The Almanack of Naval Ravikant – Eric Jorgenson
This book is for rereading. Every new read of this book gives you fresh ideas and opens up your mind.
If you can’t decide, the answer is No
Go with options that excite you, rather than finding reasons to rationalize tasks that don’t. Trust your intuition.
The reason is, modern society is full of options. There are tons and tons of options. We live on a planet of seven billion people, and we are connected to everybody on the internet. There are hundreds of thousands of careers available to you.
Small Teams
The smaller the team, the more everyone feels like a principal. The less you feel like an agent, the better the job you’re going to do. The more closely you can tie someone’s compensation to the exact value they’re creating, the more you turn them into a principal, and the less you turn them into an agent. Unfortunately, the media and modern society spend a lot of time brainwashing you about needing an agent, an agent being important, and an agent being knowledgeable.
Specific Knowledge
Specific knowledge cannot be taught, but it can be learned. It’s about what makes you special. Like the things you were effortlessly doing that made people notice you. No one can compete with you on being you. Specific knowledge is found by pursuing your genuine curiosity and passion rather than whatever is hot right now.
Most of life is a search for who and what needs you the most.
The Brain as an Operating System
Buddhists look at your brain, your consciousness, as a multilayered mechanism. There’s a core-base, kernel-level OS running. Then, there are applications running on top.
Always go back to the awareness level of OS, which is always calm, always peaceful, and generally happy and content. Try to stay in awareness mode and not activate the monkey mind, which is always worried, frightened, and anxious.
2 Definitions for Wisdom
Wisdom is knowing the long-term consequences of your actions. Wisdom applied to external problems is judgment. They’re highly linked; knowing the long-term consequences of your actions and then making the right decision to capitalise on that.
Wisdom is the discarding of vices and the return to virtue, by way of knowledge.
Intellectual Curiosity
Do things for their own sake. Whether it’s business, exercise, romance, or friendship, the meaning of life is to do things for their own sake.
Anything worth doing comes from trying to overcome boredom. Because you would be doing it for its own sake. Much more important than whatever is “hot” right now.
Have Ownership, Or Be A Slave
Without ownership, your inputs are very closely tied to your outputs. In almost any salaried job, even one paying a lot per hour like a lawyer or a doctor, you’re still putting in the hours, and every hour you get paid.
Leverage is a force multiplier for your judgment.
Labour: making other humans work for you. It is the oldest form of leverage, and actually not a great one in the modern world. Because managing other people is incredibly messy.
Money: every time you make a decision, you multiply it with money. It’s how wealth was created in the last century.
There are three really big decisions you make in your early life: where you live, who you’re with, and what you do.
Learning
The means of learning are abundant—it’s the desire to learn that is scarce.
Real knowledge is intrinsic, and it’s built from the ground up.
If you’re a perpetual learner, you will never be out of options for how to make money. You can always see what’s coming up in society, what the value is, where the demand is, and how to get up to speed.
Ego Vs Truth
You can only make progress when you start with the truth. The hard thing is to see the truth. Suffering is the moment when we can no longer deny reality.
Outside of suffering, you have to get your ego out of the way because your ego doesn’t want to face the truth. The smaller you can make your ego, the less conditioned you can make your reactions, and the fewer desires you can have about the outcome you want, the easier it will be to see reality.
The Four types of Luck
Hope luck finds you: fortune, fate, etc
Work for luck to find you: persistence, hard work, running around creating opportunities.
You Spot Luck: If you are very skilled in a field, you will notice when a lucky break happens in your field.
Luck becomes your Destiny: you build a unique character, a unique brand, a unique mindset, which causes luck to find you.
Reading
Reading (learning) is the ultimate meta-skill and can be traded for anything else.
Read originals and read classics.
Reading science, math, and philosophy for one hour per day will likely put you in the upper echelon of human success within seven years.
Read the greats in math, science, and philosophy. Ignore your contemporaries and news. Avoid tribal identification. Put truth above social approval.
Read what you love until you love to read.
Time & Compounding
All the returns in life, whether in wealth, relationships, or knowledge, come from compound interest.
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.
Whenever you can in life, optimize for independence rather than pay. If you have independence and you’re accountable for your output as opposed to your input, that’s the dream.
