the Almanack of Naval - 02

Technology democratizes consumption but consolidates production. 

The best person in the world at anything gets to do it for everyone.

★★Society will pay you for creating things it wants. But society 

doesn’t yet know how to create those things, because if it did, 

they wouldn’t need you. They would already be stamped out(扑灭).

Society always wants new things. And if you want to be wealthy, you want to figure out 

which one of those things you can provide for society that it does not yet know

how to get but it will want and provid-ing it is natural to you, 

within your skill set, and within your capabilities.

BECOME THE BEST IN THE WORLD AT WHAT YOU DO. 

KEEP REDEFINING WHAT YOU DO UNTIL THIS IS TRUE.

Sales skills are a form of specific knowledge.

But you can improve sales skills. You can read Robert Cialdini, you can go to

a sales training seminar, you can do door-to-door sales. It is brutal残忍的 but

will train you very quickly. You can definitely improve your sales skills.

When I talk about specific knowledge, I mean figure out what you were doing as a kid or 

teenager almost effortlessly. Something you didn’t even consider a skill, but 

people around you noticed. Your mother or your best friend growing up would know.

★★★Examples of what your specific knowledge could be:

→Sales skills

→ Musical talents, with the ability to pick up any instrument

→ An obsessive personality: you dive into things and remem-

ber them quickly

→ Love for science fiction: you were into reading sci-fi, which 

means you absorb a lot of knowledge very quickly

→ Playing a lot of games, you understand game theory pretty 

well

→ Gossiping, digging into your friend network. That might 

make you into a very interesting journalist.

好家伙，这也行......

(★)The specific knowledge is sort of this weird combination of unique traits from your DNA,

your unique upbringing, and your response to it. It’s almost baked into your 

personality and your identity. Then you can hone it.

No one can compete with you on being you.

Most of life is a search for who and what needs you the most.

Society, business, & money are downstream of technology, which is itself 

downstream of science. Science applied is the engine of humanity.

Corollary: Applied Scientists are the most powerful people in 

the world. This will be more obvious in the coming years.

Specific knowledge is found much more by pursuing your 

innate talents, your genuine curiosity, and your passion. 

★

Specific knowledge is found much more by pursuing your innate先天的 talents, your

genuine curiosity, and your passion. It’s not by going to school for whatever is the

hottest job; it’s not by going into whatever field investors say is the hottest.

ery often, specific knowledge is at the edge of knowledge. It’s 

also stuff that’s only now being figured out or is really hard to figure out.

The internet has massively broadened the possible space of 

careers事业. Most people haven’t figured this out yet.

★You can go on the internet, and you can find your audience. And you can build a business, 

and create a product, and build wealth, and make people happy just uniquely /ju:'ni:kli/ 

expressing yourself through the internet.

The internet enables any niche interest, as long as you’re the best person at it to scale 

out.And the great news is because every human is different, everyone is the best at something—

being themselves.

★“Escape competition through authenticity.” Basically, when you’re competing with 

people,it’s because you’re copying them. It’s because you’re trying to do the same thing. 

But every human is different. Don’t copy.

If you are fundamentally building and marketing something that is an extension of 

who you are, no one can compete with you on that.

★? The best jobs are neither decreed nor degreed. They are 

creative expressions of continuous learners in free markets.

The most important skill for getting rich is becoming a perpetual终身的 learner.

Things change fast now.

It’s much more important today to be able to become an expert in a brand-new field in 

nine to twelve months than to have studied the “right” thing a long time ago. 

Foundations are super important.

★Being able to convey yourself simply using ordinary English words is far more important 

than being able to write poetry, having an extensive vocabulary, 

or speaking seven different foreign languages.

Knowing how to be persuasive when speaking is far more 

important than being an expert digital marketer or click optimizer. 

★★★Foundations are key. It’s much better to be at 9/10 or 

10/10 on foundations than to try and get super deep into things.

★★★You do need to be deep in something because otherwise you’ll 

be a mile wide and an inch deep and you won’t get what you 

want out of life. You can only achieve mastery in one or two 

things. It’s usually things you’re obsessed about.

When you find the right thing to do, when you find the right 

people to work with, invest deeply. Sticking with it for decades 

is really how you make the big returns in your relationships and 

in your money. So, compound interest(利益结合??) is very important. 

you should be very thoughtful and realize in most things (relationships, work, 

even in learning) what you’re trying to do is find the thing you can go all-in on 

to earn compound interest.

★when you find the 1 percent of your discipline which will not be wasted, 

which you’ll be able to invest in for the rest of your life and 

has meaning to you—go all-in and forget about the rest. 

★★Clear accountability is important. Without accountability, you don’t 

have incentives. Without accountability, you can’t build credibility. But you take 

risks. You risk failure. You risk humiliation. You risk failure under your own name.

generally, people will forgive failures as long as you were 

honest and made a high-integrity effort.

If you don’t own a piece of a business, you don’t have a path 

towards financial freedom.

Owning equity in a company basically means you own the upside. When you own 

debt, you own guaranteed revenue收入 streams and you own the downside. You 

want to own equity.If you don’t own equity in a business, your odds of making 

money are very slim.

But usually, the real wealth is created by starting your own 

companies or even by investing.

Following your genuine intellectual curiosity is a better foundation for a

career than following whatever is making money right now. 

If it entertains you now but will bore you someday, it’s a 

distraction. Keep looking.

when you do things for their own(为自己着想) sake, you create your best work. 

★The less you want something, the less you’re thinking about it, 

the less you’re obsessing痴迷于 over it, the more you’re going to do 

it in a natural way.The more you’re going to do it for yourself. 

You’re going to do it in a way you’re good at, and you’re going 

to stick with it. The people around you will see the quality of 

your work is higher.

★★Follow your intellectual curiosity more than whatever is “hot” 

right now. If your curiosity ever leads you to a place where society 

eventually wants to go, you’ll get paid extremely well.

★You’re more likely to have skills society does not yet know how 

to train other people to do. If someone can train other people 

how to do something, then they can replace you. If they can 

replace you, then they don’t have to pay you a lot. You want to 

know how to do something other people don’t know how to do 

at the time period when those skills are in demand.