Naval Ravikant

管理人群 || Curate People

2025-11-08T00:12:57+00:00

Nivi: You’re listening to the Naval Podcast. Today we’re going to be talking about recruiting, hiring, team, and culture.

The Best Only Want to Work With the Best

Nivi: There’s a famous quote from Vinod Khosla, “The team you build is the company you build.” Or in other words, they told you it was a technology game when it’s really a recruiting game.

So I pulled up a tweet from Naval from August 2025: “Founders can delegate everything except recruiting, fundraising, strategy, and product vision.”

Naval: Recruiting is the most important thing because you need creativity; you need motivated people. Ideally, the early people are all geniuses. They’re self-managing, low-ego, hardworking, highly competent, builders, technical—maybe one or two sellers—but you can’t watch everything. You can’t micromanage everything.

The early people are the DNA of the company. When you outsource recruiting, when you have other people hiring and interviewing and making hiring decisions without your direct involvement and veto, that’s a sad day. That’s the day that the company’s no longer being driven directly by you.

There’s now a fly-by-wire element in between. There’s some mechanical linkage going through another human, often at a distance. And other people are not going to have the same level of selectivity that you will as a founder.

The important size at which a company starts changing is not some arbitrary number, like 20 or 30 or 40. It’s the point at which the founder is not directly recruiting and managing everyone. The moment that there are middle layers of management, then you are somewhat disconnected from the company, and your ability to directly drive a product team that can take the company from zero to one goes away.

So we really cannot outsource recruiting. People think you can. They hire recruiters, for example. Maybe you can outsource a little bit of sourcing, but I would even argue that’s difficult. The reason recruiting is so, so, so important—and a lot of it is obvious, I’ll skip the obvious reasons—but one non-obvious reason is that the best people truly only want to work with the best people.

Working with anyone who’s not at their level is a cognitive load upon them. And the more people they’re surrounded by who are not as good as they are, the more keenly they’re aware that they belong somewhere else, or they should be doing their own thing.

The best teams are mutually motivated. They reinforce each other. Everyone’s trying to impress each other.

One good test is when you’re recruiting a new person, you should be able to say to them, “Walk into that room where the rest of the team is sitting. Take anyone you want—pick them at random—pull them aside for 30 minutes, and interview them. And if you aren’t impressed by them, don’t join.”

When you do that test, you will instinctively flinch at the idea of them interviewing randomly a certain person that’s kind of in the back of your mind. That’s the person you need to let go. Because that’s the person keeping you from having this high-functioning team that all wants to impress each other. That’s the bar you have to keep, especially for all the people you’re going to directly manage—the first 20, the first 30, the first 40, the first 10—whatever that number is.

In those early people that you’re going to directly manage, what are you looking for?

There’s the old Warren Buffett line of “Intelligence, energy, integrity.” I would add “low ego.” Low-ego people are just much easier to manage. They tend to engage less in interpersonal conflict. They care more about the work than about politicking or fighting for credit.

You just scale better. You’ll be able to manage 30 or 40 low-ego people when you might only be able to manage five high-ego people, because you’re always massaging their egos.

So I think Vinod’s phrase is absolutely correct: the team you build is the company you build, especially for the first N people that you are directly managing—they’re the DNA of the company.

You’ll Never Be Able to Hire Anybody Better Than You

Naval: Back to the tweet: You can’t outsource fundraising because investors are betting on you. If you’re outsourcing fundraising, whoever you’re outsourcing to is really the person running the company. Good investors, certainly, are not going to back a company where there’s a proxy fundraiser, which is why companies that raise money through bankers are always starting off on the wrong foot.

You shouldn’t need a banker to raise money for you. Now, in later rounds it’s a little different because you’re reaching money that’s outside of the normal venture market. But especially in early stage, if you’re engaging a banker, that’s symptomatic of a deeper problem.

Strategy: You have to set and communicate the strategy.

Product vision: This is the one that’s up for debate. There are some founders who outsource product vision, but I would argue that because your job here is to take the best team you can find and distill their energy into a perfect product—to instantiate their knowledge and creativity into a product—you need to unify the product vision.

One person needs to hold any complex product entirely in their head. And this is where it helps to have more than one founder, because it’s rare that someone can fundraise and recruit and hold product vision entirely in their head.

Steve Jobs was one of these people. Elon Musk is probably another one. But usually you see a two-person team: one person who’s better at selling—although it helps if they have some builder background so they know what they’re talking about—and one person who’s better at building, but it helps if they have a little bit of a seller bone because they’re probably going to be recruiting the other builders.

I don’t think you can outsource any of those four.

There are cases where product vision has been outsourced—there’s some brilliant person underneath who’s driving the product vision—but those are rare. Usually all four are handled by the core founding team.

Nivi: There will never be a better recruiter in the company than the founder. And I mean that in two ways.

One, in any successful startup, the founder is always a great recruiter.

But there’s also the flip side of that, which is the quality of the founder as a recruiter, as a human being, or as a contributor, is a cap on the quality of anybody you’re going to bring into the organization.

You’re never going to be able to hire anybody who’s better than you are.

Naval: Right. People say, “Hire people who are better than you.” I don’t think that really works. People who are better than you don’t want to work for you for long.

Now, it may be different down the road when you’ve built a huge enterprise and there’s a network effect and an amazing product. Then maybe you can hire people who are better than you because you’re bringing a lot more than just you. But early on, all you’re bringing to the startup is you. And for people to want to work for you, you have to be at least on their level.

This is why I think early-stage investors judge the founding team so heavily. They don’t even care about early progress—at least the good ones don’t—or about partnerships or domain expertise. They just want to see how good you are. And the clearest way you can show how good you are is by recruiting great people.

Break Every Rule to Get the Best People

Nivi: Another reason you can’t outsource recruiting is that recruiting takes a tremendous amount of creativity. Otherwise, you’re going to be doing the same cookie-cutter stuff that every other company in the world is doing, and you’re going to end up with the same interchangeable talent every other company has.

Naval: So don’t take the fact that you don’t know anything about recruiting as a negative. Absolutely. In my own most recent company, I think I’ve recruited the best team I’ve ever worked with by far, and I’ve broken so many rules.

Every single hire, we had to break some core rule of recruiting. I won’t go into all of them because some of those are still tricks that are valid in the environment. Some of those are probably pushing boundaries.

But we break every rule.

We break all the objections around commuting.

We’ll break the objections around “Oh, I’m having a kid.”

We’ll break the objections around “Oh, I can’t afford to exercise these options.”

We’ll break the objections around “Oh, but I’m at a university.”

We’ll even break the objections around people who may have goals, like, “Oh, I want to be surrounded by the best scientists,” or, “I want to work in a different kind of environment.”

In the 2025 environment, everyone is trying so hard to recruit AI people and engineers. The demand for top-level engineers is higher than ever because they’re so leveraged through the new tools, and you can just see that in the salary offers that are going out to the top people. You just have to be incredibly creative. You just have to break rules.

This is another reason why you can’t outsource recruiting. Because when you outsource it, you are outsourcing to someone else who doesn’t know what rules they can break and what they can’t—they’re HR, or they’re afraid that they’ll break some rule that you’re not going to be happy with them breaking.

But as a founder, you can break rules around the cap table. You might be giving a certain amount of stock to each employee, but one might come along for whom you have to break the rules—or you have to convince them why you can’t break the rules for them—or you have to structure their stock compensation a different way, or their salary in a certain way, or their start date, or their hours, or their location, or their title, or who they’re working with, or who they’re reporting to.

Or what their office is like, or who they get to hire, or what say they get to have in what part of the product, or in what part of the company, or how they get to straddle roles across different parts of the company.

You’re going to have to break rules to get the best people because the best people are not cogs in a machine. They don’t fit into a neat and comfortable place. They’re multidisciplinary, and they have to temporarily don an identity of, “Oh, I’m an electrical engineer,” “I’m a software engineer,” “I’m a marketer,” “I’m a product manager,” whatever. But the great people are capable of anything. They chose to specialize in a particular thing, but their input is valuable everywhere.

And they’re respected by a group of peers. My co-founder has a phrase he likes to use from Latin: primus inter pares—first among equals—where they’re all peers. But each person, given their expertise and their particular know-how, is acknowledged by the others as being the first among equals in a given domain.

So one person might be better at naming and branding. One person might be better at industrial design. Another person might be better at electrical engineering or software engineering, or have taste in a different domain. But a great team will have multidisciplinary people who are each capable of doing many jobs, but are specialized and have extreme taste and judgment in particular areas.

And their peers are smart enough to recognize where they have that taste and will confer upon them the ability to make decisions in that area.

You have to break the rules not just on recruiting, but also in operating the company and how it’s structured. Every good company is idiosyncratic. Its culture is unique to it.

