The most important skill for getting rich is becoming a perpetual learner
Becoming a perpetual learner appears many places these days, it is becoming increasingly apparent that automation and remote work will replace many peoples current jobs. This means that people are going to have to be able to reskill frequently.
Anyone thats been to school knows how little you actually learn at them and that they do not teach you the skills of learning. I can atest to this, I learned more in 6 months working as a pre-registration pharmacist then I did in four years of university.
This point of becoming a perpetual learner ties in nicely with the concept of deep work, being able to do deep work which is essential to learning a new skill is critical.
Cal Newport and others have described the necessary conditions for and tips for doing deep work. It is worth going over them again and refining them constantly in the quest to become a great learner.
Some of my favourite resources on learning effectively are ‘The 4-Hour Chef’, ‘Ultralearning’, ‘Peak’ and ‘The Art of Learning’.
I am currently trying to implement the principles I have learned in them into learning the concepts from this book.
I am currently doing a daily mindmap of the main points/concepts and recall tests of flash cards.
No one can compete with you on being you. Most of life is a search for who and what needs you the most.
Naval
Naval explains that there are three elements required to create wealth: Specific knowledge, accountability and leverage.
He describes specific knowledge as “a weird combination of unique traits from your DNA, your unique unbringing, and your response to it. It’s almost baked into your personality and your idenity”.
To help further explain specific knowledge I have summarised some of main components.
Specific knowledge traits:
Can’t be thought, if they can train you they can replace you
Can’t be automated or outsourced
Found by pursing your innate talents, genuine curiosity and passions
Feels like play to you looks like work to others
Highly creative and/or technical (often the edge of knowledge)
This concept also appears in a lot of Tim Ferriss work, especially the 4 Hour Work Week, where he encourages everyone to double down and leverage their unique skills and talents as opposed to slightly improving your weaknesses.
While this concept is easy to grasp, the hard part is discovering your own innate talents and passions. This is the most difficult part as I know many friends and family that still couldn’t say their unique talents and passions if asked, me included.
The one trait of specific knowledge that stood out to me is that it ‘feels like play to me but looks like work to others’. For me that sounds like one of the most accessible ways of helping me determine my own specific knowledge.
Naval mentions in quite a few places that one of the first times he realised his innate talents was as a side remark from his mother. So I guess the first place for me to start is by asking my mother.
If you don’t own a piece of a business, you don’t have a path towards financial freedom.
The essence of understanding how wealth is created is a foundational knowledge of the differences and implications of ownership versus wage work.
Some of the main points are the following:
Without ownership, your inputs are very closely tied to your outputs.
Without ownership, when you’re sleeping, you’re not earning. When you’re retired, you’re not earning. When you’re on vacation, you’re not earning. And you can’t earn nonlinearly.
For me as I read this section I was nodding my head, I know this, I understand it. And the bit that stood out to me the most is earning nonlinearly.
When I think of my current position I am definitely still renting out my time for wages (well not at the moment as I’m employed). I have only ever worked for other people, never for myself.
In pharmacy they play this neat little trick where they call you an independent contractor so you don’t get paid holiday or sick pay essentially making you self employed all the while being an employee. In this case your outputs are directly tied to your inputs. This is what I need to avoid..
Luckily for me, about a year ago I read Ramit Sethi’s book “I will teach you to be rich“. It’s a great book with a terrible title (I believe the title is the result of A/B testing click through rates on google adwords back in the early 2000’s, the same way the 4 hour work week got its name). Since reading his book I have been slowing investing small sums of money into EFTs, mainly the S&P500 and NASDAQ.
So in theory I have a tiny bit of equity already. But how am I going to get more?
The most obvious answer is keep investing money into EFTs but the best way to get equity to start a company. Starting a company is something I have always wanted to do. I had a small taste of this with Tús Maith Journals.
Starting a business is hard, as I wrote that I know I should just start going for it, as I am now playing iterated games, I need to get my reps in…
What steps can I take right now to move towards being an owner?
After watching Ali Abdaal on YouTube, I downloaded the Anki flashcards app for Mac and copy/pasted Naval’s tweet into flashcards to test my recall. Anki flashcards allow for quick testing, spaced repetition and targeting of my weak areas of understanding.
I will continue to sketch out a mind map of the tweetstorm. This is to make sure I know how each tweet relates to each other and the bigger picture.
As I dive deeper into the book I realised there are many more tweets and statements not included in the initial tweetstorm. These will help colour and provide more context and I will update my meta map and flashcards as I go through the book.
So in effect I am meta-learning with the mind maps and drilling my weakest points with Anki as well as continuous recall (If only I studied for my exams in university like this…).
Another practice I want to employ in this process is Sheperdising. This is the process of going through all the citations mentioned. I heard of this practice from Tim Ferriss’ interview with Dr Martine Rothblatt, read her description below.
