Overview
Assembles the philosophical insights and practical wisdom of entrepreneur and investor Naval Ravikant. The book distills his thoughts on wealth creation, happiness, and the deep meanings of life, curated from various interviews, podcasts, and tweets. It highlights Naval's unique approach to building wealth not just financially, but intellectually and spiritually, emphasizing self-education, technology, and the power of leverage to achieve freedom and fulfillment.
Notes
Embrace accountability and take business risks under your own name. Society will reward you with responsibility, equity, and leverage.
If you don’t own a piece of a business, you don’t have a path towards financial freedom
If you’re looking at professions where your input and outputs are highly connected, it’s going to be very hard to create wealth and make well for yourself in that process
If you want to be part of a great tech company, then you need to be able to sell or build if you don’t do either learn
Earn with your mind, not your time
An old boss once warned: "You'll never be rich since you're obviously smart, and someone will always offer you a job that's just good enough."
Retirement is when you stop sacrificing today for an imaginary tomorrow. When today is complete, in and of itself, you're retired.
How do you get there?
Well, one way is to have so much money saved that your passive income (without you lifting a finger) covers your burn rate.
A second is you just drive your burn rate down to zero, you become a monk.
A third is you're doing something you love. You enjoy it so much, it's not about the money. So there are multiple ways to retirement.
Ways to get lucky:
Hope luck finds you.
Hustle until you stumble into it.
Prepare the mind and be sensitive to chances others miss
Become the best at what you do. Refine what you do until this is true. Opportunity will seek you out. Luck becomes your destiny.
Apply specific knowledge with leverage and eventually, you will get what you deserve.
You don't get rich by spending your time to save money. You get rich by saving your time to make money.
It's actually really important to have empty space. If you don't have a day or two every week in your calendar where you're not always in meetings, and you're not always busy, then your not going to be able to think.
To be honest, speak without identity.
Reading science, math, and philosophy one hour per day will likely put you at the upper echelon of human success within seven years.
Read what you love until you love to read.
The reality is, I don't actually read much compared to what people think. I probably read one to two hours a day. That puts me in the top .00001 percent. I think that alone accounts for any material success I've had in my life and any intelligence I might have. Real people don't read an hour a day. Real people, I think, read a minute a day or less. Making it an actual habit is the most important thing.
The number of books completed is a vanity metric. As you know more, you leave more books unfinished. Focus on new concepts with predictive power.
Because most people are intimidated by math and can't independently critique it, they overvalue opinions backed with math/pseudoscience.
If you're talking about an old problem like how to keep your body healthy, how to stay calm and peaceful, what kinds of value systems are good, how you raise a family, and those kinds of things, the older solutions are probably better.
Any book that survived for two thousand years has been filtered through many people. The general principles are more likely to be correct. I wanted to get back into reading these sorts of books.
A calm mind, a fit body, and a house full of love. These things cannot be bought. They must be earned.
The three big ones in life are wealth, health, and happiness. We pursue them in that order, but their importance is reverse.
The route to happiness is the absence of desire, especially the absence of desire for external things
A rational person can find peace by cultivating indifference to things outside of their control
You can very slowly but steadily and methodically improve your happiness baseline, just like you can improve your fitness.
Anticipation for our vices pulls us into the future. Eliminating vices makes it easier to be present.
A happy person isn't someone who's happy all the time. It's someone who effortlessly interprets events in such a way that they don't lose their innate peace.
The fundamental delusion: There is something out there that will make me happy and fulfilled forever.
Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.
Confucius says you have two lives, and the second one begins when you realize you only have one. When and how did your second life begin?
When working, surround yourself with people more successful than you.
When playing, surround yourself with people happier than you
There's the "five chimps theory" where you can predict a chimp's behavior by the five chimps it hangs out with the most. I think that applies to humans as well. Maybe it's politically incorrect to say you should choose your friends very wisely. But you shouldn't choose them haphazardly based on who you live next to or who you happen to work with. The people who are the most happy and optimistic choose the right five chimps.
Happiness habits
insight meditation
Catch yourself judging someone or a situation
Try and get more sunlight
Always thing of the positive in a situation
Dropping caffeine
Exercising everyday
Tell everyone around you that you are a happy person, you’ll be forced to conform to it
Minimize use of phone, calendar and alarm clock
More secrets you have the less happy you’ll be
Use meditation, music and exercise to get out of a funk
All screen activities are linked to less happiness
Personal metric/ how much of your day is spent doing things out of obligation rather out of interest What habit would you say most positively impacts your life?
The daily morning workout. That has been a complete game-changer. It's made me feel healthier, younger. It's made me not go out late. It came from one simple thing, which is everybody says, "I don't have time." Basically, whenever you throw any so-called good habit at somebody, they'll have an excuse for themselves. Usually the most common is "I don't have time."
*I don't have time" is just another way of saying "It's not a priority." What you really have to do is say whether it is a priority or not. If something is your number one priority then you will do it. That's just the way life works. If you've got a fuzzy basket of ten or fifteen different priorities, you're going to end up getting none of them.
One month of consistent yoga and I feel 10 years younger. To stay flexible is to stay young
Walking meetings:
• Brain works better
•Exercise & sunlight
•Shorter, less pleasantries
• More dialogue, less monologue
• No slides
• End easily by walking back
The greatest superpower is the ability to change yourself.
The current environment programs the brain, but the clever brain can choose its upcoming environment.
At some level, you're doing it for social approval. 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.
Inspiration is perishable - act on it immediately
NAVAL'S RULES (2016)
Be present above all else.
Desire is suffering. (Buddha)
Anger is a hot coal you hold in your hand while waiting to throw it at someone else. (Buddha)
If you can't see yourself working with someone for life, don't work with them for a day.
Reading (earning) is the ultimate meta-skill and can be traded for anything else.
All the real benefits in life come from compound interest.
Earn with your mind, not your time.
99 percent of all effort is wasted.
Total honesty at all times. It's almost always possible to be honest and positive.
Praise specifically, criticize generally. (Warren Buffett)
Truth is that which has predictive power.
Watch every thought. (Ask "Why am I having this thought?)
All greatness comes from suffering.
Love is given, not received.
Enlightenment is the space between your thoughts. (Eck-hart Tolle)
Mathematics is the language of nature.
Every moment has to be complete in and of itself
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