The Almanack Of Naval Ravikant

A Guide to Wealth and Happiness

by Eric Jorgenson

Money vs Wealth

  • Making money is not a thing you do— it’s a skill you learn.
  • Getting rich is about knowing what to do, who to do it with, and when to do it. It is much more about understanding than purely hard work. Yes, hard work matters, and you can’t skimp on it. But it has to be directed in the right way.
  • Seek wealth, not money or status. Wealth is having assets that earn while you sleep.
  • Ethical wealth creation is possible. 
  • If you secretly despise wealth, it will elude you.
  • Money is how we transfer wealth.
  • Wealth is businesses and assets that can earn while you sleep.
  • Being anti-wealth will prevent you from becoming wealthy, because you will not have the right mindset for it, you won’t have the right spirit, and you won’t be dealing with people on the right level. Be optimistic, be positive.
  • I’m much more interested in solving problems than I am in making money.
  • Money is not the root of all evil; there’s nothing evil about it. But the lust for money is bad.
  • Lusting for money is bad for us because it is a bottomless pit.
  • I value freedom above everything else. All kinds of freedom: freedom to do what I want, freedom from things I don’t want to do, freedom from my own emotions or things that may disturb my peace. For me, freedom is my number one value. To the extent money buys freedom, it’s great. But to the extent it makes me less free, which it definitely does at some level as well, I don’t like it.
  • By the time people realize they have enough money, they’ve lost their time and their health.

Work and business

  • I was born poor and miserable. I’m now pretty well-off, and I’m very happy. I worked at those.
  • 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.
  • All the returns in life, whether in wealth, relationships, or knowledge, come from compound interest.
  • Pick business partners with high intelligence, energy, and, above all, integrity.
  • Learn to sell. Learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable.
  • Set and enforce an aspirational personal hourly rate. If fixing a problem will save less than your hourly rate, ignore it. If outsourcing a task will cost less than your hourly rate, outsource it.
  • Become the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until this is true.
  • There are no get-rich-quick schemes. Those are just someone else getting rich off you.
  • Society will pay you for creating things it wants.
  • Society always wants new things. And if you want to be wealthy, you want to figure out which one of those things you can provide for society
  • Sales skills are a form of specific knowledge.
  • Specific knowledge cannot be taught, but it can be learned.
  • Specific knowledge is found much more by pursuing your innate talents, your genuine curiosity, and your passion.
  • Applied Scientists are the most powerful people in the world. This will be more obvious in the coming years.
  • The internet enables any niche interest, as long as you’re the best person at it to scale out.
  • The best jobs are neither decreed nor degreed. They are creative expressions of continuous learners in free markets.
  • If you don’t own equity in a business, your odds of making money are very slim.
  • 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.
  • Compound interest also happens in your reputation. If you have a sterling reputation and you keep building it for decades upon decades, people will notice.
  • Managing other people is incredibly messy. It requires tremendous leadership skills. You’re one short hop from a mutiny or getting eaten or torn apart by the mob.
  • You can manage capital much more easily than you can manage people.
  • Code is probably the most powerful form of permissionless leverage. All you need is a computer—you don’t need anyone’s permission.
  • Coding, writing books, recording podcasts, tweeting, You-Tubing—these kinds of things are permissionless. You don’t need anyone’s permission to do them, and that’s why they are very egalitarian. They’re great equalizers of leverage.
  • 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.
  • Forty hour work weeks are a relic of the Industrial Age. Knowledge workers function like athletes—train and sprint, then rest and reassess.
  • Where you don’t necessarily want to be is a support role, like customer service. In customer service, unfortunately, inputs and outputs relate relatively close to each other, and the hours you put in matter.
  • If you’re looking at professions where your inputs and your outputs are highly connected, it’s going to be very hard to create wealth.
  • Earn with your mind, not your time.
  • Stay out of things that could cause you to lose all of your capital, all of your savings.
  • We waste our time with short-term thinking and busywork. Warren Buffett spends a year deciding and a day acting. That act lasts decades.
  • You will never be worth more than you think you’re worth.
  • No one is going to value you more than you value yourself.
  • 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. Even if you’re just trying to make money, you will actually be the most successful.
  • I can create a new business within three months: raise the money, assemble a team, and launch it. It’s fun for me.
  • I’m always “working.” It looks like work to others, but it feels like play to me. And that’s how I know no one can compete with me on it. Because I’m just playing, for sixteen hours a day.
  • Become the best at what you do. Refine what you do until this is true. Opportunity will seek you out. Luck becomes your destiny.
  • Trying to build business relationships well in advance of doing business is a complete waste of time.
  • “Be a maker who makes something interesting people want. Show your craft, practice your craft, and the right people will eventually find you.”
  • The most common bad advice I hear is: “You’re too young.” Most of history was built by young people.

Competition

  • No one can compete with you on being you. Most of life is a search for who and what needs you the most.
  • “Escape competition through authenticity.”
  • When you’re competing with people, it’s because you’re copying them.
  • Every human is different. Don’t copy.

