Takeaways

  1. Eric Jorgenson talks of his book Naval Ravikant: a guide to wealth and happiness. Naval Ravikant is the founder and CEO of Angelist and one of the most respected figures in Silicon Valley. He's invested in over 200 companies including Uber, Foursquare, Twitter and Notion. This podcast is good for people looking for concepts on self management
  2. A mental model for professionals early in their careers - Eric has advised several people who are early in their careers and advises them to place themselves in a triangle with 3 vertices - Self employed with autonomy, corporate executive with wealth and long hours and with bureaucrat with job security. Based on within this triangle where a person places themselves she should then chart out her medium and short term career goals to align with them.
  3. Using Twitter as a soundboard and repository for your ideas - Eric talks of how Naval uses Twitter as a sort of repository of notes for himself. He tweets thoughts and ideas he has and people respond to them by agreeing/disagreeing. This gives him a free space to see which ideas gain traction and to get more perspectives on them since people responding to him occasionally provide evidence to back their opinion and lastly a debate can, in Eric's opinion, develop the ideas better.
  4. The 'Iron Prescription' way of solving a problem or learning about a field - The 'Iron Prescription' is a method of thinking which demands that you start learning from the ground up and make your way to more advanced knowledge. For example, reading Adam Smith before reading modern day economic magazines. Both Naval and Charile Munger of Berkshire Hathaway suggest this method because it gives the learner a deeper understanding of the problem/field and the ability to think differently about it. The podcast discusses the example of Elon Musk going to the first principles of space travel and essentially coming up with Space X's breakthrough idea of reusing spaceships. The podcast also discusses how this isn't always feasible and thus needs to be balanced with how critical the field is to you as the learner.
  5. What knowledge does Naval have that's unique to him - At the first company Naval co-founded there was a lawsuit between the co-founders and the investors. This needed him to peruse the term sheets carefully and he understood the asymmetry of information around term sheets between VCs and founders. Given that VCs execute several term sheets a year, their proficiency at understanding and drafting them was is higher than founders'. That started his journey of advising young companies which later evolved into Angel list.

Notes

  1. What Eric thinks Charlie Munger and Naval Ravikant would disagree on most
  2. One of Eric's favourite quotes - Impatient with actions and patient with results
  3. How the message of the book changed as Eric was compressing and cutting the source material down? - His primary challenge was breaking down jargon to make it easier for a broader audience to comprehend. He defined the extent to which we would break down his explanation in the book to when a reader could comprehend a tweet storm about the concept being explained.
  4. How Eric started writing the book? - He tweeted an interest in writing such a book and 5000 people replied saying they would be interested in reading it and Naval then gave him the resources to go and write the book. People kept DM-ing him asking when it will get done and that kept him motivated.
  5. Longterm commitments need you to decided multiple times - Eric felt that he had to decide multiple times to write this book and finds that the same is true for any commitment. You don't decide on doing something once and then it happens you have to renew that commitment multiple times to keep at it.