I’ve been a long time fan of Naval Ravikant, so when he went on Clubhouse recently to share his thoughts, despite not having an iPhone (I know ?), I had to find a way to tune in. While Clubhouse is designed to be the ephemeral demystification of the broader world, there are a rarified few conversations I believe are and should be evergreen. Naval’s happens to be one of them. Whether Clubhouse itself compiles these knowledge banks or through some third-party service, we already have listeners and Clubhouse users recording these conversations. A temporary hack that paves the way for a broader solution.
Over the weekend, I found Naval’s definition of purpose to be one of the best I’ve heard to date:
“You have to live up to your own moral code. Your life is an eternal single-player game. You’re not competing against anybody else; you’re competing against yourself. You set your own desires and your goals. You have your own perspective. You have your own morality. And you have to live up to it.
“There is no standard meaning or purpose. If there was a single purpose or meaning for all of us, then we’d all be slaves to that single purpose. We’d all be robots – every one of us fighting each other in conflict to get to that one purpose. And there’s not even a single purpose for you necessarily, other than the one that you create. So, you get to create your meaning and purpose. You get to craft your own story here. […]
“It is a race, but you’re just running against yourself. You pick the finish line; you pick the goal line; you pick the meaning; you pick the purpose. So you can pick a meaning or purpose that is antithetical to happiness, or one that aligns with it.”
A month ago, my friend and I watched Pixar’s Soul. In it, the writers illustrated a powerful lesson on life’s inspiration. As Jerry enlightens Joe, that distilling your whole life into a singular purpose is “so basic”, Joe enlightens Soul 22, “your spark isn’t your purpose. The last box fills in when you’re ready to come live.” To live means to enjoy and savor every minute, every second, the entire 24-hour day, all 365 days of the year, and every year we are alive and breathing. Not just, and I’m generalizing here, the 40-100-hour workweeks. Joy and purpose, after all, was never meant to measured as a unit of time alone.
Many of us live life looking for our purpose in life – a singular destination. A singular raison d’être. We compartmentalize our entire lives into self-prescribed labels. In high school, it was either by our grades or our extracurriculars. In college, by our majors. In our adult life, by our job title. I can’t speak for everyone, but I’m willing to bet that most, if not all people, are more robust than just their full-time roles make them out to be. Just like I’m more than a VC Scout. That’s why I’m so fascinated by polymaths in our society.
In opening our minds to a world beyond a single degree of freedom, we give ourselves more surface area to find inspiration and happiness. As Tim Ferriss once said, “It is not that beauty is hard to find; it’s that it is easy to overlook.”
Equally so, his rhetoric on passion is equally as provocative. Or specifically, the relationship between your passion/obsession (more on obsession here and here) and domain expertise. The latter, as Naval calls it, “specific knowledge”:
“How do you gain specific knowledge? It’s almost a catch 22. Specific knowledge is built up by you through your passions. So, when they say follow your passion, it’s kind of what they mean. It doesn’t always lead to money, but it can. Because if you’re obsessive about something and learning it for your own genuine intellectual curiosity – not to get a degree, not to make money, not to impress your friends – you’re going to end being better at it than anybody else. So, I really believe that you should only read and engage in activities that you genuinely enjoy. And you should cultivate your intellectual obsessions without any goal that you may be surprised when you look back and connect the dots later that one of them developed into a goal. One of the hallmarks of specific knowledge is that it will feel like play to you, but it will look like work to others. So, anything that fits that model, you should develop. […]
“You get what you want out of life. You just have to want it badly enough. If it’s your all-consuming desire, you will get it. You will create the path to the destination no matter what it takes.”
Naval’s encyclopedic answers asked underscored once again a question I ask myself when I am the most lost:
What would I do if, at the end of the day, I would be only one applauding myself?
Photo by Almos Bechtold on Unsplash
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