Almanack of Naval Ravikant — Eric Jorgenson

Book in 3 Sentences

1. In order to gain wealth, give society new things that it does not know how to get yet. Provided its within your capabilities and natural for you to accomplish, take the risk with your name and reap the rewards.
2. Avoid following whatever is making money right now, explore your genuine curiosity and don’t force yourself to fit in with the other monkeys. Doing it for social approval (or FOMO) is not where returns are made in life, its being out of the pack and thinking things through for yourself.
3. To be happy in life, acknowledge that happiness is just like any other muscle that needs to be trained. Accept your current state, instead of desiring a change in your external environment. The less you desire for things that will only add positives, the less you will think “oh I’ll be happy when I get this thing.”

Impressions

Naval is an incredibly wise man, and I think more people should listen to what he has to say. He grew up with a family from India who had moved to the US with all their money, resulting in a not so wealthy background. But he amassed large amounts of money through building startups and investing. The book is about how he has lived his life up until now and everything hes learnt from being happy, creating wealth and just building relationships. Overall, Naval has broadened my constantly improving perspective on wealth and living a happy life.

He really emphasises on the power of compounding in everything which I agree with. If you want to live a “successful” life then build good habits (if you want to learn how to build habits I highly recommend reading Atomic Habits) and just take care of yourself above everything else. Make hard choices in the short term in order to live an easy life in the long term. A lot of people know this, but the issue is that they continue to live comfortable lives and digitisation has made this even worse for people since everything has become a dopamine supplement.

It technically isn’t a written book, but instead a curated set of wisdom Naval has said on Twitter, Podcasts and Essays over the past decade. The person who created and pieced the entire book together is Eric Jorgenson, who I think has done an amazing job highlighting the key points of Naval’s work. Due to that, another great thing about the book is that its free! If you have a Kindle, download the .MOBI format from the books website and email it to your Kindle. Its as simple as that. If you don’t have a Kindle tablet, you can read the book on your phone through the same process but on the Kindle mobile app. Obviously, the paperback edition will cost you money and can be purchased on Amazon.

Who Should Read It?

If you have never read a book in your life, I think this would be a great way to lay that foundation for yourself in making reading a habit. It still shocks me that people think reading is boring, which I would have agreed with a year ago, but sadly people just want to hop on stereotypes and give their opinion on topics they have a lack of knowledge in.

I don’t want to rant too much here but I’ll probably make an article soon about the next generation of innovators. I’m well aware of the amazing projects young people are building. Take a look at the young kids from developing countries who would be on route to a successful career, if they were in a developed country instead. Unfortunately we fail to pay attention to them and give these kids in low economic backgrounds a platform to grow. But nah lets see what the kids on Tiktok are doing! Enough of that, back to the notes (I don’t want to sound unlikable, I’m just trying to speak on my thoughts which tend to be true).

Anyways, young people who are getting started in their life should read this book as it teaches you some lessons in order to “succeed” (I use the word success in quotes as I kind of find the word a bit cringe to say, since people glamorise it so much like it means anything).

How It Impacted Me

• I’ve started to realise that I need to think more about myself and make my happiness a priority, instead of doing it for others.
• Your family will be the only people who are there for you no matter what, stop forcing yourself to be friends with people who will only need you for a favour.
• Took meditating more seriously, I learnt that meditation isn’t something that only monks are supposed to do. I thought I had to sit in a professional position but now I simply do it whenever (usually in the mornings) I want and it feels really good afterwards.
• Learnt that I should pick friends or business partners that are high in intelligence, energy and integrity, not someone who fails to sleep and result in looking like a Zombie in mornings (bit random I know).
• I can leverage my ability to code and write, these skills are behind the newly rich. I can build software and write about the books I read which hopefully some day will work for me in my sleep.
• Money will not make me any happier in the long term, I have everything I need and having access to my family, the internet and building meaningful projects all for free is where I find joy.
• Money will 100% without a doubt remove a set of problems in my life that get in the way of my happiness, but buying external items in order to add positives is a recipe for disaster.
• Others my age calling me weird is generally a good thing, but in my current state I avoid interacting with people that I don’t find my values aligning with. Plus the kids my age are really mean and have a lack of curiosity to step outside their comfort zone. I also read something similar to this before in a post by Patrick Collison (talented co-founder of Stripe alongside his brother): “Above all else, don’t make the mistake of judging your success based on your current peer group. By all means make friends but being weird as a teenager is generally good.”

