内容来源：https://nav.al/in-the-arena

内容总结：

在最新一期的播客对话中，知名投资人Naval Ravikant与主持人Nivi围绕个人成长、创业哲学与知识获取等话题展开了深度探讨。Naval结合自身经验，分享了多项具有实践指导意义的核心观点。

实践是最高效的学习路径
Naval强调“生活存在于竞技场中”，真正的学习必须通过实践完成。他指出，仅停留在理论层面的知识过于抽象，容易变成华而不实的口号。当人们投身具体实践时，会自然产生学习需求，这种带着问题去学习的方式既高效又不易倦怠。他创办“不可能公司”的经历就是最佳例证——实际创业需求驱动他持续向AI工具提问、研读专业书籍、接触更多企业，形成了“实践-学习-再实践”的良性循环。

创业需要突破传统工作边界
针对自主创业，Naval提出了一个深刻洞见：真正的创业者将失去明确的工作与生活界限。当事业成为自我表达的载体时，当事人会进入“无周末无假期”却“感受不到工作压力”的特殊状态。这种突破传统雇佣关系的工作模式，本质上是对自由的极致体验，一旦经历过这种状态，人们将很难再回归按部就班的职场生活。

构建个人竞争优势的方法论
在个人发展方面，Naval建议通过持续实践来发现“特异性知识”。这种知识具有不可替代性，往往在应对挑战过程中自然显现。他举例说明，身边一位连续创业者的核心优势正是面对399次拒绝仍能坚持的勇气。Naval特别强调，要找到与自身特质高度契合的领域，就需要达到“近乎偏执的喜爱程度”，正如顶级播客主播对对话本身的热爱。

保持自主性的思维技巧
Naval提出“凡事归咎于自己，但保持自主性”的处世原则。他认为这种思维方式能帮助人们聚焦可控因素，避免陷入怨天尤人的消极循环。虽然现实存在各种不平等，但长期来看，持续努力终将带来改变。他以硅谷精英群体为例，指出二十年前公认的优秀人才如今都取得了成功，证明在足够长的时间维度上，个人能动性终将超越运气因素。

知识获取的优化策略
在知识获取方面，Naval推崇大卫·多伊奇（David Deutsch）的认知理论，认为其著作蕴含着解释世界的底层逻辑。他建议读者优先选择经过时间检验的经典作品（林迪效应），同时关注前沿科技动态。对于当代人而言，阅读高信息密度的内容是对时间的最大尊重，那些需要反复琢磨才能理解的精华内容往往最具价值。

产品设计的终极境界
Naval引用SpaceX猛禽发动机的迭代过程，阐释优秀产品的本质特征：难以改动。当产品经过持续优化达到“增一分则多，减一分则少”的状态时，便形成了最理想的设计。这种理念同样适用于个人成长——通过持续迭代找到最适合自己的发展路径，最终成为“做自己这件事上最出色的人”。

中文翻译：

主题：置身竞技场

尼维：欢迎回到《纳瓦尔播客》。我从纳瓦尔去年在推特上发布的内容中挑选了一些推文，接下来我们将逐一探讨。

灵感驱动一切

尼维：其实这是我的第一个问题。你之前告诉我，你从埃里克·乔根森那里提前拿到了那本关于埃隆的书。书里有什么让你惊讶的内容吗？

纳瓦尔：我大概只读了20%。书写得非常好。它完全是埃隆自己的原话。我认为最引人注目的是贯穿全书的那种独立自主、行动力和紧迫感。

阅读这些东西，你不一定能学到一套按部就班的流程；你无法模仿他的过程。那是为他量身定制的，是为SpaceX、为特斯拉量身定制的。它具有特定的背景环境，但仅仅看到他如何不让任何事物阻挡脚步、如何狂热地质疑一切、如何强调速度和迭代以及务实的执行，就足以让人备受鼓舞。

这让你想起身行动，在自己的公司里做同样的事情。对我来说，好书的作用就在于此。如果我听史蒂夫·乔布斯的演讲，它会让我想要变得更好。如果我读到埃隆关于如何执行的内容，它会让我想要更好地执行，然后我会找到自己的方法。

具体的细节未必能直接套用，但更重要的是，我认为正是这种灵感在驱动着我们。

尼维：这很有趣，因为我认为人们视你为灵感来源——是的，显然如此——但同时你也提出了人们实际遵循的原则。

纳瓦尔：我保持我的原则在较高层面且不完整。部分原因是这样听起来更好，也更容易记住，但也因为这样更具适用性。我在"如何致富"内容方面遇到的一个问题是，人们在推特上用140或280个字符向我提出非常具体的问题，但我没有足够的背景信息来回答。

