I can’t remember when I first discovered Naval Ravikant.

But I do remember a light bulb turning on in my head. The things he spoke about were answers to questions I’d had in my mind for years.

After listening to that first podcast, I searched for every podcast, blog post and YouTube video of him I could find.

This man had valuable knowledge and I wanted it.

For those that aren’t familiar, Naval Ravikant is a renowned, billionaire investor and philosopher.

According to Wikipedia, he “invested early stage in over 200 companies including Uber, FourSquare, Twitter, Wish.com, Poshmark, Postmates, Thumbtack, Notion, SnapLogic, Opendoor, Clubhouse, Stack Overflow, Bolt, OpenDNS, Yammer, and Clearview AI, with over 70 total exits and more than 10 Unicorn companies.”

The guy is a legendary investor.

But there are plenty of those out there.

What I admire most about him are his philosophical teachings and his mental frameworks. And the fact that he shares them openly for free.

He talks about more than just investing, he talks about how to live a good life, science, math and ethics.

In 2018 he wrote a now famous tweet storm called “How to Get Rich (Without Getting Lucky).”

Subsequently he did a series of podcasts to explain those tweets in more depth.

These podcasts are a masterclass on how to succeed, what you should focus on in life, what to avoid, game theory, math, science and more.

But there’s one mental framework found in these tweets that I particularly love: the idea of specific knowledge.

Specific Knowledge

He argues that this learning can come from something in your DNA or your experience as a child or something that you’ve built experience with over many iterations.

The interesting thing is: you can’t be trained for it.

This is knowledge that is highly specific to your genetic makeup, your experience in life and the environment you grew up in.

It’s knowledge that is found by pursuing your curiosities and leveraging your innate abilities.

And it’s something that will never be automated.

What I love about this idea is that it says we all have a super power. Something we are naturally good at and we enjoy doing. The idea that you can pursue that power and leverage it into a successful career is what dreams are made of.

For anyone that hasn’t had much work experience this may not sound like a ground-breaking belief.

But if you’ve ever worked at a job you didn’t enjoy for an extended period of time, this idea is revolutionary.

The Edge of Knowledge

I started my career in investment banking because I wanted to make truckloads full of money.

I have an analytical mind and I like numbers. But in the end I didn’t love it and finance was not my specific knowledge.

I’ve spent almost 20 years doing something that doesn’t fuel my curiosity or leverage my super powers.

Somewhere along the way I found that I loved writing. Then I fell down the Web3 rabbit hole.

And now I am following my curiosities in these two areas to help me develop specific knowledge.

What excites me is that Web3 is at the edge of knowledge. It’s new and hard to understand for many people.

And this is something that will dominate the next decade.

It will shape how societies interact, learn and grow.

So, dear reader, if you’re pursuing your specific knowledge in Web3, whether that be coding or writing or creating memes.

You are on the right path.

Keep going.

Additional Resources to learn more about Naval’s teachings:

The Almanack of Naval Ravikant collects all his wisdom from Twitter, blogs and podcasts into one pdf that you can download for free.

Naval's YouTube channel is a gold mine of free knowledge that can have a huge impact on your life.