The Two Decisions That Shape Your Entire Life - Naval Ravikant

you have one life don't settle for mediocrity don't settle for mediocrity and and I think the only like people debate intelligence for example right we talk about IQ tests and all that but I think the only true test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life and there are two parts to that one is getting what you want so you know how to get it and the second is wanting the right things knowing what to want in the first place I could want to be a you know 6 fo8 basketball player and I'm not going to get that so it's wanting the wrong thing so that's wanting something that you can't get that's Wan something you can't get there also wanting something that you don't want yeah wanting something that's a booby prize there are plenty of booby prizes out there too right that that word in about 20 years yeah prizes that are just not worth having or that create their own problems well if you're not careful you can end up in a place in life not only that you don't want to be but one that you didn't even mean to get to that's if you're kind of proceeding unconsciously uh how many people and usually I think people end up there because they are uh going on autopilot with sort of societal expectations or people's expectations so uh you know or out of guilt or out of like uh mimetic desire you know Peter teal has this whole thing from Rene Gerard about how mimic desires our desires are picked up from other people uh and some of those are automatically baked into society like you know go to law school go to med school go to whatever go to business school um or they might be from watching what your friends are doing and you know the other monkeys are doing um or it might just be you know what your parents expectations are might be a guilt you know guilt is just society's voice speaking in your head so socially program so you'll be a good little monkey and do things that are good for the tribe um but I think the the the best outcomes come when you think it through for yourself and decide for yourself and I don't think people spend enough time deciding for example we run on these uh fouryear Cycles you know in Silicon Valley you go join a startup you vest your stock over four years that's the standard okay um uh in uh uh College you know you go for four years high school you go for four years um some things take longer you know you have children they hit puberty 9 years later that's like a 9year cycle until that relationship changes um but we're used to these fairly long Cycles multi-year cycles in which we are committed to things you go to law school you know four five year cycle you go be a lawyer 40-year cycle these are very long Cycles the amount of time we spend deciding what to do and who to do it with very short very very short right we spend you know three months deciding one month deciding on a job where we're going to be for 10 years or 5 years and because a lot of Discovery is path dependent where the next thing you find on the path is dependent on where you were on the previous path you sort of start going down this Vector that is a very long distance people decide frivolously which city to live in and that's going to decide who their friends are what their jobs are their opportunity their weather their food supply their Air Supply quality of life you know it's such an important decision but people spend so little time thinking it through I would argue that if you're making a four-year decision spend a year thinking it through like really thinking it 25% of the time yeah exactly there's the secretary theorem I don't know if you know that one computer after you've done this many people pick the best one of the next however man that's right yeah yeah the secretary theorem is this computer science Professor is trying to figure out how much time he should spend interviewing secretaries and then how long to keep the secretary so let's say he's going to have a secretary for 10 years does he keep searching for you know one year two years 3 years one month two months what is the optimal time uh and it turns out that the optimal time is somewhere around a third about a third of the way through you take the best person you've worked with and try to find someone that good or better so that by the time you've got about a third of the way through you have excuse me seen enough that you now have a sense of what the bar is and then anybody who meets or exceeds that bar is good enough and this applies to dating this applies to jobs and careers this applies generally but the interesting thing about the secretary theorem is that it's actually not time based it's not based on onethird of the time it's iteration based the number of candidates the number of shots you took on goal that's right so you want to have lots and lots of iterations so in that you need to bail out quickly and you need to be decisive quickly that's right you need to you need to take opportunities quickly and bail out quickly correct like if you go back and you look through failed relationships uh probably the biggest regret will be staying in the relationship after you knew it was over exactly you should have left sooner the moment you knew it wasn't going to work out you should have moved on so in that sense I think Malcolm Gladwell popularize this idea of 10,000 hours to Mastery I would say it's actually 10,000 iterations to Mastery it's not actually 10,000 it's some unknown number but it's about the number of iterations that drives a learning curve and iteration is not repetition repetition is a different thing repeating is doing the same thing over and over iteration is modifying it with a learning and then doing another version of it so that's error correction so if you get 10,000 error Corrections in anything you will be an expert at it don't partner with cynics and pessimists you mentioned there about uh the people who've got a nightmare going on at home and are trying to fix the world but a lot of the time