Become the best in the world at what you do
Keep redefining what you do until you’re the best at what you do
Nivi: We talked about the importance of working hard and valuing your time. Next, there are a few tweets on the topic of working for the long-term. The first tweet is: “Become the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until this is true.”
Naval: If you really want to get paid in this world, you want to be number one at whatever you do. It can be niche—that’s the point. You can literally get paid for just being you.
Some of the more successful people in the world are that way. Oprah gets paid for being Oprah. Joe Rogan gets paid for being Joe Rogan. They’re being authentic to themselves.
You want to be number one. And you want to keep changing what you do until you’re number one. You can’t just pick something arbitrary. You can’t say, “I’m going to be the fastest runner in the world,” and now you have to beat Usain Bolt. That’s too hard of a problem.
Keep changing your objective until it arrives at your specific knowledge, skill sets, position, capabilities, location and interests. Your objective and skills should converge to make you number one.
When you’re searching for what to do, you have two different foci to keep in mind. One is, “I want to be the best at what I do.” The second is, “What I do is flexible, so that I’m the best at it.”
You want to arrive at a comfortable place where you feel, “This is something I can be amazing at, while still being authentic to who I am.”
It’s going to be a long journey. But now you know how to think about it.
Find founder-product-market fit
The most important thing for any company is to find product-market fit. But the most important thing for any entrepreneur is to find founder-product-market fit, where you are naturally inclined to to build the right product for a market. That’s a three-foci problem. You have to make all three work at once.
If you want to be successful in life, you have to get comfortable managing multi-variate problems and multiple-objective functions at once. This is one of those cases where you have to map at least two or three at once.