这些事情需要具体情境。这就是为什么我喜欢Airchat，喜欢Clubhouse，喜欢口语交流形式。以前我做Periscope直播时，当人们问我问题，我可以反过来追问他们，他们也可以再问我，我们可以深入挖掘，试图找到他们问题的核心。

然后我可以说："嗯，根据我掌握的信息，如果我是你，我会这样做。"但大多数情况都高度依赖具体情境，所以很难照搬别人的细节。适用的是原则。这就是为什么我保持我的内容在非常高的层面。

事实上，我认为作者埃里克·乔根森做得很好，他试图提炼出那些可以引用的片段，并把它们变成独立的句子。他正在从埃隆的作品中提取推文。

但我不确定。我只是按照我的风格行事。埃隆有他的方式；他以自己的方式激励他人。也许我以我的方式激励了某人。我从他那里获得灵感。我从其他人那里获得灵感——灵感驱动着一切。

但当涉及到执行时，你必须亲力亲为。

人生在竞技场中展开

纳瓦尔：人生在竞技场中展开。你只有通过实践才能学习。如果你不行动，那么你所学到的一切都过于笼统和抽象。那真的就成了贺曼贺卡上的格言。你不知道什么该用在何处、何时。

这类普遍原则和建议大多不是数学。有时你用"富有"这个词指代一件事，有时又指代另一件事。"财富"这个词也一样，"爱"或"幸福"也是如此。这些都是含义丰富的词汇。所以这不是数学。

这些不是精确的定义。你无法从中制定出一本可以像计算机一样遵循的行动手册。相反，你必须理解在何种情境下应用它们。因此，正确的学习方式是真正去实践，当你在做的时候，你会领悟到事情应该如何完成。

然后，你可以回头看看我发过的推文，或者你读到的德文（可能指David Deutsch）著作，或者叔本华的作品，或者网上看到的东西，然后说："哦，原来那个人是这个意思。这就是他谈论的普遍原则。我知道要在类似这样的情境中应用它，不是机械地，也不是100%适用，而是作为我再次遇到这种情况时的一个有用的启发式方法。"

你从推理开始，然后建立起你的判断力。当你的判断力足够精炼时，它就变成了品味、直觉或 gut feeling（直觉感受），而你就依靠这些来行动。但你必须从具体事物开始。

如果你从普遍性开始，并且停留在普遍性层面——只是阅读原则、格言、年鉴之类的书籍——你就会像那个上过大学的人：过度教育，但却迷失了方向。他们试图在错误的地方应用知识。这就是纳西姆·塔勒布所说的"有知识的傻瓜"。

尼维：我正要提到的一条推文正是这个意思。来自6月3日：
"获取知识很容易，难的是知道该应用什么以及何时应用。
这就是为什么所有真正的学习都是'在职学习'。
人生在竞技场中展开。"

纳瓦尔：我喜欢那条推文。

其实，我最初只想发推说"人生在竞技场中展开"，仅此而已。我想就此打住。但我觉得需要稍微多解释一点，因为"竞技场中的人"是一句名言，所以我想从我的角度稍作阐述。但这是我反复体会到的感悟。

如果你想学习，就去行动

纳瓦尔：我最近又创办了一家公司。这是一个非常困难的项目。事实上，公司的名字就叫"不可能公司"。有趣的是，它驱使我进入了一种疯狂学习的状态。甚至不一定是消极的动机驱动，但我比很长一段时间以来都更受鼓舞去学习。

所以我发现自己更频繁地询问Grok和ChatGPT。我发现自己读更多的书。我发现自己听更多技术类的播客。我发现自己进行更多的头脑风暴。我的思维更加活跃。我甚至愿意在投资之外接触更多公司，因为我在向它们学习。

仅仅是保持活跃就让我自然而然地想要学习更多，而且这种方式并不乏味，也不会导致我精疲力尽。所以我认为，行动会引发出学习的欲望，从而导向学习。当然，还有从行动本身中学习。而我认为，如果你纯粹为了学习而学习，过不了多久就会变得空洞。动机是不一样的。

我们是生物力学构造的生物。当我四处走动时，我的大脑运转得更快。你可能会想，"不，能量守恒——它应该运转得更慢"，但事实并非如此。一些最好的头脑风暴发生在你边走边谈的时候，而不仅仅是坐着谈话。

这就是为什么有一段时间我尝试利用"步行播客"这种方式，因为我非常享受边走边谈，而且我的大脑运作得更好。同样地，我认为行动和学习是相辅相成的。所以，如果你想学习，就去行动。

