The Almanack of Naval Ravikant
Rating: 5 / 5 stars
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High-Level Thoughts
Concise and rich book of wisdom for wealth, happiness, and values. A little bit of insight for everyone no matter what age or area of life you are at. My favorite part was learning about happiness because of how Naval translates this emotion into tangible actions for us to control.
“If you have nothing in your life, but you have one person that loves you unconditionally in your life, it’ll do wonders for your self-esteem.”
Summary Notes
Part I: Wealth
Understand how wealth is created. Wealth is created through long-term endeavors. It takes continual care similar to growing a plant. The plant grows over time whenever you’re sleeping or awake. This is the same as wealth where you are not required to be there the whole time.
Find and Build Specific Knowledge. Specific knowledge is unique to who you are. No one can replace you. We all grow up with different life experiences and problems to solve. Continue to look at problems you have a genuine curiosity about. This will lead you to naturally develop mastery in one or two things. Things that you are obsessed about.
Play Long-term games with Long-term people. Long-term games are where you continue to build trust with others. This leads to them also trusting you and your character. How you work, how you show up for yourself, but most importantly how much you show up for others depicts the reputation you receive.
Take on Accountability. When you say you’re going to do something. Stick to what you say. If there were unknown circumstances that arose, take accountability and share with it to cap off the journey.
Build or Buy Equity in Business. Owning a company means you own the upside. Ownership of something makes you have an attachment to it. You want to keep it and continue to grow it. Buy equity and grow it over time.
Find a Position of Leverage. Positions of leverage are where you have the better advantage in that conversation. This focuses on what you provide AKA your capability to BUILD and SELL. The party with more leverage holds more power in the discussion.
Get Paid for Your Judgement. Take time for big decisions that will have monumental consequences. CEOs are highly paid because of their leverage on decision making. A person who is right 60% of the time versus 50% of the time has a monumental impact on the company. Small differences in judgement at this level are greatly amplified.
Prioritize and Focus. Value your time at a certain value. If you can outsource something or not do something for less than your hourly rate, outsource it or don’t do it. This leaves up space for other areas where you make decisions on problems you do want.
Find Work That Feels Like Play. Retirement is when you stop sacrificing today for an imaginary tomorrow. You start doing the things you want to without constraint. When today is complete, regardless of what happens before or after, you’re retired. Getting to this level at an early age, start at a smaller company as there is less infrastructure and more room for growth. Focus specifically on who you will work with and what those people are going to do.
How to get lucky. There are four types of luck: 1/ Blind luck = something random, 2/ Hard work luck = your perseverance and resilience leads to rewards, 3/ Spotting luck = finding opportunities available & 4/ Mindset luck = the person who attracts luck through who you are. Be someone who creates opportunities for others. Show your progress, practice it, and the right people will find you.
Clear thinking. Clear thinking is where you can explain concepts easily to a child. This explanation allows others to understand. Keep it simple.
Identity. Speak without your identity. Speak about past experiences and examples of what you’ve done. Activities you do with relaxation are who you are, whereas actions of tension are who you think you should be.
Important Decisions. Discard past experiences when making important decisions. Focus on the facts of the problem and what it entails for the future. Our past can misjudge us by making it an analogy.
Collect Mental Models. Mental models provide you with a foundation for approaching different sets of problems. Developing these models early on enables you to have different scopes to view situations to deduce the best possible solution. Collect mental models by studying microeconomics and game theory. Read science, math, and philosophy. This information over a long period of time will bring you to the upper echelon of human success.
Learn to love to read. What to read begins with what you love until you love to read. Reading a book isn’t a race and the number of books read is negligent. How much you absorb and learn is more important. Understand the basics and derive advanced concepts. If you can’t do that, you’re lost. Books contain a multitude of knowledge to solve different problems. The older the problem, the older the solution. Be careful what you read.
Part II: Learning Happiness
Happiness is learned. 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.
Happiness is a choice. Conscious or unconscious we all make choices to pursue our endeavors. These choices paint what paths we pursue. They are where happiness, love, and passion grow from. Teaching ourselves how to make conscious choices is like teaching a muscle to lift a dumbbell.
Happiness requires presence. Cravings detract and take us away from being present with others. Enlightenment is the space between thoughts. It is where we can truly listen to our 5 senses. Eliminating the future outcomes and opportunities pulls us back into the present. What if this chance to choose is our paradise?
