Naval Ravikant - The 3 MOST DANGEROUS LIES about Success [w/ MrBeast, Kapil Gupta & Mohnish Pabrai]

how do you manage to apply discipline on yourself rather than just do what you like you know uh discipline is really overrated discipline is just you fighting with yourself to do something you don't want to do so I would say it's more important to find something that you want to do and that can be productive as opposed to uh trying to discipline yourself self-discipline is is uh it's it's tough you won't sustain it uh like you know Tiger Woods didn't become a great golfer through self-discipline what has to be understood is that where greatness comes

from it's a very murky Affair it is non-linear it is unpredictable perhaps nature in the universe set it up this way that you have to jump in and once you jump in the soup and you're being bombarded through all sides and you live in confusion and you have no idea which way is up if the obsession is there then what happens is through some messy process you find a way you see light at the end of the tunnel you forge a path through the jungle when you come out through the tunnel and someone asks you

how you did it you have no idea the thing that's almost laughable is when you ask a great athlete can you show me how you did that they won't come out and say I have no idea they will provide you with some semblance of an answer which is a non-answer and what they will do is because there's a gun point of their head and their backs against a wall they will create the highlights when the human being who watches that follows the highlights he misses and the reason that he misses is because it's All the

Small Things I can't watch Roger Federer play tennis and swing the racket the same way nor will any description from him on how to swing the racket get me to swing it the right way then we go to intellectual efforts we start asking Warren Buffett why he invests in the company and there he can try and create a mental construct as to how he thinks and how he invests in the company but there are just as many details to Warren Buffett's activities when he decides what to invest in and how he lives his life and

how he thinks as there are to Roger Federer's body running around a tennis court hitting a ball the details are not transmissible they're not copyable you can be inspired to try it yourself but without that sincerity that Obsession you won't get there not only are the details not transmissible the detail is not even knowable ah so Warren and Roger don't even know it themselves absolutely not no great artist knows the things that you do greatest are the things that you know not how you do them I would argue that you're not even there when you

do them you're not consciously thinking about it I find that when I'm speaking I do best when I'm not thinking about what I'm going to say and I don't even hear what I'm going to say until it comes out of my mouth it's like the Bukowski line find what you love and let it kill you is really put everything put everything into the thing you love that that's like the way to really create special stuff but it's also the way to yes you have to be careful given this advice because they're like they're like bodybuilders

who'll be like just go to the gym be disciplined I'm disciplined go to gym but I would argue for those people it's like it's not even discipline they just enjoy weightlifting right because there are people who are jacked but they don't make much money or run a business right if they're that disciplined they would they would be hitting every area of their life they just really like business and there's people like me who just to an extreme level love building companies right it's not even discipline for me it's just in my blood it's what I

wake up I don't think about it I don't push myself I don't need to watch a motivational video to go work I just do it it's programmed in me at this point and I couldn't imagine a world where I don't wake up and do it every day um but I think that a little bit of it is genetics um and just how you're hardwired uh not that it can't be trained or taught and not that you know and obviously the friend group you're in influences these things and over time I think can change it but

someone's just not gonna be able to flip a switch and then just start doing a kamikaze approach to building a business just like like a lot of people try to flip a switch and start bodybuilding and quit majority of the time you know that's uh just not innate to them but I think a lot of us have the capacity to do that in some domain yeah I think if you went about strategically if you surrounded yourself with fellow like-minded people and you know slowly over time switched it uh but if you just try to like

hardcore do it you're just going to lose your mind one of the things that we've talked about before that I always like your points of view is on strategies for success there are lots of variables you need to get right I'm going to list them and I want your quick opinion on a scale of one to ten where 10 means oh this is like a really important thing for Success right and one is no you don't even need that okay all right hard work three or four maybe like early on like seven or eight at

some point but yeah really three or four in Silicon Valley that there might be exceptions because you're playing games winner take all trying to build the next 50 billion dollar company where only one can win so the number one by definition is also it's gonna hit 10 on everything right but for General people going through General Life just trying to be successful hard work really doesn't matter that much because we live in an age of infinite leverage technology Capital media make it so easy to multiply your work that what you do and how well you

do it is so much more important than how hard you do it we'd like to view the world as linear which is I'm going to put in eight hours of work I'm going to get back eight hours of output right it doesn't work that way a guy running the corner grocery store is working just as hard or harder than you and me how much output is he getting what you do who you do with how you do it way more important than how hard you work right outputs are non-linear based on the quality of the

