June 7, 2020

The Almanack of Naval Ravikant | Eric Jorgenson on Infinite Loops

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The 40-hour workweek is outdated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

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_)

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

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 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.

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

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

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

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