June 7, 2020

The Almanack of Naval Ravikant | Eric Jorgenson on Infinite Loops

Check out Infinite Loops Episode Page and Show Notes

Key Takeaways

• 1% of your effort can determine 99% of your results
  • One decision, such as investing in Uber, can determine 99% of your wealth
  • One decision, such as who to marry, can determine 99% of your happiness
• Intentions don’t matter, only action does
  • We judge ourselves by our intentions but others by their actions. That disconnect is the source of a lot of problems.
• The 40-hour workweek is outdated
  • People with high leverage jobs (designers, coders, investors) will get paid more on their performance than the number of hours worked
• Create things that you only need to make once but you can sell to a near-infinite amount of people
  • Write a book, record a podcast, create a trading-algorithm, etc.
  • With these products, there’s a zero cost-margin to sell it to the next person
• People who avoid risk or accountability won’t build wealth
  • “If you aren’t willing to take the risk, you shouldn’t take the upside” – Eric Jorgenson
• When it comes to IQ, there’s little difference between 140 and 145
  • If you get to 170 or above, the chances of mental illness skyrockets
    • It would be better to have a slightly lower IQ and be happier than be a genius but unhappy

Intro

• Eric Jorgenson (@EricJorgenson) is a product strategist at Zaarly and author of The Almanack of Naval Ravikant
  • Eric is planning to release the book late summer 2020
  • The ebook version will be completely free
• Hosts: –Jim O’Shaughnessy  (@jposhaughnessy) & Jamie Catherwood (@jfc_3_)

Books Mentioned

• How to Retire Rich by Jim O’Shaughnessy
  • Back in the 90s, Jim went on Oprah to talk about his book
• The Hypomanic Edge: The Link Between (A Little) Craziness and (A Lot of) Success in America by John Gartner
  • The book talks about why America is filled with people who are hard workers and take big risks
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
  • Jim loved this book 

Who Is Naval Ravikant?

• Naval immigrated from India and lived in New York as a kid
  • He went to Dartmouth and has been in the tech industry ever since
    • He created AngelList
• Naval is known for his Twitter account and podcast appearances

Eric’s Book: The Almanack of Naval Ravikant

• Eric has spent two years creating the book The Almanack of Naval Ravikant
  • He researched Naval’s writings from the past 10 years and condensed a million words down to 50,000
    • The book covers two topics: wealth and happiness
• Everything in the book comes from Naval
  • “Everything is directly from Naval, as close as I could get it with minor editing to make reading easy and feel personal” – Eric Jorgenson
• How did Eric get the idea for this book?
  • He wrote a tweet asking if people were interested in a book about Naval one day and Naval retweeted it. Eric woke up and saw the post had over 5,000 people saying yes.

Lessons From Naval

• 1% of your effort can determine 99% of your results
  • One decision, such as investing in Uber, can determine 99% of your wealth
  • One decision, such as who to marry, can determine 99% of your happiness
• Intentions don’t matter, only action does
  • We judge ourselves by our intentions but others by their actions. That disconnect is the source of a lot of problems.
    • “We’re geniuses in seeing the flaws in everyone else and we are blind, deaf, and dumb in trying to see them in ourselves “ – Jim O’Shaughnessy
• The 40-hour workweek is outdated
  • We’ll see more and more people being paid by their output instead of their inputs
    • People with high leverage jobs (designers, coders, investors) will get paid more on their performance than the number of hours worked
• Create things that you only need to make once but you can sell to a near-infinite amount of people
  • Write a book, record a podcast, create a trading-algorithm, etc.
    • With these products, there’s a zero cost-margin to sell it to the next person
• People who avoid risk or accountability won’t build wealth
  • “If you aren’t willing to take the risk, you shouldn’t take the upside” – Eric Jorgenson

Being Too Smart Can Backfire

• When it comes to IQ, there’s little difference between 140 and 145
  • If you get to 170 or above, the chances of mental illness skyrockets
    • It would be better to have a slightly lower IQ and be happier than be a genius but unhappy
• Our brains get around 100,000 bits of data every second but it screens almost all of it out because if it didn’t we would go crazy
  • A lot of people with schizophrenia have really high IQs but they have a filter failure and experience information-overload
    • Jim’s relative has an extremely high IQ but suffers from schizophrenia

Play > Work

• Stop relying on willpower, especially if it’s for doing something you hate
  • Eric tried to force himself to read The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham but he just found it too boring
• You want to find activities in life where it doesn’t feel like work, it feels like play
  • Some people like Jamie and Jim find reading 10-Ks fun, others don’t
    • If you find a job that feels more like play than work, you’ll excel at it and enjoy it much more
• Similarly, education is most effective when it’s also entertaining 

Additional Notes

• Preference falsification is the act of communicating a preference that differs from one’s true preference
  • E.g: A lot of people said they wouldn’t vote for Trump because they didn’t want to admit it publicly but most Americans ended up voting for him

Infinite Loops : IQ, life advice, naval, naval ravikant
Notes By Alex Wiec