work that you put in but it's true if you're if you're doing anything creative or trying to pursue anything that requires like you to be more successful than a lot of other people competing to do the same thing you got to put in the time energy man yeah and you had to work smarter not harder I mean some people I I say this analogy a lot but since we're on the topic I think for most smaller channels like if they're pulling a thousand views of video and they upload a video every day for 100 days

they'll pull 100 000 views but I would recommend you just think of a really good idea one that people genuinely want to watch put a lot of time into the video and you can pull 100 000 views in a week you kind of see what I'm saying because I've most people that I talk to because I like to counsel small channels sometime just get in the Motions of just whatever you know and it's just like if you just took a step back I haven't even uploaded the last week I don't care you know it's not

like it's that big of a deal like and you just make a kick-ass video like you could like pull exponentially so many more views you know with so much less effort you know yeah the key element of hard work which I must say is an elephant in the room which is rarely discussed in the world is that hard work is considered to be a door prize it seems to be sort of the preparing of the bed of failure um I think that a lot of times hard work is done in order to have an excuse

for the mind when the Mind comes attacking and says how come you didn't make it and if a person is armed with the ammunition that I have worked hard then he has an answer for the Mind whereas if he just sat on the couch and did nothing he would not have that ammunition so many times people do hard work in order to have an answer for the mind because they know they're going to fail anyways and externally if I'm an investor in a company and it fails the entrepreneur worked hard that feels more forgivable socially

than someone who's just like oh I tried it I took a shot the market didn't want it I gave up quickly when you think of the word say successful who's the first person or people who come to mind for you yeah it's an odd answer because uh you know most people think of someone as successful when they win the game and uh it's whatever game they're playing right so if you're an athlete you're going to think of successful uh someone who is a top athlete and wins that game or if you're in business then you're

gonna think Elon Musk or uh you know someone of that sort or in in my mind I would have answered that question a little differently a few years ago I would have said Steve Jobs because he created something or he was a driving force uh part of the driving force and the spearhead for creating something that has changed the lives for all of humanity and that's the iPhone uh you know I think if Mark Andreessen is super successful not because of his recent Incarnation as a venture capitalist which is an interesting one but because of

the incredible work that he did with Netscape you know he he commercialized the web browser Satoshi Nakamoto successful in the sense that he created bitcoin which is this incredible technological creation that will have repercussions for decades to come so in the classic sense I consider those creators and commercializers successful and of course Elon Musk just because he changed everyone's viewpoint on what is possible with modern technology entrepreneurship but that said to me the real winners are the ones who step out of the game entirely who don't even play the game Who rise above it and

those are the people who have such internal mental and self-control and self-awareness that they need nothing from anybody else so there are a couple of these characters that I know in my life um some older gentlemen that I like to kind of learn from and we mentioned our polish friend earlier I would consider him successful because he doesn't need anything from anybody yeah he is at peace he is at health and whether he makes more money or less money or with the next person over from him does better or worse than him has no effect

on his mental state and bearing uh and historically I would say that the legendary Buddha uh or uh krishnamurti who stuff that I like reading they are successful quote unquote in the sense that they step out of the game entirely uh winning or losing does not matter to them uh there's some line that I read somewhere that all of man's troubles arise uh because he cannot sit in a room quietly by himself for half an hour right and if if you could literally just sit if you could just sit for 30 minutes and be happy

you were successful and I think that that is a that is a very powerful place to be but very few of us get there you know um since we have all night arvind I wanted to tell you the story of this uh very stressed out investment banker so there's this guy in New York who's an investment banker working like 100 120 hours a week totally burnt out you know just uh flaming out you know just with this intense and he's of course making a lot of money but he is uh just pressed out beyond belief

so he uh does some research and he finds this little tiny Mexican fishing Village uh which is in a very remote part of Mexico where there is a small like you know one-room Resort uh and no humans just it'll be just he'd be the only guest and there's no one around for Miles he said that's the place for me so he goes over and he books himself for a week at that place to recuperate from New York and in the morning he gets up and he notices that there's a heart uh just off the beach

