The Almanack Of Naval Ravikant

By Eric Jorgenson

I really love The Almanack Of Naval Ravikant. It’s a collection of Naval’s thoughts over the years put into a book form. Naval is a different type of thinker who really values his time on this earth on walks to the beat of his own drum.

This book is a collection of the things that he’s learned and his philosophies on life, learning, happiness, wealth and success.

His perspective on chosing to indentify as being happy actively working on being a happier person were really impactful to me.

15 Key Take-aways

1. Choose to be happy. 1 - identify as a happy person. Who are you? You’re the happy guy. Then learn & work on becoming a happier person all the time. Read everything you can on happiness & study it and apply it.
2. Default to acceptance: Any time you find something challenging in life, there’s 3 choices - (1) Accept it, 2) Change It, 3) Leave It. Be ware of choosing to change it, since you’ll need to accept being miserable until it does.
3. Exercise & Meditate Regularly - They were the two biggest contributors to Naval’s happiness. He does both daily.
4. Don’t sweat the small things - train yourself to ask - “what is the positive of this situation?” Try to actually answer it & focus on that.
5. Be the best version of yourself. Chose to be the best version of yourself, not somebody else. There’s nobody else that can ever beat you at that & everyone else is just imitating others. Your goal is to find the people, business, project or art that needs you the most.
6. Build a network through karma - To build a better network in your town through doing 2 things - 1 help people & give things away for free. 2 - Do interesting things yourself. On a long enough time horizon, people will gravitate towards you through karma.
7. Find work that feels like play. Try to find work that feels like play. Then you enjoy doing it just for the sake of doing it.
8. Direction matters most .The direction that you’re heading in matters more than how fast you’re moving. Being right about the direction is far more important than the speed that you’re traveling.
9. Read daily. Try to find your top 100 books & constantly re-read those. This will put you in the top 0.000001% of society.
10. Be long term oriented. Try to lean into things with short term pain & long term gains. They are generally the things that will reward you later on in life.
11. Keep company with the godly - Hang out with & work with people who are good to others. “The closer you want to get to me, the better your values have to be”
12. Find great relationships through an alignment of values. If your values line up, the little things often don’t matter & you get along.
13. Study more - Study persuasion, probability, micro-economics & game theory. They are subjects that are important & I know little about them.
14. For Change to Happen - Commit externally - Change happens when you tell a lot of people about something you then feel the social pressure to see it through.
15. Appreciate scarcity - “We’re evolved for scarcity but live in abundance”

Miscelaneous Notes

Happiness hacks

• Tell people you’re a happy person. Then you need to try to conform to being one since your friends will expect you be happy.
• Be picky on friends & colleagues. Surrounding yourself with people who are positive & upbeat people. Relationships that are low maintenance. People you admire & respect & don’t envy. Don’t hang around with people who constantly engage in conflict
• Default to acceptance: Any time you find something challenging in life, there’s 3 choices - (1) Accept it, 2) Change It, 3) Leave It. Be ware of choosing to change it, since you’ll need to accept being miserable until it does.
• Eliminating video games might be a good idea. Video games give you regular hits of dopamine and can lead to dopamine withdrawals.
• Thought Replacement: Go through your life & try to replace your thoughtless bad habits with good ones, making a commitment to be a happier person.
• Don’t judge. Judge → feeling good → feeling separated from someone → feeling lonely. Then you see negativity everywhere.
• Be present: When you’re present - you’ll realize everything is amazing. Everything is a gift. You want to be in a spot where you “stop asking why and start staying wow”
• Insight meditation - try to catch yourself judging somebody and say “what would be the positive interpretation of this”
• For annoyances - train yourself to ask - “what is the positive of this situation?” Try to actually answer it.
• Watch your desires: Be careful of anything you desire. Ask yourself - is this important enough for me to be unhappy until it changes? If not - don’t desire it.
• Reduce screens - without exception - all screen activities are linked in less happiness. all non-screen activities linked to more happiness. (I question if it’s the screen in the depth of the activity or the internet).
• Accept that you can’t change things: Accept that you don’t matter & you too will die. Civilizations come and go. Enjoy yourself. Do something positive. Project some love.
• Drop Caffeine. It’ll help stabilize mood.
• Exercise daily. With peace of body, you’ll have peace of mind.
• Eliminate social media
• Eliminate sugar
• Be present: When you’re present - you’ll realize everything is amazing. Everything is a gift. You want to be in a spot where you “stop asking why and start staying wow”
• Get sunlight. Look up. Smile

Happiness Tips

• He defines happiness to be a lack of desire, not thinking too much about the past or the future, really embracing the present moment
• Most happiness comes from acceptance, not from changing you environment
• Happiness requires presence: the more you’re thinking about the future or the past, the less you’re enjoying the current moment
• Many wealthy people are unhappy. Many times they were high-stress, hard-working, competitive for 20, 30, 40 years & they can’t just turn that off. They have trained themselves to be high-anxiety & now can’t turn it off.
• Happiness is a skill, just like working out or anything else. When you put your attention and focus on it, you can become a happier person.
• You can slowly & steadily & methodically improve your happiness baseline, just like you can improve your fitness. For Naval:
  • lower identity
  • lower chattering mind
  • stop caring about things that don’t matter
  • don’t get involved in politics
  • don’t hang around unhappy people
  • value time on this earth
  • meditate
  • read philosophy
  • hang around with happy people
• Naval has learned the tools to be happy. Today he’s a 9/10 of happiness, whereas for years he was a 2-3/10
• He defines happiness as a state of peacefulness, where nothing is missing and a default state.

