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I used to follow that guy religiously then I realized that he knew how to hack the "attention" system on social media. He is famous for what really is little f

I used to follow that guy religiously then I realized that he knew how to hack the "attention" system on social media. He is famous for what really is little fluffy sentences that would get retweeted and make him look like a wise man with the ultimate truth about everything. Now I see him as a huge hack. Almost a complete parody of Silicon Valley.

JamesBarney 7y ago
I think you nailed it with the term "parody" of every piece of self-help advice out there. This post reads like a buzzfeed article "21 ways to get rich". Here's a thousand soundbytes that very aren't actionable or who knows if any of them are right.
- m463 7y ago
  Except it's 37 ways, which is pretty overwhelming. I sort of think the problem with self-help advice is you get satisfaction by reading about it, which is sort of a placebo for seeking the satisfaction of doing it. That said, I kind of liked "6 Harsh Truths That Will Make You a Better Person"
- jraines 7y ago
  David Foster Wallace said something about how when elite athletes try to say how they got there, it ends up sounding mostly like clichés, but that it's probably because most clichés became such because they hold some truth[1]. And yeah, they definitely look worse when listed off in bulk. You're probably best off picking a small handful that play to your strengths as a person and figuring out how to ruthlessly make habits of them. The thing is -- cliché doesn't mean easy. Many clichés in both athletics and wealth building are very easy to understand on an intellectual level, but hard (for whatever reason) to put into practice for the required duration to reap the benefit. So there will always be a market for them to be remixed, repackaged, and expounded on ad infinitum[2], since the end results usually remain out of most people's grasp. --- [1] I'm not saying all clichés are universal truths, just that many universal truths have at least one expression as a cliché [2] I'm reminded of an exchange between two affiliate marketers on Twitter: Aff-1: "It's 2015 and people still broke" Aff-2: "It's 2015 and people still fat"
  - ken 7y ago
    (Disclaimer: I'm feeling cynical today.) I assume that elite athletes aren't complete idiots, though. When an interviewer asks them how they got where they are, it's not great PR to say "luck" or "genetics" or "my parents forced me", even if that were the most accurate explanation. "I worked really hard for it" is the story that people want to hear. Which is more likely: that cliché statements get repeated because of how true they are, or because of how much people like hearing them? Fiction has always sold much better than nonfiction.
    - StillBored 7y ago
      Well because its true. Hard work for an athlete is even more important than hard work for getting rich. Luck and being in the right place, knowing the right people, right things, etc are all far more important these days for wealth than how many hours you put in at the office. With athletics there are bunch of pre-reqs, and a lot of luck but for most physical sports your going to have to work as hard as you possibly can for years. The genetics and working hard makes you a competitor, then you have to find an edge to actually win.
  - notahacker 7y ago
    Don't elite athletes' explanations of how they got there sound mostly like clichés because their stories are so similar to the aspirations and training and effort [initially] put in by the athletes who didn't make it to elite level?
- enraged_camel 7y ago
  Is there any such “how to get rich” advice that IS actionable? Literally all of it I’ve come across suffers from extreme selection bias, and does not account for (or give credit to) luck.
  - komali2 7y ago