生活中大多数困难之事，解决之道是间接的

纳瓦尔：就像生活中大多数有趣而困难的事情一样，解决之道是间接的。

这是"如何致富"推文风暴的一部分，意思是，如果你想致富，你不要直接追求金钱。我想你可以像银行家那样（直接追求金钱），但如果你在创造有价值的东西，并且运用杠杆，承担责任，应用你的特定知识，那么赚钱就会成为副产品。

你将创造出伟大的产品，将你自己产品化，并将创造金钱作为副产品。同样地，如果你想快乐，你就要缩小自我，投身于高心流活动，或者从事那些让你忘我的活动，最终你会得到快乐。

顺便说一句，在吸引异性方面也是如此。你不可能走过去对一个女人说"我想和你上床"来吸引她。那不是它的运作方式。地位也是如此。公开追逐地位是低地位的行为，因为这首先就暴露了你在地位层级中处于较低位置。

并非所有事情都必须间接追求。很多事情最好直接追求。如果我想开车，我上车就开。如果我想写点东西，那我就坐下来写。但那些本质上具有竞争性或者对我们来说似乎难以捉摸的事情——部分原因在于，这些是最好通过间接方式追求的剩余事物。

当你真正为自己工作时

尼维：来自4月2日："当你真正为自己工作时，你将没有业余爱好，没有周末，也没有假期，但你也将没有'工作'。"

纳瓦尔：这是为自己工作的悖论，每个企业家或每个自雇人士都熟悉，那就是当你开始为自己工作时，你基本上牺牲了这种工作与生活平衡的说法。

你牺牲了工作与生活的界限。不再有朝九晚五。不再有办公室。没有人告诉你该做什么。没有现成的行动手册可以遵循。同时，也没有什么东西可以关闭。你无法关闭它。你就是企业。你就是产品。你就是工作。你就是那个实体，并且你在乎。

如果你在做真正属于你自己的事情，你会非常在意，所以你无法关闭它。这是企业家的诅咒。但企业家的好处是，如果你做得对，如果出于正确的原因、以正确的方式为正确的人做事，并且如果你能放下未能达成目标带来的压力（这种压力是真实存在且难以摆脱的），那么它就不会感觉像是工作。

那时你的效率最高。你基本上只以产出衡量。你只需要达到自己设定的标准。所以这可以令人极度兴奋和自由。这就是为什么我很早以前说过，尝过自由的滋味会让你无法被雇佣。

这正是那种自由的滋味。它让你在传统意义上的朝九晚五、遵循行动手册、有老板的模式下无法被雇佣。但一旦你突破了那个模式，一旦你走过了没有安全网、没有老板、没有工作的钢丝——顺便说一句，这甚至可能发生在初创公司的小团队中，只要你非常有自驱力——在普通人看来，你得到了巨大的负面因素：没有周末，没有假期，没有休息时间，没有工作与生活的平衡。但是，与此同时，当你在工作时，它并不感觉像是工作。它是你非常有动力去做的事情，而这本身就是回报。

总的来说，我确实认为这是一扇单向门。我认为一旦人们体验过与他们真正喜欢的人一起，以自我驱动的方式从事他们关心的事情，他们就无法被雇用了。他们无法回到一份有经理、有老板、有汇报、朝九晚五、"这周这一天出现，坐在这个办公桌，这个时间通勤"的正常工作。

尼维：我认为这条推文还有一个隐含的意思，我猜是故意的。它以"当你真正为自己工作时"开头，我猜大多数人会理解为"你是自己的老板"。但我读到的另一种理解是，你是在为自己工作。

所以，你的劳动是你自身以及你所是之物的表达。它是自我表达。而这并不是一件容易弄清楚的事情。

通过行动找到你的特定知识

纳瓦尔：我最终认为，每个人都应该弄清楚自己独特地最擅长做什么——这要与他们本质上是怎样的人相一致，这能给他们带来真实性，带给他们特定知识，给他们竞争优势，让他们不可替代。然后他们就应该专注于这一点。有时，直到你做了，你才知道那是什么。

所以这就是在竞技场中生活。除非你行动，并且在各种困难情况下行动，否则你不会知道自己的特定知识。然后你要么会意识到："哦，我设法应对了这些其他人会觉得困难的事情"，要么别人会向你指出。他们会说："嘿，你的超能力似乎是X。"

我有一个朋友，他创过好几次业。我注意到他的一点是，他不一定是最聪明或技术最强的，而且他非常努力——这就是为什么我不想说他不努力。他实际上超级努力。但我注意到的是，他是最有勇气的。

