Reading Notes of:

How to Get Rich (podcast)
By Naval Ravikant

Hard Work vs Not:  To build a multi-billion $ company, you have to get EVERYTHING right.  You have to have all of the above right, have the perfect team, AND working tremendously hard.  Product Market Founder Fit = how suited you are to this business.  Should be your overwhelming goal.

• Where is something where there is a market emerging, there is a product that I can build and be excited to work on, and something I have specific knowledge in
• 2nd most important is who you work with.  You will always be searching for people who are better than the people you can find now.
• Then it’s how hard you work.
• Nobody really works 100 hours a week consistently.  You break down.  It’s signaling.  It’s more in sprints when you have important things to be done.
  • Inspiration is perishable.   So, when you have inspiration, take action.
• Be impatient with Actions – Patient with results
• Naval:  When there is a problem in one of my companies, I can have no peace until it’s solved.   Might be a personal failing, but it gets you rich.
• We squander our time with the death of a thousand cuts.   You should be too busy to meet people for coffee, while having a clear calendar.  Always be working on the highest impact thing RIGHT NOW.  Be utterly ruthless about avoiding meetings.   Naval says “I don’t do non-transactional meetings” often.
  • If you want a meeting with someone important, you need to make it clear you have something important to talk about.  Be super actionable about it.
• A busy calendar will destroy your ability to build great things.

Working for the Long-Term:  Become the best in the world at what you do.  Keep redefining what you do until this is true.  It can me niche – and that’s the point.   Oprah gets paid for being Oprah.  Joe Rogan gets paid for being Joe Rogan.  Keep changing ‘what you do’ until it aligns with your specific skills.   Keep 2 different foci in mind while you do this:

1. I want to be the best at what I do:
2. What I do is flexible until I’m the best at it:   This is something I can be amazing at, while still being authentic to who I am.  This will be a long journey.
   1. The most important thing for an entrepreneur is to find Founder Product Market Fit.
   2. Where you are naturally inclined to build the right product, which has a market.
      1. If you want to be rich, you have to get comfortable handling multi-variant problems like this.

A lot of times, we suck at determining what we should be doing.  We focus on the things we think we should be doing.  Instead of what we are good at.  So sometimes we have to either listen to the people who know us best, and/or look at our track record.

• We are highly memetic creatures.  We copy what we see around us.  What others are doing.
• Too many times our self-esteem comes from fitting into our social group.
• Being authentic to yourself is how you don’t have competition.   Is someone going to create a better Joe Rogan or write a better Calvin and Hobbs.   Even if others build rockets, Elon is still going to Mars.
  • You might be the best juggler on a unicycle, and there might not be a market for that.  So tweak it until there is.
• If the masses knew how to build great things, and build great wealth, we would all be rich by now.  Fitting in isn’t the route to riches.
• Most people spend too much time paying attention to the competition

for a full transcript + podcast (worth the listen!!) =  https://nav.al/rich