You can’t just transplant it.

It Just Takes a Small Group of People to Create Something Great

Naval: To give you an example at my latest company, we don’t use Slack, which is one of these group chat platforms. And especially in a small company, Slack just becomes a hangout spot.

It’s kind of like email. In email, it’s too easy to generate tasks for large groups of other people. I can fire off an email with 20 to-dos for other people and it takes me five seconds to generate that email, and then it takes up the day of the other people trying to respond to it. It creates this asymmetric ability to waste other people’s time.

Over time, email has degenerated into a medium where there is very low signal and a lot of noise—AKA spam—even well-meaning spam from friends, family, and coworkers.

So we all switched to text messaging, where we understand the barrier to entry is higher. Like, “If you’re going to text me, it’d better be important.” And if you’re texting me a lot and it’s not that important, I’m probably going to mute you. Or if you’re in a group text and someone starts messaging too much, you exit the group text, which is why these large group texts die out over time—because the good people mute them and leave.

Slack and group messaging platforms have a similar dynamic where over time they degenerate into a combination of people asking random questions into thin air, people prognosticating, people politicking, people bickering, people talking about stuff that is not germane to the work. And they become largely entertainment platforms for group culture building—which is fine—with a high noise-to-signal ratio.

Whereas if you don’t have Slack, if you have a question you have to really think about it and try to solve it yourself. And if you can’t, you have to figure out who in the company might have an answer to that question, and you have to track that person down, which is highly interruptive, and you have to figure out how to approach them properly.

You could argue that communication overhead is too high. This limits your ability to scale as a company.

Which is exactly the point.

When you have a small number of brilliant people working together to try to take a product from zero to one, the last thing you want is scale. Scale is your enemy.

It just takes a small group of people to create something great.

Every good founder knows this. One of the reasons Steve Jobs implemented secrecy at Apple was to prevent teams from cross-pollinating too much and being in each other’s business and trying to take credit for each other’s work. It’s also why he moved the Macintosh team into a separate building from the Apple II team. Elon Musk encourages people to walk out of meetings and do standing meetings only. Jeff Bezos limits teams to two-pizza teams. These are all attempts by founders to unscale the company—to break it down into smaller components so people can actually get work done instead of spending all their time in meetings and politicking.

Slack breaks those boundaries. It allows 50 people to be in a group at once and waste each other’s time. If you force people to be thoughtful about their interactions, you move from a meeting schedule to a maker’s schedule. Then people can have uninterrupted free time to be creative. And creativity is all that matters because we do live in the age of infinite leverage, and AI and robotics are making that more clear every day.

You need to let your people be bored rather than busy. Always keeping them busy with make-work is not effective. You need to give them maker’s time—builder’s time—which means large amounts of uninterrupted free time to do deep creative work.

And then when they stick their heads out of that and they’re bored, they can go for a run or they can spend time with their family, or they can even go surf TikTok—no one’s judging—but they get to manage their time better. Whereas Slack takes the disease of meetings and makes it pervasive: 24/7.

So now on top of checking your email inbox, you have to check your Slack inbox. And it has that TikTok-like insidious addiction loop where there’s a lot of slop in there, but once in a while there’s a nugget. So you’re constantly now running through this pile of slop to find that nugget. People can asymmetrically waste each other’s time by sending one message that then 50 other people have to sift through and figure out if it’s slop or not.

So, especially in a small team, one-on-one communications are much better. And by limiting the use of Slack, especially early on, you can force the team to stay small. And when a team is small, people who aren’t pulling their weight can’t hide. You can curate it much better as a leader. You can manage them directly, or work with them directly, and you can actually deliver world-changing products.

Nivi: It reminds me of Nassim Taleb’s idea of never hiring an assistant, because it gives you the opportunity to expand your scale and the assistant ends up having a paradoxical effect of making you busier instead of less busy.

Find Undiscovered Talent Before Everyone Else

Nivi: In July 2025, you tweeted that “The job of a startup is to find undiscovered talent and distill it into a product.”

Naval: Obviously the product vision is there. Obviously you have to find talent. The key is “undiscovered.” That’s the part that we haven’t talked about and that I think a lot of people miss.

If you can identify the talent from afar easily, so can everybody else. You have to find them before other people do. How do you do this? Elon is probably the modern master of this. Although Jobs, Altman, and a few other people have also done extremely well in this regard. The playbook that Elon uses is interesting.

First, you pick a mission that’s extremely audacious. There’s only so many hours in a day. You’re going to work anyway. You might as well work on something big. The best people know that deep down. They want to work on something big.

For example, I think the best people don’t want to build video games or slop entertainment that’s wasting people’s lives. They don’t want to build a crypto casino. The best people want to do meaningful work because deep down they’re aware of their potential. And so when they see an opportunity to express themselves as engineers, as artists—hopefully as both, because I think the great engineers are often great artists as well—they’re going to be drawn to a big mission.

So the first thing Elon does across the board is he picks a big mission and he frames it in the largest way possible:

“We’re not going into space; we’re not going to the moon; we’re going to Mars.”

That’s a big mission.

Similarly, Sam Altman stays true to “We’re not just building Sora 2 video feeds; we’re not just building chatbots; we’re building AGI.” He’s not wavering from that. He wants to build AGI.

Elon doesn’t want to stop at just electric cars. He doesn’t even want to stop at self-driving cars. He wants robots. He wants an army of a hundred million robots. Tesla is going all the way. So these are inspiring. These attract the best people.

Second, you’re early. You lay out these missions and you do it before everybody else does. So Elon did SpaceX long before space was cool. People thought it was impossible, and so he managed to attract the best engineers out of NASA and Boeing and Lockheed and universities before everybody else did.

Now, if you’re in a more crowded space, you need to get creative and find the undiscovered talent in that space. By the time someone’s famous on Twitter, it’s too late to recruit them. Everybody knows. Even by the time someone is pedigreed—they’ve won all the awards and the papers—very hard to recruit. You’re going to have to hack your way to them.

So to be a great recruiter, you have to first be a great sourcer, and a great sourcer is a good hunter of undiscovered talent, which means you have to have taste, and you have to have interest in other people, and you have to put in the time.

For example, my co-founder loves to find tinkerers. He loves to find weird projects—not mainstream projects, not the obvious stuff. He’s not looking at who’s training a better AI model. That’s too obvious.

Instead, he might be looking at something adjacent like, “Who’s really into using weird ML algorithms for micro-weather forecasting?” Then he’ll spend a day or two going through their GitHub or going through their paper and really understanding it. And then he’ll go off and he’ll think deeply about it.

And then he’ll come back with a tweak or a modification and he’ll email that person and say, “Hey, I saw your code. I saw what you’ve done. I thought it’s really interesting. I wrote a little bit of code that I think you may want to incorporate or plug in.”

Or, “I have a question,” and usually it’s a good question—it’s a considered question. And the person responds well because here they are off tinkering on the side and somebody has spotted their tinkering and has a good question about it.

And the best part is he’s not doing this to recruit people—he’s doing this because that’s just what he does for fun. He’s genuinely interested. So he finds these weird loners tinkering at the edge, and then I get to go in and recruit them. Most of the time it fails and sometimes it succeeds. But you find really interesting people.

That’s an example of how his taste allows him to source a particular category of people.

So you do have to look for talent in undiscovered places.

Great People Have Taste in Other People

Naval: We recently hired an assistant at the company—an office-manager-type person—and it was just someone I ran into at a restaurant who was incredibly hospitable, and had never worked a day in their life at a tech company.

But you could just tell this person was good at everything they did. Everything they touched was quality and stylish, and they cared. We recruited them; we took a chance.

So it’s about finding undiscovered talent, not the obvious talent. And this is another problem with outsourcing recruiting, which is you hand it to a recruiter, you hand it to HR—they can’t bring you weird people. It’s too high risk. They don’t have the taste themselves. Makers have taste in other makers. Builders have taste in other builders. Engineers have taste in other engineers. Good salespeople have taste in other salespeople. Copywriters have taste in other copywriters. So it’s very hard to outsource that.

As a related aside, one of my pet peeves is hiring marketing and PR people who have no evidence of being able to market themselves.

For example, if you want to hire someone to do your social media, they’d better have a great social media account for themselves. They should be playing their own social media game at the top of the game.

And in fact, I would argue the best social media people are not even hireable. You have to discover them when they’re very raw, when their accounts are small and young and up-and-coming. Or you have to contract with them because they know that their real opportunity is to build a channel around themselves uniquely, and they’ll briefly rent you their channel rather than hand it over to you completely.

Nivi: One thing AngelList has done to be creative in sourcing is to turn our first floor into a cafe—it’s called Founders Cafe—and we have a constant stream of founders: one-man companies, two-person companies that are just trying to get started. And a lot of these companies are not going to go anywhere, and we will have the opportunity to recruit them if their companies fail.

