Hard Work & Effectiveness - Kapil Gupta MD & Naval Ravikant

In the business world, hard work has very little to do with effectiveness. A grocery store owner might work 60, 80 hours a week—that might be all Elon Musk is working—but Elon's making a lot more money because of his specific knowledge: knowledge that cannot be taught but can be learned on the job if you have a strong enough desire. The right things in business can't be taught because it's a moving target. I can't teach you how to make money or trade the stock market. No one who's any good at stock trading gives actionable investment advice in a public forum because all the details are too hard to convey. People who ask for stock tips aren't really serious about investing. People who ask for book recommendations aren't really serious about reading. People who ask what business should I build aren't really serious about entrepreneurship. When someone's asking for a how-to in anything, they aren't actually that serious about it. If they were truly serious, they would figure it out. But that leaves the paradoxical question: how do I figure it out? Take the person who became world-class in whatever he did—if he went back and retraced his steps and did everything again the same way, this time by mimicking himself, he would fail. Even he wouldn't be able to do it. Where greatness comes from is a very murky affair. It is non-linear, it is unpredictable. Perhaps nature and the universe set it up this way—that you'd have to jump in. And once you jump in the soup and you're being bombarded from all sides and you live in confusion and you have no idea which way is up—if the obsession is there, then through some messy process you find a way. You see light at the end of the tunnel, you forge a path through the jungle that was not done according to a 'how.' You were flailing the entire time. When you come out through the tunnel and someone asks you how you did it, you have no idea. The thing that's almost laughable is when you ask a great athlete, 'Can you show me how you did that?' They won't say 'I have no idea'—they will provide you with some semblance of an answer, which is a non-answer. They will create the highlights, and when a human being follows the highlights, he misses. The reason he misses is because it's all the small things. I can't watch Roger Federer play tennis and swing the racket the same way, nor will any description from him get me to swing it the right way. We go to intellectual efforts—we ask Warren Buffett why he invests in a company. He can try and create a mental construct as to how he thinks and how he invests, but there are just as many details to Warren Buffett's activities as there are to Roger Federer's body running around a tennis court hitting a ball. The details are not transmissible, they're not copyable. You could be inspired to try it yourself, but without that sincerity, that obsession, you won't get there. Not only are the details not transmissible—the details are not even knowable. Warren and Roger don't even know it themselves. Absolutely not. No great artist knows. The greatest are the things that you do, not how you do them. I would argue that you're not even there when you do them—you're not consciously thinking about it. I find that when I'm speaking, I do best when I'm not thinking about what I'm going to say, and I don't even hear what I'm going to say until it comes out of my mouth. You become as surprised as the audience as to what you're going to say. That is just pure. What does pure mean? Pure is not morality, and purely is not good—there's not good and bad, that's a whole other topic itself. That's actually the next topic I want to get into—another set of assumptions that everybody has that, to understand, you have to leave by the wayside. What we're doing here is trying to focus on what is true, and that means we're going to speak as honestly as possible, which means we're going to be vulnerable, which means we're going to say things that are socially unacceptable and potentially surprising. It's very difficult to speak truth in a public forum. Society is a set of collective lies that we all believe in so we can get along—it allows us to establish lowest common denominator consensus so we don't all kill each other. But there are shared fictions we have to maintain for society to function, and the cost is borne by the individual. It comes back to DNA—not genetic DNA, but DNA in one's sensibilities, the way one is wired. For some people, what society thinks is almost an insult. If we don't discuss truth here, what's the point of having a conversation? It isn't about anyone understanding—it's about speaking the truth.

Freedom is freedom from the mind. The only reason that any human being is not free is because of his mind. It is the mind which creates his tortures. It is the mind which creates his anxieties. It is the mind which creates his conflicts. It is the mind which creates his rules. All that he is confined by, all that he is imprisoned by, is the mind—not anything else.