Happiness requires peace. Someone who sees it objectively and interprets events as they are is at innate peace. Would you want this thought right now or something else?
Every Desire is a chosen unhappiness. Every desire is a chosen unhappiness. Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want. It is choosing to change versus having peace with what you have.
Success does not earn unhappiness. Happiness is being satisfied with what you have here – lines up with peace. Success comes from dissatisfaction – lines up with the desire. The only way to get peace which leads to happiness is giving up the idea of problems.
Envy is the enemy of happiness. When you seek a specific quality from someone else, you are signing up for a full trade. Would you want that? Would you want their struggles, their story, their accomplishments, everything? Take that into consideration. The word “should” implies guilt and having known something. Finally, reality is life is a single-player game. You’re born alone and you’re going to die alone.
Happiness is built by habits. Monkeys become similar to the 5 people they surround themself with. This is the same for humans. If you want to dodge conflict, don’t hang around people who constantly engage in conflict. Happiness is a skill you develop as you put yourself in situations where you consciously make the choice to be happy. For any situation, you have three options. You can change it, you can accept it, or you can leave it. Stay focused on one big desire at a time. It keeps you focused at any given time. Finally, embrace death. We’re all going to die. Nothing matters.
Part III: Saving Yourself
Choosing to be yourself. Your greatest mentor is yourself. Be yourself with passionate intensity. Listen and absorb from others, but don’t emulate 100%. Take inspiration from them and put your own spin. You will never meet two humans who are the same. Your goal in life is to find the people, business, projects, and art that need YOU the most. The ones where you can make an original contribution and be irrationally obsessed with something.
Choosing to take care of yourself. When your health is struggling, nothing else matters. When we all take the same medication, it is no longer considered a disease. This is true with iPhones and Social Media for example. Math, physics, and chemistry are the only truly tested & settled sciences people can agree on. Other areas such as diet, psychology, etc. are all biased based on sample size. Sugar makes you hungry. Fat makes you satiated. Sugar dominates. The more processed the food, the less one should consume. Starting your day off with difficulty in the workout makes the day easier.
Meditation & Mental Strength. Humans were made to be in challenging environments such as the brutal cold or hot. This allows our immune system to reinforce itself. Meditation is honing in to your inner self. It is intermittent fasting for the mind. It increases your ability to singularly focus and lose yourself to be present, happy, and more effective. Other forms of meditation include hiking, journaling, praying, gratitude, showering, and sitting quietly. When in doubt, meditate if you’re trying to fall asleep. Most of our suffering comes from avoidance.
Choosing to Build Yourself. People can change. They choose to change. They choose based on their emotions to do something. If you want to change, just do it. Have impatience with actions, and patience with results outside of your control. Controlling your emotions and your mind comes with having peace of your body first. Look at things objectively after the fact. Hindsight is 20/20. Keep it concise and clear of what you’re going to do next.
Choosing to Grow Yourself. The systems in place will lead you to reach the goals. The goals keep coming based on your environment. Do something now rather than “later”. Everything we do is for social approval, we do it to fit in with other monkeys. Fitting to get along with the herd. The important skills are 1/ read & 2/ persuasion. Mathematics will help with complex problems & nature speaks in mathematics. Persuasion is how you lead to someone doing something.
Choosing to Free Yourself. Be exactly who you are. Holding back means staying in bad relationships and bad jobs for years instead of minutes.
The Meaning of Life. You have to create your own meaning. It is based on your own subjective experience.
Live by your values. To find a worthy mate, be worthy of a worthy mate. Define your values such as honesty. Before you can lie to another, you must first lie to yourself. Be around people that allow you to be true to yourself. Only be around people who allow you to be honest with yourself. See things through peer relationships, not hierarchical. See them as horizontal, not vertical. The most important thing in the universe moves from being your body to a child’s body.
Rational Buddhism. He looks at the Buddhist teachings from a first principle methodology. Can he prove what is happening and do these stand true. If I can’t verify it on my own or if since can’t prove it, then it may be true, it may be false. We grow up as innocent and then become corrupted. Wisdom is the discarding of vices and the return to virtue (showcasing values), by way of knowledge. You understand the long-term consequences of my actions. If wisdom was done through words alone, we’d all be done here.
The Present is all we have. The finite nature of what we have is why this is all important. We will never be here again & that is what makes us lovely. Inspiration is perishable and fades. Act on it immediately and keep it going.
