You start with reasoning and then you build up your judgment. And then when your judgment is sufficiently refined, it just becomes taste or intuition or gut feel, and that’s what you operate on. But you have to start from the specific.
If you start from the general, and stay at the level of the general—and just read books of principles and aphorisms and almanacs and so on—you’re going to be like that person that went to university: overeducated, but they’re lost. They try to apply things in the wrong places. What Nassim Taleb calls the intellectual yet idiots, IYIs.
One of the tweets I was going to bring up is exactly that. From June 3rd: “Acquiring knowledge is easy. The hard part is knowing what to apply and when. That’s why all true learning is on the job. Life is lived in the arena.”
Naval: I like that tweet.
Actually, I just wanted to tweet, “Life is lived in the arena” and that was it. I wanted to just drop it right there. But I felt like I had to explain just a little bit more because “The man in the arena” is a famous quote, so I wanted to unpack a little bit from my direction. But this is a realization that I keep having over and over.