Wealth

• Naval wants to be the most successful version of himself while working the least hard
• Naval defines wealth to be the things that make you passive income - that generate you money while you sleep - eg. code, equity in businesses that you own, etc
• Retirement is when you stop sacrificing today for the imaginary tomorrow
• Getting lots of money will solve your money problems - which is a good thing in of itself but it won’t make you happy.
• Ownership: You’ll never get really rich renting out your time. If you look even at lawyers, doctors, etc - it’s really the business owners & partners that are rich. It’s important to own things to gain financial freedom. Without that your inputs are always tied to your outputs & the input being more time.

Psychology

• Happiness is a skill that can be improved over time
• Be the best version of yourself.
• Suffering: Your real resume is a catalog of your suffering. All the most interesting things you’ve done are going to be around the sacrifices & suffering that you made.
• Envy: If you envy somebody - you have to envy the whole of them, their family, their travel, their health etc - you can’t just envy the best part without realizing that it comes with the less glamorous stuff.
• Games we play: Naval got sick of “playing games” First it’s the school game, then the money game, then it’s the status game. Right now he just doesn’t want to play any games.
• It’s much more important today to be able to become an expert in a brand new field than to have “studied” the right thing a long time ago.
• Embrace accountability. Take business risks under your own name. Society will reward you with responsibility, equity and leverage.

Work

• Find work that feels like play.
• Naval feels that hard work is really over-rated.
• Judgement is underrated.
• The direction that you’re heading in matters more than how fast you’re moving. Being right about the direction is far more important than the speed that you’re traveling.
• If you do something that you love so much, it’s not about the money. You feel retired in your mind.
• You get rewarded for giving society what it wants before others realized it wanted it
• The year Naval generated the most wealth, was the year he told people he was retired and not working. Then he just worked on the things that he was actually interested in.
• Follow your intellectual curiosity vs. whatever is hot right now. You’ll be more likely to develop skills that society doesn’t know how to train people in.

Learning things

• The smartest people can explain things to a child. If you can’t explain a concept to a child - then you don’t really know it.
• The basics of any field trumps the advanced concepts & the advanced concepts are less proven. Focus on mastering the basics.
  • Math: know statistics
  • Economics: Understand micro-economics & the principal-agent problem
• “Very smart people tend to be weird since they insist on thinking everything through for themselves.”

Relationships

• “Sharks eat well, but live a life surrounded by sharks”
• Naval values people who are good to others. “The closer you want to get to me, the better your values have to be”
• Intentions don’t matter. Actions do. That’s why being ethical is very hard.
• If you want more successful people around you - help people & give away things for free. On a long enough scale Karma works you will attract what you project.
• When you find the right people to work with, invest deeply. Sticking with it for decades is how you make real returns, because they are people who you trust and who trust you.
• It’s important to do things in your own name so that you are accountable to them. You build credibility by doing them in your own name.
• Your odds of doing something go up significantly the more you tell people about it. It creates a social responsibility to do it.
• Naval thinks business networking is a complete waste of time.
• The best way to build good relationships is by doing interesting things. People will always want to know you, when you’re doing things they find interesting.

Philosophy

• Do things with short term pain:
  • Things with short-term pain, often are good for long term gains. Eg. Exercise - is short term pain, for long term gains.
  • Because of compounding interest, the long term gains are worth it
• Reading:
  • Re-reading: Find your top 100 books, then re-read those repeatedly.
  • Success: “Reading 1 hour a day will likely put you in the upper echelons of human success in 7 years”
  • Read slowly: ”Reading a book isn’t a race - the better the book, the more slowly it should be absorbed”
  • His process:
    • Naval reads 1-2 hours per day. That puts him in top 0.0000001% of humanity. He attributes that to all his success.
    • He skims, he speed reads, jumps around in the book itself & doesn’t waste his time.
    • Notes: He takes notes of aha concepts on twitter. It forces him to distill the concept into a clear thought.
    • Internalizing concepts: Explain things to others.

Time

• It’s important to have empty space - time in your days & weeks, when you’re not in meetings. It’s only in those times that you’re able to think.

Suffering

• Most of our suffering comes from avoidance. It’s thinking about the pain rather than actually experiencing it. eg. thinking about going into the cold vs. actually being in a cold shower

Meditation

• Relaxed breathing tells your body you’re safe
• “Meditation is like dieting. Everyone says they’re doing it & nobody is actually doing it”
• Choiceless Awareness or Nonjudgemental Awareness: the practice of just accepting the moment you’re in without judging it .
  • eg. don’t look at a person and say “i’m in better shape than him or you see a guy with bad hair & think, he is losing his hair.
  • Don’t judge anything. You just accept everything.
  • Practice - do this for 10-15 min while walking around. You should end up in a peaceful state afterwards.
• Transendental meditation: the use of a repetitive chant to create white noise in your head and bury your thoughts.