This is not an idea that any recruiter is going to come up with.

Naval: And I would go one level further. I think you should open a cafe like that, not because you want to recruit people, but just because you like hanging around founders and you like having a cafe. That’s going to be a lot more genuine and authentic and won’t feel like work and you’ll do a better job and then there’ll be ancillary benefits to it.

Nivi: Agreed. We opened it because we are in the business of serving founders.

Every Great Engineer Is Also an Artist

Nivi: In August 2025, you tweeted that “Every great engineer is also an artist.”

Naval: I know this experientially, but let’s also talk about what art is. My definition of art is much broader than a conventional definition.

I characterize art as something that is done for its own sake, and done well, and often creates a sense of beauty or some strong emotion.

And a lot of engineers are introverts.

As an aside, I hate the term “incel.” It’s just a way of putting introverts down. It’s the new “nerd,” if you will. If someone says that somebody is an incel, I’m more likely to want to interview them. So let’s move away from the slurs.

But introverts tend to want to express themselves through other things rather than going out and expressing themselves directly. So what are they going to do? They’re going to express themselves through their craft. They’re going to create art.

In my current company, at least half the engineers have serious artwork they’ve done on the side. World-class artwork—everything from elegant mathematical proofs to beautiful computer art, to literally sculpting things with clay, designing clothing, designing doorknobs, water bottles. There’s one who’s done incredible music videos, really good stuff. And I see a lot of the better engineers tinker with the AI art products, much more so than even so-called artists do. I think a lot of artists are scared by AI art products saying, “This is going to replace me.” Whereas someone who doesn’t have that identity of an artist and doesn’t feel threatened by it—it’s just a tool and they try it out to see what it can create.

Anything done for its own sake and done as well as one possibly can is art. And great engineers are also artists. They’re capable of anything. It’s just they’ve chosen to be engineers and focused on building things because engineering is the ability to turn your ideas and your art into things that actually work, that do something useful, that embody some knowledge in a way that it can be repeated and people can get utility out of it. But that doesn’t mean that it can’t be beautiful.

Again, I’m channeling my co-founder, but if you ask him what is the best form of art—painting, music, literature, etc.—for him, it’s industrial design.

For example, if you look at the AirPods—the way they’re sculpted aerodynamically, and still have to be manufacturable on a machine at a certain price point by someone in China, according to a spec.

The way they satisfyingly click into the little resting places in their case with magnets.

The way they pioneered that whole charging case with the Find My AirPods product built in.

The way they hid all the extra buttons.

The way they made it carry spare batteries.

The way they fit inside your ear with the replaceable tips.

That is a marvel of art and engineering.

It took incredible artistry to figure out how to design it so it fits—sculpted—into the human ear, which is a beautiful and natural form, while still being mass-producible at a certain price point and making all of the little elements work together.

When you close the lid on the AirPods, it makes a very satisfying snap. The way the curves around it—those are G3 curves. Those are hand-sculpted and then scanned in—computers can’t generate those.

The way it feels in your hand: it feels like a smooth, polished pebble that fell from the sky.

It’s a thing of beauty. It’s a work of art; and I think people intrinsically know that, which is why they flock to Apple products over various Android products because they are sculpted like works of art. The care goes in there and you can feel it. Apple triumphed as a company of people who genuinely, deeply cared—of engineer artists.

That’s why to this day, even all the other founders, even ones who might have built more market cap recently than Apple has, they still all look up to Apple.

Every entrepreneur from my generation, and I think many subsequent generations, looks up to Steve Jobs and his team more than any other because they were truly artists, not just engineers.

Early Teams Look Like Cults

Nivi: To me, the ideal person for any role is technical, an artist, constantly generating new knowledge, and finally, automating the repetitive parts of their job through code, product or AI.

Exceptions apply, but the ideal candidate for any role should either have these capabilities or be aspiring to gain these capabilities: technical, an artist, constantly generating new knowledge—call that creativity—and automating the tedious parts of their job.

Naval: I think that’s right, and it’s telling that when you talked about automation, you left out automating through process or people—that’s the worst form of automation, because then that adds non-technical or non-creative people into the process. And those people aren’t going to be happy in those jobs for long because they’re cogs in the machine and will eventually be replaced by some piece of technology.

It also changes the environment because humans are social animals. If you start mixing them together, they’re always going to want to accommodate the other people. And so the level of conversation will shift.

For example, if you have a bunch of politicians in a room and a bunch of engineers, you’re not going to be talking engineering for long.

Eventually you will drift into common topics. And in a large enough group, the common topics are always travel and food because they’re non-threatening topics. People always degenerate to that.

If you really want to have a strong culture of people who are mission-oriented, you can’t mix too many different kinds of people.

That’s where the “cult” in culture comes from. Early teams do look like cults. They are monomaniacal; they are weird; but they’re all kind of weird in a similar way. And if you start mixing too many different kinds of people, you’re just going to get a bland average, which is not how you’re going to build a great company or product. It’s a regression to the mean problem.

Nivi: There’s actually an old Quora thread by a famous founder that I won’t name, where he says the last thing you want in an early-stage company is quote-unquote diversity. You want a monoculture of people who all believe the same things. Because if you don’t have that, you’re going to just spend your time arguing about everything, and you don’t have that time at an early-stage startup.

So you need everybody to already be on the same exact page. And then there’s a few things that you might argue about that really move the needle on the performance of the business.

You Can’t Make a Product that is Simple Enough

Naval: Founders want to be popular like everybody else, so externally, they’ll try to project this image that they’re consensus-driven, and sometimes they’re even stupid enough to fall for it. But every great founder I’ve seen up close, or even from afar, is highly opinionated and they’re almost dictatorial in how they run things.

Also, early-stage teams are opinionated. And the products they build are opinionated. Opinionated means they have a strong vision for what it should and should not do.

If you don’t have a strong vision of what it should and should not do, then you end up with a giant mess of competing features.

Jack Dorsey has a great phrase: “Limit the number of details and make every detail perfect.” And that’s especially important in consumer products. You have to be extremely opinionated. All the best products in consumer-land get there through simplicity.

You could argue the recent success of ChatGPT and similar AI chatbots is because they’re even simpler than Google.

Google looked like the simplest product you could possibly build. It was just a box. But even that box had limitations in what you could do.

You were trained not to talk to it conversationally. You would enter keywords and you had to be careful with those keywords. You couldn’t just ask a question outright and get a sensible answer. It wouldn’t do proper synonym matching, and then it would spit you back a whole bunch of results. That was complicated. You’d have to sift through and figure out which ones were ads, which ones were real, were they sorted correctly, and then you’d have to click through and read it.

ChatGPT and the chatbot simplified that even further. You just talk to it like a human—use your voice or you type and it gives you back a straight answer.

It might not always be right, but it’s good enough, and it gives you back a straight answer in text or voice or images or whatever you prefer.

So it simplifies what we looked at as the simplest product on the Internet, which was formerly Google, and makes it even simpler. And you just cannot make a product that’s simple enough.

To be simple, you have to be extremely opinionated. You have to remove everything that doesn’t match your opinion of what the product should be doing. You have to meticulously remove every single click, every single extra button, every single setting.

In fact, things in the settings menu are an indication that you’ve abdicated your responsibility to the user. Choices for the user are an abdication of your responsibility. Maybe for legal or important reasons, you can have a few of these, but you should struggle and resist against every single choice the user has to make.

In the age of TikTok and ChatGPT, that’s more obvious than ever. People don’t want to make choices. They don’t want the cognitive load. They want you to figure out what the right defaults are and what they should be doing and looking at, and they want you to present it to them.

The Founder’s Personality Is the Company

Nivi: Warren Buffett says that you should hire people who have energy, intelligence and integrity. Joel Spolsky put it another way—that you want people who are Smart and Get Things Done.

What’s become important to me on the intelligence side, is that there’s really only one significant test for a candidate, which is: Are they generating new knowledge? Which is just a fancy way of saying: Are they creative?

Because otherwise you’re just hiring a robot whose job should be automated.

Naval: I think that’s correct, and people may get unhappy saying, “Well, you’re calling these people robots,” but I don’t think anybody wants to do the same thing over and over. Everybody wants to do new, unique, and creative things.

Everyone can be an artist. Not in the sense of grabbing a paintbrush and painting—but in the sense of creating new knowledge and enjoying that process. It may just be in different domains. Even figuring out how to hack Twitter or YouTube to get your word out is a form of creating new knowledge.

For example, a couple of years ago the way to get the word out was probably writing blog posts. Now it might be X plus Substack, or going viral on TikTok, or doing a great startup launch video. The target is always moving and people are always trying to apply creativity to hack that system—even fundraising.

