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Finding Time to Invest in Yourself.html
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<html>
<head>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="styles2.css" />
</head>
<body>
<p>
If you have to work a “normal job,” take on accountability to build your
specific knowledge
</p>
<p>
<em
>This is a transcript of the bonus material at the end of the giant
<a href="http://nav.al/rich">How to Get Rich</a> episode.</em
>
</p>
<p>
<strong>Nivi:</strong> A common question we get: “How do I find the time
to start investing in myself? I have a job.”
</p>
<p><strong>You have to rent your time to get started</strong></p>
<p>
In one of the tweets from the cutting room floor, you wrote: “You will
need to rent your time to get started. This is only acceptable when you
are learning and saving. Preferably in a business where society does not
yet know how to train people and apprenticeship is the only model.”
</p>
<p>
<strong>Naval:</strong> Try to learn something that people haven’t quite
figured out how to teach yet. That can happen if you’re working in a new
and quickly expanding field. It’s also common in fields that are
circumstantial—where the details matter and it’s always moving. Investing
is one of those fields; so is entrepreneurship.
</p>
<p>
Chief of Staff for a founder is one of the most coveted jobs for young
people starting out in Silicon Valley. The brightest kids will follow an
entrepreneur around and do whatever he or she needs them to do.
</p>
<p>
In many cases, the person is way overqualified. Someone with multiple
graduate degrees might be running the CEO’s laundry because that’s the
most important thing at the moment.
</p>
<p>
At the same time, that person gets to attend the most important meetings.
They are privy to all the stress and theatrics, the fundraising decks and
the innovation—knowledge that can only come from being in the room.
</p>
<p>
Coming out of college, Warren Buffett wanted to work for Benjamin Graham
to learn to be a value investor. Buffett offered to work for free, and
Graham responded, “You’re overpriced.” What that means is you have to make
sacrifices to take on an apprenticeship.
</p>
<p>
<strong>Find the part of the job with the steepest learning curve</strong>
</p>
<p>
If you can’t learn in an apprenticeship model because you need to make
money, try to be innovative in the context of your job. Take on new
challenges and responsibilities. Find the part of the job with the
steepest learning curve.
</p>
<p>
You want to avoid repetitive drudgery—that’s just biding time until your
job is automated away.
</p>
<p>
If you’re a barista at the coffee shop, figure out how to make connections
with the customers. Figure out how to innovate the service you offer and
delight the customer. Managers, founders and owners will take notice.
</p>
<p><strong>Develop a founder mentality</strong></p>
<p>
The hardest thing for any founder is finding employees with a founder
mentality. This is a fancy way of saying they care enough.
</p>
<p>
People will say, “Well, I’m not the founder. I’m not being paid enough to
care.” Actually, you are: The knowledge and skills you gain by developing
a founder mentality set you up to be a founder down the line; that’s your
compensation.
</p>
<p>
You can get a lot out of almost any position. You just have to put a lot
into it.
</p>
<p>
<strong>Accountability is something you can take on immediately</strong>
</p>
<p>
<strong>Nivi:</strong> We’ve discussed accountability, judgment, specific
knowledge and leverage. If I’m working a “normal” job, is specific
knowledge the one I should focus on?
</p>
<p>
<strong>Naval:</strong> Judgment takes experience. It takes a lot of time
to build up. You have to put yourself in positions where you can exercise
judgment. That’ll come from taking on accountability.
</p>
<p>
Leverage is something that society gives you after you’ve demonstrated
judgment. You can get it faster by learning high-leverage skills like
coding or working with the media. These are
<em>permissionless</em> leverage. This is why I encourage people to learn
to code or produce media, even if it’s just nights and weekends.
</p>
<p>
So, judgment and leverage tend to come later. Accountability is something
you can take on immediately. You can say, “Hey, I’ll take charge of this
thing that nobody wants to take charge of.” When you take on
accountability, you’re also publicly putting your neck on the chopping
block—so you have to deliver.
</p>
<p>
You build specific knowledge by taking accountability for things that
other people don’t know how to do. Perhaps they’re things you enjoy doing
or are naturally inclined towards doing anyway.
</p>
<p>
If you work in a factory, the hardest thing may be raising capital to keep
the factory running. Maybe that’s what the owner is always stressed out
about.
</p>
<p>
You might notice this and think, “I’m good at balancing my checkbook and
have a good head for numbers; but I haven’t raised money before.” You
offer to help and become the owner’s sidekick solving their fundraising
problem. If you have a natural aptitude and take on accountability, you
can put yourself in a position to learn quickly. Before long, you’ll
become the heir apparent.
</p>
<p>
Early on, find things that interest you and allow you to take on
accountability. Don’t worry about short-term compensation. Compensation
comes when you’re tired of waiting for it and have given up on it. This is
the way the whole system works.
</p>
<p>
If you take on accountability and solve problems on the edge of knowledge
that others can’t solve, people will line up behind you. The leverage will
come.
</p>
<p><strong>Specific knowledge can be timely or timeless</strong></p>
<p>
There are two forms of specific knowledge: <em>timely</em> and
<em>timeless</em>.
</p>
<p>
If you become a world-class expert in machine learning just as it takes
off and you got there through genuine intellectual interest, you’re going
to do really well. But 20 years from now, machine learning may be second
hat; the world may have moved on to something else. That’s
<em>timely</em> knowledge.
</p>
<p>
If you’re good at persuading people, it’s probably a skill you picked up
early on in life. It’s always going to apply, because persuading people is
always going to be valuable. That’s <em>timeless</em> knowledge.
