Building a Product That Takes More Than One Person's Skill Set

Eric Jorgenson is a writer, course creator, blogger, and podcaster. He is also on the founding team of Zaarly, an online marketplace for hiring home service providers.

Eric has been publishing online since 2014, and operates a monthly newsletter. His business blog, Evergreen, has educated and entertained over a million readers.

Eric is the author of The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness. Naval Ravikant is an entrepreneur, philosopher, and investor. Naval's principles for building wealth and creating long-term happiness have captivated the world.

The Almanack of Naval Ravikant is a collection of Naval’s wisdom and experience from the last ten years. It's a curation of his most insightful interviews and poignant reflections.

Eric’s current project, Building a Mountain of Levers, teaches “how to accomplish superhuman feats by playing a different game — building leverage.”

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• The most important things to do when starting a newsletter
• What leverage is, and how to use it to exponentially scale your business
• How a random tweet blossomed into Eric’s best-selling book

Links & Resources

• The Almanack of Naval Ravikant
• Naval Ravikant’s podcast
• @FAKEGRIMLOCK
• Ben Caballero
• Rework
• Anything You Want: 40 Lessons for a New Kind of Entrepreneur
• Peter Bevelin
• Poor Charlie's Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T Munger
• Berkshire Hathaway Letters to Shareholders

Eric Jorgenson’s Links

• Eric’s website: ejorgenson.com
• Twitter: @EricJorgenson

Episode Transcript

Eric: [00:00:00]
Munger said the best thing a human being can do is to help someone else to know more. Everyone has something to teach. Everyone can participate as a student and as a teacher at different points in their lives. There’s always somebody who’s one step ahead of you to learn from, and always somebody who’s one step behind you that you can help.

I think counseling and learning keeps us humble and keeps life exciting. Teaching is rewarding. The fact that we can all kind of be a part of it is really fun.

Nathan: [00:00:29]
In this episode, I talked to Eric Jorgensen, who is the author of one of my favorite books. It’s actually the book that I have gifted the most recently, and that is The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, which is a distillation of the wisdom writing podcast episodes of Naval. So Eric did this awesome project where you compile all this edited down into a book.

And I know we talked about that at the end of the episode, but throughout the episode, we talk about online education, leverage—we spend a lot of time talking about leverage—which is sort of this thing that Naval has really made the centerpiece to a lot of his content that he’s produced.

Eric has gone even further and produced a course on and talked about so much great stuff. Really important concepts that I think you’re really gonna enjoy. So I’ll get out of the way and we’ll just dive in.

Eric, thanks for joining me.

Eric: [00:01:18]
Thanks for having me. You’re on like the Mount Rushmore of heroes of like bootstrappers, turned content creators, turned bootstrappers. So like I’m super excited to be talking to you in any context. This is going to be fun.

Nathan: [00:01:30]
Well, good. And now, now I’m curious who else is on Mount Rushmore?

Eric: [00:01:33]
I knew you were going to ask me that. And I don’t, I, I don’t know. I have not prepared for it, but we can start Photoshopping it up later.

Nathan: [00:01:41]
Yeah, exactly. That’d be a really good use of both of our time.

Reading through all of your stuff online, you are obsessed with education, specifically online education. You’ve got Course Correctly where you’re like reviewing online courses with a friend of yours.

You’ve got like there’s a lot going on and you truly care a lot about the details of online education, and I’m curious, like why, where does that come from? Where does the interest turn into obsession?

Eric: [00:02:12]
So long-term I think like going to Mars is awesome, and curing cancer is awesome, and like solving world hunger is awesome. But education is the variable with the biggest coefficient into all of those things over the long term. So, like all of us who are alive right now are kind of like, Oh God, we’ve got to solve all these problems that are like affecting us.

But if we just kind of look at the species over like a few hundred years or a few thousand years, like our ability to educate ourselves. And then the next generation is like a huge, huge, heavily weighted variable. I guess into like the outcome that we achieve over a long period of time and like how we can affect that.

And I think like there’s no, you know, the, the first principles kind of like where’s the laws of physics limitedness is like, we have the ability to be so much better at education than we are, and we are. There’s some specific context where we’re incredible educators. Like our doctors are incredibly well-educated; the rigor of like a pilot’s education or doctor’s education compared to, you know, somebody who maybe like a writer, like different creative pursuits or do an MBA, like is just, we’re just missing easy opportunities to kind to become significantly better.

And the internet lowers the cost of that and increases the accessibility of it. And so I think we’re going to see like a really kind of cool transformation of that over our lifetimes. I was excited to kind of see it, see it come together.

Nathan: [00:03:40]
Yeah. So what I hear in that is there’s individual pursuits, you know, that will like advanced civilization. You know, in like one very specific and highly effective area, but then education is like the rising tide for everything of like, if you can help people teach well, you know, learn well, any of those things and make those, those tools and Content, everything available, then that can go in any, any, and every direction.

Eric: [00:04:09]
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like Munger said, like the best thing that human being can do is to like help someone else to know more. And I think that’s a really, like everyone has something to teach and. We are all trying to learn. And, it’s something that everyone can participate in as a student and as a teacher at different points in their lives.

And there’s always somebody who’s like one s...