Naval Ravikant & Kapil Gupta - THE TRUTH ABOUT HARDWORK

This is Naval Ravikant. I'm here with Kopal Gupta, and we're just having a conversation as two friends who like to explore topics fairly deeply, and in a way that we're just trying to understand the truth. And truth is a word that gets thrown around a lot, so I'm not even sure exactly what that means. There's a definition that I like to use, but there are multiple definitions. In fact, this might be a good question: how do you know when something is true? In my mind, very often I know something is true just because it feels true to me. It feels very true. You know it when you hear it, even if you don't like it. Another definition I've used is that truth is that which has predictive power. You can use it to predict the future a little bit. The more accurately you can use something to predict the future, the more true it is. But I'm sure you, Kopal, have very different definitions, so why don't you give me a definition or two of how you know something is true.

Yeah, anyway, I don't get caught up in definitional games too much. I wanted to get into a specific topic, which is you recently wrote a discourse about hard work, which I thought was really, really interesting. And you know, I have a bunch of views on hard work. Maybe I'll start off with a very high level. Like, I think hard work is important, but I think hard work is an effect of something that needs to be done. Like, if you need to do hard work to get something done that you care about, then you work hard. But a lot of what I see going on these days is hard work for its own sake. And I think we live in a very different era than one that we evolved in. We live in an era of almost infinite leverage, and that means when you are working, your decisions echo larger. So there's code working for you, there's people working for you, there's money that's working for you, there's machines working for you. It isn't just that you're standing there with your bare hands and tearing at something. Your tools are tool-bearing creatures. And so because of all these tools available, our judgment matters much more than hard work. So even though I think sometimes you do need to work hard and you should never shy away from it if that's what it takes to succeed in whatever you want, I do think that it gets overplayed in society. So that's kind of my view on hard work, but I think it's probably a little more conventional than yours. So I just wanted to explore it together with you a little bit. How do you think about hard work?

That's right. In fact, one of the things I really think people should focus much more on is figuring out what feels like play to them but looks like work to others. Because that's your superpower, and that's where you'll just outperform everybody. You know, I see with startups all the time. I see lots of people who work really hard but still fail, and often the most common reason is they just pick the wrong thing to do. The world is a big place. It's very hard to figure out what's going to work before it works. Product-market fit — this thing that gets thrown around, coined by Marc Andreessen — is a very difficult thing to achieve. You're trying to predict what the market wants, you're trying to build a product exactly for the market, and sometimes hard work alone won't get you there. I think what you choose to work on, and who you choose to work with, and actually how badly you want it, which is more than just working hard or more important than just the raw hours you put in. There are lots of people running restaurants and meat-space businesses, not in the startup world, who outwork startup entrepreneurs, but yet they don't succeed, or if they do succeed, with much lower numbers or much lower magnitude.

Yeah, it's also — I think sometimes I also think of work as a set of things that you have to do that you don't want to do. If you want to do it, it's not work. An example is you might be grinding at work for ten hours and it's suffering, it's painful, and then you get home and to relax you play video games. But to an alien watching from the outside, playing a video game is more intense than whatever you're doing at work. You're running around with a gun shooting at people, you're jumping over, collecting mushrooms, gold coins, whatever it is. That could be construed as hard work, but because you want to do it, because you can lose yourself in it, there's no suffering. So I don't think people get burned out on work. They just get burned out of work they don't want to do, which is a form of suffering. Not every step of what you need to do is going to be pleasant, of course, but it's really important to align yourself and work where you're not suffering. So when I find engineers who are out trying to be salespeople, or salespeople who are out trying to be engineers, it's better to team up with someone who really enjoys the other side of it, and stick to what you're good at, and team up. That's why I think founding teams are very powerful, where you have one person who can build and one person who can sell, because then neither one feels like they're doing hard work. Each one is doing what they enjoy, but together the company from the outside looks like it's working really hard. And as we know, in a billion-dollar company, the employees aren't working any harder than the million-dollar company. They're just doing the right thing, and the right people are doing the right things in the right way.

And externally, if I'm an investor in a company, it fails, the entrepreneur worked hard — that feels more forgivable socially than someone who's just like, 'Oh, I tried it, I took a shot, the market didn't want it, I gave up quickly.' I used to have an engineer who worked for me who was absolutely brilliant, and he would create great products, and he would work an hour, two hours a day, and then he would very blatantly sit around watching cricket matches or playing Counter-Strike, which was this online game, while all the other people in the office were just looking at him and he just looked really lazy. And people complained to me about him all day long, but he added tons of value by creating the right product the right way at the right time. Yeah, so he could get away with it. He didn't have this pretense of sitting around the water cooler talking or going to meetings. He didn't want to waste time on those things. He was basically either enjoying himself or he was working on what he thought was effective. And I think his talent to some extent allowed him to get away with it, but given the era that we live in, talent matters so much more than hard work, and he would exemplify that.