Rather than going and meeting VCs one by one, today I would argue you’re better served, if your product shows well, to build a killer launch video and a great demo of the product and try to get it to go viral online—to have a personality and stand out from the noise.

So creativity can be applied anywhere.

The other thing I look for in people is being self-motivated. So you don’t have to tell them what to do. You don’t have to push them.

“Hey, what did you get done this week?” That’s a famous Elon question, and I think it’s a great one. But it is fundamentally still a management question. It’s a manager’s question. It’s not a leader’s question. With leadership, you motivate people.

You give them the place to march to, but they’re relatively self-motivated. Once they know what direction you’re all headed in, they’re going to figure out how best to get there and to contribute to the team getting there. And if they have to be told when to march and they have to be pushed along and flogged, then they don’t belong in an early-stage startup.

So I think being self-motivated is really important. And as I mentioned earlier, low ego is also very important. And these are pretty rare combinations, but high-ego people can just destroy the functioning of a team.

A lot of these principles are very difficult to adopt once the company’s past a certain size.

For example, you could have the criteria saying, “I’m only going to work with self-motivated people. I’m only going to work with people who don’t need a lot of direction, so I can work with as many of them as possible, and I don’t have to look over their shoulder all the time.”

But if you already have 40 or 50 people in the company, odds are you’ve already hired a bunch of these people. Now what are you going to do—a mass layoff? Based on what—some fuzzy feeling about motivation? How much conviction do you have? Probably not enough.

So it’s not only that the team you build is the company you build, literally—the founder’s personality is the company because your principles and your non-negotiables and your values dictate who you’re going to hire.

The best founders have extreme taste in people and in products. They are extremely judgy. For example, in my current company, I have extreme taste about investors. I won’t take money from any VC. I don’t respect most VCs—they’re just money managers pushing money around. A lot of them like taking credit for other people’s work. I’ve had bad encounters with VCs in the past. There’s no VC who’s going to sit on my board and give me advice, which I probably haven’t already heard.

So what am I going to recruit a VC for? I’m going to have very extreme taste about a VC.

My co-founder has extreme taste about builders. I have extreme taste about marketers and sellers and copywriting. I’m never going to hire a marketing person who can’t outwrite me, and that’s a rare person.

It helps to be very judgy. You do want to be very opinionated. Anyone who tells you to listen to others and build consensus and gather feedback is implying that you’re weak, you’re not good enough at what you do, or that you have the wrong approach.

Good founders are incredibly opinionated. The problem is the bad founders are very opinionated too.

Good Teams Throw Away Far More Product Than They Keep

Nivi: There’s a lot of ways people try to assess whether someone has the ability to create new knowledge. Peter Thiel has his famous question: “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?”

He’s trying to find out if that person has opinions of their own. Do they have their own ideas?

I will sometimes ask people whether they have any unique theories that they’ve come up with about their hobbies—even if it’s about squash. I’ve heard people give me unique theories about squash. If you are able to generate new knowledge, you will start coming up with ideas about how squash should be played and taught within the first hour of learning squash.

They might not all be right, but you will come up with novel theories.

Naval also has one question he mentioned on Twitter recently, which I would sum up as, “What do you care about that isn’t popular?”

That’s another way of trying to assess whether that person has the ability to generate their own ideas.

Naval: Thiel’s famous question about a secret is really, from an investor’s perspective, where he’s hunting for the unique bet that the business is making, because he doesn’t want competition. As he says, “Competition is for losers.”

As we learn in basic microeconomics, competition reduces profits to zero, and he wants to make a unique bet. Or as Mike Maples, early AngelList investor, likes to say, “non-consensus and right.” But that’s for investing.

I think in everyday work you want to work with people who are very good at distilling the insight from their work on a constant basis.

Malcolm Gladwell popularized 10,000 hours. 10,000 hours is directionally correct, but it’s not exactly correct. It implies that if you spend 10,000 hours doing something, you get mastery. Let’s put aside whether 10,000 is the right number or not.

It’s not just hours put in—it’s iterations.

How many learning loops do you have that drive the learning curve?

What is an iteration? An iteration is when you do something and then you look at the result; you test the result somehow—ideally against a free market, nature, or physics. Then you ask, “Did this work or not? What part of this experiment worked or not?”

And then based on that, you make a new creative guess on how to improve that thing, and you do it again.

The number of times you can do that rotation, that iteration, the faster you’re going to learn. That’s the curve you want to be on.

Great people will distill insights from every iteration.

So it’s not as simple as finding one secret. Yes, every company makes a secret bet. They have a theory as to how the world is going to work out that other people don’t necessarily have en masse, or it’s not conventional wisdom yet.

But along the way, they’re going to discover thousands of insights, and each one will build upon the last, and that’s all going to be driven by the number of iterations they can do.

One of the problems you run into when scaling a startup is you hire someone who hires someone, and then that person is used to a well-defined job at a larger company. They’re used to getting credit for their work.

They’re divorced enough from the end outcome that all they have to do is kind of impress their manager—the principal-agent problem.

So now what they want is for their work to not be thrown away. A common objection you get when your company scales beyond 20, 30, 40, 50 people is “We don’t want to try this because it’s probably not going to work.”

It’s actually probably the number one thing a founder will struggle with as a company scales—that they’ll come up with more ideas than their organization can execute upon, and there’ll be internal resistance to doing things because nine out of 10 ideas are half-baked.

But really, you’re in a search process; you’re in a learning process; you’re in a discovery process. You’re trying to find the thing that works, and you do have to try a lot of things, and a good founder will have the ability to iterate on many things, and throw away the things that didn’t work, because learning necessarily involves failure.

All New Information Starts as Misinformation

Naval: Remember: All new information starts as misinformation. It starts as not being obviously true, and so it’s accused of being misinformation. Eventually, over time, it’s proven right or wrong. If it’s right then it’s information you can then build upon.

A good founder will struggle with exactly this.

My advice would be: Power through it. Figure out what is your organizational capacity to get things done. Get people comfortable with the idea that most of their work is going to be thrown away—it’s all experimentation and it’s fine for it to be thrown away—and get comfortable with repeated, small failure as long as you distill the insights along the way.

Balaji Srinivasan has another way of putting this, which is wandering through the “idea maze.” You’re taking left turns and right turns and backtracking, figuring out what works and what doesn’t. It might be in the rough direction where you started out, although it’s an ego trip to think that you’re always going to be moving in the right direction.

The biggest impediment here is pride. People stay locked into their original vision and they don’t properly navigate the idea maze.

It’s about taking lots and lots of repeated steps and backtracks and side turns until you find your way through the maze.

This is why, even though from the outside it looks like what a company has done is trivial and it’s going to be easy for competitors to catch up to them—and it’s a common thing to see a startup break out and then you say, “Well, that big company’s just going to crush it.”

No, as long as that startup keeps wandering through the idea maze, they’re actually much deeper down through the maze than the big company is. Even if the big company copies them, by the time it gets to where the startup is, the startup has moved way ahead. It’s in a different part of the maze. The big company can’t resist the urge to explore side hallways that the startup has already explored years ago and knows are dead ends.

It’s this ability to iterate very quickly and to learn from it, and constantly generate new insights and secrets, that is the secret to success.

It’s not just the one simple secret where you ask the founder, “What is the thing you believe that nobody else does?” It’s literally every single day you figure out something new that builds upon something old, and you realize, “Oh, things don’t work like I thought they would. They actually work a different way.”

Nivi: The side effect that you have to be willing to tolerate is that great teams are throwing away most of their work.

Geniuses Only

Nivi: To me, the missing ingredient in most people’s recruiting is intolerance. You should really just treat every employee in the company, including yourself, as an enemy agent that’s trying to destroy the company by bringing mediocre talent into the business. It’s unfortunately just human nature.

Naval: My co-founder and I have a new criterion in our company: “Geniuses only.”

It’s a harsh word, but it sets a very high bar. You can just look around for who’s not a genius. The only way you’re going to attract geniuses, whatever that term means to you, is by having a company full of geniuses.

And if someone’s not a genius, then either you’re transitioning into the phase where you can no longer hire geniuses and you just need to scale up for whatever reason, or you can just show that person the door because you hired them prematurely for the kind of company you’re trying to build.

Now, this is very difficult.

You’re lucky if you can hire one genius a month. You as a founder have to identify them and do whatever it takes to recruit them and motivate them. So it’s inherently self-limiting. Given that a person probably isn’t going to stick around your company for more than three, four, five years—although in some great companies, people stick around for decades—at that attrition rate you’re talking about a 30 to 50 person company.

But if you can even assemble a team of 10 geniuses, you’re way ahead of everybody else. At most companies—the successful ones—the founders, and maybe a few early people are at the genius level. But in the urge and the rush to scale, that gets drowned out too quickly.

