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Naval
Being Ethical Is Long-term Greedy
Being Ethical Is Long-term Greedy

Being Ethical Is Long-term Greedy

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Naval Ravikant, Babak Nivi
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4 Clips
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Jun 26, 2019
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Episode Transcript
0:00
In one of your tweets you listed out some of the things you should study like programming sales Reading Writing arithmetic. One of the items that ended up on The Cutting Room floor was that you should also study ethics.
0:15
I was originally going to put that out there as a concession to people who believe that making money is evil and that the only way to make it as evil, but then I realize ethics is not necessarily something you study. It's something you think about and something you do every one of us has a personal moral code and where you got that moral code from it's different for everybody. It's not like a point you to a textbook sure I could point you some Roman and Greek text but that's not going to suddenly make you ethical. There's the Golden Rule right do unto others as you would have them do unto you or there's nothing to live silver rule, which is don't do unto others what you don't want them doing unto you once you've been in business long enough, you will realize how much of business is about trust and it's about trust because you want to compound interest you want to be able to work for long.
1:00
Good time with trustworthy people without having to reevaluate every discussion without and rethink each time and without having to constantly look over your shoulder. And so over time you gravitate towards working with certain kinds of people and similarly those people will gravitate towards working with other ethical quote-unquote people. So being ethical turns out to be a selfish imperative you want to be ethical because it attracts the other long-term players in the network and then they want to do business with you and if you build a good enough reputation for being ethical eventually people will pay you just to do deals through you because you are the one who will validate and ensure the deals by your presence because you wouldn't be involved with low quality stuff. So being ethical actually pays off in the long run, but it's the very long run and the short run being unethical pays off which is why so many people go for it's a greedy algorithm, but you can be ethical simply because your long-term greedy and I can even outline a framework for different parts of so-called.
2:00
Fix just based on the idea of long-term selfishness. For example, you want to be honest because it leaves you with a clear mind. You don't have two threads running in your head one is a lies that you told it to keep track of in the other one is what you're saying. You just have to think about one thing at a time. So you have more energy to think about that things you're clear thinker also by being honest you're rejecting the people who only want to hear the Pretty Lies. So you forced those people audio Network and sometimes it's painful like friends and family, but long-term you create room for the people who like you exactly the way that you are. So that is a selfish reason to be honest, for example in negotiations. If you're the kind of person who always tries to get the best deal for yourself, you will win a lot of very early deals and it'll feel very good. But on the other hand, there are a few people who will recognize that you're always scrabbling and not acting fairly and they will tend to avoid you over time those people end up being the deal makers in the network because people go to them for a few.
2:59
Shake or to figure out what's fair. And so if you are cutting people Fair deals, you don't get paid in the short term but in the long term, everybody wants to deal with you and you end up being a Market Hub. You have more information. You have trust you have reputation and people end up doing deals through you a lot of wisdom is just realizing long-term consequences of your actions. And so the longer term you're willing to look the wiser that you're going to seem to everybody around you.
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