2025-08-26 14:10:26
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 cliche, or if they’ve heard it too much, it’s a cliche. 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’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.
2025-08-07 10:52:32
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 is 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 of the world at it, and it is just being yourself.
2025-08-04 06:19:30
Nivi: We’re hiring an editor for the Naval Podcast, and Naval is also hiring a personal chief of staff. If you’re not interested in either of these, you can move on to the next episode. Let me give you some details on both of them.
First, the editor for the Naval Podcast, which as you already know, is the most timeless and overproduced podcast in human history. The editor will be primarily editing the podcast in Descript. They’ll be editing the transcripts for clarity and posting videos to social media to get Naval’s ideas into the hands of 8 billion people on planet Earth. If you’re already working on another podcast, don’t hesitate to contact us. You’ll learn more with us.
If you’re more of a producer than an editor, feel free to get in touch anyway. We are open to new ideas. This is a part-time role, but there’s infinite room to get into more challenging and creative problems. You don’t need experience, but you need to be extremely smart and high-slope. Here’s some more details on what we’re looking for.
You must have a DSM-5 level attention to detail. You must be a good writer with a nose for design, and you must get things the first time you hear them. Please send less than 750 characters about yourself to [email protected]. Include links to your best work and your smartest tweet. Tell us about a hard problem you’ve solved, new knowledge you’re creating for fun, and share something you’ve made with AI. The shorter your email, the better.
Thanks for considering us.
Chief of Staff
On to the second position. Naval is also hiring a personal chief of staff to work directly with him. This is independent of the podcast. You’ll be working with him to solve problems, including traveling the world to recruit engineers, researching investments, throwing events, personal tasks, and anything else he needs done.
The work will range from prestigious to pauperian. You must be extremely technical, always working, based in San Francisco and willing to travel anytime. The right person probably has a couple years of work under their belt and wants to start a company one day. Again, please send under 750 characters about yourself to [email protected].
Include links to your best work and your smartest tweet. Tell us about a hard problem you’ve solved, new knowledge you’re creating for fun, and share something you’ve made with AI. The shorter your message, the better.
Thanks for considering this.
2025-08-01 07:36:21
Naval: Marketing is an open problem. People try to solve marketing in different ways. Some people will create videos, some people will write and/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 firstly, 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 face and doesn’t seem to really enjoy it, and is doing the podcast equivalent of looking at their watch.”
Whereas someone like Joe Rogan—really, 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 YouStream 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 a 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.
2025-07-30 09:22:28
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.
2025-07-27 08:01:59
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 your self.
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.
