Don’t Chase Booby Prizes
“The only true test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life.”
There are lots of ways to define intelligence, but only one I really like. It’s Naval Ravikant’s definition:
“The only true test of intelligence is if you get what you wanted out of life.”
If you got what you wanted, you’re smart. If you didn’t, you’re not.
But there’s an even more important question embedded in the premise of the first: Are you wise enough to know what to want to begin with?
Because if you aren’t, you’ll waste your life chasing booby prizes.
The Real Test Of Intelligence Is Getting What You Want Out of Life.
Test scores, academic metrics, honor rolls – none of these matter at the end of your life if you didn’t get what you wanted.
It’s not about raw mental abilities. It’s about your success in “gaming the system” to achieve whatever you want. It could be to get rich, have a giant family that loves you, or build a sustainable business you can work on from the beach.
And to succeed, you need all your faculties - skill, strategy, planning, perseverance, resourcefulness, tenacity, and emotional intelligence - pushing in the same direction towards your goal.
That’s the only way to achieve what Charlie Munger calls the Lalapalooza effect: an incredible, outsized result that’s greater than the sum of its parts after years of compounding in the same direction.
But beware… even if you win and get what you want, you’ve lost if what you chose to achieve never mattered to begin with.
Don’t Chase Booby Prizes.
What most people miss about Naval’s definition is the importance of choosing something worth wanting in the first place.
Here’s Naval talking about this on a Twitter space:
“One part of course is were you able to hack reality to get what you wanted? But the more important part is were you smart enough to figure out what to want in the first place? And that means there are many booby prizes that simply aren’t worth having. And then there are others that are out of your reach. It’s ludicrous for me to desire wings or even to travel into a rocket into outer space. Because it’s either low ROI (return on investment) effort or it’s unachievable for me. So what I want to do is figure out what it is that is worth wanting.”
So, there are two parts to intelligence:
1) being able to “hack reality” and achieve the goals you want, and 2) being wise enough to figure out what goals are worth pursuing.
Many people forget about the second part and end up winning “booby prizes.” These are usually status symbols like a huge following on Twitter, a new title at work without much more money, a fancy car, or a huge house. They look and sound good, but they don’t really improve your life or give it meaning.
To Figure Out What You Want, Get To Know Yourself.
To figure out what matters to you - what’s going to feed your soul, not your ego - you have to spend time getting to know yourself. You have to find out what kind of person you are, and the goals that best align with that person.
During this process, you want to be as honest with yourself as possible. Honest about your capabilities, values, skills, and smarts… even if it doesn’t feel good. Because after a realistic look, sometimes your dreams aren’t reasonable.
There are a bunch of things I’ve had to come to terms with. I know I’ll never be a professional hockey player (despite my quality men’s league scoring rate:). I know I won’t be the CEO of a huge, established company. I don’t have a head for numbers, and I don’t want to spend 12 hours / day in an office. I know I’m never going to be a professional performance artist or singer. The list goes on.
It takes time to get to know yourself, so be patient. It took me most of my twenties. In my mid 20’s, I was on the corporate track and what I desperately wanted more than anything was a “Producer” title. Out of film school, this was the golden title – the one my bosses had and the one we (the assistants and development execs) all coveted. What could be cooler than being a “producer” in Hollywood?
Well, I finally got that title. I got some more money too, along with more work and longer hours. At the same time, I was reading about owning a business, and equity, and using free leverage on the internet to forge a new path to making money… one that gave me my time back. A new title with more work and longer hours didn’t get me any closer to what I now wanted: freedom of my time.
My wife had it (she’s an actor), my friends had it, and I wanted it too. Freedom was my next want. And I got that too! I quit my job in 2021 and have had control of my time ever since.
And guess what? It still wasn’t enough. I quickly realized that freedom of time isn’t enough. I had to use my time to create meaning in my life. I found that creative projects were what I really wanted to work on. Things like writing movies with my wife, writing online, and creating products that can help others build what I’ve built.
And what I want may well change again. But for now, making cool stuff with good people is pretty awesome. And I’m so lucky to get to do it. I spend every day laughing with my wife (usually at me). What’s better than that?
The Best “Wants” Let You Win Even When You Fail.
When you’re trying to figure out what you want to do, it’s best to choose things where even if you fail, you win. Anything entrepreneurial or creative is set up like this because you’re getting feedback from the real world and using it to improve.
When I quit my job to write a movie with my wife, I knew that we would win even if we failed. Because the process of learning how to write a movie – with an incredible producer as a mentor – would be a “once in a lifetime” opportunity. And it was. And we’ve used every lesson we learned over that process to make our next movie better.
The same goes for writing online. I started writing because I wanted my own creative outlet. I didn’t really care how many people read my posts. And I knew that even if no one read what I wrote, I would still become a better writer, learn how to own and operate a blog, and learn the economics of the internet even if I failed.
So choose things where failure is still a win.
Not Wanting Something Is As Good As Having It.
Tech entrepreneur Liad Shababo tells us that “not wanting something is as good as having it.” This is wise because the more you want, the more you suffer (as the Buddha says, desire is the root of suffering).
If there’s one factor that determines your happiness over all others, it’s the difference between what you want and what you currently have. And there are two ways to close the gap. Either:
1. Get more, or
2. Want less.
If you can figure out how to want less, it’s as good as getting it. And life will be a lot easier.
So, choose what you want wisely. Pick things where even if you lose, you win, and then go after it with everything you have. And if you can figure out how to not want something, do that instead.
Start now.