所以他根本不在乎有什么阻碍。没有什么能让他沮丧。他总是笑口常开。他总是能闯过去。这种人要是在一百年前，你会说："哦，他是最勇敢的。去冲锋那个机枪堡垒吧。"

他适合做那种事。但在创业的背景下，他是那个能不断用头撞销售墙、不停地给几百个人打电话直到最后有一个人说"是"的人。所以他会打400个电话，得到399个"不"。他只要一个"是"就满足了。那就够了。

然后他可以从那里开始迭代和学习。所以那就是他的特定知识。它是一种知识。这是一种能力，他知道自己能接受这种情况。另一边有他愿意追求的结果，这就是一种超能力。现在，也许如果他能把这一点进一步发展，或者与其他东西结合，或者甚至只是把它应用到需要的地方，那就会让他变得有些不可替代。

所以你通过行动——通过实践——找到你的特定知识。当你为自己工作时，你也会自然而然地倾向于选择并以符合你是谁以及你的特定知识的方式去做事。

你必须非常享受它

纳瓦尔：例如，看看市场营销，市场营销是一个开放性问题。人们试图用不同的方式解决营销问题。有些人会制作视频，有些人会写作或发推文。有些人真的会站在外面举着广告牌。有些人会交一大堆朋友，只是举办派对，通过口碑传播。

现在，可能对你的业务来说，其中一种方式比其他方式好得多，但最重要的是选择一个与你喜欢做的任何事情相一致的业务。例如，我有很多朋友找我，说："嘿，我们一起开个播客吧。"我就问："你是真的喜欢交谈吗？你是真的非常喜欢说很多话吗？"

因为如果你不喜欢，你就不会享受播客的过程。你无法做到最好。而他们只是想做营销。于是他们开了播客，做了两三期，然后最终就放弃了。

他们放弃是因为，首先，他们不喜欢做播客。我指的不是喜欢一点点，你必须非常享受。如果你想做到顶尖，你几乎要达到近乎偏执地享受那件事的程度。所以他们会录几期，然后他们的读者或听众就会察觉到："实际上这个人只是在问一堆问题，面无表情，似乎并不真正享受，就像在做播客版的'看表'动作。"

而像乔·罗根那样的人——他如此沉浸其中——他如此热衷于与他播客上那些形形色色的怪人交谈，即使没有观众他也会做，而且他在没有观众的时候就在做了，当时他在Ustream上，只有他自己，深夜在某个随机网站上直播。

所以他成为顶级播客并非偶然。所以当你做营销时，你要倾向于你的特定知识和你自己。如果你喜欢交谈，那就试试播客。也许你喜欢以更对话式的语气交谈，那样的话你可以试试像Twitter Spaces这样的实时网络。

也许你喜欢写作。如果你喜欢长篇写作，用Substack。如果你喜欢短篇写作，用X。如果你喜欢真正长篇的写作，那也许是一系列最终汇集成书的博客文章。如果你喜欢制作视频，那么也许你可以使用最新的人工智能模型制作一些视频并叠加内容。

但你必须做对你来说非常自然的事情。其中的一个诀窍是选择一个业务，让你自然擅长的事情能很好地契合，或者在那个业务中选择一个角色，或者选择一个联合创始人。这是一个匹配问题，一个契合问题。好消息是，在现代世界，机会是无限的。

有无限的人，无限的平台，无限形式的媒体。有无限多的事物可供选择。那么，你如何找到你真正擅长的事情呢？你要尝试所有事情，而你要尝试所有事情是因为你要去行动。你要置身于竞技场中。你要尝试应对和解决问题。

所以第一次做的时候，你可能会做一大堆你不喜欢做的事情，而且你可能做得不好，但最终你会磨练出你真正喜欢做的事情，然后你希望找到那个契合点。

暂停，反思，看效果如何

纳瓦尔：我们过去谈到过"成为你所做领域的世界第一。不断重新定义你所做的事情，直到这成为现实。"Akira还把它编成了歌。Akira the Don，愿上帝保佑他。我认为这绝对正确。你想成为你所做领域的世界第一，但要不断重新定义你所做的事情，直到这成为现实。而重新定义能够奏效的唯一方式是通过迭代的过程，通过实践。所以，你需要那个胡萝卜，你需要那个旗帜。