and this guy this Mexican guy in this Hut have you heard the story before no yeah I know all my stories are original so uh so he sees this Mexican guy in this Hut and this Mexican guy pulls out a small boat a small little canoe and he takes it out in the ocean and then he's gone for like an hour hour and a half and he comes back with two fish and then he makes a little fire and you know Cooks one fish and then has that's his lunch then he goes and takes a

nap and he wakes up in the evening Cooks the second fish and that's his dinner and then you know he's just hanging out of his heart and goes to sleep and then the next morning the banker notices again in the morning the guy wakes up takes his board goes out in the ocean you know gets the two fish comes back again Cooks one fish takes the nap second fish and after three days the banker can't take it anymore okay so he goes and talks to the only human he can which is the Mexican fisherman and

so he says that you know uh when you go out in the ocean could you catch more than two fish and uh the Mexican fisherman said yeah the ocean is full of fish I can catch a lot more fish so he says uh why don't you cash catch more than two fish he says I only need two fish why would I need to catch more than two fish he says so the banker says look if you catch more than two fish then you would have some extra fish you would only eat the two fish but

you could sell it in the market you know so the fisherman says uh and then what he says well you know then you'd have some money and you know as you keep getting these more fish and you get more money uh what you can do is you can get a second boat and hire a guy and he's gonna go out in the boat and fish as well and he's going to catch a bunch of fish too and now you'll have more fish because you'll pay the guy but you'll have some left over and uh you'll

have more to sell in the market so the fisherman says and then what he says then you know we're gonna keep doing this and of course we're gonna have a fleet which is going to be bringing this fish but then we're going to vertically integrate so instead of selling the fish into the market we're gonna set up a canning operation and we're not gonna let those comebacks take all the margin by doing the canning themselves we're going to do the canning and you know we're in this great part of the country you're going to create

a great brand and we're going to have this you know organic you know uh fish and all this stuff and we're gonna can it and uh we're gonna you know send it out all over the world so the fisherman says uh and then what he said and then you know I'm gonna take you public you know I'm I'm I'm I'm your man you know I can take you public I we can do an IPO and then you know you're gonna have uh lots of money and uh you know great life and such and he says

and then what he said then you know when you when you want to take a vacation you can come here and hang out and the fisherman just looks at him that he's already there sorry exactly I actually do think you told me that story but it's one of the things I wanted to share say with the class is don't be like the banker be like the fisherman you know so think of life in terms of the essence of life there are some basic fundamentals the first essence of life is the bankers forgotten is life is

finite okay it's not infinite the second essence of life is that like my dad used to say we come to this world naked and we leave this world naked no one's taken even a pin with them so basically uh whatever we get in this world is going to get recycled back in one way or another so we don't know how long we are on earth uh we don't know how we'll leave and so the best thing you can do is not defer things into the future but take it into the present like the fisherman has

reflections you need a genuine Obsession to succeed a segment from the book The subtle art of not giving a by Mark Manson I wanted the reward and not the struggle I wanted the result and not the process I was in love with not the fight but only the Victory and life doesn't work that way who you are is defined by what you're willing to struggle for people who enjoy the struggles of a gym are the ones who run triathlons and have cheese labs and can bench press a small house people who enjoy long work weeks

and the politics of the corporate ladder are the ones who fly to the top of it people who enjoy the stresses and uncertainties of the starving artist's lifestyle are ultimately the ones who live it and make it hard work is overrated what matters is good judgment Naval ravikant tweeted in an age of infinite leverage judgment is the most important skill let's analyze these quotes in two parts The Leverage and the Judgment the infinite leverage means that your product or service can be replicated infinitely with the internet at no marginal cost and you can get paid

by each of these replications this is why pure hard work is much less relevant in our current environment because you don't have to hustle anymore to make the replications as now you can delegate this to the robots behind the internet as Naval also quoted an army of robots is already here it's very cheaply available the bottleneck is just figuring out intelligent and interesting things to do to them this takes us to the second part how can we build good judgment there are two proven ways one is to iterate fast the more you iterate the more

experience you gain which leads to better judgment the other one is to acquire foundational skills and mental models Navarro vacant tweeted judgment requires experience but can be built Faster by learning foundational skills quote from Charlie Munger you have got to have models in your head and you have got to a radio experience both precarious and direct onto this lattice work of mental models more about building judgment on the link above success is a completely internal metric quote from nasintaleb contrary prevailing belief success isn't being on top of a hierarchy it is standing outside all hierarchies

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