Hunting Knowledge with Eric Jorgenson

Eric Jorgenson has one big idea. Behind his work as a product strategist at Zaarly, behind his writing and blogging, behind the creation of his recent book, The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, there is the idea that the best thing a human can do is help another human know more.

Of course, to help someone else know more, you have to start by knowing more yourself. Eric is no casual reader, not a passive consumer of culture. He is a hunter of knowledge, and he believes that great knowledge can be hiding anywhere.

Snippets of wisdom from great books (Charlie Munger’s Poor Charlie’s Almanack is a big influence on Eric’s idea of knowledge sharing), tweets, ideas from his colleagues at Zaarly, anything he thinks he might one day come back to goes to live in a series of giant Google docs, like habitats for wisdom where it’s always open season.

As Eric puts it, “My work product is in Google Docs, and words are my medium.” He uses these docs when looking for inspiration for new features that get built at Zaarly, or for when he needs to find a piece of information he knows he’s seen before. Some of it serves as purely personal reference material that he can turn to whenever he needs to make a decision.

In ways private and public,what Eric hunts gets rebuilt and renewed, transforming flashes of insight into content that can serve more than his own needs. When he’s working on his blog, Evergreen, he turns what he’s captured out into the wild again, in fresh forms that will reach and teach others. On a much bigger scale, that’s how he built his book, The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, turning the investor’s every tweet, talk, interview, and essay into a compendium of Navalisms that could be shared with the world.

“As a relatively young person, maybe I don't yet have a huge wealth of incredible life experiences to draw on. But what I can do is seek out ideas that are time-tested, well-vetted, and likely to be helpful—and then talk about them, curate them, or repackage them in a way that is equally timeless.”

In this interview, Eric walks us through how he uses the Google docs to build his compendium of knowledge and create new stuff, like The Almanack, from all that raw material. Read on to learn how you can use his methods to store the gains of your own hunting—to organize and synthesize—and to make new.

Let’s dive in!

Eric introduces himself

My name is Eric Jorgenson. I joined Zaarly in 2011, after half-dropping out and half-graduating from Michigan State. I started there as an intern on a one-month contract, and since then I’ve done every non-technical, non-design job in the company—all the way to my current role as Product Strategist.

I have no specific software talents, so I don't directly manage any projects, and I don't manage designers or engineers. What I do is an amalgamation of strategic direction and coordination throughout the company to make sure everybody is moving in the same direction, with a shared vision.

I also do a fair amount of writing on my own time—Evergreen was a project that involved two years of focused curation and synthesis on a range of different topics around business strategy and company growth.

I’ve recently published a book called The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, a collection of Naval’s insights from his Twitter, podcasts, essays, and talks.

I store knowledge and educate myself using Google Docs

I’ve found that the act of curating ideas drives them into me much more deeply. I do a lot of deliberate work in my life to find blocks of knowledge that are going to be of lasting relevance, figure out how they relate to other things, and then set up a system for how to efficiently reference them when I have a problem I’m trying to solve.

For me—whether it’s creating Evergreen and the Navalmanack, my work with Zaarly, or my own personal knowledge-building projects – this process happens in Google Docs.

A really good example is the document I put together as part of the process of teaching myself about growth. I call it my ‘Ever-Growing Guide to Growth.’ It’s private—I haven’t ever shared it with anyone.

My basic philosophy is that if I’m going to spend years of my life working on growth, I want a robust document that contains everything I’m learning and want to retain on the subject. I just keep collecting material, and at some point—who knows?—maybe the right thing to do will be to create a book about growth out of all the knowledge and references I have accumulated here.

The document is over a hundred pages—almost book-length already. I’d say that around 80% of it is made up of excerpts from different things I’ve read or listened to, or materials from courses I’ve taken. I have all of that material collected in one place, and categorized in relation to other things.

Here’s a look at the table of contents:

Developing this is an ongoing process as I accumulate more and more information—I certainly didn’t start with a table of contents like this and then fill it out piece by piece. When I started out, there were three items in there. Now there are maybe fifty.

I know that people do this kind of thing in Evernote with amazing results, but I’m fluent in Google Docs already, and I'm not enough of a tool nerd to really want to spend a whole weekend learning a new system. Plus, I like knowing that I have an outline and a table of contents, that I can search and link, add tables and images, and reorganize everything the way I want it—that’s just the way my brain works.

I’ve probably never spent more than twenty minutes at a stretch working on this document. If I’m reading something that seems like a good idea, or something I’ll definitely want to come back to, I’ll just add it in. For example, I was reading First Round Review and found this great articulation of the concept of ‘product-market fit’. I copied a few paragraphs into the doc and left the link to the place where I found it in there too:

I have more than one of these documents, though this is the biggest.