The Truth About Hard Work – Naval Ravikant

Here’s a more detailed summary of the key points and discussions from the video “The Truth About Hard Work” featuring Naval Ravikant and Coupl Gupta:

1. Understanding Truth

Personal Resonance: Naval asserts that truth often feels right at a visceral level, transcending intellectual comprehension. It resonates deeply and can provoke emotional responses, which signifies its authenticity.
Predictive Power: He introduces a functional definition of truth as something that can predict future outcomes accurately. The ability to foresee and influence future events enhances the credibility of a statement or belief.

2. The Concept of Hard Work

Cultural Anxiety: Naval critiques the cultural fixation on hard work, suggesting that it often stems from societal anxiety and fear of competition. This notion of hard work creates a game-like environment where individuals feel pressured to demonstrate their effort.
Hard Work vs. Purpose: He posits that hard work should be an outcome of a strong desire to achieve something meaningful rather than an end in itself. People who are truly passionate about their goals will work hard without perceiving it as laborious.

3. Leverage in Modern Times

Tools and Resources: Naval highlights that we live in an era with almost infinite leverage—through technology, capital, and human resources. This leverage allows individuals to amplify their impact without necessarily increasing their work hours.
Judgment Over Labor: He emphasizes that the quality of decisions made is more important than the sheer amount of work. In today’s context, effective judgment leads to greater success than simply working longer hours.

4. Effort vs. Efficiency

Romanticizing Hard Work: There is a cultural narrative that equates effort with success, often ignoring those who achieve great results with seemingly less effort. This creates an environment where efficiency is undervalued and even demonized.
Natural Processes: Drawing parallels to nature, Naval states that natural phenomena occur without exerting hard effort. For example, gravity and the movement of water exemplify inherent efficiency, which can serve as a model for human productivity.

5. Distinction Between Work and Play

Enjoyment in Tasks: Naval explains that if an activity is enjoyable, it shouldn’t be classified as work, even if it appears demanding. For example, playing video games can be more intense than traditional work, yet it’s seen as fun because it’s engaging.
Complementary Skills: He discusses the importance of collaboration, where individuals with complementary skills can maximize their strengths. When people work in areas they enjoy, they perform better collectively, which can create the illusion of hard work to outsiders.

6. Failure and Desire

Desire as a Driver: Naval argues that failure is more often a result of insufficient desire or misalignment with one’s true interests rather than a lack of hard work. He believes that if someone genuinely wants to achieve something, they will find a way to do it.
Energy vs. Cash: He asserts that companies fail not because they run out of money, but because the founders lose their energy and motivation. The desire to continue is what ultimately sustains efforts in business.

7. Iteration and Experimentation

Learning Through Iteration: The ability to quickly iterate and experiment is crucial for success. Naval stresses that running many experiments leads to more effective learning and growth than simply dedicating time to repetitive tasks.
Quality of Practice: He critiques the idea that simply clocking hours (e.g., the “10,000 hours rule”) guarantees mastery. Instead, the focus should be on meaningful practice and experimentation that fosters genuine improvement.

8. Leadership Philosophy

Inspiring Leadership: Naval defines effective leadership as inspiring others to want to achieve goals rather than commanding them. Leaders should embody the vision they wish to instill in their teams, creating a culture of shared desire and motivation.
Micromanagement Concerns: He shares insights from a successful founder who regretted micromanaging. This highlights that effective leadership is less about control and more about empowering individuals to thrive in their roles.

9. Compensation and Performance

10x Performers: Naval discusses the phenomenon of “10x performers,” individuals whose contributions are disproportionately high compared to their peers. He notes that while everyone works hard, not all efforts yield the same results.
Compensation Disparities: There is a systemic issue in how society compensates high performers. Despite acknowledging their value, organizations often fail to pay them what they are worth, leading these individuals to seek opportunities elsewhere where they can capture their full value.

10. Truth and Social Constructs

Frameworks for Truth: The conversation concludes with reflections on how societal frameworks shape perceptions of truth. Naval suggests that people often accept truths that fit within pre-existing moral frameworks, which can lead to self-deception about reality.
Nature of Society: He contrasts the constructed nature of societal norms with the more equitable and natural order of the wild, implying that artificial systems often complicate our understanding of fairness and success.