    "Increase surface area" is the only one I can think of. I.e., the "make your own luck" aphorism - the more you open yourself up to opportunities, the more likely you are to get lucky in the first place (finding an opportunity to generate riches). So like, meeting lots of people, talking to lots of people, going out a lot. Not staying in, and if you are staying in, increasing your knowledge-based surface area. Pretty much my go-to advice when I'm mentoring job seekers - the more people see your resume, the sooner you'll get a job, one way or the other. Nobody's gonna hire you if they don't "see" you.
  - xxhss7ss 7y ago
    In theory it should be easy to explain, along with things like how to graduate from a top university, how to socialise in groups and how to date. But they aren't easy to explain because there's so many little things that people just infer along the way. While people are trying to follow cliches they forget things like atmosphere and a hundred other things.
  - JamesBarney 7y ago
    There is one path which is get really good at an in demand skill and figure out how to get paid as much as possible for it, all while spending as little as possible. Basically doing something like becoming a neurosurgeon, or investment bank, etc... This is lower risk, but you're not going to get FU rich. The other one is find a high risk high reward path like founding startups and then keep on rolling the dice. There is real estate as well which is somewhere in the middle. Each path has a lot of specific advice about how to achieve it, but they're all hard and require varing degrees birth luck and blind luck.
    - tomhoward 7y ago
      As he points out in his Joe Rogan interview from yesterday, highly-skilled specialists like neurosurgeons often don't do all that well, as their income is pegged to their time spent working, and their lifestyle costs often scale linearly with their income. Of course that changes if you can break out of being an hourly-billing practitioner, and become an entrepreneur, like the dentist I know who built a successful chain of clinics then sold it to a large heath service provider. You're doing a lot of picking holes in his points (much of critique seems to come down to luck being more important than anything else). But consider that this is always going to be easy to do for something like this that is specifically designed to be a set of simple, broadly-applicable rules of thumb. Of course there will be limitless numbers of exceptions or domain-specific variations. The world is infinitely complex. But there are still patterns than can be observed and principles that can be applied that will give people a better chance of a successful outcome than had they not applied those principles, and that's what he's seeking to share here. And he deserves to be listened to, given that he's said he started learning/refining/applying these principles from a young age, and credits them for his own achievements, which are formidable and far from accidental (see the story of how he sued two of the biggest VC firms in Silicon Valley after they tried to screw him out of what he was due for his stake in the first company he helped build). As for luck: nobody, least-of-all Naval, claims that it is immaterial to many people's success or opportunities. But it's also uncontrollable, so you may as well forget about it, and focus on what you can control: making decisions that increase the probability of getting the outcome you want.
- mikeschmatz 7y ago
  The right term is "entreporn" which what this article really is. > There’s no actual skill called business. Avoid business schools and magazines. Proceeds giving a bunch of generic business and life lessons.
berberous 7y ago
I think he comes off better on this podcast than on twitter: https://medium.com/@gaurav1886/learnings-from-farnam-street-podcast-with-naval-ravikant-73240234a50d https://medium.com/@gaurav1886/learnings-from-farnam-street-...
knowingathing 7y ago
This article is over 35,000 words and he is speaking from experience (he isn't a young kid).

