The Almanack of Naval Ravikant – Eric Jorgenson | Free Book Summary

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.