Naval Ravikant on Judgement
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Welcome to Make Daily! This episode contains an idea, reflection, and a simple action you can take on your creative project today.
The world is noisy and your dreams deserve attention. Use this minute to shift your focus back to what you want to get done today.
Idea 💡
“Judgement, not work, determines success and failure. Good judgement is the product of a calm and curious mind, reasoning without motivation and attachment. Whatever strengthens your ego weakens your judgement, and ultimately, your success.” ― Naval Ravikant
Reflection 🤔
Good judgement is more important than hard work.
Every creator starts in the same rural landscape of choosing what to work on. Your judgement is the compass, and your steps are the work.
It’s costly to walk in the wrong direction. If you end up in the wrong place, you’ll have to turn around and start from square one.
Thankfully, judgement is a skill you can develop. Here are three principles Naval has shared in the past:
Action ✅
- Always choose long-term over short-term: If you’re looking at two options, the one with short-term pain is almost always the better path to take. If the easier path worked, everyone would take it.
- Discard bias: Our biases often hinder our ability to choose wisely. We all have stories and projections that are wrong. To see clearly you must drop your bias and examine the problem from new angles.
- Don’t fool yourself: Cultivating radical honesty about yourself is the hardest lesson here. As the famous physicist Richard Feynman said, “You should never, ever fool anybody, and you are the easiest person to fool.”
Prompt: Use these 3 principles to make a creative decision about your project today.
Deeper Dive 🌊
Here is a helpful (and short) clip of Naval explaining why ‘Judgement is the decisive skill.’
About the creator 👤
Naval Ravikant is an American entrepreneur and investor. He is the co-founder, chairman and former CEO of AngelList. He has 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. (Via Wikipedia)
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See you tomorrow,
Alex