Eric-Jorgenson The-Almanack-of-Naval-Ravikant indd

INTENTIONS DON’T MATTER.
ACTIONS DO.
TAKE ON ACCOUNTABILITY
Embrace accountability and take business risks under your 
own name. Society will reward you with responsibility, equity, 
and leverage.
To get rich, you need leverage. Leverage comes in labor, comes 
in capital, or it can come through code or media. But most of 
these, like labor and capital, people have to give to you. For 
labor, somebody has to follow you. For capital, somebody has 
to give you money, assets to manage, or machines.
So to get these things, you have to build credibility, and you 
have to do it under your own name as much as possible, which 
is risky. So, accountability is a double-edged thing. It allows 

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B U I L D I N G W E A L T H · 51
you to take credit when things go well and to bear the brunt 
of the failure when things go badly. [78]
Clear accountability is important. Without accountability, you 
don’t have incentives. Without accountability, you can’t build 
credibility. But you take risks. You risk failure. You risk humil-
iation. You risk failure under your own name.
Luckily, in modern society, there’s no more debtors’ prison 
and people aren’t imprisoned or executed for losing other 
people’s money, but we’re still socially hardwired to not fail 
in public under our own names. The people who have the 
ability to fail in public under their own names actually gain 
a lot of power.
I’ll give a personal anecdote. Up until about 2013, 2014, my 
public persona was entirely around startups and investing. 
Only around 2014, 2015 did I start talking about philosophy 
and psychological things and broader things. It made me a 
little nervous because I was doing it under my own name. 
There were definitely people in the industry who sent me 
messages through the backchannel like, “What are you doing? 
You’re ending your career. This is stupid.”
I kind of just went with it. I took a risk. Same with crypto. Early 
on, I took a risk. But when you put your name out there, you 
take a risk with certain things. You also get to reap the rewards. 
You get the benefits. [78]
In the old days, the captain was expected to go down with the 
ship. If the ship was sinking, then literally the last person to 
get off was the captain. Accountability does come with real 
risks, but we’re talking about a business context.

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52 · T H E A L M A N A C K O F N A V A L R A V I K A N T
The risk here would be you would probably be the last one to 
get your capital back out. You’d be the last one to get paid for 
your time. The time that you put in, the capital you put into 
the company, these are at risk. [78]
Realize that in modern society, the downside risk is not that 
large. Even personal bankruptcy can wipe the debts clean in 
good ecosystems. I’m most familiar with Silicon Valley, but 
generally, people will forgive failures as long as you were 
honest and made a high-integrity effort.
There’s not really that much to fear in terms of failure, and 
so people should take on a lot more accountability than they 
do. [78]