On Elon, iteration and agency

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 a