Specific Knowledge & Leverage
Naval Ravikant · 2018
"Specific knowledge — skills you can only acquire by pursuing genuine curiosity, not by following a credentialed path — combined with leverage (labor, capital, code, or media) is what lets one person's judgment produce outsized results."
Specific knowledge is knowledge you couldn't have acquired through a standard credentialing path, precisely because if society could train you for it at scale, it could train (and replace) you with someone else just as easily — it's found by pursuing what genuinely interests you rather than what's prestigious. Leverage is the multiplier applied to your judgment and effort: labor (people working for you) and capital (money) are 'permission-based' leverage — someone has to hand them to you — while code and media are 'permissionless' leverage, since anyone can create and scale them without asking anyone's approval.
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Naval's Life Formulas
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