Overall Themes

Authenticity and Passion: The discussion advocates for aligning work with genuine interests and passions rather than conforming to societal expectations of hard work.
Efficiency Over Labor: Naval promotes a shift in focus from the quantity of effort to the effectiveness of actions and decisions in achieving desired outcomes.
Exploration and Experimentation: Emphasizing the value of experimentation and iteration, the dialogue encourages a mindset of continuous learning and adaptation rather than rigid adherence to traditional paths.

This in-depth exploration captures the nuanced arguments made by Naval and Coupl regarding hard work, success, and the nature of truth in our lives.

The video is by SCAST – Easy Podcast, Easy Life and is titled The Truth About Hard Work – Naval Ravikant. The entire transcript is given below.
this is naval rabbicon i’m here with couple gupta and we’re just having a conversation as two friends who like to explore topics fairly deeply uh and in a way that we’re just trying to understand the truth and the truth is a word that gets thrown around a lot um so i’m not even sure exactly what that means uh definition that i like to use but you know there are multiple definitions in fact this might be a good question how do you know when something is true in my mind very often i know something is true just because it feels true to me uh it feels very true you you know it when you hear it even if you don’t like it another definition i’ve used is that truth is that which has predictive power you can use it to predict the future a little bit uh the more accurately you can use something to predict the future the more true it is uh but i’m sure you couple have very different definitions so why don’t you give me a definition or two of how you know something is true i very much agree with your first answer which is that it it relates very much to feel often times when you hear truth the the inner sensation that you get of um of a resonance is beyond the intellect and i think that is a a great sign because oftentimes uh we’ll feel something that someone says and we’ll feel it viscerally as soon as it is said and we will have a heart at the very same time we’ll have a hard time intellectually framing it and understanding it and that that is a very good sign that something is true because in very many ways we are beings in spite of our intelligence we tend to use our intelligence as uh the the machinery with which to process things however that’s a very limited domain intelligence and so when it cuts straight through that into the essence of something something within our core for which we have receptors so to speak um seems to uh grasp that and i think that’s that’s a very good sign of truth and and very often it can sometimes it just leaves you silent sometimes it actually creates an emotional response especially if it’s aimed at your identity or your ego you know like little kids have a way of telling truth in a way that adults don’t like a little if you’re fat and little kids come up and say hey you’re fat right in a way that adults won’t and sometimes i can provoke a reaction from an adult uh because they’re not ready for that that level of truth you’re not supposed to go around saying society it’s not socially acceptable yeah anyway yeah i don’t want to get caught up in definitional games too much i wanted to get into a specific topic which is you recently wrote a discourse about hard work which i thought was really really interesting and you know i have a bunch of views and hard work maybe i’ll start off with a very high level like i think hard work is important but i think hard work is an effect of something that you know needs to be done like if you need to do hard work to get something done that you care about then you work hard but a lot of what i see going on these days is hard work for its own sake and i think we live in a very different era than one that we evolved in we live in an era of almost infinite leverage and that means like when you are working your decisions mean they echo larger so there’s code working for you there’s people working for you there’s money that’s working for you so there’s there’s machines working for you it isn’t just that you’re standing there with your bare hands and tearing at something your tools were tool uh bearing the creatures and so because of all these tools available our judgment matters much more than hard work so even though i think sometimes you do need to work hard you should never shy away from it if that’s what it takes to succeed in whatever you want i do think that it gets overplayed in society so that’s kind of my view on hard work but i think it’s probably a little more conventional than yours so i just wanted to explore it together with you a little bit how do you think about hartford i think hard work is yet another example of a prescription to be honest with you i think is done largely out of anxiety i think hard work is done largely out of fear i think one of the common things that you will um often hear in the world of sports and business is that if if you’re not working hard and the next guy is and if you’re only putting in four hours he’s putting in 12. and so hard work has become its own game it’s like meditation meditation becomes a competition so the thing that you were really seeking actually becomes replaced by the game of hard work and hard work like effort becomes sort of its own goal and when and that seems to be the pattern behind things is when you follow a prescription or an intermediary then that intermediary tends to replace the ultimate goal and that becomes your new game so hard work it isn’t you know the person who needs to work hard will work hard but it isn’t that he needs to be told to work hard and he needs