Notes from "The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness" by Eric Jorgenson
Here are my thoughts and the notes from the book on Naval.
One of the good things I am happy about my activities this month is reading this book. I heard about Naval from a friend who shared his popular Twitter thread on creating wealth.
I’ve been following him for many days now, and whenever I see a quote credited to this man on Twitter, I wonder how can he come up with such thoughts, which are out of his experiences and learnings.
Delving deeper, I found this book, written by Eric Jorgenson, and downloaded it for free from their website.
First, let’s see the notes and then I’ll talk about my thoughts on this book.
On Wealth
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.
Getting rich is about knowing what to do, who to do it with, and when to do it.
Study microeconomics, game theory, psychology, persuasion, ethics, mathematics, and computers.
Money is how we transfer wealth. Money is social credits.
Wealth is assets that earn while you sleep. Wealth is much more businesses and assets that can earn while you sleep.
The specific knowledge is sort of this weird combination of unique traits from your DNA, your unique upbringing, and your response to it.
Well, if you’re not already good at it or if you’re not really into it, maybe it’s not your thing—focus on the thing that you are really into. Specific knowledge is found much more by pursuing your innate talents, your genuine curiosity, and your passion.
“Escape competition through authenticity.”
The most important skill for getting rich is becoming a perpetual learner. You really care about having studied the foundations, so you’re not scared of any book.
It’s much better to be at 9/10 or 10/10 on foundations than to try and get super deep into things.
The people who have the ability to fail in public under their own names actually gain a lot of power.
They’re going to pay you the bare minimum they have to, to get you to do their job.
You could own equity as a small shareholder where you bought stock. You could also own it as an owner where you started the company.
Following your genuine intellectual curiosity is a better foundation for a career than following whatever is making money right now.
I think the meaning of life is to do things for their own sake. Ironically, when you do things for their own sake, you create your best work.
Follow your intellectual curiosity more than whatever is “hot” right now. If your curiosity ever leads you to a place where society eventually wants to go, you’ll get paid extremely well.
Code is probably the most powerful form of permissionless leverage. All you need is a computer—you don’t need anyone’s permission.
The most interesting and the most important form of leverage is the idea of products that have no marginal cost of replication.
Coding, writing books, recording podcasts, tweeting, YouTubing—these kinds of things are permissionless. They don’t require somebody else’s permission for you to use them or succeed.
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.
What you want in life is to be in control of your time. You want to get into a leveraged job where you control your own time and you’re tracked on the outputs.
The higher the creativity component of a profession, the more likely it is to have disconnected inputs and outputs.
Learn to sell, learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable.
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.
I think every human should aspire to being knowledgeable about certain things and being paid for our unique knowledge.
Judgment—especially demonstrated judgment, with high accountability and a clear track record—is critical.
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. Those attacking wealth creation are often just seeking status.
There are basically three really big decisions you make in your early life: where you live, who you’re with, and what you do.
On a long enough timescale, you will attract what you project. But don’t measure—your patience will run out if you count.
Retirement is when you stop sacrificing today for an imaginary tomorrow. When today is complete, in and of itself, you’re retired.
To get rich without getting lucky, we want to be deterministic. We don’t want to leave it to chance.
In a long-term game, it seems that everybody is making each other rich. And in a short-term game, it seems like everybody is making themselves rich.
Be a maker who makes something interesting people want. Show your craft, practice your craft, and the right people will eventually find you.
If I ask you to describe your real life to yourself, and you look back from your deathbed at the interesting things you’ve done, it’s all going to be around the sacrifices you made, the hard things you did.
On Judgement
If you can be more right and more rational, you’re going to get nonlinear returns in your life.
Praise specifically, criticize generally.
If you want it done, then go. And if not, then send.
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.
On Happiness
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.
Happiness is there when you remove the sense of something missing in your life. It’s about the absence of desire, especially the absence of desire for external things.
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.
You can literally destroy your happiness if you spend all of your time living in delusions of the future.
Enlightenment is the space between your thoughts.
If it’s your internal purpose, the thing you most want to do, then sure, you’ll be happy doing it.
I think it’s important just being aware the anxiety is making you unhappy. The anxiety is just a series of running thoughts.
Looking outside yourself for anything is the fundamental delusion.
Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.
“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.
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.
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.
The obvious one is meditation—insight meditation. Working toward a specific purpose on it, which is to try and understand how my mind works.
Increase serotonin in the brain without drugs: Sunlight, exercise, positive thinking, and tryptophan.
We don’t always get what we want, but sometimes what is happening is for the best. The sooner you can accept it as a reality, the sooner you can adapt to it.
Your life is a firefly blink in a night. You’re here for such a brief period of time.
Do something positive. Project some love. Make someone happy. Laugh a little bit. Appreciate the moment.
On being Yourself
World’s simplest diet: The more processed the food, the less one should consume.
World’s simplest diet: The more processed the food, the less one should consume.
“I don’t have time” is just another way of saying “It’s not a priority.”
“Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life.”
What I find is 90 percent of thoughts I have are fear-based. The other 10 percent may be desire-based.
Life-hack: When in bed, meditate. Either you will have a deep meditation or fall asleep. Victory either way.
The mind itself is a muscle—it can be trained and conditioned.
Courage isn’t charging into a machine gun nest. Courage is not caring what other people think.
Value your time. It is all you have. It’s more important than your money. It’s more important than your friends. It is more important than anything. Your time is all you have. Do not waste your time.
Health, love, and your mission, in that order. Nothing else matters.
You can purchase the paperback copy here.
My thoughts
I feel this book came to me at the right time and during the proper phase of my life. I used to worry about many things that weren’t in my control neither under my influence, and this book and Naval sat with me, taught me the essential things to remember in life. His quotes are trivial, but we don’t realize them until we assimilate their essence and the context in which he talks.
I’ve to re-read the book every five years to reflect upon my life and compiling these notes so that I can review it every month, like examining the expenses at the end of the month. Honestly, I didn’t comprehend everything written in this book, but I hope to understand the content as time progresses.
All Excerpts From Jorgenson, Eric. “The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness.” Magrathea Publishing. This material may be protected by copyright.