The Almanack of Naval Ravikant
The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness by Eric Jorgenson. Buy it on Amazon here, or read a pdf for free here.
🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences
Naval shares the tools needed to get rich in a predictable and replicable way, and through this re-considers what wealthy actually means, encompassing much more than purely money.
Naval shares his evolving definition of happiness, being what is there when you remove the sense of something missing in your life.
Lots of other wisdom and life-changing advice about learning, specific knowledge, judgement, decisions, reading, anger, honesty, being yourself and freedom.
🎨 Impressions
Having listened to several podcasts with Naval as the guest, and loving the succinctness and significance of his idea, this book was the logical next thing to engage with.
Naval's wisdom and philosophies really are priceless. He has such an insightful, thought-provoking outlook on the world and is able to excellently convey these deep truths and ideas in a relatable, understandable way.
Who Should Read It?
Everyone. If you are a twenty something and are just starting out, this book will give you the thought tools required to succeed. If you are fifty something, this book will challenge you on your ideas of wealth, happiness and life.
☘️ Summary of Tips and Advice
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 (learning) 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. (Eckhart Tolle)
Mathematics is the language of nature. Every moment has to be complete in and of itself.
✍️ My Top 3 Quotes
The greatest superpower is the ability to change yourself.
Don’t take yourself so seriously. You’re just a monkey with a plan.
Nature has no concept of happiness or unhappiness. Nature follows unbroken mathematical laws and a chain of cause and effect from the Big Bang to now. Everything is perfect exactly the way it is.
📒 Summary + Notes
Naval questions nearly everything, thinks from first principles and tests things well. He doesn't fool himself, changes his mind regularly, thinks holistically and long-term.
Naval's premise is that getting wealthy is a replicable skill we can all learn. He says that he 'likes to think that if I lost all my money and you dropped me on a random street in any English-speaking country, within five or ten years I’d be wealthy again because it’s just a skillset I’ve developed that anyone can develop.'
Getting Wealthy:
Getting rich is about knowing what to do, who to do it with, and when to do it.
Seek wealth, not money or status. Wealth is having assets that earn while you sleep. Money is how we transfer time and wealth. Status is your place in the social hierarchy.
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.
You will get rich by giving society what it wants but does not yet know how to get. At scale.
Pick an industry where you can play long-term games with long-term people.
The internet has massively broadened the possible space of careers. Most people haven’t figured this out yet.
Play iterated games. All the returns in life, whether in wealth, relationships, or knowledge, come from compound interest.
Learn to sell. Learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable.
Gain Specific Knowledge
Specific knowledge is knowledge you cannot be trained for. If society can train you, it can train someone else and replace you.
Specific knowledge is found by pursuing your genuine curiosity and passion rather than whatever is hot right now.
Building specific knowledge will feel like play to you but will look like work to others.
Embrace accountability, and take business risks under your own name. Society will reward you with responsibility, equity, and leverage.
Judgment requires experience but can be built faster by learning foundational skills.
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.
Specific knowledge cannot be taught, but it can be learned.
The specific knowledge is sort of this weird combination of unique traits from your DNA, your unique upbringing, and your response to it. It’s almost baked into your personality and your identity. Then you can hone it.
No one can compete with you on being you. Most of life is a search for who and what needs you the most.
Summary: Productize Yourself
Learning and Fundamentals:
The most important skill for getting rich is becoming a perpetual learner.
Basic arithmetic and numeracy are way more important in life than doing calculus. Similarly, being able to convey yourself simply using ordinary English words is far more important than being able to write poetry, having an extensive vocabulary, or speaking seven different foreign languages.
Knowing how to be persuasive when speaking is far more important than being an expert digital marketer or click optimizer. Foundations are key. It’s much better to be at 9/10 or 10/10 on foundations than to try and get super deep into things.
What can I do for the next sixty days to become a clearer, more independent thinker? Read the greats in math, science, and philosophy. Ignore your contemporaries and news. Avoid tribal identification. Put truth above social approval.
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.
Where to Focus Efforts:
99% of effort is wasted.
I’m not saying don’t do the 99 percent, because it’s very hard to identify what the 1 percent is. What I’m saying is: when you find the 1 percent of your discipline which will not be wasted, which you’ll be able to invest in for the rest of your life and has meaning to you—go all-in and forget about the rest.
The year I generated the most wealth for myself was actually the year I worked the least hard and cared the least about the future. I was mostly doing things for the sheer fun of it. I was basically telling people, “I’m retired, I’m not working.” Then, I had the time for whatever was my highest valued project in front of me. By doing things for their own sake, I did them at their best.
If you have specific knowledge, you have accountability and you have leverage; they have to pay you what you’re worth.
Forty hour work weeks are a relic of the Industrial Age. Knowledge workers function like athletes—train and sprint, then rest and reassess.
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.
