I am reading the book THE ALMANACK OF NAVAL RAVIKANT by Eric Jorgenson and there is Naval’s famous tweetstorm on how to get rich printed at the beginning of the book. I like especially the tweets about knowledge. They are a bit depressing though, since I realized I don’t really have any specific knowledge, sadly I am “trained by society” only. Not that I don’t like what I do (math), but it’s a pity I didn’t read this or came to this myself when I was younger. And so I wonder what specific knowledge you might have?
Some but not all tweets from the tweetstorm (p. 33 of the book):
Arm yourself with specific knowledge, accountability, and leverage.
Specific knowledge is knowledge you cannot be trained for. If society can train you, it can train someone else and replace you.
Specific knowledge is found by pursuing your genuine curiosity and passion rather than whatever is hot right now.
Building specific knowledge will feel like play to you but will look like work to others.
When specific knowledge is taught, it’s through apprenticeships, not schools.
Specific knowledge is often highly technical or creative. It cannot be outsourced or automated.
I guess, he read Human Action by Mises, too.
What do you think you would have done if you'd found it when you were younger?
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This is something I have been thinking about for a while. I studied math and always had interest in special topics and theories, but never really pursued any. So, I guess, a specialist in a field, one of the very few that would do something so unique and special… This would perfectly fit all boxes. Or something else, I would have time to think about it more carefully. Instead, I spent my high school and university years by playing NHL, damn :D
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In some sense I was pretty close.
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It's hard to take a series of tweets seriously even though I've read some good ones.
More importantly I'm concerned that you don't believe you have specific knowledge. Either case it is a point of view that needs approval or disapproval which are irrelevant when it comes to your funeral.
This is your life. No one is here to be impressed by your knowledge. It is only the power of your knowledge that matters. It matters in that you are able to build mental models that are superior to promoted models and your models are not dumbed down.
You may need to share your experience with some others in order to gain a bit of knowledge that you could not accumulate but yourself.
I call myself a Constructive Technology Aggregate. My knowledge ranges from linguistics, anthropology, religion, history, symbols, occult, construction, architecture and a lot of others that I've read or have had the curiosity to explore.
I don't need anyone's approval.
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I take the tweets with a grain of salt and honestly don’t care about the “get rich” part at all. I’m puzzled by what he calls specific knowledge. I am trained in math and I do things that my non math colleagues always think like they come out of the blue. But I could be easily replaced, there are many others like me, maybe even with AI one day.
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I think you've underestimated your existence.
Because you are human you have the potential to be an awakened being. Only through being human is this possible. Every human can obtain this because being human is part of the path.
Study this
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If we can train a bot, we will train a bot.
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I am specifically trained in the art of the meme
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This is a masterpiece!
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