Thread by @coryjss

This is a penetrating depiction of one of the major directional arrows of progress of our time and should be required reading/listening.

@Naval on 'working like a lion' in the industrial age:

"We live in an age of infinite leverage...

...the impacts of good decision making are much higher than they used to be because you can influence thousands or millions of people through your decisions or code.

If you want to operate at peak performance you have to learn how to train your mind just like an athlete has to train their body.

Allow that one thing to be your obsession.

We like to view the world as linear: I put in 8 hours of work, I get 8 hours of output.

It doesn't work that way.

The person running the corner grocery store is putting in just as much work as a finance executive but is getting much lower output.

What you do, who you do it with, and how you do it is way more important than how hard you work. Outputs are non-linear based on the quality of the work you put in.

**The right way to work is like a lion.**

We're not like cows, we're not meant to graze all day. We're meant to hunt like lions. We're closer to carnivores in our omnivorous development than we are to herbivores.

**As a modern knowledge worker athlete, as an intellectual athlete, you want to function like an athlete.**

This means you train hard. Then you sprint, then you rest, then you reassess. You get your feedback and train some more. Then you sprint again....rest and reassess.

This idea that you'll have linear output by cranking every day the same amount of time - that's not for "people", that's for machines. Machines are meant to work 9-5. Humans aren't meant to work 9-5.

BUT people working for someone else don't have that option. That's the rub.

**If you're going to make money, you're not going to get rich renting out your time.**

Even lawyers and doctor's who make $500 an hour aren't getting rich because their lifestyle is slowly ramping up along with their income and they're not saving enough.

They don't have that ability to retire.

The first thing: you have to own a part of a business, you have to own equity, either as an owner, investor, shareholder, or a brand you're building to accrue to you to gain your financial freedom.

**In the future, whether 50 or 100 years from now virtually everyone is going to be working for themselves.

The information age will reverse the industrial age.**

Back in hunter-gatherer times, how we evolved, we basically worked for ourselves. We communicated and cooperated within tribes but each hunter and each gathered stood by themselves and combined their resources with a family unit.

But there was no boss-hierarchy where you're the third middle manager down. In the farming age we became a little more hierarchical because we had to run farms, but even those were mostly family farms.

It's industrial work with factories that created the model of thousands of people working together on one thing and having bosses and schedules and times to show up.

**The reality is no matter how rich you are, if someone can tell you when to be at work and what to wear and how to behave you're not a free person, you're not actually rich.**

We're in this model now where we think it's all about employment and jobs. Intrinsic in this is that I have to work for someone else. But the information age is breaking that down.

Ronald Coase is an economist who has a theorem that's very famous. He talks about why is a company the size that it is? Why is a company one person, or ten or hundred or a thousand? Well it has to do with the external transaction costs.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Natur…

Let's say I'm building a house and I need someone to come in and provide the lumber. Do I want that to be part of my company or do I want that to be an external provider? A lot of that depends on how hard it is to do that transaction with someone externally vs internally.

If it's too hard to keep contracting externally every time I'll bring it in house. If it's easy to do it externally and it's a one off type of thing then I'd rather keep it out of the house.

**Information technology is making it easier and easier to do these transactions externally.**

It's becoming much easier to communicate with someone. In the gig economy you can send small amounts of money through the app, you can hire through app, you can rate afterwards.

**We're seeing the atomization of the firm**

The optimal size of the firm is shrinking. It's most obvious in Silicon Valley. There are tons of firms constantly coming up and shaving off little pieces of the business from large companies and turning it into huge markets.

So what looked like small little vacation rental market on craigslist has now blown up into AirBnB.

**But what I think we'll see whether 10, 20 50 100 years from now, high quality work - not driving an Uber, we're talking about super high quality work - will be available in a gig fashion.**

You'll wake up in morning, your phone will buzz and you'll have five different job opportunities, people you've worked with in the past, people who've been referred to you from your network.

**This is kind of how Hollywood already works**

Organize for projects. Decide whether to take the project or not. The contract is right there on the spot.

You get paid a certain amount. You get rated every day or every week. You get money delivered. Then when you're done working you turn it off and go to Tahiti or wherever you want to spend the next three months.

The smart people have already figured out the internet enables this. They've already started to work more and more remotely, on their own schedule, on their own time, in their own place, with their own friends, in their own way.

**That's actually how we're most productive.**

The information revolution, by making it easier to communicate, connect and cooperate, enables us to go back to working for ourselves.

I tell people hey I'll help you start your own company when you're ready. This is our dream. That's our highest calling.

The idea that we're factory like COGS in a machine who are specialized and have to do things by rote memorization or instruction is going to go away and *****we're going to go back to being small groups of creative bands of individuals setting out to do missions.*****

And when those missions are done we collect our money, we get rated and then we rest and reassess until we're ready for the next sprint."

- Naval Ravikant

Source:

*Information Age 😅🤷‍♂️