JamesBarney 7y ago

I think you nailed it with the term "parody" of every piece of self-help advice out there. This post reads like a buzzfeed article "21 ways to get rich". Here's a thousand soundbytes that very aren't actionable or who knows if any of them are right.

m463 7y ago
Except it's 37 ways, which is pretty overwhelming. I sort of think the problem with self-help advice is you get satisfaction by reading about it, which is sort of a placebo for seeking the satisfaction of doing it. That said, I kind of liked "6 Harsh Truths That Will Make You a Better Person"
jraines 7y ago
David Foster Wallace said something about how when elite athletes try to say how they got there, it ends up sounding mostly like clichés, but that it's probably because most clichés became such because they hold some truth[1]. And yeah, they definitely look worse when listed off in bulk. You're probably best off picking a small handful that play to your strengths as a person and figuring out how to ruthlessly make habits of them. The thing is -- cliché doesn't mean easy. Many clichés in both athletics and wealth building are very easy to understand on an intellectual level, but hard (for whatever reason) to put into practice for the required duration to reap the benefit. So there will always be a market for them to be remixed, repackaged, and expounded on ad infinitum[2], since the end results usually remain out of most people's grasp. --- [1] I'm not saying all clichés are universal truths, just that many universal truths have at least one expression as a cliché [2] I'm reminded of an exchange between two affiliate marketers on Twitter: Aff-1: "It's 2015 and people still broke" Aff-2: "It's 2015 and people still fat"
- ken 7y ago
  (Disclaimer: I'm feeling cynical today.) I assume that elite athletes aren't complete idiots, though. When an interviewer asks them how they got where they are, it's not great PR to say "luck" or "genetics" or "my parents forced me", even if that were the most accurate explanation. "I worked really hard for it" is the story that people want to hear. Which is more likely: that cliché statements get repeated because of how true they are, or because of how much people like hearing them? Fiction has always sold much better than nonfiction.
  - StillBored 7y ago
    Well because its true. Hard work for an athlete is even more important than hard work for getting rich. Luck and being in the right place, knowing the right people, right things, etc are all far more important these days for wealth than how many hours you put in at the office. With athletics there are bunch of pre-reqs, and a lot of luck but for most physical sports your going to have to work as hard as you possibly can for years. The genetics and working hard makes you a competitor, then you have to find an edge to actually win.
- notahacker 7y ago
  Don't elite athletes' explanations of how they got there sound mostly like clichés because their stories are so similar to the aspirations and training and effort [initially] put in by the athletes who didn't make it to elite level?
enraged_camel 7y ago
Is there any such “how to get rich” advice that IS actionable? Literally all of it I’ve come across suffers from extreme selection bias, and does not account for (or give credit to) luck.
- komali2 7y ago
  "Increase surface area" is the only one I can think of. I.e., the "make your own luck" aphorism - the more you open yourself up to opportunities, the more likely you are to get lucky in the first place (finding an opportunity to generate riches). So like, meeting lots of people, talking to lots of people, going out a lot. Not staying in, and if you are staying in, increasing your knowledge-based surface area. Pretty much my go-to advice when I'm mentoring job seekers - the more people see your resume, the sooner you'll get a job, one way or the other. Nobody's gonna hire you if they don't "see" you.
- xxhss7ss 7y ago
  In theory it should be easy to explain, along with things like how to graduate from a top university, how to socialise in groups and how to date. But they aren't easy to explain because there's so many little things that people just infer along the way. While people are trying to follow cliches they forget things like atmosphere and a hundred other things.
- JamesBarney 7y ago
  There is one path which is get really good at an in demand skill and figure out how to get paid as much as possible for it, all while spending as little as possible. Basically doing something like becoming a neurosurgeon, or investment bank, etc... This is lower risk, but you're not going to get FU rich. The other one is find a high risk high reward path like founding startups and then keep on rolling the dice. There is real estate as well which is somewhere in the middle. Each path has a lot of specific advice about how to achieve it, but they're all hard and require varing degrees birth luck and blind luck.
  - tomhoward 7y ago
    As he points out in his Joe Rogan interview from yesterday, highly-skilled specialists like neurosurgeons often don't do all that well, as their income is pegged to their time spent working, and their lifestyle costs often scale linearly with their income. Of course that changes if you can break out of being an hourly-billing practitioner, and become an entrepreneur, like the dentist I know who built a successful chain of clinics then sold it to a large heath service provider. You're doing a lot of picking holes in his points (much of critique seems to come down to luck being more important than anything else). But consider that this is always going to be easy to do for something like this that is specifically designed to be a set of simple, broadly-applicable rules of thumb. Of course there will be limitless numbers of exceptions or domain-specific variations. The world is infinitely complex. But there are still patterns than can be observed and principles that can be applied that will give people a better chance of a successful outcome than had they not applied those principles, and that's what he's seeking to share here. And he deserves to be listened to, given that he's said he started learning/refining/applying these principles from a young age, and credits them for his own achievements, which are formidable and far from accidental (see the story of how he sued two of the biggest VC firms in Silicon Valley after they tried to screw him out of what he was due for his stake in the first company he helped build). As for luck: nobody, least-of-all Naval, claims that it is immaterial to many people's success or opportunities. But it's also uncontrollable, so you may as well forget about it, and focus on what you can control: making decisions that increase the probability of getting the outcome you want.
mikeschmatz 7y ago
The right term is "entreporn" which what this article really is. > There’s no actual skill called business. Avoid business schools and magazines. Proceeds giving a bunch of generic business and life lessons.

berberous 7y ago

I think he comes off better on this podcast than on twitter: https://medium.com/@gaurav1886/learnings-from-farnam-street-podcast-with-naval-ravikant-73240234a50d https://medium.com/@gaurav1886/learnings-from-farnam-street-...

knowingathing 7y ago

This article is over 35,000 words and he is speaking from experience (he isn't a young kid).