On today's episode I speak with Eric Jorgenson, the Product Strategy guy at Zaarly and the author of the Almanack of Naval. We spend time discussing the forms and importance of leverage, building the infrastructure around online education, and the most unexpected benefit of publishing his book.

Links:

Eric's Twitter
The Almanack of Naval
Eric's Personal Website
Course Correctly

Contact Me:
My Twitter
My Website

5 Key Takeaways: 

1. I think of mental models as just like a quick, memorable sort of metaphor for like a way that the world works.  So it's kind of a mental toolkit, I guess, is like the way I would think of mental models. 

2. I definitely have a focus on the idea of leverage, where you build specific knowledge, you take on accountability, and then you apply leverage through capital, labor or product. 

3. I also know that there are people selling basically scams, as online courses and their landing pages pretty much all look alike. So I think there's, there's definitely some like credibility that can get built, which is like, I started Course Correctly. Course Correctly focuses on independent, unbiased, like thorough reviews of online courses. So I've actually, like, hired somebody who starts soon here, and we're gonna like, kind of double down on starting to build that much more aggressively. 

4. I think there's really interesting stuff to do around curriculum, like treating every course, as a modular piece, and building curriculums and stories and career paths. So somebody who's coming in saying, like, you know, I'm 19, when I'm 25, I want to be like, a founder of a technology company. And I want it to be like a venture-backed, scalable thing. It's like, Okay, cool. Here are the courses that like we would all put together, we're gonna start, you know, it's maybe one year of full-time education, but then five years of part-time education. 

5. It's easy to overlook the fact that like, even 100 people reading a blog post, like, while you just go about your day, or like, are asleep is a fucking miracle, right? Like that is an awesome miracle. And is 100 more people, like if we were in a room and you were going to get up in front of them and read this book, like, you'd be nervous.