In the video “Exceptional People Are Built In Solitude,” Naval Ravikant shares nuanced perspectives on education and personal development for young adults. Here’s a detailed summary of the key points discussed:
Education and University Degrees
- Value of University Degrees:
- Naval acknowledges that university degrees still carry a certain weight in society, acting as a form of credentialing or signaling.
- However, he likens degrees to “taxi medallions,” suggesting they are becoming artificially scarce and less relevant in many fields.
- Alternatives to Traditional Degrees:
- He points out that there are emerging substitutes for university degrees, especially in entrepreneurship. For instance, starting a company or gaining recognition through achievements (like winning a medal or writing a notable book) can serve as valid credentials.
- Notably, programs like Y Combinator can act as alternatives to university, providing networking and credibility without formal education.
- Self-Learning:
- Ravikant emphasizes that many fields, particularly those outside STEM, can be learned independently through books and online resources. He argues that if someone can learn a subject on their own, a degree may not be necessary.
- Selective Pursuit of Education:
- He suggests that if one does choose to attend university, they should aim for the best institution possible and focus on hard skills that cannot be easily self-taught.
- Degrees in fields like biology, law, medicine, physics, math, and computer science are considered worthwhile, while degrees in social sciences from lesser institutions may not justify the cost of education.
- Curation and Networking:
- Ravikant discusses the importance of being accepted into prestigious universities like Stanford, where simply being admitted can enhance one’s network and opportunities. He mentions that dropping out after admission can sometimes be more beneficial than completing the degree.
Language and Communication
- Importance of English:
- English is identified as the lingua franca of the internet, making fluency in the language a significant asset for anyone wanting to succeed online.
- Ravikant reflects on how his articulation in English, stemming from extensive reading, has benefited his career and ability to communicate effectively.
- Remote Work and Globalization:
- The rise of remote work has leveled the playing field, allowing individuals from non-English-speaking countries, like India, to compete for jobs in tech companies based in English-speaking countries.
- He views this trend as a transformative force in globalization, enabling a broader exchange of ideas and skills.
Parenting and Education Approaches
- Homeschooling vs. Traditional Schooling:
- Ravikant is critical of traditional schooling, arguing that it often focuses more on compliance and socialization than on genuine education. He believes that this system can stifle curiosity and creativity.
- He suggests that socialization in schools can create unnecessary hierarchies and pressures among children, which may hinder their personal development.
- Social Development:
- He challenges the notion that children need extensive social interaction in school settings, asserting that the modern world is overly socialized through platforms like Instagram and TikTok.
- Ravikant argues that exceptional individuals often develop their skills in solitude, and that the time spent alone can be more beneficial than socializing in school environments.
- Best Practices for Parents:
- He recommends parents consider homeschooling or forming small, local groups for education if they have the means. This allows for a more tailored approach to learning that can avoid the pitfalls of traditional schooling.
- For those who must use traditional education systems, he advises choosing the best possible schools and focusing on educational merit.
- Personal Reflection:
- Ravikant reflects on his own education experience, expressing gratitude for having attended magnet schools, which he feels offered a more enriching educational environment than standard public schools.
Conclusion
In summary, Naval Ravikant’s insights offer a thought-provoking perspective on education, advocating for self-learning, the value of language skills, and the potential downsides of traditional schooling. He emphasizes the need for young adults to focus on developing hard skills, seek meaningful experiences, and leverage their unique strengths to navigate an increasingly complex world.
The video is by SCAST – Easy Podcast, Easy Life and is titled Exceptional People Are Built In Solitude – Naval Ravikant. The entire transcript is given below.