Nivi: I think genius is actually even a bit of an underused term.

I think everybody does have a zone of genius. You want to find people who have already found their zone of genius, or they have the capability—they have the slope to be able to find their zone of genius or get close to it while they’re still working at your company.

Naval: As an investor, also, I have an unfair advantage. I’ve often worked with people where it hasn’t worked out in a company and I have to let them go, but I’ve gotten to know them well enough that I recognize their zone of genius, and I can say, “This is not where you’re operating in your zone of genius, but if you ever end up doing this other thing, let me know, because I’ll probably want to invest.”

And that has actually worked out reasonably well in a couple of cases. So you’re right that people often just need to be in the right environment.

The thing you can’t fix is motivation. If someone’s just unmotivated, if they don’t want to apply themselves fully, if they have other things going on in their life, then you just have to cut them off at this point.

One of the things that’s less talked about is often you’ll meet the right person at the wrong time. They just have internal problems—life problems, home problems, health problems, things that are going on—that make them not capable of functioning at the level that you need.

And that’s a sad situation, but it happens all the time.

On a related note: People say, “Oh, I’m burned out. I need to take a break for a month or two and recharge.”

In my experience, that’s largely not true. Usually burnout is a sign you’re working on something that either isn’t working or you don’t enjoy the work fundamentally. Just taking time off won’t fix it.

If you’re really enjoying what you do, generally that’ll give you more energy and more motivation.

There are rare cases—like I know Elon is famous for flogging his teams until four in the morning and calling staff meetings at odd hours of the night and doing crazy death marches. That’s the culture that he sets and builds—that’s fine. In those situations, I could see certain people burning out.

But even there, what they’re saying is, “I cannot sustain this workload in the future.” So even there, taking time off doesn’t work because when you come back, he’s going to put you to task the same way as earlier.

So generally when someone says, “I’m burned out,” I just read that as, “I want to quit.”

Even if they don’t necessarily realize that themselves.

Practice Your Craft At the Edge of Your Capability

Nivi: You have to be careful about who you bring into the organization because they will bring their own sense of aesthetics without even knowing it. They will hire people that are like them without knowing it.

For example, at AngelList, one of the people on the team was trying to decide between two consultants that we wanted to hire, and he was picking the wrong one because he was like, “I think I’ll have more fun with this consultant.”

The fun one was more like them in their personality and their way of carrying themselves and communicating. My idea of fun is working on great products and succeeding.

Naval: David Deutsch would say something like, “When you’re having fun, you’re learning at the edge of your capability to learn.”

If you are not having fun, what does that mean? You’re not getting anything new; you’re not learning.

If it’s anxiety-inducing, what does that mean? That means it’s beyond your capability.

So if you’re operating at the edge of your capability, you’re in flow. You’re learning; you’re doing—you’re being stressed enough for it to be interesting, but not so stressed that you’re anxious—and it’s fun.

It may not be fun moment-to-moment, but when you look back day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month, it is fun. What else would you rather be doing than practicing your craft at the highest level of capability—at your edge?

So I do think the fun criterion applies to business and to jobs.

For example, at my most recent company, the designers are obsessed with design to the point where we are getting a new office space—it’s not their job to design it. Nobody asked them to design it; we probably didn’t even want them to design it. They can’t help but design it down to a T. It’s meticulous.

Similarly, I asked them for a book in which we could just collect various checkpoints along the way of the work that we’re doing—the people that we have. They’re designing their own book binding. They got their own printer to print it on a special paper. They’re obsessive; they can’t 80% design something.

Warren Buffett famously refused to put a bet on a golf game because he doesn’t bet—he doesn’t take risks. He only does sure things. That’s his whole model.

The same way, a good engineer will not let themselves write a shoddy piece of code. And I know you want to be practical and you want to cut corners and you want to get things out the door. But a truly great engineer is not going to create something shoddy. A great designer is not going to halfway design something.

I will delete tweets that have 10,000 likes on them because I catch a grammar or spelling error, or I think of a better way to formulate it. I’ll just kill it. I don’t care about the views because I want it to be done just right. People make fun of me on Twitter sometimes because I’ll put out a tweet, then I’ll change my mind and I’ll delete it after it’s gotten a lot of traction, and I’ll reverse the order of two words or I’ll change one word. Then I’ll wake up the next morning, past the edit window, and I decide I like the original one and I’ll post the original one back up. And I’ve lost all the virality and all the momentum, but I don’t care.

I don’t want to be associated with a slipshod statement. It has to be correct and incompressible; it has to say something true to me in an interesting way.

And that’s more important—that the art is correct than that it’s popular.

Nivi: There’s an old quote that people who are not good at their jobs, you ask them to do something, they try and do it, and then you have to check their work.

The best people, you ask them to do something and they come back with something that you never could have come up with yourself and never could have imagined.

Naval: It’s high-agency people—founder mode, whatever you want to call it—but it’s people who take responsibility for doing the job the best way possible.

You just have to communicate to them what it is that you think needs to be done. And it’s not just communication—communication is a management thing—it’s a leadership thing. So you also have to motivate them—not in some cheesy rah-rah way, but to help them understand the insight you have as to why you think it’s so important.

And if you think it’s really important, then it’s your job to either convince them equally that it’s important or to be talked out of it yourself because you might have made a mistake. And then once they’re convinced it’s important, they’re high-agency enough that they will just go and do it in the absolute best way possible. And to your point about creativity, they’ll come up with new knowledge and new creativity along the way to figure out how to solve the problem, and they’ll solve it in a way you didn’t even know.

Sometimes you’re in a conversation with someone and a disingenuous person is going to latch onto the exact words you said and jump on you. Whereas a smart person is going to understand the intention of what you’re actually trying to say, and a highly intelligent person will often answer the question, not that you asked, but the question you really wanted to ask or you meant to ask.

Curate People

Nivi: If I was going to sum up this whole conversation: The prime directive of a startup is to never compromise on recruiting and talent. I would rather take a short-term hit on customer experience than take a short or long-term hit on the quality of the team.

Naval: I would summarize it in two words: Curate people. And the philosophy that I have going forward in my current company and all subsequent ones is that I only want to work with geniuses.

I only want to work with self-motivated people. I only want to work with low-ego people. I only want to work with people who are builders and engineers and artists, and are at the top of their craft, and that’s all there is to it. You just have to be willing to curate people.

We haven’t talked about firing, by the way, but that’s the other side of it.

You’ll always make mistakes. Sourcing is hard. Recruiting is hard. Leadership is hard. I don’t like the word management because great people don’t need to be managed. But firing and letting go of people is hard too. But you have to do it. You’re never going to have a 100% hit rate, not even close to it.

If you’re not firing, it means that you’re deluding yourself. So you do need to let people go who don’t match up. Otherwise, you’re only going to recruit people who are weaker than them, and your company will slowly deteriorate.

One other side note on hiring geniuses: Only hire geniuses (that’s the current motto—obviously aspirational), but you’re not trying to fill slots. You’re not trying to fill roles. That is a common trap you fall into: “Well, I need to fill a marketing role, so I’m just going to interview a bunch of marketing people and then I’ll hire the best one out of that set.”

Nope. If they’re not a genius, don’t hire them. Just be aware as a founder of what are the rough capabilities you need, and then look for geniuses who can fill those capabilities. And you find a genius who doesn’t fill any of those capabilities, but is somehow hireable, hire them right away.

So collect geniuses. Warehouse them. You’ll never regret it.

Your challenge may be to keep them interested because you may not have the right fit for them. But great people have a way of identifying whatever the problem is and getting involved even if it’s not their quote-unquote job. So when you find someone who’s truly great, you just hire them anyway if you can, regardless of whether you have a slot or not.

It’s a mistake to try and fit great people into pegs and squares and triangles and holes. The real geniuses are incredibly idiosyncratic. They don’t resemble each other. You cannot fit them into a box. By trying to fill a role, you’re inherently trying to fit somebody into a box.

So I don’t even think you necessarily want to hire for roles. Yes, you want people to have skillsets that matter for your company, but good people are much more flexible than these artificial rigid boxes that we make out, which are more of a function of HR and large companies.

Small companies should not be applying large company practices that come from multi-hundred or multi-thousand-person companies—things like HR and roles and compensation brackets and things of that nature.

As a founder, you’re always hacking the system, so you always have to be incredibly flexible on your feet, and when you recognize genius, just recruit them.

合集：在竞技场中 || Collection: In the Arena

2025-10-15T02:58:50+00:00

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.

