Naval Ravikant

“Enlightenment is in between your thoughts, in understanding why you are having such thoughts”

The Almanack of Naval Ravikant

• Building Wealth
  • Getting rich is about knowing what to do, who to do it with, and when to do it.
  • Wealth is having assets that earn while you sleep. Money is how we transfer time and wealth.
    • Money is social credits. It is the ability to have credits and debits of other people’s time.
  • You will get rich by giving society what it wants but does not yet know how to get. At scale.
  • Play iterated games. All the return in life, whether in wealth, relationships, or knowledge, come from compound interest.
  • Business leverage come from capital, people, and products with no marginal cost of replication (code and media).
  • There is no skill called business. Avoid business magazines and business classes.
  • Become the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until this is true.
    • Technology democratizes consumption but consolidates production. The best person in the world at anything gets to do it for everyone.
      • In this leveraged world, small difference results in huge difference
• Specific Knowledge
  • It cannot be taught, but it can be learned.
    • The specific knowledge is the combination of unique traits from your DNA, your unique upbringing, and your response to it. It’s baked into your personality and your identity.
      • Escape competition through authenticity—Know thyself
  • Most of life is a search for who and what needs you the most
  • Specific knowledge is stuff that’s only now being figured out or is really hard to figure out
    • If you are not 100 percent into it, somebody else who is will outperform you—and they’ll outperform you by a lot because compound interest and leverage really applies in the domain of ideas.
  • The most important skill for getting rich is becoming a perpetual learner
• Long-Term Games With Long-Term People
  • In most things what you’re trying to do is find the thing you can go all-in on to earn compound interest.
• Ownership
  • Ownership is important. Without ownership, your inputs are closely tied to your outputs. The real wealth is created by starting your own companies or even by investing.
• Leverage
  • Following your genuine intellectual curiosity is a better foundation for a career than following whatever is making money right now.
    • “I only really want to do things for their own sake. That is one definition of art. Ironically, when you do things for their own sake, you create your best work.”
      • The less you want something, the more you’re going to do it in a natural way. The more you’re going to do it for yourself. You’re going to do it in a way you’re good at, and you’re going to stick with it. The people around you will see the quality of your work is higher.
        • Being at the extreme in your art is important in the age of leverage
  • You are waiting for your moment when something emerges in the world, they need a skillset, and you’re uniquely qualified.
    • You build your brand in the meantime. You make a name for yourself, and you take some risk in the process.
      • When it is time to move on the opportunity, you can do so with leverage—the maximum leverage possible.
  • Whenever you can in life, optimize for independence rather than pay. If you have independence and you’re accountable on your output, as opposed to your input—that’s the dream.
  • A good software engineer, just by writing the right little piece of code and creating the right little application, can create half a billion dollar’s worth of value for a company.
  • You start as a salaried employee. But you want to work your way up to try and get higher leverage, more accountability, and specific knowledge. The combination of those over a long period of time with the magic of compound interest will make you wealthy.
• Judgement
  • “I would love to be paid purely for my judgement, not for any work. I want a robot, capital, or computer to do the work, but I want to be paid for my judgement.”
    • Warren Buffet spends a year deciding and a day acting—that act lasts decades
• Prioritize And Focus
  • Value your time at an hourly rate, and ruthlessly spend to save time at that rate. You will never be worth more than you think you’re worth.
  • Wealth creation is an evolutionarily recent positive-sum game. Status is an old zero-sum game. The business world has many people playing zero-sum games, and a few playing positive-sum games.
    • Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
  • Spend more time making the big decisions: where you live, who you’re with, and what you do
    • “Do you want to leave your friends behind? Or be the one left behind?”
  • Figure out what you are good at, and start helping other people with it. Give it away. Pay it forward.
    • Karma works because people are consistent. On a long enough timescale, you will attract what you project. But don’t measure—your patience will run out if you count.
• Find Work That Feels Like Play
  • Retirement is when you stop sacrificing today for an imaginary tomorrow. When today is complete, in and of itself, you’re retired.
  • Find the thing you know how to do better than anybody. You know how to do it better because you love it, and no one can compete with you. If you love to do it, be authentic, and then figure out how to map that to what society actually wants.
  • Whether in commerce, science, or politics—history remembers the artists.
    • Art is creativity. Art is anything done for its own sake. What are the things that are done for their own sake, and there’s nothing behind them. Loving somebody, creating something, playing.
  • “I’m always working. It looks like work to others, but it feels like play to me. And that’s how I know no one can compete with me on it. Because I’m just playing, for sixteen hours a day. If others want to compete with me, they’re going to work, and they’re going to lose because they’re not going to do it for sixteen hours a day, seven days a week.“
  • The winners of any game are the people who are so addicted they continue playing even as the marginal utility from winning declines.
• How To Get Lucky
  • There are four kinds of luck—put yourself in a position to capitalize on those
  • Be a maker who makes something interesting people want. Show your craft, practice your craft, and the right people will eventually find you.
• Be Patient
  • It takes time—even once you have all of these pieces in place, there is an indeterminate amount of time you have to put in. If you’re counting, you’ll run out of patience before success actually arrives.
    • “You have to enjoy it and keep doing it, keep doing it, and keep doing it. Don’t keep track, and don’t keep count because if you do, you will run out of time.”
    • Don’t plan too much—nothing goes exactly as planned
  • You have to do hard things anyway to create your own meaning in life
• Building Judgement
  • You don’t get rich by spending your time to save money. You get rich by saving your time to make money.
  • Nature doesn’t have any should
    • The number one thing clouding us from being able to see reality is we have preconceived notions of the way it should be