Build or Buy Equity in a Business
If you don’t own a piece of a business, you don’t have a path toward financial freedom.
It’s ownership versus wage work. If you are paid for renting out your time, even for professionals like lawyers and doctors, you can make some money, but you’re not going to make the money that gives you financial freedom. Money won’t be automatic.
Find Your Passion and Be The Best
You can only master one or two things. It’s usually something you’re obsessed with.
All you should do is what you want to do. If you stop trying to figure out how to do things the way other people want you to do them, you get to listen to the little voice inside your head that wants to do things a certain way. Then, you get to be you.
Retirement
Retirement is when you stop sacrificing today for an imaginary tomorrow. When today is complete, in and of itself, you’re retired.
Have so much money saved that your passive income covers your burn rate.
Drive your burn rate down to zero – become a monk.
Do something you love. You enjoy it so much, it’s not about the money.
And the best way to stay away from this constant love of money is to not upgrade your lifestyle as you make money.
Learning Happiness
Happiness is really a default state. Happiness is there when you remove the sense of something missing from your life. Happiness is a state in which nothing is lacking. When nothing is missing, your mind shuts down and stops running into the past or future to find regret.
Jobs of the Future and Infinite Learning
The best jobs are neither created nor obtained through education. They are creative expressions of continuous learners in free markets. The most important skill for getting rich is becoming a perpetual learner. You have to know how to learn anything you want to learn.
It’s much more important today to be able to become an expert in a brand-new field in 9 to 12 months than to have studied the “right” thing a long time ago. You really care about having studied the foundations, so you’re not scared of any book.
Classical Virtues
Virtues are trained heuristics that automate decision-making. You cannot solve every problem in life as if it’s the first time it’s thrown at you.
The classical virtues are all decision-making heuristics that make one optimize for the long term rather than for the short term.
Know Yourself
Everyone makes it up as they go along. You have to find your own path, picking, choosing, and discarding as you see fit.
There is no endpoint to self-awareness and self-discovery. It’s a lifelong process you hopefully keep getting better and better at. There is no one meaningful answer, and no one is going to fully solve it unless you’re one of these enlightened characters.
Priorities
‘I don’t have time’ is just another way of saying ‘It’s not a priority.’
If something is your number one priority, then you will do it. That’s just the way life works. If you’ve got a fuzzy basket of ten or fifteen different priorities, you’re going to end up getting none of them.
The three big ones in life are wealth, health, and happiness. We pursue them in that order, but their importance is reversed.
Health, love, and your mission, in that order. Nothing else matters.
Money buys you freedom in the material world. It’s not going to make you happy; it’s not going to solve your health problems, it’s not going to make your family great, it’s not going to make you fit, it’s not going to make you calm. But it will solve a lot of external problems.
Money vs Wealth
- Money is not going to solve all of your problems, but it’s going to solve all of your money problems.
- Money is how we transfer wealth. Money is social credit. It is the ability to have credits and debits of other people’s time.
- Making money is not a thing you do—it’s a skill you learn.
Specific Knowledge
Specific knowledge is sort of this weird combination of unique traits from your DNA, your unique upbringing, and your response to it. It’s almost baked into your personality and identity. Then you can hone it.
Specific knowledge is found much more easily by pursuing your innate talents, your genuine curiosity, and your passion.
If You Secretly Despise Wealth, It Will Elude You
Money is not the root of all evil; there’s nothing evil about it. But the lust for money is bad.
This is because it is a bottomless pit. It will always occupy your mind. If you love money, and you make it, there’s never enough. There is never enough because the desire is turned on and doesn’t turn off at some number.
Naval Ravikanth
You don’t get rich by spending your time trying to save money. You get rich by saving your time to make money.
The Meaning Of Life
You have to find your own meaning. You have to find it for yourself, so the important part is not the answer, it’s the question. You just have to sit there and dig with the question. It might take you years or decades.
There is no meaning to life. “It’s like writing on water or building houses out of sand.” The reality is you’ve been dead for the history of the universe—10 billion years or more. You will be dead for the next 70 billion years or so, until the heat death of the Universe. Anything you do will fade. It will disappear. There’s no meaning. You have to create your own meaning.
Naval Ravikanth
Figure out what you’re good at and start helping other people with it. Give it away. Pay it forward.