to strive towards working hard i think hard work is the result of something i think whatever needs to be done when a person has a sufficient and requisite degree of desire he will do and from the outside that will come off and reflect his hard work to those who are looking but but it isn’t the opposite it isn’t that it isn’t that if i work hard then i will get this because then that introduces what i call a gap and that gap is that i must introduce some step in the middle that i am being promised that if i if i fulfill that step that some powers that be or some some force out of the universe will grant me what i want because i have satisfied that step and i think that’s that is the default i think that is the the way that everyone looks at things and is being taught to look at things um many things are named and in the naming problems exist and problems arise so if someone wants to become that you know arrive at the top of their field you know does that mean that they don’t work hard no but they would never view it as working hard they would view it as i will do whatever needs to be done to get there and i don’t consider that work necessarily yeah consider that the necessities you know you look at the experts and to them what what may look like hard work from the outside to them is play from the inside that’s right in fact one of the things i really think people should focus much more on is figuring out what feels like play to them but looks like work to others that’s right because that’s your superpower and that’s where you’ll just outperform everybody um you know i see with startups all the time i see lots of people who work really hard but still fail uh and often you know the most common reason is they just pick the wrong thing to do uh the world is a big place it’s very hard to figure out what’s going to work before it works product market fit this thing that gets thrown around uh coined by mark andreessen uh it’s a is a very difficult thing to achieve you’re trying to predict what the market wants you’re trying to build a product exactly for the market and sometimes hard work alone won’t get you there i think what you choose to work on and who you choose to work with and actually kind of how badly you want it which is more than just working hard or more important than just the raw hours you put in there are lots of people running restaurants and uh you know kind of meat space businesses not in the startup world who outwork startup entrepreneurs but yet they don’t succeed or if they do succeed with their much lower numbers or much lower magnitude right and i i and i would say that a large a large reason for that is that society has been has been uh sold romantic ideas romanticism is a very big part of things um society very much seems to value effort effort is a big deal and effort is um sort of a a sort of an arrival of sorts uh for for society that look how hard i work look how much effort i’m putting in and therefore i’m doing i am doing the right thing by by doing that and and the problem that arises from that oftentimes is those who are very efficient are demonized because very often you will find in every domain those who don’t work nearly as quote hard as everybody else but they get 10 times the results and they’re considered to be lucky and so i think i think if you look at i like to pattern things around nature and if you look at nature it doesn’t work hard if you look at gravity it doesn’t work hard if you look at a tree and a leaf falling off of a tree it doesn’t work hard if you look at a water going down a river it doesn’t work hard so everything everything moves according to its own rhythm and whatever necessities are there they’re there and therefore they need to be worked around but working hard is an added extra romantic step in order to put another feather in the cap which says i succeeded by working hard yeah it’s also i think there’s a sometimes i also think of work as a set of things that you have to do that you don’t want to do if you want to do it it’s not work so example is like you know you might be grinding at work for 10 hours and it’s it’s suffering it’s painful and then you get home and to relax you play video games but to an alien watching from the outside playing a video game is more intense than whatever you’re doing at work you’re running around with a gun shooting at people you’re jumping over collecting mushrooms gold coins whatever it is that could be construed as hard work but because you want to do it uh because you can lose yourself in it uh there’s not suffering so i don’t think it’s people get burned out on work they just get burned out of work they don’t want to do which is a form of suffering so not and every thing that you need to do not every step of it is going to be pleasant of course uh but it’s really important to align yourself and work where you’re not suffering so when i find like engineers who are out trying to be sales people or sales people who are out trying to be engineers it’s better to team up with someone who really enjoys the other side of it uh and stick to what you’re good at um and you know team up so that that’s where that’s why i think founding teams are very powerful where you have one person who can build and one person who can sell because then neither one feels like they’re doing hard work each one is doing what they enjoy uh but together the company from the outside looks like it’s working really hard and as we know in a billion dollar company the employees aren’t working any harder than a million dollar company they’re just doing the right thing and the right people are doing the right things in the right way and and i think one of perhaps the the the key element of hard work which i must say is an elephant in the room which is rarely discussed in