So I applied that Shepardizing process to these medical articles, and somewhat like doctors, whenever a researcher publishes an article, they make footnotes and citations to other people’s research who they relied upon. So I would get all of those articles and read those. And then I would follow up on all of the references in those. And ultimately, you get to a point of diminishing returns where three, four, five levels down, the references are all circling back around on themselves.
This process of going down the rabbit hole is one I haven’t really done before (except in my literature review maybe).
My aim in doing this is to make a conscious effort to practice depth over breadth.
Going through the tweetstorm and writing out examples that support each point was not as informative as I thought. For some tweets I struggled to find any, and for ones I did, I was doubting if the example was even accurate, or was it just my opinion of things.
Since this plan wasn’t as effective as I thought, I am considering doubling down on the testing myself through the Feynman technique to achieve a solid foundational understanding.
I am at this point doing a recall test once daily on a blank A4 page. Will I see more benefit if I increase it to twice daily?
Or on second thought and after consultation with “Ultralearning” I am going to continue with the recall test of the entire tweetstorm once daily, and in addition, I will focus in greater depth at each part of the tweetstorm in turn.
Maybe it is time I made flashcards for this purpose?
Would it be too much if I made flash cards for every one of Naval’s tweets?
Is that me becoming a parrot, just memorising his words?
I am struggling with the concept of testing them before making them my own. I want to follow Tim’s advice but I am not sure if I know how.
I have decided to start this journey with Naval Ravikant’s famous tweetstorm “How to Get Rich (without getting lucky)”. This series of tweets does not only contain entrepreneurial and economic maxims but also philosophical wisdom. The tweetstorm is written to be information-dense, very-concise, high-impact and timeless.
So it seems to me to be the best place to start in my journey, I am hoping that this will be the 20% that will provide me with 80% of the results.
Naval’s tweetstorms have been compiled into a short ebook by Eric Jorgenson available for free here. (I was sicked I hadn’t thought of this first, he even got Tim Ferriss to be apart of the project, aghhhh)
I started by quickly reading through the book and now will proceed by going through it slowly, as per Naval’s advice “- the better the book, the more slowly it should be absorbed”. (I wonder if he includes the “Almanack of Naval Ravikant” in this?)
At the start of the book Tim Ferriss advises the readers to “pay attention… but don’t simple parrot his words. Follow his advice… but only if it holds up after security and stress-testing in your own life. Consider everything… but take nothing as gospel”.
This advice can be seen repeated many places and it is no where near my first time hearing it. Recall the famous Bruce Lee quote “Adapt what is useful, reject what is useless, and add what is specifically your own”.
While Bruce’s quote is more accessible to me than Tim’s I still have a problem with this. Some maxims like “reading is faster than listening, doing is faster than watching” are easy to test and determine but how am I going to scruitise “play long-term games, with long-term people”…
Maybe a start would be to think of examples for and against each point…
However, is that scrutiny enough?
After some thought I decided before I examine each point and give examples, I should make sure I fully understand them at a foundational level.
How does one understand something at a foundational level?
I’m not sure exactly, but what I have decided to try is the Feynman technique I read about in Scott H. Young’s book “Ultralearning”. Check out the description below.
THE FEYNMAN TECHNIQUE
1. Write down the concept or problem you want to understand at the top of a piece of paper.
2. In the space below, explain the idea as if you had to teach it to someone else. If it’s a concept, ask yourself how you would convey the idea to someone who has never heard of it before. If it’s a problem, explain how to solve it and—crucially—why that solution procedure makes sense to you.
3. When you get stuck, meaning your understanding fails to provide a clear answer, go back to your book, notes, teacher, or reference material to find the answer.
So everyday I am testing myself by trying to explain the entire tweetstorm, well the main points, on a blank sheet of paper.
This technique is working surprisingly well and I will continue to do it until the concepts are inscribed in my core.
I don’t have a full time job, I haven’t since November.
I am in the process of redesigning my life, into what?
I am not sure yet.
Why am I redesigning my life?
I saw a glimpse of myself 20 years down my old trajectory in the form of an older colleague and I did not like what I saw.
The one thing I know for sure about myself and I can provide many supporting examples is that I only perform well or perform at all when I have some outwards accountability. Promises/ goals/ plans made to myself are useless. I have never in my 28 years kept one.
When I realised this a few years ago, I felt defeated. Like I had discovered a unfixable major design flaw. I have since come to realise it is liberating. Now when I really want to achieve something I create some outwards accountability and it will be done.
So far, my life redesign has consisted of leaving my full time pharmacist job (my university masters and first job) to learn python with an initial aim of becoming a data scientist or analyst.
However, most importantly, I am redesigning and updating my personal Operating System (OS), with the maxims and principles of people I think I want to be like.
This blog and instagram are my outwards accountability of this journey.
Eoghan‘s Blog 