      I never ask if “I like it” or “I don’t like it.” I think “this is what it is” or “this is what it isn’t.” – Richard Feynman

  • Make the time
    • It’s only after you’re bored you have the great ideas. It’s never going to be when you’re stressed, or busy, running around or rushed.
• Shed Your Identity to See Reality
  • It’s really important to be able to uncondition yourself
    • Identities and labels locks you in and keeps you from seeing the truth
      • Keep redefining
        • “Facebook redesigns. Twitter redesigns. Personalities, careers, and teams also need redesigns. There are no permanent solutions in a dynamic system.
• Mental Models
  • Inversion
    • “I think being successful is just about not making mistakes. It’s not about having correct judgement. It’s about avoiding incorrect judgements.”
  • Principal-Agent Problem
    • The less you feel like an agent, the better the job you’re going to do.
  • Run Uphill

    “Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life.” – Jerzy Gregorek

• Learn to Love to Read
  • Read what you love until you love to read.

    “As long as I have a book in my hand, I don’t feel like I’m wasting time.” – Charlie Munger

  • As you know more, you leave more books unfinished. Focus on new concepts with predictive power.
  • There are as many different kinds of authors as there are other people. Many of them are going to write lots of junk.
    • Be selective
  • To think clearly, understand the basics. If you’re memorizing advanced concepts without being able to re-derive them as needed, you’re lost.
  • There is no obligation whatsoever to finish the book
    • Take it lightly
  • You know that song you can’t get out of your head? All thoughts work that way. Careful what you read.
• Happiness
  • “The three big ones in life are wealth, health, and happiness. We pursue them in that order, but their importance is reverse.”
  • “Whatever happiness means to me, it means something different to you.”
    • Similar to how whatever risk means to me, it means something different to you.
  • “You have to view the negative before you can aspire to and appreciate the positive.”
  • “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.”
  • “Happiness to me is mainly not suffering, not desiring, not thinking too much about the future or the past, really embracing the present moment and the reality of what is, and the way it is.”
  • “Happiness is what’s there when you remove the sense that something is missing in your life.”
  • “Memory and identity are burdens from the past preventing us from living freely in the present.”
  • It’s way more important to perfect your desires than to try to do something you don’t 100 percent desire.
    • Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
  • “There are unlimited external problems. The only way to actually get peace on the inside is by giving up this idea of problems.”
• Envy Is the Enemy of Happiness
  • Whenever the word should creeps up in your mind, it’s guilt or social programming.
    • Training yourself to be happy is completely internal. There is no external progress, no external validation. You’re competing against yourself—it is a single-player game.
      • A lot of it is conditioning from your environment, but you can un-condition and recondition yourself.
• Happiness Is Built by Habits
  • You are a combination of your habits and the people who you spend the most time with.
    • Are they habits that will increase your long-term happiness rather than your short-term happiness? Are you surrounding yourself with people who are generally positive and upbeat people? Are those relationships low-maintenance? Do you admire and respect but not envy them?
  • “The more you judge, the more you separate yourself. You’ll feel good for an instant, because you feel good about yourself, thinking you’re better than someone. Later, you’re going to feel lonely. Then, you see negativity everywhere. The world just reflects your own feelings back at you.”
• Find Happiness in Acceptance
  • In any situation in life, you always have three choices: you can change it, you can accept it, or you can leave it. If you want to change it, then it is a desire.
