The Two Decisions That Shape Your Entire Life - Naval Ravikant（原声文稿）

You have one life, don't settle for mediocrity.

the only, like people debate intelligence, for example, right? We talk about IQ tests and all that.

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.

things, knowing what to want in the first place.

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.

There's 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? I don't know if that worked. I don't know if that worked in about 20 years.

Yeah, prizes that are just not worth having or that create their own problems.

want to be, but one that you didn't even mean to get to.

That's if you're kind of proceeding unconsciously.

expectations or other people's expectations.

about how mimetic desires are desires are picked up school, go to whatever, go to business school, or they might be and, you know, the other monkeys are doing.

or it might just be what your parents' expectations are.

little monkey and do things that are good for the tribe.

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 four-year cycles.

In Silicon Valley, you go join a startup, you vest your stock over four years. That's the standard.

in college, you know, you go for four years, high school, you go for four years.

have children, they hit puberty nine years later.

It's like a nine-year cycle until that relationship changes.

cycles, multi-year cycles in which we are committed to things. You go to law school, you know, four or five-year cycle.

You go be a lawyer, 40-year cycle.

to do it with, very short, very, very short, right?

one month deciding on a job where we're going to be for 10 years or five years.

on the previous path, you sort of start going down this vector that is a very long distance.

food supply, their air supply, quality of life.

people spend so little time thinking it through.

it through, like really thinking it through. 25% of the time. Yeah, exactly. There's the secretary theorem. I don't know if you know that one in computer science.

people, picked the best one of the next, however many?

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 one year, two years, three years, one month, two months?

that the optimal time is somewhere around a third.

the best person you've worked with and try to find someone that good or better.

So by the time you've gone about a third of the way through, you have seen enough to dating this applies to jobs and careers.

This applies generally not time-based.

It's not based on one-third of the time goal That's right.

So you want to have lots and lots of iterations quickly That's right.

You need to take opportunities quickly and bail staying in the relationship after you knew it was over.

sense, I think Malcolm Gladwell popularized this idea some unknown number, but it's about the number of iterations that not repetition. Repetition is a different thing.

it. So that's error correction. So if you get 10,000 error corrections in anything, you will be an expert at it.

and are trying to fix the world.

But a lot of the in ourselves, we see the world, whether we want 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. We're naturally hardwired for it. Again, I go back to evolution. I'm sorry to keep harping at evolution.

So if you can't explain something about life or evolution, then you probably don't have a good theory for it.

Because let's say that I see something rustling turns out to be a predator, I get eaten, and that's the end of that.

So we are naturally hardwired to be pessimists, than living in the jungle and just trying to survive.

investing, If you short a stock, 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 an xNVIDIA and it goes 100x or 1000x, you make a lot of money.

So upside, because of leverage, is nearly unlimited.

there are infinite more people to go on a date with.

20 people and you can't even get through all of them.

to realize that you're much more running a search function, that one thing will pay off in massive compounding.

husband, then you can compound it in that relationship. It's okay if you had 50 failed dates in between.

had 50 small failed ventures or 50 small failed job interviews. The number of failures doesn't matter. And so there's no point in being a pessimist.

say you want to be skeptical about specific things.

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?

right now, then this is a little woo-woo, 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.

right thing, you have to be optimistic and compound into it. So you don't want to jump into the first thing.

you date necessarily, unless you've got very lucky.

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 to the center of the table.

So both those approaches are required.

So it's a barbell strategy. It's sort of black or it's white.

gray bit and like half in, but I'm kind of don't know if I am.

I also think like labels like pessimists, optimists, cynic, introvert, extrovert. These are very self-limiting.

there are times when you feel like being extroverted.

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 sense.

motivated reasoning is the worst kind of reasoning.

You're not going to find truth through highly motivated reasoning.

much as possible, or at least your personality out of it as much as possible.

thick identity and personality, it's going to cloud your judgment. It's going to try and lock you into the past.

that's a way of locking yourself into your past. even saying, I have trauma, I have PTSD.

into your identity and you're just gonna loop on it.

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.

identity, it's going to cloud your judgment. Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed that clip with Naval, just a mere taster.

the full-length episode is available right here.