Who changes the world

 

Navalism

@NavalismHQ

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2h

Lasting novels don’t come from literature departments. Successful businesses don’t come from business schools. Scientific revolutions don’t come from research universities. Get your education, then get moving. Find the loners tinkering at the edge.

@naval

Arjun Khemani

@arjunkhemani

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@naval

: If I look back on my life, almost everything great that I managed to pull off—great by my own definition, not by the world’s definition—has come from following my own natural intellectual obsessions. So I think if you can get obsessed over something, and if you can dive into it, just let yourself go and learn everything about it with no motivation other than just wanting to know the answer, that becomes the basis for all of the so-called “self-improvement” out there. You have

@bryan_johnson

here somewhere. He’s obsessed with not dying and aging. Well, he’s obsessed, and that’s great. He’s following his intellectual obsession, and we all get to learn from that. You’re following your obsession with the network state, and there are people out there following their obsession on AI, on crypto, and on history—Roman history, whatever it is. But if you get obsessed with something, you can figure it out to a detail that other people don’t. You can satisfy yourself. If you go deep enough into anything, you find the same commonalities, you find the same philosophies. As a weird aside, I’ve gotten into photography recently. Don’t ask me why, but it’s just a way of combining art and science, being social and antisocial, doing something utilitarian. But sure enough, I’m obsessed with photography. I’m reading all the philosophical photography blogs where the authors talk about the meaning of life, art, science, and so on. If you go deep into anything, you’ll find the same common threads. And so, I think self-improvement really just comes from letting yourself be who you are—following the things you truly want to follow, figuring out what you want to figure out—not worrying about what others want or think. And then, you kind of find yourself in the same place at the end, no matter which route you take.