The Almanack of Naval Ravikant by Eric Jorgenson
Three Point Summary | Notes on big ideas from intriguing books
Jeff Sullivan’s Three Pointers
Naval Ravikant is an entrepreneur, investor, and philosopher. This book is a collection of his wisdom. It focuses on achieving health, wealth, and happiness.
Building Wealth
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.
Arm yourself with specific knowledge, accountability, and leverage.
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.
Capital (money) and labor (people) are permissioned leverage (someone has to give them to you).
Code and media are permissionless leverage (anyone can create on the internet). They’re the leverage behind the newly rich. You can create software (websites, digital products/services) and media (videos, blogs, podcasts) that work for you while you sleep.
An army of robots is freely available—it’s just packed in data centers for heat and space efficiency. Use it. If you can’t code, write books and blogs, record videos and podcasts.
The internet has massively broadened the career space. Most people haven’t figured this out yet. You can go on the internet, and you can find your audience. And you can build a business, and create a product, and build wealth, and make people happy just uniquely expressing yourself through the internet.
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…The way to get out of the competition trap is to be authentic, to find the thing you know how to do better than anybody. You know how to do it better because you love it, and no one can compete with you.
Learn to sell, learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable.
If you do not understand the principal-agent problem, you will not know how to navigate your way through the world.
You don’t need to learn geometry, calculus, or any of the complicated stuff if you’re just going into business. But you want arithmetic, probability, and statistics. Those are extremely important.
Work as hard as you can. Even though who you work with and what you work on are more important than how hard you work.
Wealth is assets that earn while you sleep. Wealth is the factory, the robots, cranking out things. Wealth is the computer program that’s running at night, serving other customers. Wealth is even money in the bank that is being reinvested into other assets, and into other businesses.
Learning Happiness
You can increase your happiness over time, and it starts with believing you can do it. It’s a skill.
There’s a friend of mine, a Persian guy named Behzad. He just loves life, and has no time for anybody who is not happy. If you ask Behzad what’s his secret? He’ll just look up and say, “stop asking why and start saying wow.” The world is such an amazing place. As humans, we’re used to taking everything for granted. Like what you and I are doing right now. We’re sitting indoors, wearing clothes, well-fed, and communicating through space and time. We should be two monkeys in the jungle right now watching the sun go down, asking ourselves where we are going to sleep.
If you look at little children, on balance, they’re generally pretty happy because they are really immersed in the environment and the moment, without any thought of how it should be given their personal preferences and desires.
Our lives are a blink of a firefly in the night. You’re just barely here. You have to make the most of every minute, which doesn’t mean you chase some stupid desire for your entire life. What it means is every second on this planet is precious, and it’s your responsibility to make sure you’re happy and interpret everything in the best possible way.
It’s always the next thing, then the next thing, the next thing after that, then the next thing after that creates pervasive anxiety…the anxiety is just a series of running thoughts. How I combat anxiety: I don’t try and fight it, I just notice I’m anxious because of all these thoughts. I think it’s important just being aware the anxiety is making you unhappy.
You can literally destroy your happiness if you spend all of your time living in delusions of the future. We crave experiences that will make us be present, but the cravings themselves take us from the present moment.
No exceptions—all screen activities linked to less happiness, all non-screen activities linked to more happiness.
I don’t hang around unhappy people.
I hang around happy people.
I read philosophy.
It works.
Meditation & Awareness
Caught in a funk? Use meditation, music, and exercise to reset your mood.
The advantage of meditation is recognizing just how out of control your mind is. It is like a monkey flinging feces, running around the room, making trouble, shouting, and breaking things. It’s completely uncontrollable. It’s an out-of-control mad-person. You have to see this mad creature in operation before you feel a certain distaste toward it and start separating yourself from it. In that separation is liberation.
The mind itself is a muscle—it can be trained and conditioned. It has been haphazardly conditioned by society to be out of control. If you look at your mind with awareness and intent, I think you can unpack your own mind, your emotions, your thoughts, and reactions. Then, you can start reconfiguring. You can start writing this program to what you want.
Principles & Philosophy
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.
If you cannot decide, the answer is no.
I think a lot of modern society can be explained through evolution. One theory is civilization exists to answer the question of who gets to mate.
Charisma is the ability to project confidence and love at the same time. It’s almost always possible to be honest and positive.
The genuine love for reading itself, when cultivated, is a superpower.
You know that song you can’t get out of your head? All thoughts work that way. Careful what you read.
You can only make progress when you’re starting with the truth. The hard thing is seeing the truth. To see the truth, you have to get your ego out of the way because your ego doesn’t want to face the truth.
Facebook redesigns. Twitter redesigns. Personalities, careers, and teams also need redesigns.
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 into 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 take yourself so seriously. You’re just a monkey with a plan.
There is actually nothing but this moment.
I’ve read this book over and over and over. These ideas are the cheat codes to the game of life. Thank you, Naval.
THANK YOU JEFF.JIM