    • Pick one big desire in your life at any given time to give yourself purpose and motivation. Not two—you’ll be distracted.
  • “You’re going to die one day, and none of this is going to matter. So enjoy yourself. Do something positive. Project some love. Make someone happy. Laugh a little bit. Appreciate the moment. And do your work.”
• Saving Yourself
  • “No one in the world is going to beat you at being you. You’re never going to be as good at being me as I am.”
    • The combinatorics of human DNA and experience are staggering. You will never meet any two humans who are substitutable for each other.
    • Your goal in life is to find the people, business, project, or art that needs you the most. Be the artist.
  • “My number one priority in life, above my happiness, above my family, above my work, is my own health.”
  • “I do not want my sense of self to continue to develop and strengthen as I get older. I want it to be weaker and more muted so I can be more in present everyday reality, accept nature and the world for what it is, and appreciate it very much as a child would.”
  • Impatience with actions, patience with results.
    • You have to be patient with the results because you’re dealing with complex systems and many people.
      • Long volatility means long time
  • Use your judgement to figure out what kinds of environments you can thrive in, and then create an environment around you so you’re statistically likely to succeed.
  • “Advice to my younger self: Be exactly who you are.”
    • Holding back means staying in bad relationships and bad jobs for years instead of minutes.
• Choosing to Free Yourself
  • If they have an expectation of you, that’s completely their problem
    • The sooner you can dash their expectations, the better.
      • Courage isn’t charging into a machine gun nest. Courage is not caring what other people think.
    • 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.
  • The mind should be a servant and a tool, not a master
    • Break the habit of uncontrolled thinking
• Philosophy
  • There is no fundamental, intrinsic purposeful meaning to the Universe.
• Rational Buddhism
  • “I have to reject all the pieces I can’t verify”
  • “Rational Buddhism, to me, means understanding the internal work Buddhism espouses to make yourself happier, better off, more present and in control of your emotions—being a better human being.”
    • “I would say my philosophy falls down to this—on one pole is evolution as a binding principle because it explains so much about humans, on the other is Buddhism, which is the oldest, most time-tested spiritual philosophy regarding the internal state of each of us.”
      • The older the question, the older the answers.
  • “Everyone starts out innocent. Everyone is corrupted. Wisdom is the discarding of vices and the return to virtue, by way of knowledge.”
• Live by Your Values
  • Honesty is a core, core, core value
    • “I want to be able to just be me. I never want to be in an environment or around people where I have to watch what I say. If I disconnect what I’m thinking from what I’m saying, it creates multiple threads in my mind. I’m no longer in the moment—now I have to be future-planning or past-regretting every time I talk to somebody. Anyone around whom I can’t be fully honest, I don’t want to be around.”
  • “I don’t believe in any short-term thinking or dealing”
    • All benefits in life come from compound interest
  • “I only believe in peer relationships”
    • “I don’t want to be above anybody, and I don’t want to be below anybody. If I can’t treat someone like a peer and if they can’t treat me like peer, I just don’t want to interact with them.”
  • Much of finding great relationships, great coworkers, great lovers, wives, husbands, is finding other people where your values line up. If your values line up, the little things don’t matter.

    “To find a worthy mate, be worthy of a worthy mate.” – Charlie Munger

• How do you define wisdom?
  • “Understanding the long-term consequences of your actions.”

  “If wisdom could be imparted through words alone, we’d all be done here”