Some Quotes

• “You’re not going to get rich renting out your time. You must own equity — a piece of a business — to gain your financial freedom.”
• “If you can’t decide, the answer is no. If I’m faced with a difficult choice, such as: Should I marry this person? Should I take this job? Should I buy this house? Should I move to this city? Should I go into business with this person? If you cannot decide, the answer is no. And 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. There are so many choices.”
• “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. The fewer desires I can have, the more I can accept the current state of things, the less my mind is moving, because the mind really exists in motion toward the future or the past. The more present I am, the happier and more content I will be. If I latch onto a feeling, if I say, “Oh, I’m happy now,” and I want to stay happy, then I’m going to drop out of that happiness. Now, suddenly, the mind is moving. It’s trying to attach to something. It’s trying to create a permanent situation out of a temporary situation.”
• “When you’re young, you have time. You have health, but you have no money. When you’re middle-aged, you have money and you have health, but you have no time. When you’re old, you have money and you have time, but you have no health. So the trifecta is trying to get all three at once. By the time people realize they have enough money, they’ve lost their time and their health.”
• “Playing video games will make you happier in the short run — and I used to be an avid gamer — but in the long run, it could ruin your happiness. You’re being fed dopamine and having dopamine withdrawn from you in these little uncontrollable ways.”
• “The greatest superpower is the ability to change yourself.”
• “How do you define wisdom? Understanding the long-term consequences of your actions.”