the world is that hard work is considered to be a door prize it seems to be sort of the preparing of the bed of failure i think that a lot of times hard work is done in order to have an excuse for the mind when the mind comes attacking and says how come you didn’t make it and if a person is armed with the ammunition that i have worked hard then he has an answer for the mind whereas if he just had on the couch and did nothing he would not have that ammunition so many times people do hard work in order to have an answer for the mind because they know they’re going to fail anyways and externally if i’m an investor in a company that fails the entrepreneur worked hard that feels more forgivable socially than someone who’s just like oh i tried it i took a shot the market didn’t want it i gave up quickly um i used to have an engineer who worked for me who was absolutely brilliant and uh he would create great products um and he would work an hour two hours a day and then he would very blatantly sit around watching qriket matches or playing uh counter-strike which was this uh online game uh while all the other people in the office were just looking at him and he just looked really lazy and people complained to me about him all day long but he added tons of value by creating the right product the right way at the right time yeah so he could get away with it uh and he had this pretense of sitting around the water cooler and talking uh or going to meetings he didn’t want to waste time on those things he basically either enjoying himself or he was working on what he thought was effective and i think his talent to some extent allowed him to get away with it but just given the the era that we live in talent matters so much more than hard work and he would exemplify that yes and it’s interesting because all the books that have been coming out in recent years from from outliers to all the books related to talent being secondary to hard work in the 10 000 hours and everything it’s the exact opposite message that that hard work supersedes talent and i think that’s a separate sort of discussion but but there is you know there is a truth to the fact that um humans tend to do many things in order to satisfy those who are watching them and they also do tend to do many things in order to satisfy the idea of having tried and romantically failed failure is also something that is considered not only okay but almost lauded now you know as i as i say these words i’m certain that some in the audience are getting ready to say that one must fail in order to succeed and quite frankly i’ve never looked at that as failure when i when i say failure i’ve always looked at it personally as ultimate failure not getting to where you want to go ultimately everything besides that to me i call experimentation i think everything is everything is experimentation there is no failure along the way yeah i agree i mean especially i think the speed of iteration is what drives learning so you know in gladwell and others they say 10 000 hours of grinding i think it’s quite that simple if i do the same thing for 10 000 hours uh that’s not going to be very effective if in 10 000 hours i run a hundred experiments that’s great but it’s not as effective as if i ran a thousand experiments or ten thousand experiments so the speed of iteration matters uh that said it’s still not hard work alone because i could play golf for ten thousand hours and i would never be tiger woods uh tiger woods played golf for ten thousand hours yes it was hard work but it was also for the sheer love of it like he enjoyed every you know he enjoyed most of those days most of those times uh and it was sort of in his nature and character by some point to not look at hitting the the you know golf length of hard work he looked at that as the thing that he most wanted to do that day um so this idea of suffering and sacrifice all this romantic and it levels the playing field a little bit i think it also misleads us it misleads us into thinking that everybody can be everyone one interesting hypothesis i heard is that in modern society one of the reasons we have more unhappy people is because of the myth that everyone can be everything excuse me so yeah so if you think you can be uh you know larry page or steve jobs or jeff bezos or mark zuckerberg but you didn’t make it it’s because you didn’t work hard enough and then you feel lousy about yourself whereas the reality is like their talents uh intersected in the right way at the right time and they put in the hard work uh for the thing that they were meant to create and your talents are gonna intersect in a completely different way uh in a different place at a different time and a lot of life is just searching for uh what it is that you’re uniquely good at and where and when to apply that thing that’s exactly right the last line that you mentioned absolutely i think is is the key um i don’t you know this sort of may sound um sort of really counter-intuitive um but i don’t think anybody fails because of not working hard enough i don’t think that that creature exists i think that people fail because they didn’t really want it i don’t think that a sufficient degree of desire exists in a given person but because he just didn’t do quote do enough work that he failed i don’t really buy that i think i would say that if he didn’t do the quote work or do the leg work or do whatever needed to be done it’s because the desire you got to look more upstream i think the desire wasn’t there i don’t think the desire is bursting through you and you choose to hold back that desire and not do it i don’t don’t i don’t i don’t think that’s the case yeah i’ve always had a belief that companies don’t fail when they run out of cash they fail when the founders and team run out of energy