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 14: Specific Knowledge Is Highly Creative or Technical
Specific knowledge tends to be creative or technical. It’s on the bleeding edge of technology, art and communication.
Specific knowledge can be learned through apprenticeships.
And that’s why the best businesses, the best careers, are the apprenticeship or self-taught careers, because those are things society has not figured out how to train and automate yet.
After Warren Buffett graduated he went to Benjamin Graham (an author and successful investor) and offered to work for him for free. And Graham said, “Actually, you’re overpriced; free is overpriced.”
And Graham was absolutely right.
When it comes to a very valuable apprenticeship like the type that Graham was going to give Buffet, Buffet should have been paying Graham a lot of money.
That right there tells you that those are skills worth having.
Specific knowledge is specific to the individual and situation.
The knowledge must be specific to a situation, it’s specific to an individual, it’s specific to a problem, and it can only be built as part of a larger passion, interest, or time spent in that industry.
It can’t just be read straight out of a single book, nor can it be taught in a single course, nor can it be programmed into a single algorithm. That’s what makes it difficult to teach.
Maybe it isn’t possible for you to be the best in the world at programming, but if you’re in top 25% of programmers, AND you also have top-notch sales skills, AND really good writing skills, that sets you apart as if you were in the top 1% of your field.
Build specific knowledge where you are a natural.
Whatever you are a natural at, you want to double down on that.
And then there are probably multiple things you’re natural at because personalities and humans are very complex. So, we want to be able to take the things that you are natural at and combine them so that you automatically, just through sheer interest and enjoyment, end up top 25% or top 10% or top 5% at a number of things.
Next week we’ll review chapter 15, “Learn to Sell, Learn to Build”
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