All Highlights

• You’re not going to get rich renting out your time. You must own equity — a piece of a business — to gain your financial freedom.
• Pick business partners with high intelligence, energy, and, above all, integrity.
• Code and media are permissionless leverage. They’re the leverage behind the newly rich. You can create software and media that works for you while you sleep.
• If you can’t code, write books and blogs, record videos and podcasts.
• Reading is faster than listening. Doing is faster than watching.
• Society always wants new things. And if you want to be wealthy, you want to figure out which one of those things you can provide for society that it does not yet know how to get but it will want and providing it is natural to you, within your skill set, and within your capabilities.
• But when you put your name out there, you take a risk with certain things. You also get to reap the rewards. You get the benefits.
• Following your genuine intellectual curiosity is a better foundation for a career than following whatever is making money right now.
• Think about what product or service society wants but does not yet know how to get. You want to become the person who delivers it and delivers it at scale.
• Set a very high hourly aspirational rate for yourself and stick to it. It should seem and feel absurdly high. If it doesn’t, it’s not high enough. Whatever you picked, my advice to you would be to raise it.
• Every person I met at the beginning of my career twenty years ago, where I looked at them and said, “Wow, that guy or gal is super capable — so smart and dedicated”…all of them, almost without exception, became extremely successful.
• What making money will do is solve your money problems. It will remove a set of things that could get in the way of being happy, but it is not going to make you happy.
• Very smart people tend to be weird since they insist on thinking everything through for themselves.
• You absolutely need habits to function. You cannot solve every problem in life as if it is the first time it’s thrown at you. We accumulate all these habits. We put them in the bundle of identity, ego, ourselves, and then we get attached to them.
• It’s really important to be able to uncondition yourself, to be able to take your habits apart and say, “Okay, this is a habit I probably picked up when I was a toddler trying to get my parent’s attention. Now I’ve reinforced it and reinforced it, and I call it a part of my identity. Does it still serve me? Does it make me happier? Does it make me healthier? Does it make me accomplish whatever I set out to accomplish?”
• A lousy way to do memory prediction is “X happened in the past, therefore X will happen in the future.” It’s too based on specific circumstances. What you want is principles. You want mental models.
• The best mental models I have found came through evolution, game theory, and Charlie Munger. Charlie Munger is Warren Buffett’s partner. Very good investor. He has tons and tons of great mental models. Author and trader Nassim Taleb has great mental models. Benjamin Franklin had great mental models. I basically load my head full of mental models.
• Principal-Agent Problem To me, the principal-agent problem is the single most fundamental problem in microeconomics. If you do not understand the principal-agent problem, you will not know how to navigate your way through the world. It is important if you want to build a successful company or be successful in your dealings.
• But you want arithmetic, probability, and statistics. Those are extremely important. Crack open a basic math book, and make sure you are really good at multiplying, dividing, compounding, probability, and statistics.
• If you can’t decide, the answer is no. If I’m faced with a difficult choice, such as: Should I marry this person? Should I take this job? Should I buy this house? Should I move to this city? Should I go into business with this person? If you cannot decide, the answer is no. And 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. There are so many choices.
• If you have two choices to make, and they’re relatively equal choices, take the path more difficult and more painful in the short term. What’s actually going on is one of these paths requires short-term pain. And the other path leads to pain further out in the future. And what your brain is doing through conflict-avoidance is trying to push off the short-term pain.
• Your brain is overvaluing the side with the short-term happiness and trying to avoid the one with short-term pain.
• Reading science, math, and philosophy one hour per day will likely put you at the upper echelon of human success within seven years.
• These days, I find myself rereading as much (or more) as I do reading. A tweet from @illacertus said, “I don’t want to read everything. I just want to read the 100 great books over and over again.” I think there’s a lot to that idea. It’s really more about identifying the great books for you because different books speak to different people. Then, you can really absorb those.
• They started out reading a set of false or just weakly true things, and those formed the axioms of the foundation for their worldview. Then, when new things come, they judge the new idea based on a foundation they already built. Your foundation is critical.
• Today, I am a 9/10. And yes, having money helps, but it’s actually a very small piece of it. Most of it comes from learning over the years my own happiness is the most important thing to me, and I’ve cultivated it with a lot of techniques.
• We are highly judgmental survival-and-replication machines. We constantly walk around thinking, “I need this,” or “I need that,” trapped in the web of desires. Happiness is the state when nothing is missing. When nothing is missing, your mind shuts down and stops running into the past or future to regret something or to plan something.
• 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. The fewer desires I can have, the more I can accept the current state of things, the less my mind is moving, because the mind really exists in motion toward the future or the past. The more present I am, the happier and more content I will be. If I latch onto a feeling, if I say, “Oh, I’m happy now,” and I want to stay happy, then I’m going to drop out of that happiness. Now, suddenly, the mind is moving. It’s trying to attach to something. It’s trying to create a permanent situation out of a temporary situation.
• Real happiness only comes as a side-effect of peace. Most of it is going to come from acceptance, not from changing your external environment.
• I just don’t believe in anything from my past. Anything. No memories. No regrets. No people. No trips. Nothing. A lot of our unhappiness comes from comparing things from the past to the present.
• We bought a new car. Now, I’m waiting for the new car to arrive. Of course, every night, I’m on the forums reading about the car. Why? It’s a silly object. It’s a silly car. It’s not going to change my life much or at all. I know the instant the car arrives I won’t care about it anymore. The thing is, I’m addicted to the desiring. I’m addicted to the idea of this external thing bringing me some kind of happiness and joy, and this is completely delusional.
• The mistake over and over and over is to say, “Oh, I’ll be happy when I get that thing,” whatever it is. That is the fundamental mistake we all make, 24/7, all day long.
• Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want. I don’t think most of us realize that’s what it is. I think we go about desiring things all day long and then wonder why we’re unhappy. I like to stay aware of it, because then I can choose my desires very carefully. I try not to have more than one big desire in my life at any given time, and I also recognize it as the axis of my suffering. I realize the area where I’ve chosen to be unhappy.
• When you’re young and healthy, you can do more. By doing more, you’re actually taking on more and more desires. You don’t realize this is slowly destroying your happiness. I find younger people are less happy but more healthy. Older people are more happy but less healthy.
• When you’re young, you have time. You have health, but you have no money. When you’re middle-aged, you have money and you have health, but you have no time. When you’re old, you have money and you have time, but you have no health. So the trifecta is trying to get all three at once. By the time people realize they have enough money, they’ve lost their time and their health.
• There’s a line from Blaise Pascal I read. Basically, it says: “All of man’s troubles arise because he cannot sit in a room quietly by himself.” If you could just sit for thirty minutes and be happy, you are successful. That is a very powerful place to be, but very few of us get there.
• Peace is happiness at rest, and happiness is peace in motion. You can convert peace into happiness anytime you want. But peace is what you want most of the time. If you’re a peaceful person, anything you do will be a happy activity.
• Today, the way we think you get peace is by resolving all your external problems. But there are unlimited external problems. The only way to actually get peace on the inside is by giving up this idea of problems.
• Playing video games will make you happier in the short run — and I used to be an avid gamer — but in the long run, it could ruin your happiness. You’re being fed dopamine and having dopamine withdrawn from you in these little uncontrollable ways.
• Basically, if you are making the hard choices right now in what to eat, you’re not eating all the junk food you want, and making the hard choice to work out. So, your life long-term will be easy. You won’t be sick. You won’t be unhealthy. The same is true of values. The same is true of saving up for a rainy day. The same is true of how you approach your relationships. If you make the easy choices right now, your overall life will be a lot harder.
• I learned a very important lesson from this: most of our suffering comes from avoidance. Most of the suffering from a cold shower is the tip-toeing your way in. Once you’re in, you’re in. It’s not suffering. It’s just cold. Your body saying it’s cold is different than your mind saying it’s cold. Acknowledge your body saying it’s cold. Look at it. Deal with it. Accept it, but don’t mentally suffer over it. Taking a cold shower for two minutes isn’t going to kill you.
• The greatest superpower is the ability to change yourself.
• At some level, you’re doing it for social approval. You’re doing it to fit in with the other monkeys. You’re fitting in to get along with the herd. That’s not where the returns are in life. The returns in life are being out of the herd.
• Don’t spend your time making other people happy. Other people being happy is their problem. It’s not your problem. If you are happy, it makes other people happy. If you’re happy, other people will ask you how you became happy and they might learn from it, but you are not responsible for making other people happy.
• Generally, I find if people are fighting or quarreling about something, it’s because their values don’t line up. If their values lined up, the little things wouldn’t matter.
• How do you define wisdom? Understanding the long-term consequences of your actions.