what life advice for success would you give an 18 year old in the world and they specifically are asking would you rather recommend them going to the university which i know you tweeted about but something interesting to talk about the universities are complicated i mean right now you sort of probably want to go to them because they’re these very strong curators and so they have a signal they give you a badge that unfortunately is still very useful in large parts of society but i joke that university degrees are the new taxi medallions in that they’re artificially scarce and they’re required for certain things but they’re going to be obsoleted relatively soon or already are in many disciplines so you can already see some substitutes emerging for the university degree for example if you start a company that vc’s fund or if you join y combinator that can be a substitute for a university degree if you win some incredible medal or award or you launch a company or build a website or do something interesting when you’re very young that can be used as a credential or you write some great book or what have you that can be used as a as a substitute but it’s a rare person right now who can really skip the university they would have to be very auto didactic especially in the technical domains so i don’t think it’s kind of doable for everyone it is a unique small set like the so-called teal fellows for example or people who are chosen for that and there just can’t be that many of them yet that said i think it’ll get easier because the credentialing will become less important out of university the other thing is i think there’s a whole class of university degrees that are pretty worthless if you’re not getting a stem degree or degree that can help you build or fix things then you don’t need a degree for it you can just read books on it i mean that’s you can teach yourself so really the classical university degree where you’re investing four years of your life and boy isn’t it coincidence takes four years to learn anything regardless of whether it’s english lit or physics you know i would argue that if you can learn it on your own then you don’t need a university degree for it to the extent you need for signaling there’s a fun little hack which is at least in silicon valley or or the greater tech ecosystem it’s almost better to get accepted to stanford and then drop out than to actually finish the degree first you’re in a very illustrious court of people who then went on to be very successful or at least that’s the perception which is good enough for signaling purposes and secondly you just save yourself a lot of time you’ve shown you’ve passed the filter but then you recover the next three years now i think a lot of the stanford students were ambitious also get around this by starting companies while they’re at stanford but they used something like stanford you could say you know a one-third curation signaling which is done the moment you get in and then one-third sort of alumni network and networking into with other smart people that you may want to start a company or do something with and then maybe there’s a third of it that’s actually the education so i would say if you’re sorry to interrupt if you’re the kind of person that needs to question whether or not you should go to university at least today in 2021 yes then go to the university on the other hand there are a small set of people who can’t stand the idea of wasting three or four years of their life in a university when they could be doing something and those people should not go to universities but you will know it is one of those things where if you are going to air air on the side of going to a university now i would say go to the best university possibly can because the signal slash curation function is the most important and then secondly once you’re in study something worthwhile that you absolutely cannot learn on your own whether it’s uh you know biology or law or medicine or or my favorites are you know physics math computer science uh the the hard skills because once you’re good at mathematics and you don’t fear any book then you can learn anything on your own later um but i i would say the soft squishy skills those are the ones where i think you’ll be suspect like if you’re going to go to a middling school and graduate with like a social sciences degree i don’t know if you’re going to pay back your student loans so on the other end people who perhaps going to university isn’t really even an option for them there’s a question about if with leverage that we’re seeing with like technology and you’ve talked extensively about self self learning for coding and other ways to essentially create financial freedom on the internet there’s been there’s a few questions asking if you believe or if you think that the trend towards moving to english-speaking countries are important and your your kind of your thoughts on that that question was asked a few times in a few different ways yeah english is the lingua franca of the internet ironically enough and so the internet uh took english from being a a plurality of speakers to i think it’s gonna take you to a majority of online speakers and because a lot of technical stuff is written in english you know the various websites work best in english apps work best in english if you want to be a first class citizen on the internet it really helps to be fluent with english you know the reason i’m up here and not in the audience like the rest of you is because i happen to be more articulate than the average person with english because i read a lot of books when i was a kid and so i just happened to be good at expressing myself in the english language and that’s a that’s a big deal uh you know that eloquence turns someone to a speaker as opposed to a listener so there’s there’s huge value in being a good native english speaker so i think places like india are advantaged by the trend towards remote work and zoom and clubhouse and so on because it gives more of them an opportunity to compete on a relatively level playing field the you know one of the things that people are going to learn with the remote work is remote work is not really about letting the facebook engineer work from ohio instead of from silicon valley i mean that may be true in the short term but in the long term it’s