复杂系统源于简单设计的迭代 || Complex Systems Emerge From Iterations On Simple Designs

2025-10-02T00:12:24+00:00

尼维：我们都见过SpaceX火箭的Raptor发动机图片，如果你仔细观察各种版本，它们从易于调整变得难以调整。因为最新版本的发动机部件数量少，你几乎无法对其进行任何改动。

早期版本的发动机有成千上万的部件，你可以随意更改其厚度、宽度、材料等。而当前版本几乎没有多余的部件可供调整。

纳尔：复杂性理论中有一个理论，每当我们在自然界中发现一个复杂系统在运作时，它通常是由一个非常简单的系统经过反复迭代而产生的。

我们最近在人工智能研究中就能看到这一点——人们只是将非常简单的算法与越来越多的数据结合。它们不断变得更聪明。

但反向操作则效果不佳。当你设计一个非常复杂的系统，然后试图用它构建一个功能完整的大型系统时，它往往会崩溃。因为其中的复杂性太多。因此，很多产品设计都是通过不断迭代自己的设计，直到找到一个简单有效的方案。而往往我们会在其中添加一些不必要的部分，之后又必须回过头来从这些杂乱中提取出真正的简洁。

这一点在个人计算领域也能看到，macOS仍然比iOS更难使用。iOS更接近操作系统这一概念的柏拉图式理想。不过，基于大型语言模型（LLM）的操作系统可能更接近——因为它能用自然语言进行交互。

最终，你必须去除一些东西才能实现扩展。Raptor发动机就是这样一个例子。当你弄清楚哪些部分有效后，就会意识到哪些是不必要的，然后去除它们。

这也是马斯克的一个重要原则。他基本上认为：在你优化一个系统之前，这是最后才做的事情。在你开始尝试让某物更高效之前，首先要质疑需求。

你会问：“为什么这个需求存在？”

乔根森新书里提到的埃隆方法之一是，你首先要找到这个需求的来源。不是哪个部门提出的，而是某个具体的人提出的。

是谁说“这就是我想要的”？

你要回去问：“你真的需要这个吗？”

然后你消除这个需求。一旦去除了不必要的需求，你就会拥有更少的需求。现在你有了部件，然后你尝试尽可能多地去除这些部件，以满足绝对必要的需求。

之后，你才开始考虑优化，思考如何最高效地制造这个部件并将其放置在合适的位置。最后，你可能会进入成本效率和规模经济等层面。

将一个优秀产品从零带到一的关键人物，通常是那个能将整个问题装在自己脑海中的单个人——通常是创始人。他们需要能够理解：为什么这个部件在这里？如果部件A被去除了，那么部件B、C、D、E及其需求和考虑又会如何变化？

这就是对整个产品拥有整体视角的体现。

你可以在Raptor发动机的设计中看到这一点。埃隆给出的例子让我印象深刻——他试图让这些玻璃纤维垫片在特斯拉电池上更高效地生产。于是他去了生产线，发现这个过程太慢，就干脆把睡袋铺在地上，留在那里。他们尝试优化用于将玻璃纤维垫片粘贴到电池上的机器人，试图更高效地完成这个任务或加快这条生产线。他们确实做到了一些改进，但速度仍然令人沮丧。

最后，埃隆说：“为什么会有这个需求？为什么我们要在电池上放玻璃纤维垫片？”

电池工程师回答：“实际上是因为降噪，所以你得去和噪音与振动团队谈谈。”

于是埃隆去找了噪音与振动团队。

他问：“为什么我们要放这些垫片？电池的噪音和振动问题是什么？”

他们却说：“不，不——其实没有噪音和振动问题。它们放在这里是因为电池起火时的热量。”

然后他回到电池团队，问：“我们真的需要这个吗？”

他们回答：“不需要。这里没有火灾问题，也没有热保护问题。这是过时的做法。其实是噪音和振动问题。”

他们各自都按照自己被训练的方式做事——按照过去的方法。他们通过测试安全性来验证，用麦克风测试噪音，然后决定不需要这些垫片，于是去除了这个部件。

这在非常复杂的系统和设计中经常发生。

有趣的是，每个人都说自己是“通才”，这其实是他们逃避成为“专家”的一种说法。但真正需要的是“通才”——一种能够掌握各种专业领域、至少达到80%熟练程度的通才，从而做出明智权衡的人。

尼维：我认为人们要获得这种通才能力——能够掌握任何专业领域——的方法是，如果你要学习某样东西，如果你要上学，就去学习那些具有广泛影响的理论。

纳尔：我会进一步简化，只说学习物理学。

一旦你学习了物理学，你就是在学习现实如何运作。如果你有坚实的物理学背景，你就能掌握电气工程、计算机科学、材料科学、统计学和概率学，甚至数学，因为它们都是应用性的。

我几乎在任何领域遇到的最优秀的人，都有物理学背景。如果你没有物理学背景，也别着急。我也有失败的物理学背景。你仍然可以通过其他方式达到，但物理学能训练你与现实互动，而它又是如此严苛，以至于能把你所有不切实际的假想都击碎。

相比之下，如果你在社会科学领域，你可能会有各种荒诞的信念。即使你掌握了一些社会科学中使用的抽象数学，你可能只有10%的真实知识，而90%都是错误的。

物理学的好处在于，你可以学习相当基础的物理学知识。你不需要深入到夸克和量子物理等层面。你只需学习一些基本的物理概念，比如球体沿斜面滚动，这其实是一个很好的入门。

不过我认为任何STEM学科都值得学习。如果你无法选择学习什么，或者已经错过了学习阶段，那就与他人合作。实际上，最好的人并不只是学习物理学。他们是动手实践的人，是建造者，是不断创造东西的人。动手实践的人总是处于知识的前沿，因为他们总是使用最新的工具和部件来打造酷炫的东西。

因此，是那些在无人机成为军事工具之前就制造竞速无人机的人，是那些在机器人成为军事工具之前就制造战斗机器人的人，是那些想要在家中拥有电脑，而不满足于去学校使用电脑的人。这些人真正理解事物，也最快地推动知识进步。
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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.

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.

You’re like, “Why does the requirement even exist?”

Who’s the individual who said, “This is what I want.”

You go back and say, “Do you really need this?”

It’s that holistic view of the whole product.

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.”

This happens a lot with very complex systems and complex designs.

Naval: I would summarize that further and just say study physics.

优质产品难以改变 || Good Products Are Hard to Vary

2025-09-29T21:47:07+00:00

海军：我认为跨所有不同学科阅读德鲁伊特的著作非常有用。即使他谈论迷思和迷思理论——这些源于进化，但直接延伸到认识论、推测和批判。它超越了他对财富的定义：你能实现的一系列物理转变。这同时考虑了资本和知识，并清楚地表明知识是更大的组成部分。然后这种理解可以应用于商业，并融入到你的日常生活中。它既适用于国家的财富，也适用于个人的财富。因此，有很多部分是相互连接的。他说好的解释很难被改变。当你回顾一个好的解释时，你会想：“好吧，它本来可以是其他样子吗？这似乎是唯一能让这个事物运作的方式。” 所有这些不同的部分以一种相互约束的方式结合在一起，产生了一些你意想不到的涌现特性、复杂性或结果——一种能够完美解释一切的解释。这不仅适用于好的解释，也适用于产品开发。好的产品很难被改变。看看iPhone：这是一款光滑、完美、美丽的宝石。自第一代以来，其外形尺寸几乎没有太大变化。它围绕着单屏、多点触控、内置电池、使其适合放入口袋、使其在手中顺畅滑动——基本上创造了真正个人、便携式计算机的柏拉图式理想。因此，这款产品很难被改变。苹果及其竞争对手在16代iPhone中都尝试对其进行改变，但未能实质性改变。他们只能改进组件和一些底层能力；但实质上，外形尺寸很难改变，他们设计了正确的东西。有一句著名的说法，我认为来自安托万·德·圣埃克苏佩里，他说飞机机翼是完美的，“不是因为没有可以添加的东西，而是因为没有可以去除的东西。” 这飞机机翼很难被改变。当我们确定前往火星的航天器的正确设计时，我打赌在高层次和细节上，它在相当长一段时间内都将很难被改变，直到出现某种突破性技术。基本的内燃机设计在我们获得足够好的电池之前很难改变，之后我们创造了电动汽车。现在电动汽车也很难改变。事实上，现在一些设计师抱怨说，在现代社会，产品和物品开始看起来都差不多了。这是不是因为Instagram？为什么？至少在汽车案例中，它们看起来都经过风洞设计，因为这是最有效的设计。它们之所以看起来流线型、光滑，是因为它们都经过风洞测试，试图找到在空气中阻力最小的形态。因此，它们最终都看起来一样，因为这种设计在不失去效率的情况下很难改变。优秀的作家以如此高的密度和互联性写作，以至于他们的作品具有分形特性。你会在准备好接受知识的层面遇到它。你不需要理解全部。这就是学习的本质。你读了，你理解了20%。然后你再回顾一遍，你理解了25%。你一边听布雷特·霍尔的播客，现在你理解了28%。你再去格洛克或ChatGPT上提问，深入探讨某个部分，现在你理解了31%。所有知识都是作者与观察者或读者之间的交流，你们双方都必须达到一定的层次才能吸收它。当你准备好接受不同的片段时，你会接受不同的片段，但无论你处于什么层次，只要能够进行交流和阅读语言，你总会从中得到一些东西。
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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.”