你需要最终的那个奖励来拉动你前进，去实践，并且你需要迭代。迭代并不意味着重复。迭代不是机械的。它不是一万小时，而是一万次迭代。不是花费的时间，而是学习循环。

迭代意味着你做某事，然后你停下来，暂停，反思。你看它效果如何，或者哪里不行。然后你改变它。然后你尝试别的东西。然后你暂停，反思，看效果如何。然后你改变它，再尝试别的东西。这就是迭代的过程，也是学习的过程。所有学习系统都是这样运作的。

所以进化是迭代，其中有变异、复制，然后有选择。你剔除那些无效的东西。技术在发明中也是如此，你会创新，创造一项新技术，然后尝试扩展它，要么在市场中生存下来，要么被淘汰。

正如大卫·多伊奇在寻找好的解释中所谈论的，也是如此。你提出一个猜想，这个猜想受到批评，然后那些无效的东西被淘汰。这才是真正的科学方法。

这一切都是为了找到什么对你自己是自然的，并通过在竞技场中生活、高能动性、迭代的过程来实现它，直到你弄明白，然后你成为"它"的世界第一，而"它"就是做你自己。

凡事归咎于自己，并保持你的能动性

尼维：我们来谈谈另一条推文，我第一次看到时就喜欢它，或者我可能转发了它。我认为人们转发东西，是因为他们看到了自己还没想好怎么表达，但心里已经知道，只是隐含未明——还没有被明确表达出来。

我想那就是人们觉得"我需要转发这个"的时候。

这条推文是1月17日的："凡事归咎于自己，并保持你的能动性。"

在我看来，这就像是：对一切负责，在对某事负责的过程中，你创造并保持了去解决那个问题的能动性。如果你对问题不负责任，你就没有办法解决问题。

纳瓦尔：先回应你关于"这是你已经知道但以你喜欢的方式表达出来"的观点。爱默生经常这样做。他会用优美的方式表达事物，然后你会说："哦，这正是我所想所感，但我不知道如何表达。"

他表达的方式是，他说："在每一部天才之作中，我们都认出自己曾经摒弃的思想；它们带着某种疏离的威严回到我们身边。"我太喜欢这句话了。这就是我试图在推特上做的事情，我试图说一些真实的东西，但以一种有趣的方式。

而且不仅要以真实有趣的方式表达，还必须真正有情感分量 behind it。它必须是最近打动我、对我很重要的东西。否则，我就是在装模作样。我不会坐在那里苦思冥想该发什么推文。更多的是，我遇到了某事，某事在情感上影响了我，然后我以某种方式将其综合起来。

我检验它。我会想："这是真的吗？"如果我觉得它是真的，或者大部分是真的，或者在我关心的背景下是真的，并且如果我能以某种方式说出来，帮助我记住它，那么我就把它发出去。对于理解它的人来说，这并不新鲜。

如果它不是以有趣的方式说出来，那就是陈词滥调，或者如果他们听得太多，那也是陈词滥调。但如果以有趣的方式说出来，它可能会提醒他们一些重要的事情，或者可能转化他们的特定知识，或者可能成为一个钩子，将他们的特定知识在他们自己的头脑中转化为更普遍的知识。

所以我发现这个过程对我自己有用，希望对其他人也有用。现在，对于这条具体的推文，我只是注意到一种倾向，人们非常愤世嫉俗，他们会说，"所有的财富都是被偷走的"，例如，被银行家之类的人，或者裙带资本家，或者彻头彻尾的小偷、寡头偷走的。

"如果你是X，你在这个世界就无法崛起。"
"如果你是个穷孩子，你在这个世界就无法崛起。"
"如果你来自这个种族或民族，如果你出生在那个国家，或者如果你跛足、残疾或失明，"等等，你在这个世界就无法崛起。

问题在于，是的，世界上确实存在真正的障碍。这不是一个公平的竞技场，公平只存在于孩子的想象中，无法以任何真实的方式确定下来。但世界并不全是运气。事实上，你知道这一点，因为在你自己的人生中，你做过一些事情带来了好的结果，你知道如果你没有做那件事，就不会有那个好结果。

所以你绝对可以改变现状，这不全是运气。尤其是你谈论的时间框架越长，活动强度越大，你进行的迭代越多，投入的思考和选择越多，运气的重要性就越低。它会退居到远处。

给你一个简单的例子，大多数人不会喜欢，因为他们不在硅谷，但20年前我在硅谷遇到的每一个聪明人，每一个，那些年轻聪明的，每一个都成功了。每一个。我想不出一个例外。我本应该回去，仅仅根据他们的聪明才智给他们做个索引。顺便说一句，Y Combinator 就在大规模

英文来源：

Collection: In the Arena
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.