really about you know amit from india being able to work for facebook in silicon valley but while he’s in you know some rural town in india so you know that’s that’s going to disrupt and change lives and global supply chains some people will be better off some will be worse off but that’s true globalization happening so yeah english is a superpower you know if i had to pick subjects from my kids to learn i’d really really drill down on logic math computer science and english and then i think everything else they can follow their natural intellectual curiosity so if they want to learn music they can learn music but you know you don’t like force them to go learn the violin just because you have some idea that every kid should be a musician the rest of it they can follow the natural aptitude but english is foundational it’s it’s the classic reading writing arithmetic right the classic stuff instead i would add code and science which are like slight variations on those you know science being called language of you know applied mathematics into nature and and computers being applied mathematics into machines but i think those are very foundational skills everything else you can kind of learn on your own so another question kind of along the lines of thinking about children there’s some parents on twitter who wanted to ask what are your thoughts or general perhaps advice for them on how they can pick for themselves if they want to homeschool their kids that they should take their kids to private school and regardless like what type of social skills do you think they should be focused on helping their kids develop and also you actually already answered it but they wanted to know what how what you would like to educate your kids on so i think that the the missing aspect here is social development with like home school or private school yeah i reject this whole social development thing i know it’s gotten very popular but i think humans are social machines and these days we’re over socialized not under socialized we have instagram snapchat tick tock clubhouse twitter facebook we have unlimited ways to socialize virtually lots of kids i see are socializing in real life you know if they’re not socializing virtually i would argue that socialization creates far more problems and solves and that the modern individual is over socialized exceptional people are built in solitude that’s not popular here but it’s true it’s the alone time that you spent when you were a kid that made you good at whatever you are it wasn’t the group time the group time was spent having too much fun most likely there are a few exceptions but not many so i would say in general socialization is actually the problem that you’re trying to avoid as opposed to the asset that you’re trying to bring into it and i think it’s kind of pathetic how quickly we’ll fall into saying with schools for socialization and achieve what about socialization we’ve abdicated this idea that it’s the best way to educate your child because clearly it’s not true it’s a combination of uh one-size-fits-all education compliance training uh daycare and social and i would argue socialization and the worst kinds of socialization socialization in false little lord of the flies type worlds where people are very hierarchical who’s the prom queen who’s the who’s the football player who’s the jock who’s popular who’s cool who’s doing drugs who’s not all that stuff is nonsense i mean the further you get in life the for the more of an adult you become the more you get away from that and we all remember that shock when we shifted from school to the real world what a tremendous difference it was and we’d just been in a little bubble for uh in our lives up until that point so i would argue and i don’t have any i don’t care about you know sure people may ask me for citations but there is plenty of evidence that homeschool kids do a lot better than um than even private school kids or public school kids there’s even evidence that unschooled kids kids who are basically just left alone with no education tend to be at worst one grade behind school kids and when they get to college they actually catch up completely because they’re interested think about that all the time you said spent in school k through 12 really amounted to being one year ahead of a kid who didn’t go to school at all and then in college that kid caught up right away because now they were generally interested so i think the way we do schooling is much more about daycare and it’s also preparing kids for the wrong things i mean eight hours a day nine hours a day you know in a little group prison camp where you’re sort of you have to raise your hand to go to the bathroom and they tell you how to think and how to behave i mean that this is it’s terrible but i think most parents don’t have a choice right most parents are busy working they we don’t live in tribal societies in the war where grandma and the aunts and uncles can all raise the kids together so raising kids is really hard so we abdicate that to the state the state turns into the lowest common denominator situation and the kid ends up bored and compliant or having you know most of their curiosity stamped out of them and just wasting enormous amount of time most of the time spent in school is just completely wasted and then they use it to build a social life because there’s nothing else to do so i i i just cannot imagine sending my kids to a regular school maybe i’ll abdicate maybe i’ll be forced to so i reserve the right to change my mind but at least right now i don’t think it’s the best way to educate them obviously i have the means another time to do otherwise if you don’t have the means and the time then you know send your kids to the best school possible or try to you know form a local homeschooling group where you can share the burden or try to live close to your tribe so you can do you know do what you can there that said look i am a product of mostly public schools including thank god magnet schools which i know are out of fashion now um but uh so i don’t necessarily say that that won’t work but i i do get the sense that at least in my time public schools used to care a lot more about proper education and merit and much less about being politically correct so i’m not sure where schools are today but i i hope not to find out you