when they basically say okay we’re done here at some level you have to give up on something and just because and it’s pragmatic there are other things that you want to do more by that point but if you have an unswerving desire to do something then usually you’ll get it yeah although i think i think in this modern age we tend to have too many loosely scattered imitative desires correct um there’s that great old chinese thing like man who chases two rabbits catches none yeah um so a lot a lot of it is just about cultivating your desire and being ready well there there’s the want with the small w then there’s a want with a big w yeah i’m reminded that antoine is an exuberant line where he basically said something like if you want to uh you know uh build a ship and hit the high seas then don’t gather the men and start giving orders and chopping the wood and building a fire and you know building a ship instead teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea yes and and that is a lot of the role of a leader it’s to inspire people absolutely another great definition i once heard was that you know management is telling people what to do leadership is getting them to want to do it themselves correct yes i think a leader is far more hands-off than what sort of the business world tells him he should be i don’t think it’s about managing anybody i think it really is becoming someone that others look at that leader and see in him what they would love to see in themselves yeah i was actually talking to a founder the other day of a company that’s not worth almost 10 billion dollars and he’s done obviously quite well and i asked him like what would you do differently if you were doing it again uh and he said he would micromanage people less which i thought was really interesting i did not expect that answer i thought it would be some other answer about how he could have been even bigger but he actually just felt like he made a mistake by constantly trying to order people around and well and i think and i think and i and i think it also matters how what you just said is going to be heard because oftentimes things are heard through the lens of morality and right and wrong and correct and incorrect and good and bad and so that might be heard as you are right it is wrong to micromanage people you should leave them alone and and and i would say that and i would say it’s far more and i’m sure that he meant it this way as well that it’s far more that it wasn’t that that was quote wrong or immoral that that was ineffective exactly exactly yeah uh you know so when we get to morality for example uh one of the things that silicon valley likes to talk a lot about is 10x engineers and now it’s been broadened a little bit to be a little more politically correct 10x performers but it is true that you can have individuals especially when they’re leveraged through code or capital like on hedge fund managers or engineers or even on the sales side where someone can literally accomplish 10x what the next closest person in the organization can and the easiest way to see this as founders a founder can build a company one founder can build a company that’s a thousand times more valuable the next founder and so there’s kind of this idea of 10x performers and obviously it can’t be through hard work because they’re not doing 10x that work that’s impossible everyone’s working hard so then we pay lip services idea of 10x performers and everybody wants to hire them but then we go around paying them 1x or 1.1 x or 1.2 x because society doesn’t want to hear this idea of that you can actually pay a 10x performer 10x so what happens is 10x performers all end up leaving and starting their own companies because they’re not getting paid 10x otherwise the only way to do it so we have a few socially acceptable areas where you can get paid 10x basically if someone else is not making the decision if you made it by yourself or for yourself or you at least steered the ship long enough that you managed to capture more of the value for yourself than you get to be a 10x performer but i think one of the things that’s utterly broken in the startup ecosystem is that we all know and acknowledge that 10x performers or higher 100x out next exist especially within certain circumstances and situations yet we do not compensate them at those levels because it is socially unacceptable to do so um that one’s worth covering another discussion it’s a longer discussion but i think that it’s just an example of how uh you know real truth is hard to speak because it offends people it hurts a sensibility of equality it hurts a sensibility of how the world ought to work it hurts your sensibility of morality uh but you can always fix things in other ways it’s better to acknowledge how the world actually works and then figure out maybe how you want to change it as opposed to live with your head in the sand and everyone has to speak the same way in the same language and the same coded words and you may actually end up just denying how the world actually works that process you end up deluding yourself yes yeah i think that i think humans seek truth to some degree so long as it has conditions it it must fit within the framework already established or it’s not accepted and so the so the problem isn’t that the truth is wrong the problem is that there’s too many frameworks there’s you know every everyone’s walking on eggshells because so many eggs have been created you know morality to what is correct what is right what is what is fair um then society is and institutions created around the very idea of enforcing fairness you know quite honestly the jungle in the wild is far more fair and equitable and moral than any fabricated society in this world i think we’ll end on that thank you couple yes sir