Yeah, I agree. I mean, especially I think the speed of iteration is what drives learning. So you know, in Gladwell and others, they say ten thousand hours of grinding. I think it's quite that simple. If I do the same thing for ten thousand hours, that's not going to be very effective. If in ten thousand hours I run a hundred experiments, that's great, but it's not as effective as if I ran a thousand experiments or ten thousand experiments. So the speed of iteration matters. That said, it's still not hard work alone, because I could play golf for ten thousand hours and I would never be Tiger Woods. Tiger Woods played golf for ten thousand hours. Yes, it was hard work, but it was also for the sheer love of it. Like, he enjoyed most of those days, most of those times, and it was sort of in his nature and character at some point to not look at hitting the golf ball as hard work. He looked at that as the thing that he both wanted to do that day. So this idea of suffering and sacrifice, all this romantic notion — and it levels the playing field a little bit — I think it also misleads us. It misleads us into thinking that everybody can be everyone.

One interesting hypothesis I heard is that in modern society, one of the reasons we have more unhappy people is because of the myth that everyone can be everything. So if you think you can be Larry Page or Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg, but you didn't make it, it's because you didn't work hard enough, and then you feel lousy about yourself. Whereas the reality is, their talents intersected in the right way at the right time, and they put in the hard work for the thing that they were meant to create. And your talents are going to intersect in a completely different way, in a different place, at a different time. And a lot of life is just searching for what it is that you're uniquely good at, and where and when to apply that thing.

Yeah, I've always had a belief that companies don't fail when they run out of cash. They fail when the founders and team run out of energy, when they basically say, 'Okay, we're done here.' At some level you have to give up on something, and it's pragmatic — there are other things that you want to do more by that point. But if you have an unswerving desire to do something, then usually you'll get it.

Yeah, I'm reminded of that Antoine de Saint-Exupéry line where he basically said something like: if you want to build a ship and hit the high seas, don't gather the men and start giving orders and chopping the wood and building a fire and building a ship. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea. And that is a lot of the role of a leader — it's to inspire people.

Yeah, I was actually talking to a founder the other day of a company that's now worth almost ten billion dollars, and he's done obviously quite well. And I asked him, what would you do differently if you were doing it again? And he said he would micromanage people less, which I thought was really interesting. I did not expect that answer. I thought it would be some other answer about how he could have been even bigger. But he actually just felt like he made a mistake by constantly trying to order people around. And I think it also matters how what you just said is going to be heard, because oftentimes things are heard through the lens of morality and right and wrong and correct and incorrect and good and bad. And so that might be heard as, 'You are right, it is wrong to micromanage people, you should leave them alone.' And I would say it's far more — and I'm sure that he meant it this way as well — that it wasn't that that was wrong or immoral, but that it was ineffective.

Yeah. So when we get to morality, for example, one of the things that Silicon Valley likes to talk a lot about is ten-x engineers, and now it's been broadened a little bit to be a little more politically correct — ten-x performers. But it is true that you can have individuals, especially when they're leveraged through code or capital, like hedge fund managers or engineers, or even on the sales side, where someone can literally accomplish ten-x what the next closest person in the organization can. And the easiest way to see this is founders — a founder can build a company that's a thousand times more valuable than the next founder. So there's kind of this idea of ten-x performers, and obviously it can't be through hard work because they're not doing ten-x the work. That's impossible. Everyone's working hard. So then we pay lip service to the idea of ten-x performers, and everybody wants to hire them, but then we go around paying them one-x or one-point-one-x or one-point-two-x, because society doesn't want to hear this idea that you can actually pay a ten-x performer ten-x. So what happens is ten-x performers all end up leaving and starting their own companies because they're not getting paid ten-x. Otherwise, the only way to do it. So we have a few socially acceptable areas where you can get paid ten-x — basically if someone else is not making the decision. If you made it by yourself or for yourself, or you at least steered the ship long enough that you managed to capture more of the value for yourself, then you get to be a ten-x performer. But I think one of the things that's utterly broken in the startup ecosystem is that we all know and acknowledge that ten-x performers or higher, a hundred-x, exist, especially within certain circumstances and situations, yet we do not compensate them at those levels because it is socially unacceptable to do so.

I think we'll end on that. Thank you, Kopal.