
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- The 40-hour workweek is outdated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
- If you get to 170 or above, the chances of mental illness skyrockets
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
- He went to Dartmouth and has been in the tech industry ever since
- 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
- He researched Naval’s writings from the past 10 years and condensed a million words down to 50,000
- 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
- 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
- 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
- We’ll see more and more people being paid by their output instead of their inputs
- 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
- Write a book, record a podcast, create a trading-algorithm, etc.
- 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
- If you get to 170 or above, the chances of mental illness skyrockets
- 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
- A lot of people with schizophrenia have really high IQs but they have a filter failure and experience information-overload
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
- Some people like Jamie and Jim find reading 10-Ks fun, others don’t
- 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