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.
2025-07-26 07:32:13
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.
2025-07-22 09:00:09
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.
2025-07-18 09:58:52
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 a hundred percent 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.
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.
