the Almanack of Naval - 03

If they can train you to do it, then eventually they will train a 

computer to do it.

You get rewarded by society for giving it what it wants and 

doesn’t know how to get elsewhere. A lot of people think you 

can go to school and study for how to make money, but the 

reality is, there’s no skill called “business.” 

products with no marginal cost of replication.This includes books, media,

movies, and code. 

Forget rich versus poor, white-collar versus blue. It’s now 

leveraged杠杆作用 versus un-leveraged.

The most interesting and the most important form of leverage 

is the idea of products that have no marginal cost of replication(没有边际效应的复制?). 

This is the new form of leverage.

You’re never going to get rich renting out your time.

Whenever you can in life, ★★optimize for independence rather 

than pay. If you have independence and you’re accountable on 

your output, as opposed to your input—that’s the dream.

Now we’ve invented leverage—through capital, cooperation, technology, 

productivity, all these means. We live in an age of leverage.

★★★A leveraged worker can out-produce a non-leveraged worker 

by a factor of one thousand or ten thousand. With a leveraged 

worker, judgment is far more important than how much time 

they put in or how hard they work.

A good software engineer, just by writing the right little piece of code

and creating the right little application, can literally create half a 

billion dollars’ worth of value for a company. But ten engineers 

working ten times as hard, just because they choose the wrong model, the 

wrong product, wrote it the wrong way, or put in the wrong viral毒性的 loop, 

have basically wasted their time. Inputs don’t match outputs, 

especially for leveraged workers.

If you have specific knowledge, you have accountability and 

you have leverage; they have to pay you what you’re worth. If 

they pay you what you’re worth, then you can get your time 

back—you can be hyper-efficient.

When you do just the actual work itself, you’ll be far more 

productive, far more efficient. You’ll work when you feel 

like it—when you’re high-energy—and you won’t be trying 

to struggle through when you’re low energy. You’ll gain your 

time back.

When you do just the actual work itself, you’ll be far more 

productive, far more efficient. 

Forty hour work weeks are a relic遗物 of the Industrial Age. 

Knowledge workers function like athletes—train and sprint, 

then rest and reassess复盘.

★★★Tools and leverage create this disconnection between inputs 

and outputs. The higher the creativity component of a profession, 

the more likely it is to have disconnected inputs and outputs.

If you want to be part of a great tech company, then you 

need to be able to SELL or BUILD. If you don’t do either, learn.

Learn to sell, learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable.

★Judgment———especially demonstrated被显露的 judgment, with high 

accountability and a clear track record———is critical. 

10 percent better judgment steering掌舵 a $100 billion ship is very valuable. 

We waste our time with short-term thinking and busywork. Warren Buffett 

spends a year deciding and a day acting. That act lasts decades.

Just from being marginally better, like running a quarter 

mile a fraction of a second faster, some people get paid a lot 

more—orders of magnitude more. ★Leverage magnifies放大 those 

differences even more. Being at the extreme in your art is very 

important in the age of leverage.