What is your specific knowledge?
How to identify, name and start taking your specific knowledge seriously.
In my first year, I sat through five club interviews. Every single one started the same way: “tell us about yourself, what are you interested in?” I never had a clean answer. Not because I didn’t have interests, but because I had too many that didn’t seem to belong together. AI, finance, design, writing, startups. I’d watch people answer the question with certainty, with one word, as if they already had it all figured out, then talk my way through my own answer. It took me a while to realise: the fumbling wasn’t the problem, the one-box question was.
Naval Ravikant has this idea called specific knowledge and it’s one of those concepts that sounds obvious until you realize you have no idea what yours actually is.
The short definition: it’s what you know or can do that can’t be taught, trained or outsourced. It’s not a skill you list on a resume. It lives somewhere in the overlap between what you’re genuinely curious about, what you’re naturally drawn to and what you keep coming back to without anyone asking you to.
Most people have some version of it already. They’re just not taking it seriously, because it doesn’t fit neatly into a box. And if it doesn’t fit a box, the assumption is that it doesn’t count.
Here’s what’s been helping me figure out mine.
Start with what you learn without being asked. Not what you studied for an exam. What did you read last week just because you wanted to? What did you end up explaining to someone for way longer than you meant to?
For me it was entrepreneurship books, the How I Built This podcast, products I found interesting, always wondering if there was a gap somewhere I could build something in. I wasn’t doing it for a class or a club. I just couldn’t not do it.
I never called that specific knowledge. But that’s where I started building it.
Specific knowledge rarely lives inside one discipline. It lives in the gap between two or three things that don’t obviously belong together. The question isn’t what am I good at. It’s what combination of things do I understand, together, that most people in any one of those fields don’t?
For me it’s somewhere between economics and computer science. Economists build models. CS engineers build systems. The interesting work is using code to run the models, test the assumptions, see where they break and build something from them.
You don’t fully know what you know until you try to explain it to someone who doesn’t. Writing a post, talking it through, journaling until it clicks are just some ways to share ideas but also they’re how you find out where your understanding is solid and where it’s full of holes you’d been ignoring.
Nobody hands you permission to name what you know. We wait for a degree, a job title, a specific number of years. But specific knowledge almost by definition doesn’t come with a certificate.
The club interview version of me kept waiting for someone to hand me a category that fit. That was never going to happen. The category didn’t exist yet, that was the whole point.
None of this is fast. Specific knowledge compounds over years, not weeks. This isn’t a shortcut. It’s just where you can start.
Nobody tells you that the hardest part isn’t building specific knowledge. It’s believing you’re allowed to have it. You’ll feel like you haven’t earned it yet, like everyone else has something more legitimate, more defined. That feeling doesn’t mean you’re behind. It means you’re paying attention. And the people who eventually build something real? They felt it too. They just kept going anyway.