You Can’t Code
If you can’t code, write books and blogs, record videos and podcasts. — Naval Ravikant
There are a lot of people quoting Naval saying this, although I couldn’t find the original quote easily. I finally found it here in a tweet storm.
One time I was In a plane working with my cofounder (who can code) and he showed me a quote from Steve Jobs that was very inspirational. It was an email that Steve wrote to himself. We marveled at the insight of Steve’s words, but when we spent 10 minutes trying to find out if Steve really wrote the email, we couldn’t find a credible source. That led to a discussion about source. Is the source important? If the words or theory or idea moves you, does it matter if it was Steve Jobs said it?
We decided that when it comes to great inspirational quotes, the ones that are just opinions, it really doesn’t really matter who says them. It doesn’t matter to me, as long as it feels good. Ai could make up thousands of quotes in seconds that would be insightful and inspiration, let’s do a few:
ChatGPT Sure! Here are four more quotes that channel Steve Jobs’ tone and mindset:
1. “It’s not about making something new for the sake of it. It’s about creating something that makes people wonder how they ever lived without it.”
2. “The most powerful tool you have is the belief that you can change the world, and the guts to actually try.”
3. “Success isn’t measured by what you’ve built—it’s measured by how it inspires others to build.”
4. “Don’t just aim to be better than your competition—aim to redefine the game entirely.”
These carry the essence of Jobs’ belief in innovation, disruption, and creating meaningful impact.
I do love these quotes above, and could get hundreds made that all sound fantastic and very Jobsian.
Ok, enough of this discussion of quotes. I got distracted from the very topic of this email. It’s about Naval basically saying this, “if you can’t code, write or record words”
A year ago I was feeling like I couldn’t provide the same value to my startup that the coders could. We were in build mode. However, my favorite part of a company is when you get to share what you are working on. In build mode, you can only do so much sharing without having a product to let people see and use. So, I went to town on Naval’s advice and started writing and blogging, while the coders coded. I just started writing and reading and using the code our team created. I write about everything under the sun, but as a reader, you know what ai imagery and prompts are littered throughout almost every post I make. I am user testing at the ground level, and trying to be a useful non-coder a technology company.
Coding is writing using language and numbers. I have watched the code get written and edited, and there is a lot of words and abbreviations and numbers and shortcuts.
Writing, like this, can be a form of coding and building. It’s very different than the code that makes an app function on your phone, but writing words is the original programming before we learned the language of the computers.
I am hacking on thoughts with words every single day. I am building up theories and ideas and testing them with something that I will dub “human coding”, which is what most non fiction books, podcast and blogs do inherently. The words we consume are snippets of code that our processors ingest. The words are coded to get space in your memory. When successful, the words can even cause action if the code is meant to be executable. I put in polls and requests in my words and some percentage of humans will take action when prompted.
Most of the time, my code is very unintentional and quite sloppy, if I say so myself. I do not even edit my code after my first pass. I intentionally leave it raw so that it’s easily distinguished as a human creation. But many writers code with a lot of intention. Religious texts are very effective written code and create full programs that run for centuries. White papers are written code, like the one that made Bitcoin .
Thanks for ingesting my code snippets. I am just trying to make all us non-coders feel a little more useful in the world. I hope my words haven’t made you dumber as Billy Madison did to his audience.
Happy 420
Scott X