Specific Knowledge: The Stuff That Can’t Be Taught, Only Learned
“Specific knowledge is found much more by pursuing your innate talents, your genuine curiosity, and your passion.”
The most important knowledge can’t be taught. It can only be learned by pursuing the things you’re curious about. Naval Ravikant calls this kind of knowledge specific knowledge - the knowledge that can’t be trained for.
And this is the kind of knowledge that can make you rich.
What Is Specific Knowledge?
Specific knowledge is a term Naval Ravikant uses in the context of wealth creation to describe valuable knowledge that is specialized to the person and circumstance.
Here’s Naval discussing it in his viral tweetstorm, How to get rich (without getting lucky):
“The first thing to notice about specific knowledge is that you can’t be trained for it… [it’s] found much more by pursuing your innate talents, your genuine curiosity, and your passion…Very often specific knowledge is at the edge of knowledge. It’s also stuff that’s just being figured out or is really hard to figure out... [It] tends to be technical and creative. It’s on the bleeding edge of technology, on the bleeding edge of art, on the bleeding edge of communication.”
Specific knowledge can’t be taught - in the same way that going to business school won’t teach you how to build a business. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb says:
“The only thing you can learn from a business school professor is how to become a business school professor.”
For most creative and business pursuits, there is no exact road map to follow. Most successful people got to where they are by making things up as they go along. They try something and see if it works, and if it doesn’t they iterate and try it again. Along the way, they’re building specific knowledge.
You learn specific knowledge by asking good questions, creating, failing, iterating, and trying again.
Let’s break out some of the pieces of specific knowledge and examine them.
Specific knowledge can’t be trained for.
Specific knowledge isn’t taught in the classroom because every other student - regardless of their personal circumstance, passions, and interests - is learning exactly the same thing. It’s not specific to you in any way.
Instead, specific knowledge is often passed down through apprenticeships. You’ll learn a lot more valuable info by shadowing someone with 10+ years of experience in the business than by reading “business” books.
Specific knowledge is found by pursuing your innate talents and passions.
It takes time and energy to build specific knowledge. You’ll only go deep enough into an area if you’re passionate and curious about the field you’re digging in. It should feel like play for you when it looks like work to others.
The right kind of work should give you energy back as you do it. You feel energized and alive, not exhausted and burnt out.
That’s why you want to find a career that fires you up - that gives you loads of energy back, no matter how much time you spend doing it. This is the field you’ll dig into for long enough to figure out the specific knowledge that matters.
Specific knowledge is technical and creative.
If specific knowledge can’t be trained for, it means it’s both highly creative and technical. There’s no clear road map or “career path” to follow. There are technical tools, but you are left to combine those tools in new ways or create entirely new ones.
When I wrote a feature film with my wife, we had a general roadmap for a “three-act structure” that offered some guidance. But, there was still an infinite number of directions we could go with the script. And it was only our creative instinct - what we felt to be right - that could guide us.
This is why specific knowledge is highly creative. When creating anything, you rely on your entire life’s experiences to come to a decision. There is no “right” or “wrong” answer - the only question is, does it “work.”
Specific knowledge is on the edge of knowledge.
This is where Naval and the late Felix Dennis agree. Dennis was a billionaire in his own right and wrote a book on his success called, How To Get Rich. In that book, he writes:
“New or rapidly developing industries, whether glamorous or not, very often provide more opportunities to get rich than established sectors. The three reasons for this are availability of risk capital, ignorance and the power of a rising tide.”
These industries are on the edge of knowledge. They are still being defined. If you can become part of that definition process and learn specific knowledge as the field takes form, you can get rich.
Iterate To Learn Specific Knowledge.
Every action you take gives you feedback - it either got you closer to your goal or further away. And you learn something from each failed attempt. That’s why iteration - making continuous tweaks and changes to improve something - is so powerful.
Each draft of my wife’s and my feature film got progressively better. We made choices, saw if they worked, then got rid of what didn’t work and kept what did. We iterated for 8 months until we had a “final draft” we could go out to buyers with.
And with each iteration, we learned something about writing our script - about what worked and didn’t work, and (more importantly) why it didn’t work. And we built specific knowledge - knowledge that could only be learned by working on that script, at that time, with that partner, with our particular sensibilities.
Making choices, getting feedback, then making new choices is a great way to get specific knowledge.
Start now.
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ARTICLE SOURCES
Naval Ravikant - How To Get Rich (without getting lucky)
Naval Ravikant - Arm Yourself with Specific Knowledge https://nav.al/specific-knowledge
Naval Ravikant - Specific Knowledge Is Highly Creative or Technical - https://nav.al/creative-technical
Dennis, Felix. How to Get Rich: One of the World's Greatest Entrepreneurs Shares His Secrets. Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.