Jaynit@jaynitx
Naval Ravikant on why it's 10,000 iterations, not 10,000 hours:
"The only true test of 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. And the second is wanting the right things, knowing what to want in the first place."
Naval believes most people are proceeding unconsciously through life.
As he puts it:
"If you're not careful you can end up in a place in life not only that you don't want to be, but one that you didn't even mean to get to. Usually, people end up there because they are going on autopilot with societal expectations or people's expectations. Out of guilt or mimetic desire, our desires are picked up from other people."
On how little time we spend deciding:
"We run on these four-year cycles. You go join a startup, you vest your stock over four years. College you go for four years, high school you go for four years. These are very long cycles, the amount of time we spend deciding what to do and who to do it with? Very short. Very, very short."
He continues:
"We spend three months deciding, one month deciding on a job where we're going to be for 10 years or 5 years. People decide frivolously which city to live in and that's going to decide who their friends are, what their jobs are, their opportunity, their weather, their food supply, their air supply, quality of life. It's such an important decision but people spend so little time thinking it through."
His rule:
"I would argue that if you're making a four-year decision, spend a year thinking it through. Like really thinking it. 25% of the time."
On the secretary theorem:
"The optimal time to search is somewhere around a third of the way through. You take the best person you've worked with and try to find someone that good or better. By the time you've got about a third of the way through, you have seen enough that you now have a sense of what the bar is. Then anybody who meets or exceeds that bar is good enough."
But here's the catch:
"It's actually not time-based; it's not based on one-third of the time, it's iteration-based. The number of candidates, the number of shots you took on goal. So you want to have lots and lots of iterations. You need to bail out quickly, and you need to be decisive quickly."
On failed relationships:
"If you go back and you look through failed relationships, probably the biggest regret will be staying in the relationship after you knew it was over. The moment you knew it wasn't going to work out, you should have moved on."
His reframe of Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hours:
"I would say it's actually 10,000 iterations to Mastery. It's not actually 10,000; it's some unknown number, but it's about the number of iterations that drives a learning curve. Iteration is not repetition—repetition is doing the same thing over and over. Iteration is modifying it with a learning and then doing another version of it. That's error correction."
On modern society:
"Modern society is far more forgiving of failure. Once you find the one business you're meant to plow into and compound returns, it's okay if you had 50 small failed ventures or 50 small failed job interviews. The number of failures doesn't matter."
His approach:
"You want to be skeptical about specific things—every specific opportunity is probably a fail. But you want to be optimistic in the general. Something in here is going to work out. You want to investigate and explore very, very quickly until you find the match. And then you have to be willing to go all in."
On labels:
"Labels like pessimist, optimist, cynic, introvert, extrovert, these are very self-limiting. Don't define yourself by trauma or PTSD because then you lock it into your identity and you're just going to loop on it. It's better to stay flexible because reality is always changing and you have to be able to adapt to it."
Spend a year deciding. Take 10,000 iterations. Then go all in.