that cynicism and pessimism we find in ourselves we see the world whether we want to whether it's because we've imbibed what the news or or the negative people around us have said or it's a bit more kind of endogenous than that it's just sort of in us it's the way that we see the world how can people avoid cynicism and pessimism within themselves yeah cynicism and pessimism is a tough one it's we're naturally hardwired for it again I go back to Evolution I'm sorry to keep harping on Evolution but within biology there's very few good explanatory theories and you know theory of evolution by natural selection is probably the best one so if you can't explain something about life or psychology or human nature through Evolution then you probably don't have a good theory for it and I would say that pessimism is another one that comes out of this which is in the natural environment you're hardwired to be pessimistic because let's say that I see something rustling in the woods and if I move towards in it and it turns out to be food and prey then good I get to eat one meal but if it turns out to be a predator I get eat and that's the end of that so we are hardwired to avoid ruin um and and uh you know just dying so we are naturally hardwired to be pessimists but modern society is very different despite whatever problems you may have with modern society it is far far safer than living in the jungle and just trying to survive uh and the opportunities and the upside are nonlinear for example when you're investing if you short a stock you the most money you can make is 2x you just lose you know if the stock goes to zero you double your money but if the stock is in next to Nvidia and it goes 100x or a THX you make a lot of money so upside through because of Leverage is nearly unlimited uh also in modern society because there's so many different people you can interact with if you go on a date and it fails they're infinite more people to go on a date with in a tribal system there might have been 20 people and you can't even get through all of them so modern society is far more forgiving of failure and you just have to sort of neoc cortically realize and override that you have to realize that you're much more running a search function to find the thing that'll work and then that one thing will pay off in massive compounding once you find your mate for the rest of your life you find your wife or your husband then you can compound in that relationship it's okay if you had 50 failed dates in between the same way once you find the one business you're meant to plow into and it compound returns it's okay if you had 50 small fail Ventures or 50 small fail job interviews it doesn't the number of failers doesn't matter and so there's no point in being a pessimist it's you want to be an optimist but I would say you want to be you want to be skeptical about specific things every specific opportunity is probably a fail but you want to be optimistic in the general in the general you want to be like something in here is going to work out how do you navigate that tension I mean exactly as I said I'm optimistic in the general that if something fails right now then this is a little woooo but it wasn't meant to be it was a learning experience it was an iteration as long as I learned something from it then it's a win if I didn't learn from it then it's a loss but as long as you're learning and you keep ating fast and cutting your losses quickly then when you find the right thing you have to be optimistic and compound into it so you don't want to jump into the first thing you don't want to marry the first person you date necessarily unless you got very lucky um but you you want to investigate and explore very very quickly until you find the match and then you have to be willing to go all in you have to be willing to move your chips at the center of the table so both those uh both those uh approaches are required so it's a bob strategy it's sort of black or it's white and most people are sort of stuck in this gray bit and I'm like half in but I'm kind of don't really know if I am and I also think like labels like pessimist Optimist cynic introvert extrovert these are very self-limiting humans are very Dynamic there are times when you feel like being introverted there are times when you feel like being extroverted there are contexts in which you'll be pessimistic there are contexts in which you'll be optimistic leave all those labels alone it's better just to look at the problem at hand look at reality the way it is try to take yourself out of the equation in a in a sense like obviously you're involved but motivated reasoning is the worst kind of reasoning uh you're not going to find truth through highly motivated reasoning you have to be objective and objective means trying to take yourself out of it as much as possible or at least your personality out of it as much as possible and so to the extent you run with this thick identity and personality it's going to Cloud your judgment it's going to try and lock you into the past if you say I'm a depressed unhappy person yeah I'm going to be unhappy that's a way of locking yourself into your past even saying I have trauma I have PTSD yeah you you feel something there are memories there are flashes there are occasional bad feelings but don't Define Yourself by it because then you lock it into your identity and you're just going to loop on it it's better to stay flexible because reality is always changing and you have to be able to adapt to it adaptation is also intelligence adaptation is survival adaptation is kind of how you're here you're here because you're an adapter and your ancestors were adapters so to adapt you you to see things clearly and if you're seeing them through your own identity it's going to Cloud your judgment in other news this episode is brought to you by function staying on top of your health requires more than just an annual physical which is why I partnered 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