Almanack of Naval Ravikant

Sharing my learnings from the book, Almanack of Naval Ravikant by Eric Jorgenson

Naval Ravikant by Eric Jorgenson

This book collects and curates Naval’s wisdom from Twitter, Podcasts, and Essays over the past decade. The wisdom of Naval Ravikant, created and edited by Eric Jorgenson, with Illustrations by Jack Butcher, and a Foreword by Tim Ferriss.

• There’s a cliché as old as antiquity that says that wisdom and practicality are incompatible. Like many clichés, it’s not necessarily true, even though it describes something we’ve all observed. Naval Ravikant is living proof of that. His success as an entrepreneur and investor reflects his understanding of the practical business of making money. But he’s also a philosopher dedicated to discovering the secret of living well.
• modern society is full of options, which means there are countless answers to questions like whom you should marry, where you should live, and which career you should pursue. it helps if you’re applying the right principles when you make important decisions.
• it pays to apply a simple heuristic – that is, a rule of thumb that helps make sense of a problem. This heuristic states that if you’re unsure, then the answer is always no.
• Compound interest is exponential –  it makes money more and more quickly. Compounded over three decades, $10,000 at 10 percent yields $174,494. Simple interest, by contrast, gets you to $40,000. Compounding is all about playing the long game. That’s also a lesson you can apply to relationships.
• A good reputation is an invaluable asset
  • Over the years, they’ve stuck with their work and proved their integrity. That’s what a reputation is – the compound interest on a long-term investment in defining what you stand for.
  • If you establish a good working relationship with someone over a five- or ten-year period, you end up trusting them. That makes life easier. All the negotiations that define the business world become simple. Mutual trust means you know things will work out.
  • If you want big returns on your reputation, you need to think carefully about how you build it. Remember, you’ll be investing deeply over decades, so it’s so important to move on quickly when you realize your investment isn’t leading anywhere.
  • If you’re studying something and you see that you’re never going to use that information, for example, you should drop that class. It’s a waste of time and energy. More importantly, it means you’re missing out on a chance to find truly valuable long-term investments.
• If you want to make money, you’re going to have to work with people who are doing better than you. As humans, we’re hardwired to pick up on what others really think of us. When you’re resentful or envious, it shows
• We all play two social “games.”
  • the money game. Money can’t buy happiness or make all your problems disappear, but it will solve your money problems. That’s reason enough to play the game.
  • it’s positive-sum. You can win without someone else losing, or become wealthy without condemning someone else to poverty.
  • the status game. Rejecting money as something that they neither need nor want is a way for people to claim a higher status in others’ eyes.
  • zero-sum game. For someone to win, someone else has to lose. Number two can only move up the pecking order if number one vacates that spot.
• Money can give you freedom. Money isn’t the root of all evil. In fact, it’s neutral – it can be used well or poorly. It all depends on the goal you’re pursuing.
• If you love money, there’s never enough – it’s a bottomless pit. Desire isn’t rational, after all, and it doesn’t shut off once you reach a particular figure. In this state, money constantly occupies your mind – it’s all you think about, and it frames every decision. You’re unhappy with what you’re making and fearful of losing what you’ve already made. This cycle of dissatisfaction and paranoia is the punishment for the love of money, and it arrives along with the money itself.
• You can keep yourself working toward this goal by avoiding upgrades to your lifestyle as you make more money. When you keep your outgoings fixed at a modest level, your money contributes to your financial freedom. Constantly upgrading, by contrast, creates new problems that can only be solved by running faster and faster on the same treadmill.
• Reality – the world outside our minds – is neutral. If judgment exists only in the human mind, Taoists and Buddhists conclude, happiness is just one possible way of responding to a neutral world. In other words, we can choose to be happy.
  • the Tao Te Ching. Attributed to the sixth-century BCE Chinese sage Laozi. It holds that every positive thought or judgment contains the seed of a corresponding negative thought. To say you’re happy, for example, means that you were unhappy at some point.
  • Within these traditions, happiness is understood as the absence of such judgments, which is associated with the absence of desire. The fewer desires you have, the greater your ability to accept the way things are right now. This brings inner calm.
  • The more you live in the present, the happier you’ll be.
• What does happiness look like?
  • Blaise Pascal, the seventeenth-century French philosopher, said that it’s sitting quietly in a room by yourself.
  • Buddhists take a similar view. To sit still for 30 minutes is happiness.
• Thoughts, the Buddha said, are like branches, and the conscious mind is like a monkey swinging from one branch to the next. This monkey can’t sit still. Over the day, the monkey mind covers tens of thousands of these branches. Some thoughts are judgments. Others are movies playing back what happened yesterday or ten years ago. Many are fantasies about a future in which all our desires have been satisfied. This cerebral busyness does have its uses – it’s how we make long-term plans and solve problems, for example. What it’s not good for is happiness.
  • The answer to this problem is to train the monkey. That, in a nutshell, is what meditation is all about – quieting the simian chatter that prevents us from being present.
• Happiness isn’t innate – it’s a skill.
  • Happiness comes when you quiet your monkey mind and focus your attention on what’s happening around you
  • some things don’t meet the standards of scientific evidence, but they can still help you. The rule of thumb here is simple: If it works, use it; if it doesn’t, look for something else.
  • The other is building good habits.