Naval Ravikant’s idea: find the thing that feels like play to you but looks like work to others. That’s your edge.
The typical career advice is to work harder, develop discipline, grind through resistance. And sometimes that’s necessary. But the truly disproportionate outcomes come from people who aren’t grinding at all — they’re playing.
How to Recognise It
It doesn’t feel like effort. Ideas come without forcing them. You lose track of time. Other people look at what you produced and say “that must have taken ages” — but it didn’t. It just happened.
For me, it’s connecting ideas across domains. Enterprise AI strategy, philosophy of honesty, river metaphors for constraints, career positioning — these don’t feel like separate tasks. They feel like one continuous thought that happens to touch different surfaces.
The Trap
The trap is assuming that because it’s easy, it’s not valuable. We’re trained to believe that value requires suffering. If it came naturally, it must not be worth much.
The opposite is true. The things that come naturally to you are precisely the things that are hardest for others. That’s what makes them valuable.
The Career Implication
Don’t optimise for the highest-paying job. Optimise for the one where the daily work feels like play. The money follows — because you’ll be unreasonably good at something, and unreasonably good is what the market pays premium for.
The hard part isn’t finding the work. It’s trusting that play counts.