That doesn’t just apply to good explanations. It applies to product development.

Good products are hard to vary.

That airplane wing is hard to vary.

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?

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.

当我第一次阅读德语时，我并没有完全理解它。 || When I First Read Deutsch, I Didn’t Quite Get It

2025-09-26T22:05:38+00:00

Nivi认为，对于知识哲学（即认识论）的最新研究，可以直接跳到大卫·德鲁克（David Deutsch）。Naval表示赞同，认为如果想了解认识论，直接阅读德鲁克的著作就足够了。不过，他补充说，对于某些人来说，了解相关的历史背景、反论点以及德鲁克的理论来源可能有帮助。传统知识理论，如“被证实的真信念理论”或“归纳理论”，深深植根于我们的教育和日常经验中。例如，归纳似乎很直观：每天看到太阳升起，自然会认为明天太阳也会升起，这看起来像是常识。因此，许多人可能认为这些理论是稳固的，但德鲁克的理论却会挑战这些观点，让人意识到它们并不牢固。他建议读者先从德鲁克开始，如果对某些内容不确定，可以再阅读其他相关著作，然后再回到德鲁克的书重新理解，这样能更好地体会他如何解决这些问题。

Naval还提到，德鲁克本人会引用卡尔·波普尔（Karl Popper），但认为德鲁克的写作风格比波普尔更易理解。他觉得波普尔的著作较为晦涩，而德鲁克则面向更广泛的读者，不是专门写给哲学家或科学家的，而是写给普通大众的。德鲁克更像是在阐述自己的思想，并解释它们如何相互关联。他指出，虽然阅读德鲁克的著作可以让人看到其理论的整体性，但仅阅读认识论部分可能无法获得最大价值。不过，所有人都应该从认识论部分开始，因为这是《无限的开始》（The Beginning of Infinity）一书的前几章。有趣的是，这本书的开头和结尾部分相对容易理解，而中间部分涉及量子计算、量子物理和进化论等内容，较为艰深，需要一定的科学概念基础。德鲁克在提出多重宇宙理论时，需要设计实验来证伪该理论，因此他发展出了量子计算理论，这反过来推动了量子计算领域的发展。这体现了量子物理与量子计算之间的紧密联系。

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尼维：对于知识哲学的最新进展，也就是人们所说的认识论，你基本上可以跳过所有内容，直接阅读大卫·德克斯（David Deutsch）。纳尔：我认为没错。如果你想了解认识论，就直接读大卫·德克斯吧，不用多说。不过，对于一些人来说，了解历史、反论点以及他的出发点可能会有帮助。现有的知识理论，比如“有正当理由的真信念理论”或“归纳理论”，这些理论深深植根于我们的思维中，不仅因为学校教育，也因为日常经验。归纳似乎应该有效：你每天看到日出，那么明天太阳也会升起。这看起来就像常识一样。很多人相信这一点，所以如果你只读德克斯，你会看到他驳斥这些观点，但你自己可能并没有牢固的基础来支持这些观点。因此你可能会想象出一些反例。很久以前我第一次读德克斯的时候，我并没有完全理解。我把他当作其他物理学家写的书一样对待。所以我读保罗·戴维斯和卡洛·罗韦利，以及德克斯的书，给予它们同样的思考、时间和尊重。结果我发现我错了。我发现德克斯实际上是在一个更深层次上进行工作的。他有一系列相互关联的理论，这些理论构建了一个所有部分相互支持的世界哲学。也许读一些其他人的作品会有所帮助，而不是直接跳到德克斯，但我一定会从德克斯开始。如果你不确定，可以读一些其他人的作品，然后再回到德克斯，重新阅读一遍，这样你就能看到他是如何处理这些问题的。德克斯本人会引导你去读波普尔（Popper）。他会说：“哦，我只是在重复波普尔的观点。” 这并不完全正确。我认为波普尔的著作更难以理解，更难读，表达也不够清晰。尽管我认为德克斯和布雷特·霍尔（Brett Hall）会不同意我的看法——他们觉得波普尔写得非常清晰；而我觉得他很难读。不管怎样，我觉得德克斯更容易读，也许是因为波普尔花了很多时间来阐明核心观点。波普尔是为哲学家写作的，而德克斯并不是为哲学家写作的。他甚至不是为科学家写作的。他不是为你写作的。我觉得德克斯是在为自己写作。他只是在阐明自己的想法以及这些想法如何相互关联。我认为，仅仅阅读德克斯的认识论部分，你可能无法获得最大的价值，尽管这绝对是每个人应该开始的地方。这是《无限的开始》（The Beginning of Infinity）的前三章。讽刺的是，在《无限的开始》中，前几章和后几章是最容易理解和最易接近的，而中间部分则比较难读，因为那涉及量子计算、量子物理、进化等主题。我认为人们在这里会遇到困难，因为这需要的不只是数学或科学背景，而是至少对科学概念和原理有一定的熟悉程度。他还在强力论证多重宇宙理论，而大多数人对此并不关心。他们没有深入思考过这个问题，也没有对量子力学的观察者坍缩理论产生执着。因为量子力学并不影响他们的日常生活。从阅读德克斯的所有著作中，我看到他的理论是如何相互关联的。每个部分都触及并依赖于其他部分。他实际上提出了量子计算的理论，并将图灵-邱奇猜想扩展为图灵-邱奇-德克斯猜想，这是他在试图寻找一种方式来证伪他的多重宇宙理论——这本身是一个量子物理理论。为了做到这一点，他必须发明量子计算，因为要设计一个实验来证伪多重宇宙理论，他需要在脑海中想象一个通用人工智能（AGI），进入它的大脑并问：“如果这个AGI观察到某事，它会坍缩吗？” “但现在我需要进入大脑。” “那么，如何进入一个量子AGI的大脑？你甚至如何制造一个量子AGI？我们还没有量子计算机！” “好吧，我们需要量子计算机。” 因此，他提出了量子计算的理论，这开启了量子计算这一领域。这是一个量子物理和量子计算不可分割的例子。
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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.

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.

It turned out I was wrong.

Deutsch himself would refer you to Popper. He would say, “Oh, I’m just repeating Popper.”

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.

“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.

优秀作者尊重读者的时间 || The Best Authors Respect the Reader’s Time

2025-09-24T18:30:53+00:00

Nivi认为，与叔本华不同，Naval是一位面向大众的工业哲学家，他的哲学更像工业设计师的作品，适合大众阅读。她提到，人们常建议阅读像亚里士多德和维特根斯坦这样的“伟大著作”，但她读过之后收获甚微。相比之下，她更喜欢在Twitter上看到的哲学思考，比如Naval的。她建议那些想读哲学的人直接去读大卫·德克斯（David Deutsch）的作品。

Naval赞同这一观点，表示他无法忍受那些传统哲学家的著作。他认为这些书大多是在琐碎问题上进行晦涩的争论，试图构建包罗万象的世界理论。即使是叔本华，当他涉及科学、医学或政治等话题时，观点也显得过时。但他在探讨人性时的见解却具有永恒价值。因此，他建议在涉及人性主题时阅读那些经得起时间考验的经典著作（即“Lindy书籍”），而在追求具体知识、实用价值时，则应关注前沿领域，因为这些知识更及时且更容易过时。

Naval认为，现代人更倾向于阅读高密度、有深度的内容，而不是低密度、冗长的书籍，比如历史书。他喜欢威尔·杜兰特（Will Durant）的《历史的教训》，因为它是对杜兰特12卷《文明的故事》的浓缩，但不会去读那12卷完整的系列。他强调，当前的读者更重视智慧和普适性原则，而非单纯的知识积累。他列举了德克斯、博尔赫斯、特德·奇昂（Ted Chiang）以及早期的尼尔·斯蒂芬森（Neal Stephenson）等作者，认为他们都是高密度思想的代表。他最后指出，真正优秀的作者都尊重读者的时间，而叔本华正是这样一位作者。

