May 3, 2018
Naval: “You can get to whatever you want to. You just have to care about it badly enough.”
“When I went to college, my first year there I had three jobs, and it was delivering newspapers and washing dishes and those kinds of jobs in the school cafeteria.
And if you’re the 17-year-old kid and you’re working in the cafeteria and you’re washing dishes and all the other kids are out there having fun and eating, it sticks with you. It makes an impression.
And I said, “Well, this is terrible. I don’t want to do this.”
At the time, I was majoring in English and history. And I was like, “Okay, if I keep doing that, I’m going to continue doing this and it’s not the way to go.”
So I actually went and smooth talked my way into tutoring an advanced computer science class when I was completely unqualified. I didn’t even know the subject matter at hand. So then what I had to do was I had to learn the material well enough the night before that I could be at tutoring level the next morning in the class.
And that was a seminal point, because it showed me a few things. One is you can get to whatever you want to get to. You just have to care about it badly enough.”
From his interview w Mixergy.