Live Instead of Playing Games:
Any end goal will just lead to another goal, lead to another goal. We just play games in life. When you grow up, you’re playing the school game, or you’re playing the social game. Then you’re playing the money game, and then you’re playing the status game. These games just have longer and longer and longer-lived horizons. At some point, at least I believe, these are all just games. These are games where the outcome really stops mattering once you see through the game. Then you just get tired of games. I would say I’m at the stage where I’m just tired of games. I don’t think there is any end goal or purpose. I’m just living life as I want to. I’m literally just doing it moment to moment.
Retirement is when you stop sacrificing today for an imaginary tomorrow. When today is complete, in and of itself, you’re retired.
The winners of any game are the people who are so addicted they continue playing even as the marginal utility from winning declines.
Honesty:
Radical honesty just means I want to be free. Part of being free means I can say what I think and think what I say. They’re highly congruent and integrated.
Richard Feynman famously said, “You should never, ever fool anybody, and you are the easiest person to fool.” The moment you tell somebody something dishonest, you’ve lied to yourself. Then you’ll start believing your own lie, which will disconnect you from reality and take you down the wrong road
Decisions:
When you choose something, you get locked in for a long time. Starting a business may take ten years. You start a relationship that will be five years or maybe more. You move to a city for ten to twenty years. These are very, very long-lived decisions. It’s very, very important we only say yes when we are pretty certain. You’re never going to be absolutely certain, but you’re going to be very certain.
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.
Don’t take yourself so seriously. You’re just a monkey with a plan.
Happiness:
Naval's definition keeps evolving. He believe happiness is really a default state. Happiness is there when you remove the sense of something missing in your life.
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.
If you ever want to have peace in your life, you have to move beyond good and evil.
Nature has no concept of happiness or unhappiness. Nature follows unbroken mathematical laws and a chain of cause and effect from the Big Bang to now. Everything is perfect exactly the way it is.
Happiness, love, and passion…aren’t things you find—they’re choices you make.
The idea you’re going to change something in the outside world, and that is going to bring you the peace, everlasting joy, and happiness you deserve, is a fundamental delusion we all suffer from, including me.
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.
Doing You & Playing Single Player Games:
The real winners are the ones who step out of the game entirely, who don’t even play the game, who rise above it. Those are the people who have such internal mental and self-control and self-awareness, they need nothing from anybody else.
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.
Of the things I’m trying to get rid of is the word “should.” Whenever the word “should” creeps up in your mind, it’s guilt or social programming. Doing something because you “should” basically means you don’t actually want to do it. It’s just making you miserable, so I’m trying to eliminate as many “shoulds” from my life as possible.
We compete purely in multiplayer games. The reality is life is a single-player game. You’re born alone. You’re going to die alone. All of your interpretations are alone. All your memories are alone. You’re gone in three generations, and nobody cares. Before you showed up, nobody cared. It’s all single player.
Perhaps one reason why yoga and meditation are hard to sustain is they have no extrinsic value. Purely single player games.
One day, I realized with all these people I was jealous of, I couldn’t just choose little aspects of their life. I couldn’t say I want his body, I want her money, I want his personality. You have to be that person. Do you want to actually be that person with all of their reactions, their desires, their family, their happiness level, their outlook on life, their self-image? If you’re not willing to do a wholesale, 24/7, 100 percent swap with who that person is, then there is no point in being jealous. Once I came to that realization, jealousy faded away because I don’t want to be anybody else. I’m perfectly happy being me.
Death is the most important thing that is ever going to happen to you. When you look at your death and you acknowledge it, rather than running away from it, it’ll bring great meaning to your life. We spend so much of our life trying to avoid death. So much of what we struggle for can be classified as a quest for immortality
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.
Doctors won’t make you healthy. Nutritionists won’t make you slim. Teachers won’t make you smart. Guru's won’t make you calm. Mentors won’t make you rich. Trainers won’t make you fit. Ultimately, you have to take responsibility. Save yourself.
To make an original contribution, you have to be irrationally obsessed with something.
When everyone is sick, we no longer consider it a disease.
The greatest superpower is the ability to change yourself.
When you really want to change, you just change. But most of us don’t really want to change—we don’t want to go through the pain just yet.
Other:
Science is, to me, the study of truth. It is the only true discipline because it makes falsifiable predictions. It actually changes the world. Applied science becomes technology, and technology is what separates us from the animals and allows us to have things like cell phones, houses, cars, heat, and electricity.
The hardest thing is not doing what you want—it’s knowing what you want.
My old definition was “freedom to.” Freedom to do anything I want. Freedom to do whatever I feel like, whenever I feel like. Now, the freedom I’m looking for is internal freedom. It’s “freedom from.” Freedom from reaction. Freedom from feeling angry. Freedom from being sad. Freedom from being forced to do things.
Anger is its own punishment. An angry person trying to push your head below water is drowning at the same time.
