The Almanack Of Naval Ravikant

Mostly transcripts of Naval interviews. But the way he talks feels like well-edited, content-rich, all quotable sentences!

It’s an amazing collection of thoughts on how to navigate your life and build wealth, judgment, health, and happiness along the way.

Some very interesting thoughts from the book:

“My only friends were books. Books make for great friends because the best thinkers of the last few thousand years tell you their nuggets of wisdom.”

“Learn to sell. Learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable.”

“There is no skill called ‘business’. Avoid business magazines and business classes. Study microeconomics, game theory, psychology, persuasion, ethics, mathematics, and computers.”

“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.”

“If you don’t own a piece of a business, you don’t have a path towards financial freedom.”

“The most interesting and the most important form of leverage is the idea of products that have no marginal cost of the replication. Code and Media are prime examples of this type of leverage.”

“Every great software developer, for example, now has an army of robots working for him at nighttime while he or she is sleep after they have written the code.”

“There are basically three really big decisions you make in your early life: where you live, who you are with, and what you do. Choosing what city to live in can almost completely determines the trajectory of your life, but we spend so little time trying to figure out what city do you live in.”

“If you want to get rich over your life in a deterministically predictable way, stay on the bleeding edge of trends and study technology, design, and art, become really good at something.”

“Hard work is really overrated. Judgment is underrated. My definition of judgment is knowing the long-term consequences of your actions. Wisdom applied to external problems is judgment. Knowing the long-term consequences of your actions and then making the right decision to capitalize on that. In the age of leverage, one correct decision can win everything. The direction you’re heading in matters more than how fast you move, especially with leverage. Picking the direction you’re heading in for every decision is far, far more important than how much force you apply.”

“Praise specifically, criticize generally. If you have a criticism of someone, then don’t criticize the person; criticize the general approach or criticize the class of activities. If you have to praise somebody, then always try and find a person who is the best example of what you are praising and praise the person, specifically. Then people’s egos and identities, which we all have, don’t work against you. They work for you.”

“Reading science, math, and philosophy one hour per day will likely put you at the upper echelon of human success within seven years. The genuine love for reading itself, when cultivated, is a superpower. Every book and every piece of knowledge ever written down is a fingertip away. The means of learning are abundant, it’s the desire to learn that is scarce.”

“The number of books completed is a vanity metric. As you know more, you will leave more books unfinished. Focus on new concepts with predictive power.”

“How to become a clearer, more independent thinker? Read the grades in math, science, and philosophy. Ignore your contemporaries and the news. Avoid tribal identification. Put truth about social approval.”

“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.”

“We are a collection of thousands of habits constantly running subconsciously. You’ll become your habits. I started realizing it’s all about habits. At any given time, I’m either trying to pick up a good habit or discard a previous bad habit. It takes time.”

“Set up systems, not goals.” Use your judgment to figure out what kinds of the environments you can thrive in, and then create an environment around you so you are statistically likely to succeed.”

“There is no meaning to life. There is no purpose to life. It’s like writing on water or building houses on sand. The reality is you have 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. Anything you do will fade. It will disappear, just like the human race will disappear and the planet will disappear. No one is going to remember you passed a certain number of generations, whether you are an artist, a poet, a conqueror, or anyone else. There is no meaning. I think after this life, it’s very much like before you were born. Remember that? It’s going to be just like that.”

“How do you define Wisdom? Wisdom is understanding the long-term consequences of your actions.”