#16 - Eric Jorgenson: Lessons from Naval Ravikant

My guest today is Eric Jorgenson, the author of The Almanack of Naval Ravikant. Eric and I discussed his decision to drop out of college, how he thinks about credentials, and the differences between specialists and generalists. Of course, we also spent a lot of time talking about his book and many of Naval's ideas.

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My guest today is Eric Jorgenson, the author of The Almanack of Naval Ravikant. Eric and I discussed his decision to drop out of college, how he thinks about credentials, and the differences between specialists and generalists. Of course, we also spent a lot of time talking about his book and many of Naval's ideas. I thoroughly enjoyed Eric's book, but I enjoyed this conversation even more. I think you'll find his stories and thoughts to be entertaining, eye opening, and insightful.

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Selected links from the show:

• Eric's Twitter and personal Website

• The Almanack of Naval Ravikant

• The Kauffman Foundation

• Bo Fishback

• Zaarly 

• Eric's article on credentials

• David Goggins

• Colin O'Brady

• My half ironman article

• Eric's article on generalists and specialists

• Venture Hacks

• Naval on The Knowledge Project

• The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel

• Shoe Dog by Phil Knight

• The Fish that Ate the Whale by Rich Cohen

• Steve Jobs commencement speech

• Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts

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Show notes:

00:49 - Eric's book, The Almanack of Naval Ravikant

01:30 - Eric is a college dropout with a degree. He talks about the specifics. 

04:25 - Proof of work is a great demonstrator of your potential (organizing events, writing publicly, trying to start companies)

05:35 - An unconventional way to get a job

"To tell someone you love what they're doing and you want to work for them is an enormous compliment." 

10:08 - How Eric thinks about credentials

"If you don't have the credentials, you can build your own. It's not to say if you don't have your Harvard MBA you can't start a company or if you haven't gone to Juilliard you can't be an artist."

16:00 - Using an environment to run a program on yourself

19:18 - How Eric thinks about generalists and specialists

27:45 - How Eric thinks about investing

31:00 - Who is Naval Ravikant?

35:25 - The format of The Navalmanack

40:17 - Using The Lindy Effect to assess the relevance of creative work

46:43 - Eric's thoughts on writing additional similar books

53:47 - The difficulty and importance of setting a personal hourly rate

1:00:00 - Using leverage to build wealth

1:09:18 - The relationship between leverage and judgment

"Wisdom is knowing the long term consequences of your actions. Wisdom applied to external problems is judgment." - Naval

1:14:03 - Tactical steps to improve judgment

1:19:25 - How large amounts of free time leads to high levels of output

"I don't even know yet how this knowledge is going to be important, but I trust that it's going to help me make a good decision, feed my judgment, and it's going to have a high outcome eventually."

"You don't have to know where you're going or how a specific action serves a goal for it to be an important and valuable thing to do."

1:24:02 - Eric's most gifted book

1:26:48 - Eric's best purchase under $100

1:27:46 - Eric's advice to a recent college grad

"The further away you go from the most obvious career paths, the more opportunity there is. If you're comfortable with that, there are some fascinating things to be done is some small niches."

1:29:45 - The kindest thing anyone has done for Eric

1:30:39 - Where you can find Eric and the Navalmanack