Work As Hard As You Can - Naval Ravikant

🎥 Jun 01, 2019 📺 ISM ⏱ 3m

A visual curation from Naval Ravikant's podcast on working as hard as you can. If getting wealthy is your goal, you're going to ...

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About Naval Ravikant

In recent appearances, Naval Ravikant has argued that the global economy is entering a period of structural transition that will be economically and psychologically difficult for many people over the next five to ten years. He has described this as a gradual process driven by compounding forces including AI-driven compression of cognitive labor markets, persistent inflation, housing affordability stress, and the monetization of government debt. Ravikant stated that the combination of high prices and high interest rates has produced monthly mortgage payments "dramatically disconnected from incomes" in most major markets, and that AI is "commoditizing the specific form of cognitive labor" that has been the economic foundation of the professional middle class. He has characterized inflation as a mechanism that transfers real wealth from non-asset holders to asset holders, and from workers to capital owners. Ravikant has also discussed the implications of these trends for individual financial strategy, advocating for a deliberate transition from labor income to ownership income. He described the U.S. government's likely response to its debt burden as gradual monetary erosion rather than explicit default, stating that "the option to inflate is available." Following a trip to China, he said the experience changed his thinking about wealth, noting the scale of infrastructure investment, the cultural normalization of ambition, and the "patient long-term building of genuine productive capability" he observed there. He has also spoken about the psychological challenges of modern life, describing social media as "weaponized" and arguing that constant exposure to breaking news can be destructive to mental health.

Source: AI-verified profile updated from Naval Ravikant's recent appearances. Browse all interviews →

Transcript (9 segments)

✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution

Naval Ravikant0:00

Let's talk about hard work if getting wealthy is your goal. You are going to have to work as hard as you can, but hard work is absolutely no substitute for who you work with and what you work on.

What you work on is probably the most important thing, and you can save yourself a lot of time if you pick the right area to work in. Picking the right people to work with is the next most important piece, and then third comes how hard you work. But there are like three legs of a stool—if you shortchange any one of them, the whole stool's gonna fall down. So it's not like you can pick one over the other that easily.

First, figure out what should I be doing? What is something where there is a market that is emerging, there's a product that I can build that I'm excited to work on, and something where I have specific knowledge and I'm really into it? Then surround yourself with the best people possible. And no matter how high your bar is, raise your bar, because you can never be working with other people who are great enough. There's someone greater out there to work with—you should go work with them.

I advise a lot of people who are looking at which startup to join in Silicon Valley to basically pick the one that's going to have the best alumni network for you in the future. Look at the PayPal mafia—they worked with a bunch of geniuses, so they all got rich. Try and pick based on the highest intelligence, energy, and integrity people that you can find.

And then finally, once you've picked the right thing to work on and the right people to work with, then you work as hard as you can. This is where the mythology gets a little crazy. People will work 80 to 120 hour weeks—a lot of that's just status signaling. It's showing off. Nobody really works 80 to 120 hours a week sustained at high output with mental clarity. Your brain breaks down. You just won't have good ideas.

Really the way people tend to work most effectively, especially in knowledge work, is they sprint as hard as they can while they're working on something and they're inspired and they're passionate, and then they rest—they take long breaks. It's more like a lion hunting and much less like a marathon runner running. So you sprint, then you rest, you reassess, and then you try again. What you end up doing is you end up building a marathon of sprints.

Inspiration is perishable. When you have your inspiration, do it right then and there.

People talk about impatience. When do you know to be impatient? When do you know to be patient? Impatience with actions, and patience with results. Anything you have to do, just get it done. Why wait? You're not getting any younger. Your life is slipping away. You don't want to spend it waiting in line. You don't want to spend it traveling back and forth. You don't want to spend it doing things that you know ultimately aren't part of your mission.

And when you do them, you want to do them as quickly as you can while you do them well with your full attention. But then you just have to give up on the results. You have to be patient with the results because we deal with complex systems, you deal with lots of people, it takes a long time for markets to adopt products, it takes time for people to get comfortable working with each other, it takes time for great products to emerge as you polish away, polish away, polish away. Impatience with actions and patience with the results.