Naval Ravikant - 5 Key Principles To Become a Successful Entrepreneur

if you really want to get paid in this world you want to be number one at whatever it is that you're doing and it can be Niche that's the point it can literally be you're getting paid for just being you you know at this point some of the more successful people in the world are That Way Oprah gets paid for being Oprah Joe Rogan gets paid for being Joe Rogan and they're being authentic to themselves so what this tweet is trying to say simultaneously is that you want to be number one but you want to keep changing what you do until you're number one you can't just pick something arbitrary you can't say I'm going to be the fastest runner in the world and now you got to beat us bolt that's too hard of a problem but what you can do is you can keep changing what your objective is until it arrives to your specific knowledge your skill sets your position your capabilities your location your interests and then converges to making you number one so when you're searching for what to do you actually have two different fosi that you have to keep in mind at all points and one of those is I want to be the best at what I do and the second is what I do is flexible so that I am the best at it until you arrive at a comfortable place where you're like yes this is something I can be amazing at while still being authentic to who I am and this is not going to be an overnight Discovery it's going to be a long journey but at least you know how to think about it the most important thing for a company is to find product Market fit I would say the most important thing for an entrepreneur is to find founder product Market fit where you are naturally inclined to build the right product which has a market and that's a three Focus problem which is you got to make all three of those work at once if you want to be successful in life you just have to get comfortable managing multivariate problems multiple objective functions at once and this is one of those cases where you have to map at least two or three at once especially in entrepreneurship the masses are never right if you see a lot of people tweeting about what a great Market to enter is or you see journalists talking about a company is terrible they don't know anything if the mass is new how to build great things and create great wealth we'd all already be done we'd all already be rich by now so in a sense when you see a lot of competition sometimes that indicates to you that the masses are already here so it's already competed over too much and there's nothing here or it's in the wrong Trend to begin with on the other hand if it's completely empty if the whole Market is empty and no one's there that can also be a warning indicator that you've gone too authentic and not enough on the product Market fit part of founder product Market fit so there's a balance you have to find it but generally most people will make the mistake of paying too much attention to the competition and being too much like the competition and not being authentic enough and the great Founders tend to be authentic icono classs talking about combining skills you said that you should learn to sell learn to build if you can do both you will be unstoppable you know this is a very broad category now but it's two broad Cate categories one is building the product which is hard and it's multivariate that can include design that can include development that can include manufacturing Logistics procurement it could even be designing and operating a service it has many many definitions but in every industry there is a definition of the Builder in our tech industry that's the CTO it's the programmer it's the software engineer Hardware engineer but you know even in like a laundry business it could be the person who's building the laundry service who is making the trains run on time who's making sure all the clothes end up in the right place the right time and so on then the other side of it is the sales side again selling has a very broad definition selling doesn't necessarily just mean selling individual customers but it could mean marketing it could mean communicating it could mean recruiting it could mean raising money it could mean inspiring people it could mean doing PR so it's a broad umbrella category so generally the Silicon Valley startup model tends to work better fast it's not the only way but it is probably the most common way when you have two Founders one of whom is worldclass at sales and one of whom is world-class at building the ultimate is when one individual can do both that's when you get true superpowers that's when you get people who can create entire Industries the living example is Elon Musk he may not necessarily be building the Rockets himself but he understands enough that he actually makes technical contributions he understands the technology well enough that no one's going to snow him on it and he's not running around making claims that he doesn't think he can eventually deliver he may be optimistic in the timelines but he thinks it's within reasonableness of delivery even Steve Jobs developed enough product skills and was involved enough in the product that he also operated in both of these domains Larry Ellison started as a programmer and I think wrote the first version of article or was actually heavily involved in it Mark andrees was also in this domain he may not have had enough confidence in sales skills but he was the programmer who wrote Netscape Navigator a big chunk of it so I think the real giants in any field are the people who can both build and sell and usually the building is a thing that like a salesperson can't pick up building later in life it requires too much focused time but a builder can pick up selling a little bit later especially if they were already sort of inly wired to be a good communicator Bill Gates famously paraphrase this as I would rather Teach an engineer marketing than a marketer engineering I think if you start out with a building mentality and you have building skills and still early enough in your life or you have enough focused time that you think you can learn selling and you have some natural characteristics for your good salesperson then you can double down on those this is sort of pointing out that if you're at the intersection of these two don't despair because you're not going to be the best technologist and you're not going to be the best salesperson but in a weird way that combination back to the Scott Adams skill stack that combination of two is Unstoppable longterm people who understand the underlying product and how to build it and can sell it these are catnip to investors these people can break down walls if they have enough energy and they can get almost anything done the world offers us very easily the opportunity to do the same thing over and over and over again but really we'd be better served if we went off and found ways to do new things from scratch and doing something new the first time is painful because you're wandering into uncertain territory and high odds are that you will fail so you just have to get very very comfortable with frequent small failures you know Nasim taleb talks about this also he made his fortune his wealth by being a Trader who relied upon black swans Nim talb made money by essentially losing little bits of money every day and then once in a blue moon he would make a lot of money when the unthinkable happened for other people whereas most people want to make little bits of money every day and in exchange they'll tolerate lots of blowup risk they'll tolerate going completely bankrupt we're not evolved to bleed a little bit every day if you're out in the natural environment