Naval Ravikant
Productise yourself
Specific knowledge times leverage
The How to Get Rich tweetstorm; The Almanack of Naval Ravikant
He compresses the whole method into two words. What each of the two refers to, and why the new leverage is different in kind.
What actually happened?
The formula collapses into a phrase: productise yourself. Yourself means specific knowledge — the kind you cannot be trained for, growing out of your temperament, obsessions and history; it feels like play to you and looks like work to others. Productise means putting leverage on it. Labour and capital are the old kinds and both need somebody's permission. The new kind replicates at zero marginal cost: code and media, which need permission from nobody. What you wrote keeps working while you sleep.
Specific knowledge is not on any syllabus
Any skill taught in a standard way is supplied in unlimited quantity and priced accordingly. Specific knowledge comes from the part that cannot be standardised: your combination of oddities, the crossings between fields, an obsession out of proportion to its subject. The detection method is his own line — play to you, labour to others.
Someone technical who can also make complicated things funny; someone clinical who is compulsive about spreadsheets. Each piece is ordinary. The combination has no second supplier.
Permissionless means you can start today
The bottleneck in the old leverage is persuasion: nothing moves until you have hired someone or raised something. Code and media delete that step. Writing, recording, publishing — live today, at the cost of time rather than consent. The opportunity of this generation is essentially that the entry price of leverage fell to zero.
The same insight can wait for funding and a team, or go out as a public series of posts that grows an audience. The second needs nobody's approval, and frequently produces the first.
Productising means taking yourself out of delivery
Where the two words end up: packaging your judgement, taste and method into something that delivers without you present. The test is replication — each additional user should cost you an amount of time approaching zero. Until then what you own is a good job. After it, an asset.
Five years of consulting turned into a book, a course, a self-serve tool. The same knowledge moves from sold by the occasion to permanently on sale.
How do I use it today?
Where you are: capable, and your income is welded to your hours.
Ask first: what do I do that is play to me and labour to others? Can it be packaged as code or as content and published without anyone's permission?
Where it goes wrong: reading productise as everyone should sell a course — without specific knowledge, leverage only amplifies the average. And do not use polishing the knowledge to postpone publishing forever; leverage only counts what shipped.
Lines to keep
Productise yourself.
Specific knowledge feels like play to you but looks like work to others.
Code and media are permissionless leverage.
Same situation, other people are asking
What I'm good at, nobody needs right now.Anything I can be trained to do, something else can now do too.It does in seconds what used to be my whole day.The one thing I was best at, it now does better.My craft stopped being worth anything · all 6 questions →If this one named what you are going through,
send it to someone who needs it, or keep it somewhere you will find it again.