Naval warns against tracking time when building anything meaningful. [“If you’re counting, you’ll run out of patience before it arrives”](transcripts/eventually.md).
The mathematical reality is brutal. Good things take longer than anyone expects. “Don’t keep track. Don’t keep count. Because if you do, you will run out of time”. Counting creates psychological pressure. Pressure kills persistence before exponential returns kick in.
This connects to Naval’s observations about agency. “Agency does work, but if you’re keeping track of the time period, you’re going to be disappointed”. He saw this pattern repeatedly. Smart people give up too early because they measure progress against artificial timelines instead of evolutionary scales.
Naval learned this through decades of watching brilliant people succeed. “Looking back on my career, the people who I identified as brilliant and hardworking two decades ago are all successful now, almost without exception”. The key insight: “On a long enough timescale, you will get paid”. Their social proof emerged slowly, then suddenly.
But there’s a catch. You must “enjoy it and keep doing it and doing it and doing it” without measuring. This explains why get-rich-quick schemes fail. When you watch the clock, attachment to outcomes kills the process. You’re playing finite games instead of infinite ones.
“You have to make sure you give these things time. Life is long”
Naval’s formula requires urgency in actions but patience with results. Counting confuses the two. It turns wealth creation into wage slavery.