and you get a cut and you're literally bleeding a little bit every day you will eventually die you have to stop that cut we're evolve for small victories all the time but that becomes very expensive that's where the crowd is that's where the herd is so if you're willing to bleed a little bit every day but in exchange you will win big later you'll do better that is by the way entrepreneurship entrepreneurs bleed every day they're not making money they're losing money they're constantly stressed out all the responsibility is upon them but when they win they win big on average they'll make more when young entrepreneurs ask me for advice I generally tell them to optimize for their Alumni network your future determinant of success will be most determined by who you are surrounded with these people will force you to up your game they'll be your future co-founders they'll be your future customers they'll be your feedback engine there'll be a financiers and there'll be the peer group from which you absorb which you work with and which you strive against so I would say optimize for the Alumni network very often that advice will then lead you to moving towards a startup Hub working with highly technical people working with young people and even in universities going to hacker clubs going into stem classes and going to hacker houses and meetups and boot camps just optimize for who you're going to be around around you want to be around the absolute smartest most driven people possible that will determine your career trajectory and your eventual outcome more than any other single factor that you haven't already considered and I think all the greatness in life comes from uh all the great outcomes in life come from compound interests whether it's in investing or whether it's in relationships so like my most popular tweet of all time is this one that kind of GLI but it says uh if you can't see yourself working with somebody for life don't work with them for a day now now of course you're not going to like say no I'm not going to work with you cuz I'm not working with you for the rest of my life but it's a good reminder that if you that if any relationship is short-term or temporary it's really not going to pay out the dividends that you want later in life um so it's better to just kind of treat a lot of your time as a search function where you're searching for through the set of jobs you're searching through the set of dates and spouses you're searching through the set of friends you're searching through the set of hobbies until you find things you love and when you find things and people that you love you go all in on them now let me leave you with some Reflections as Naval recant said the most important thing for an entrepreneur is to find founder product Market fit but since we have a cognitive bias to just do what everybody else in our Social Circle is doing High odds are that we are lacking authenticity on the projects that we undertake to compensate for this natural Distortion what we can do is we can focus more on doing things that are true to ourselves that is to follow our genuine curiosity and intuition as Paul grah founder of why combinator said in his popular essay how to work hard the best test of whether it's worthwhile to work on something is whether you find it interesting that may sound like a dangerously subjective measure but it's probably the most accurate one you are going to get you are the one working on the stuff who is in a better position than you to judge whether it's important and what's a better predictor of its importance than whether it's interesting and in his most recent say how to do great work Paul Graham said curiosity is the best guide your curiosity never lies and it knows more than you do about what's worth paying attention to if you asked an oracle the secret to doing great work and the Oracle replied with a single word my bet would be on curiosity end of quote another useful way to think about this is to visualize the opposite of this idea and then try to avoid that at all cost in this case the opposite of following your curiosity is to chase the hot thing so we can easily get pretty ahead by just not chasing the hot thing never chase the hot thing whatever it is that's that's like trying to catch the wave and you'll never catch it you need to position yourself and wait for the wave and the way you do that is you pick something you're passionate about so that that's the number one piece of advice that I give to somebody who wants to start a company make sure it's something you're interested in something you're passionate about missionaries build better products and so I would take a missionary over a mercenary any day in the area of sales Peter the who was a co-founder of PayPal said the following in his book 0 to1 poor sales rather than bad product is the most common cause of failure if you can get just one distribution channel to work you have a great business if you try for several but don't nail one you are finished end of quote so figuring out a way to effectively distribute your product or service is is vital despite this Peter the also argues that most people underestimate sales and he gives a clear reasoning for why this is the case he said sales works best when hidden this explains why almost everyone whose job involves distribution whether they're in sales marketing or advertising has a job that has nothing to do with those things people who sell advertising are called account Executives people who sell customers work in business development people who sell companies are in investment bankers and people who sell themselves are called politicians there's a reason for these redescriptions none of us wants to be reminded when we are being sold the most fundamental reason that even business people underestimate the importance of sales is the systematic effort to hide it at every level of every field in a world secretly driven by it end of quote as Navar rant point out sales is a broad category and personally I have learned sales by learning about business psychology and copywriting for business psychology I read the book influence by Robert chelini and I read Port Charlie Almanac by Peter kofman which curates the best ideas of Charlie monger and for copywriting which is kind of the application of business psychology my favorite books were confessions of an advertising Man by David Ogilby and the Boron Letters by Gary Halbert for copywriting I also took two online courses with Ruth chlo which are more up to date with the best practice in the digital marketing space I leave you here some of my highlights the importance of solving potential objections in my writing the importance of using an active tone and making rhetorical questions to increase engagement how to transform features into benefits how to Target an audience the importance of novelty and direct commands and how to write an engaging headline I actually found these courses on skillshare who are also very kindly sponsoring this video skillshare is a great platform to learn any skill you want and what I like the most about skillshare is that it has this learning paths to master any career skill you might need such as design on web flow getting better with notion or fundamentals of copywriting which is actually the learning path that contains these two copyrighting classes that I took and all the classes have I learned by doing approach where each member can create and share a project after completing a class which I think makes everything way more useful and fun and if you're one of the first 500 people to use my link in the description you will get a one month free trial of skillshare and thank you so much skillshare for sponsoring this video