</p>
<p>
Now, persuasion is a generic skill—it’s probably not enough to build a
career on. You need to combine it in a skill stack, as
<a
href="https://www.scottadamssays.com/2016/11/28/the-trump-talent-stack/"
>Scott Adams writes</a
>. You might combine persuasion with accounting and an understanding of
semiconductor production lines. Now you can become the best semiconductor
salesperson and, later on, the best semiconductor company CEO.
</p>
<p>
<em>Timeless</em> specific knowledge usually can’t be taught, and it
sticks with you forever. <em>Timely</em> specific knowledge comes and
goes; but it tends to have a fairly long shelf life.
</p>
<p>
Technology is a good place to find those timely skills sets. If you can
bring in a more generic specialized knowledge skill set from the outside,
then you’ve got gold.
</p>
<p>
<strong
>Technology is an intellectual frontier for gaining specific
knowledge</strong
>
</p>
<p>
<strong>Nivi:</strong> There were a couple other tweets from the
cutting-room floor on this topic. The first: “The technology industry is a
great place to acquire specific knowledge. The frontier is always moving
forward. If you are genuinely intellectually curious, you will acquire the
knowledge ahead of others.”
</p>
<p>
<strong>Naval:</strong>
<a href="https://twitter.com/dannyhillis?lang=en">Danny Hillis</a>
famously said technology is
<a href="https://kk.org/thetechnium/everything-that/"
>everything that doesn’t work yet</a
>. Technology is around us everywhere. The spoon was technology once; fire
was technology once. When we figured out how to make them work, they
disappeared in the background and became part of our everyday lives.
</p>
<p>
Technology is, by definition, the intellectual frontier. It’s taking
things from science and culture that we have not figured out how to mass
produce or create efficiently and figuring out how to commercialize it and
make it available to everybody.
</p>
<p>
Technology will always be a great field where you can pick up specific
knowledge that is valuable to society.
</p>
<p>
<strong>If you don’t have accountability, do something different</strong>
</p>
<p>
<strong>Nivi:</strong> Here’s another tweet from the cutting-room floor
related to accountability: “Companies don’t know how to measure outputs,
so they measure inputs instead. Work in a way that your outputs are
visible and measurable. If you don’t have accountability, do something
different.”
</p>
<p>
<strong>Naval:</strong> The entire structure of rewarding people comes
from the agricultural and industrial ages, when inputs and outputs matched
up closely. The amount of hours you put into doing something was a
reliable proxy for what kind of output you’d get.
</p>
<p>
Today, it’s extremely nonlinear. One good investment decision can make a
company $10 million or $100 million. One good product feature can be the
difference between product-market fit and complete failure.
</p>
<p>
As a result, judgment and accountability matter much more. Often the best
engineers aren’t the hardest workers. Sometimes they don’t work very hard
at all, but they dependably ship that one critical product at just the
right time. It’s similar to the salesperson who closes the huge deal that
makes the company’s numbers for the quarter.
</p>
<p>
People need to be able to tell what role you had in the company’s success.
That doesn’t mean stomping all over your team—people are extremely
sensitive to others taking too much credit. You always want to be giving
out credit. Smart people will know who was responsible.
</p>
<p>
Some jobs are too removed from the customer for this type of
accountability. You’re just a cog in a machine.
</p>
<p>
Consulting is a good example. As a consultant, your ideas are delivered
through someone else within the organization. You may not have visibility
to the top people; you may be hidden behind a screen. That’s a trade-off
you’re making in exchange for your independence.
</p>
<p>
<strong>You’ll develop thick-skin if you take on accountability</strong>
</p>
<p>
When you have accountability, you get a lot more credit when things go
right. Of course, the downside is you get hurt a lot more when things go
wrong. When you stick your neck out, you have to be willing to be blamed,
sacrificed and even attacked.
</p>
<p>
If you’re the kind of person who thrives in a high-accountability
environment, you’re going to end up thick-skinned over time. You’re going
to get hurt a lot. People are going to attack you if you fail.
</p>
<p><strong>Scale your specific knowledge with apprentices</strong></p>
<p>
<strong>Nivi:</strong> Once you get some specific knowledge, you can scale
it by training your own apprentices and outsourcing tasks to them.
</p>
<p>
<strong>Naval:</strong> For example, I made good investments and figured
out the venture business. I could have kept doing that and making money.
Instead, I co-founded Spearhead to train up-and-coming founders to become
angels and venture investors. We give them a checkbook to start investing.
</p>
<p>
It’s an apprenticeship model. They come to us with deals they’re looking
at, and we help them think it through. This model is more scalable than my
personal investing.
</p>
<p>
<strong>Specific knowledge comes on the job, not in a classroom</strong>
</p>
<p>
At Spearhead we lead classes teaching founders about investing, and we
also hold office hours to discuss specific deals they bring.
</p>
<p>
It turns out the classes and talks we lead are largely worthless. You can
give all the generic advice people need in about an hour. After that, the
advice gets so circumstantial that it essentially cancels to zero. But the
office hours are incredibly useful.
</p>
<p>
This reinforces the notion that investing is one of those skills that can
only be learned on the job. When you find a skill like that, you’re
dealing with specific knowledge.
</p>
<p>
Another good indicator of specific knowledge is when someone can’t give a
straight answer to the question: “What do you do every day?” Or you get an
answer along the lines of, “Every day is different based on what’s going
on.”
</p>
<p>
The thing is so complicated and dependent upon circumstances that it can’t
be boiled down into a textbook form.
</p>
<p>
<strong>Nivi:</strong> The mafia figured out this apprenticeship model a
long time ago. The best way to end up running one of the families was to
become the driver for the Don.
</p>
<p>
<strong>Naval:</strong>
<a
href="https://www.google.com/search?q=Tony+Soprano&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-us&client=safari"
>Tony Soprano</a
>
was a businessman who had to enforce his own contracts. That’s a very
complicated business.
</p>
</body>
</html>