Learning

  • The most important skill for getting rich is becoming a perpetual learner.
  • Books make for great friends, because the best thinkers of the last few thousand years tell you their nuggets of wisdom.
  • If you go to the library and there’s a book you cannot understand, you have to dig down and say, “What is the foundation required for me to learn this?” Foundations are super important. 
  • The genuine love for reading itself, when cultivated, is a superpower.
  • “As long as I have a book in my hand, I don’t feel like I’m wasting time.”—Charlie Munger
  • No book in the library should scare you. Whether it’s a math, physics, electrical engineering, sociology, or economics book. You should be able to take any book down off the shelf and read it.
  • If you’re a perpetual learning machine, you will never be out of options for how to make money.
  • Arm yourself with specific knowledge, accountability, and leverage.
  • Study microeconomics, game theory, psychology, persuasion, ethics, mathematics, and computers.
  • 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.
  • You can only achieve mastery in one or two things. It’s usually things you’re obsessed about.
  • When you’re studying something, like a geography or history class, and you realize you are never going to use the information, drop the class. It’s a waste of time. It’s a waste of your brain energy.

Happiness

  • Happiness is there when you remove the sense of something missing in your life.
  • If I say I’m happy, that means I was sad at some point. If I say he’s attractive, then somebody else is unattractive. Every positive thought even has a seed of a negative thought within it and vice versa, which is why a lot of greatness in life comes out of suffering. You have to view the negative before you can aspire to and appreciate the positive.
  • Happiness is the absence of desire for external things.
  • Happiness is embracing the present moment and the reality of what is, and the way it is.
  • Happiness is what’s there when you remove the sense that something is missing in your life.
  • When I say happiness, I mean peace. When a lot of people say happiness, they mean joy or bliss, but I’ll take peace.
  • Happiness is being satisfied with what you have. Success comes from dissatisfaction. Choose.
  • Peace and happiness are skills.
  • Happiness is a skill you develop and a choice you make. You choose to be happy, and then you work at it. It’s just like building muscles. It’s just like losing weight. It’s just like succeeding at your job. It’s just like learning calculus.
  • What making money will do is solve your money problems. It will remove a set of things that could get in the way of being happy, but it is not going to make you happy.

Decisions

  • If I’m faced with a difficult choice, such as: → Should I marry this person? → Should I take this job? → Should I buy this house? → Should I move to this city? → Should I go into business with this person? If you cannot decide, the answer is no.
  • 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.

And…

  • Spend more time making the big decisions. There are basically three really big decisions you make in your early life: where you live, who you’re with, and what you do.
  • Retirement is when you stop sacrificing today for an imaginary tomorrow. When today is complete, in and of itself, you’re retired.
  • If someone is talking a lot about how honest they are, they’re probably dishonest.
  • Look at the kids who are born rich—they have no meaning to their lives. Your real résumé is just a catalog of all your suffering.
  • Amazing how many people confuse wealth and wisdom.
  • “Clear thinker” is a better compliment than “smart.”
  • Someone is using a lot of fancy words and a lot of big concepts, they probably don’t know what they’re talking about. I think the smartest people can explain things to a child.
  • It’s only after you’re bored you have the great ideas. It’s never going to be when you’re stressed, or busy, running around or rushed. Make the time.
  • “Tension is who you think you should be. Relaxation is who you are.”—Buddhist saying
  • I would combine radical honesty with an old rule Warren Buffett has, which is praise specifically, criticize generally.
  • If you have a criticism of someone, then don’t criticize the person—criticize the general approach or criticize the class of activities. If you have to praise somebody, then always try and find the person who is the best example of what you’re praising and praise the person, specifically.
  • I believe we are fundamentally ignorant and very, very bad at predicting the future.
  • 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.
  • Every positive thought essentially holds within it a negative thought.
  • There’s this “nexting” thing where you’re sitting in one spot thinking about where you should be next. It’s always the next thing, then the next thing, the next thing after that, then the next thing after that creating this pervasive anxiety.
  • 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.
  • Blaise Pascal said “All of man’s troubles arise because he cannot sit in a room quietly by himself.”
  • 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.
  • Doing something because you “should” basically means you don’t actually want to do it.
  • 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.
  • The more you judge, the more you separate yourself. You’ll feel good for an instant, because you feel good about yourself, thinking you’re better than someone. Later, you’re going to feel lonely. Then, you see negativity everywhere. The world just reflects your own feelings back at you.
  • In any situation in life, you always have three choices: you can change it, you can accept it, or you can leave it. If you want to change it, then it is a desire. It will cause you suffering until you successfully change it.
  • The phrase I probably use the most to myself in my head is just one word: “accept.”
  • 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.
  • I never met my greatest mentor. I wanted so much to be like him. But his message was the opposite: Be yourself, with passionate intensity.
  • Don’t make any decisions. You don’t judge anything. You just accept everything.
  • When in bed, meditate. Either you will have a deep meditation or fall asleep. Victory either way.
  • You become your habits.
  • If you have nothing in your life, but you have at least one person that loves you unconditionally, it’ll do wonders for your self-esteem.

Disclaimer: The key points of the book presented here are not a substitute for reading the book. To get the entire holistic message the author has offered requires reading the book.

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