38 Weeks to Get Rich
Welcome to the “38 Weeks to Get Rich”, where each week we’ll break down a section from Naval’s iconic tweetstorm and interviews on the topics of wealth, freedom, money, status, and happiness.
The full PDF is available here.
What follows is my summary & key takeaways to help you digest the 127 page document.
Week 13: Arm Yourself With Specific Knowledge
Arm yourself with “Specific Knowledge”, the things that can be learned but can’t be taught.
Why pay you? Specific Knowledge.
There are things you know that few others do. Things that you learned, that can’t easily be taught.
We have this idea that everything can be taught in school. And it’s not true. In fact, the most interesting things cannot be taught. But everything can be learned.
Specific Knowledge can’t be trained.
Very often that training either comes from your childhood where you learn soft skills which are very, very hard to teach later on in life, or it’s something that is brand new so nobody else knows how to do it either, or it could be unique circumstances that you’ve experienced.
A good example is a meteorologist. You can teach meteorology in a school. But there’s something that separates a good weatherman from a bad one; and it’s often something that they learned that school can’t teach.
It reminds me a lot of this tweet:
Price vs. value. pic.twitter.com/wwo5y9uk4m
— Visualize Value (@visualizevalue) September 20, 2020
“Knowing which screw to turn”
No one’s going to pay a screw turner very much money. Any able-bodied person can turn a screw. Even robots can turn screws. But not everyone will be able to know which screw to turn.
There’s a lot that can be taught about when to turn which screw. But there’s a segment of repairs that fall into “Specific Knowledge” where no matter how nice my screwdriver was I wouldn’t be able to fix the problem–but someone with specific knowledge could.
Pursue curiosity.
Specific knowledge is found by pursuing your innate talents, your genuine curiosity, and your passion. It’s not by going to school for whatever is the hottest job, it’s not for going into whatever field investors say is the hottest.
Very often specific knowledge is at the edge of knowledge. It’s also stuff that’s just being figured out or is really hard to figure out.
It can feel like play.
Because it’s something you’re interested in and curious about, building specific knowledge will often be a lot fun. It’s the thing you can work on and lose track of time. The intersection of what you’re naturally good at and interested in.
So, it’s not something you sit down and you reason about, it’s more found by observation. You almost have to look back on your own life and see what you’re actually good at.
This is very different than the advice, “Do what you love and the money will follow,”
This is, “Find what you can be exceptionally good at (because you’re passionate about it) and people will pay you good money for your excellence,”
Next week we’ll dive deeper on this topic as we unpack chapter 14.
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