to go all the way deep into quarks and quantum physics and so on. You can just go with basic balls rolling down a slope, and it’s actually a good backgrounder.
But I think any of the STEM disciplines are worth studying. Now if you don’t have the choice of what to study and you’re already past that, just team up with people. Actually, the best people don’t necessarily even just study physics. They’re tinkerers, they’re builders, they’re building things. The tinkerers are always at the edge of knowledge because they’re always using the latest tools and the latest parts to build the cool things.
So it’s the guy building the racing drone before drones are a military thing, or the guy building the fighting robots before robots are a military thing, or the person putting together the personal computer because they want the computer in their home and they’re not satisfied going to school and using the computer there. These are the people who understand things the best, and they’re advancing knowledge the fastest.