The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness by Eric Jorgenson
Part I: Wealth
Building Wealth
- You want to get into a leveraged job where you control your own time and you’re tracked on the outputs.
- Learn to sell, learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable.
- I think every human should aspire to being knowledgeable about certain things and being paid for our unique knowledge.
- It’s more about consistently creating wealth by creating businesses, creating opportunities, and creating investments.
- Set a very high hourly aspirational rate for yourself and stick to it.
- You should avoid status games in your life — they make you into an angry, combative person.
- There are basically three really big decisions you make in your early life: where you live, who you’re with, and what you do.
- Figure out what you’re good at, and start helping other people with it. Give it away. Pay it forward.
- I’m just playing, for sixteen hours a day. If others want to compete with me, they’re going to work, and they’re going to lose because they’re not going to do it for sixteen hours a day, seven days a week.
- It’s good to be in a smaller company early because there’s less of an infrastructure to prevent early promotion.
- For someone who is early in their career (and maybe even later), the single most important thing about a company is the alumni network you’re going to build.
- Your character and your reputation are things you can build, which will let you take advantage of opportunities other people may characterize as lucky,
- Business networking is a complete waste of time.
- If someone is talking a lot about how honest they are, they’re probably dishonest
- You have to do hard things anyway to create your own meaning in life.
Building Judgment
- Stay on the bleeding edge of trends and study technology, design, and art — become really good at something.
- The more desire I have for something to work out a certain way, the less likely I am to see the truth.
- It’s actually really important to have empty space. If you don’t have a day or two every week in your calendar where you’re not always in meetings, and you’re not always busy, then you’re not going to be able to think.
- If all your beliefs line up into neat little bundles, you should be highly suspicious. I don’t like to self-identify on almost any level anymore, which keeps me from having too many of these so-called stable beliefs.
- The classical virtues are all decision-making heuristics to make one optimize for the long term rather than for the short term.
- Almost all biases are time-saving heuristics. For important decisions, discard memory and identity, and focus on the problem.
- I would combine radical honesty with an old rule Warren Buffett has, which is praise specifically, criticize generally
- I believe we are fundamentally ignorant and very, very bad at predicting the future.
- If you cannot decide, the answer is no. And the reason is, modern society is full of options.
- If you’re evenly split on a difficult decision, take the path more painful in the short term.
- Reading science, math, and philosophy one hour per day will likely put you at the upper echelon of human success within seven years.
- Reading a book isn’t a race — the better the book, the more slowly it should be absorbed.
- Explain what you learned to someone else. Teaching forces learning.
- When it comes to reading, make sure your foundation is very, very high quality.
- Read originals and read classics.
- To think clearly, understand the basics. If you’re memorizing advanced concepts without being able to re-derive them as needed, you’re lost.
Part II Part II: Happiness
Learning Happiness
- Don’t take yourself so seriously. You’re just a monkey with a plan.
- When you have internal silence, then you are content, and you are happy.
- To me, happiness is not about positive thoughts. It’s not about negative thoughts. It’s about the absence of desire, especially the absence of desire for external things.
- Memory and identity are burdens from the past preventing us from living freely in the present.
- Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.
- The enemy of peace of mind is expectations drilled into you by society and other people.
- When working, surround yourself with people more successful than you. When playing, surround yourself with people happier than you.
- If I catch myself judging somebody, I can stop myself and say, “What’s the positive interpretation of this?”
- Recover time and happiness by minimizing your use of these three smartphone apps: phone, calendar, and alarm clock.
- There is no legacy. There’s nothing to leave. We’re all going to be gone. Our children will be gone. Our works will be dust. Our civilizations will be dust. Our planet will be dust. Our solar system will be dust.
Saving Yourself
- Your goal in life is to find the people, business, project, or art that needs you the most.
- The best workout for you is one you’re excited enough to do every day.
- I recommend meditating one hour each morning because anything less is not enough time to really get deep into it.
- At any given time, I’m either trying to pick up a good habit or discard a previous bad habit.
- Impatience with actions, patience with results.
- I don’t believe in specific goals. Scott Adams famously said, “Set up systems, not goals.
- You should know statistics and probability forwards and backwards and inside out.
- Value your time. It is all you have. It’s more important than your money. It’s more important than your friends. It is more important than anything. Your time is all you have. Do not waste your time.
Philosophy
- I don’t believe in any short-term thinking or dealing.
- All benefits in life come from compound interest, whether in money, relationships, love, health, activities, or habits.