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尼维：与叔本华不同，你是一位工业哲学家。就像工业设计师一样，你的哲学是为大众设计的。人们建议你阅读那些伟大的著作——亚里士多德和维特根斯坦，以及其他所谓的伟大哲学家的作品。我几乎读过所有这些内容，但从中获得的价值却很少。而我真正从中获益的是像你这样在推特上进行哲学思考的人。任何想读哲学的人，我都会告诉他们直接跳过那些书，去读大卫·德克斯（David Deutsch）。纳尔：你说得没错。我完全无法忍受你提到的那些哲学家。我也不喜欢柏拉图。我读过的其他哲学作品，通常都只是快速地拿起又放下，因为它们只是在一些琐碎的问题上进行晦涩的争论，试图构建涵盖一切的宇宙理论。甚至叔本华也陷入这种陷阱。当他试图与其他哲学家交流时，他的表现最差。我喜欢他在较短的随笔中写作风格。那里的写作几乎就像在推特上一样。他会在推特上占据主导地位。他的思想密度很高，思考非常深入，例子和类比也简洁明了。你可以读一段，接下来的几个小时都在思考。我认为，我之所以成为更好的作家、更好的思考者，以及更好的人和性格判断者，很大程度上要归功于他。现在，他写于19世纪早期。每当他涉及科学、医学或政治等话题时，显然已经过时了——那些内容已经不再适用。但当他谈论人性时，却是永恒的。说到人性相关的内容，我建议大家去读那些“林迪书籍”——那些经受住时间考验的古老书籍。但如果你想获得具体的知识，赚取报酬，做些有用的事情，那么你就应该待在知识的前沿。这种知识会更及时，也更容易过时。这两者都有道理。但对我来说，不讲道理的是去读那些非林迪书籍，或者不是关于人性的旧书。我也回避那些思想密度低的书籍，比如历史书。我喜欢威尔·杜兰特（Will Durant）的《历史的教训》，因为它总结了他那套12卷的《文明的故事》系列。但我不会去读那12卷的系列。我已经读过很多历史了，我知道他指的是这些内容，因此我不只是盲信他关于高层次概念的论述。但与此同时，在我这个年纪，我想要读的是思想密度高的作品。你可以称之为“TikTok病”或“推特一代”，但这也只是对时间的尊重。我们已经有了大量的数据，也掌握了一些知识，现在我们想要的是智慧。现在我们想要那些可以与我们脑海中已有信息相结合的普遍原则。我们确实想要读高密度的作品，但我认为叔本华的作品就是高密度的。我所有喜欢的作者都是高密度的。德克斯的思想密度极高。博尔赫斯的思想密度也很高。泰德·奇昂（Ted Chiang）的思想密度同样很高。老尼尔·斯蒂芬森（Neal Stephenson）曾经也写得非常高密度（后来他变得高产量、高密度、高一切）。但最好的作者尊重读者的时间，叔本华正是如此。
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Naval: You’re not wrong. I can’t stand any of the philosophers you talked about. I don’t like Plato either.

We do want to read high-density work, but I would argue that Schopenhauer is very high-density work.

But the best authors respect the reader’s time, and Schopenhauer is very much in that vein.

不可能欺骗大自然母亲 || It Is Impossible to Fool Mother Nature

2025-09-22T16:27:33+00:00

总结

Naval 的观点：

承担责任与努力的重要性
- 人们需要为自身遭遇的失败承担责任，这是一种心态。
- 将成功归因于运气可能更有助于成长，但长期来看，持续努力、不放弃并承担结果的人最终会取得成功。
- 理查德·费曼曾表示自己并非天才，只是勤奋的普通人。虽然聪明是必要的，但并非充分条件。
对群体反馈的批判
- 群体倾向于寻求共识而非真相，因此他们的反馈往往是虚假的。
- 家人、朋友的赞美、奖项或批评都可能不真实，无法提供有效的指导。
- 真实的反馈来自自由市场和自然法则，例如产品是否有效、市场是否接受等。
对叔本华的解读
- 叔本华的哲学并非适合所有人，其作品既有晦涩的理论（如《作为意志和表象的世界》），也有实用的思考（如《人生的矛盾》）。
- 他直言不讳地表达自己的观点，不迎合大众，也不追求华丽的辞藻。
- 叔本华的“悲观主义”并非完全准确，但他的思想为人们提供了直面真实的勇气，允许个体坚持自我。
- 尽管 Naval 认为叔本华过于偏执，但他认可叔本华对自我认同的启发：若擅长某事，应坦然接受自己的能力，而非因害怕被排斥而隐藏。
行动与真实反馈的关联
- 个体需将潜力转化为实际行动，因为人类是动态的，通过实践才能提升能力。
- 真实的反馈来自自然和市场，而非群体的虚伪评价。
- 企业应以客户反馈为核心，而非追求媒体曝光或奖项，否则将偏离本质。

核心结论：

真实的成就源于持续努力与自我认知，而非依赖虚假的群体反馈。
通过实践和自然结果检验能力，才能获得可靠的指导。
勇于面对自我，接受并发挥自身潜力，是成功的关键。

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海军：你必须为发生在你身上的一切坏事承担责任——这是一种心态。也许这有点虚伪，但它非常利己。事实上，如果你能多走一步，把发生的一切好事都归因于运气，这或许也有帮助。但某种程度上，真相非常重要。你不想假装。从我观察到的情况来看，事实是：那些非常努力、专注且不放弃、在足够长的时间尺度上为结果承担责任的人，最终会在他们专注的领域取得成功。而每一个成功案例都知道这一点。理查德·费曼曾经说过他不是天才，他只是一个努力学习并非常勤奋的男孩。当然，他非常聪明，这毋庸置疑。但聪明只是必要条件，而非充分条件。我们都熟悉聪明但懒惰的人这个刻板印象。我喜欢骚扰我的所有朋友——包括尼维——指出我注意到的一个问题是，这些人只是远远没有发挥出自己的潜力。他们的潜力远高于目前所处的位置。你必须将一些精力投入到实际行动中。讽刺的是，这反而会提升你的潜力，因为我们并不是静态的生物。我们是动态的生物。你会学到更多，你通过实践来学习。所以，停止找借口，进入赛场吧。尼维：你也喜欢叔本华。你从叔本华那里学到了什么，或者他的作品中有什么令人惊讶的地方？海军：叔本华并不是适合每个人的哲学家，而且有很多不同版本的叔本华。他写了很多内容，你可以阅读他那些较为晦涩的哲学著作，比如《作为意志和表象的世界》，他在为其他哲学家写作。或者你可以阅读他更实用的作品，比如《存在的虚荣》。他是历史上少数敢于直言不讳写作的人之一。他写下自己认为真实的东西。他并不总是正确，但他从不欺骗你——这一点很明显。他深入思考过很多问题。他不太在意别人对他的看法。他唯一知道的是，“我写下的东西，我知道是真实的。” 他也不故作高深。他不用华丽的语言，也不试图给你留下印象。人们称他为悲观主义者。我认为这并不完全公平。我认为他的世界观可以被解读为悲观的，但我读他的书只是为了获取一份严厉的真实。叔本华对我独特的影响在于，他完全允许我做我自己。他根本不在乎大众对他的看法，他对普遍思维的蔑视也表现了出来。现在，我并不完全认同这一点——我比他更倾向于平等主义。但他确实给了你做自己的许可。所以如果你擅长某件事，不要害羞，接受你擅长这一点。对我而言，这很难，因为我们所有人都希望与人相处。如果你想在群体中融入，就不想太突出自己。那句老话就是：高大的蒲公英会被剪断。但如果你想做任何非凡的事情，你必须在某种程度上相信自己。如果你在某方面非常出色，这就需要你承认自己在这一方面很出色——至少要努力做到这一点——而不要在意他人的看法。现在，你也不想要陷入幻觉。任何在投资领域工作过的人，都会不断遇到一些人说：“我在某方面非常擅长。”而他们往往有些自欺欺人。不，你不能说自己在某方面很出色。别人可以这么说，但你妈妈不算。来自他人的反馈通常是虚假的。奖项是虚假的。评论是虚假的。朋友和家人的赞美也是虚假的。他们可能试图真诚，但在这片虚假的海洋中，你得不到真实的反馈。真实的反馈来自自由市场和大自然。物理法则很严厉：你的产品要么有效，要么无效。自由市场也很严厉：人们要么购买，要么不购买。但来自他人的反馈是虚假的。你无法从群体中获得良好的反馈，因为群体只是在努力维持和谐。个体追寻真理，群体则寻求共识。一个无法和谐相处的群体会分裂。它会崩溃。群体越大，你得到的反馈就越不真实。你不想依赖来自你妈妈、朋友、家人，甚至颁奖典礼和奖项体系的反馈。如果你在优化公司以登上杂志封面或赢得行业奖项，那你就是在失败。你需要客户。这才是你真实的反馈。你需要来自大自然的反馈。你的火箭发射了吗？你的无人机飞起来了吗？你的3D打印机是否在预定的时间、成本预算内，按照规定的公差打印出了物体？很容易欺骗自己，也很容易被他人欺骗。但你不可能欺骗大自然。
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