The Almanack of Naval Ravikant

📝 Notes

• If you don’t know yet what you should work on, the most important thing is to figure it out. You should not grind at a lot of hard work until you figure out what you should be working on. (Page 24)
• 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. (Page 25)
• Pick an industry where you can play long-term games with long-term people. (Page 26)
• Pick business partners with high intelligence, energy, and, above all, integrity. (Page 26)
• Don’t partner with cynics and pessimists. Their beliefs are self-fulfilling. (Page 27)
• Specific knowledge is knowledge you cannot be trained for. If society can train you, it can train someone else and replace you. (Page 27)
• Building specific knowledge will feel like play to you but will look like work to others. (Page 28)
• Write books and blogs, record videos and podcasts. (Page 30)
• Study microeconomics, game theory, psychology, persuasion, ethics, mathematics, and computers. (Page 31)
• Become the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until this is true. (Page 32)
• 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 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. (Page 34)
• Applied Scientists are the most powerful people in the world. This will be more obvious in the coming years. (Page 38)
• Specific knowledge is at the edge of knowledge. It’s also stuff that’s only now being figured out or is really hard to figure out. If you’re not 100 percent into it, somebody else who is 100 percent into it will outperform you. And they won’t just outperform you by a little bit—they’ll outperform you by a lot because now we’re operating in the domain of ideas, compound interest really applies and leverage really applies. (Page 39)
• “What is the foundation required for me to learn this?” Foundations are super important. (Page 41)
• Foundations are key. It’s much better to be at 9/10 or 10/10 on foundations than to try and get super deep into things. (Page 41)
• If you have a sterling reputation and you keep building it for decades upon decades, people will notice. Your reputation will literally end up being thousands or tens of thousands of times more valuable than somebody else who was very talented but is not keeping the compound interest in reputation going. (Page 43)
• 99 percent of your life is wasted and only 1 percent is useful. (Page 45)
• Accountability is a double-edged thing. It allows you to take credit when things go well and to bear the brunt of the failure when things go badly. (Page 47)
• There’s not really that much to fear in terms of failure, and so people should take on a lot more accountability than they do. (Page 48)
• You are waiting for your moment when something emerges in the world, they need a skill set, and you’re uniquely qualified. You build your brand in the meantime on Twitter, on YouTube, and by giving away free work. You make a name for yourself, and you take some risk in the process. When it is time to move on the opportunity, you can do so with leverage—the maximum leverage possible. (Page 55)
• 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. If you do something incredible to move the needle on the business, they have to pay you. Especially if they don’t know how you did it because it’s innate to your obsession or your skill or your innate abilities, they’re going to have to keep paying you to do it. (Page 58)
• Figure out what you’re good at, and start helping other people with it. Give it away. Pay it forward. Karma works because people are consistent. On a long enough timescale, you will attract what you project. (Page 72)
• Then, there’s luck through persistence, hard work, hustle, and motion. This is when you’re running around creating opportunities. You’re generating a lot of energy, you’re doing a lot to stir things up. It’s almost like mixing a petri dish or mixing a bunch of reagents and seeing what combines. You’re just generating enough force, hustle, and energy for luck to find you. (Page 80)
• If you’re building something interesting, you will always have more people who will want to know you. Trying to build business relationships well in advance of doing business is a complete waste of time. I have a much more comfortable philosophy: “Be a maker who makes something interesting people want. Show your craft, practice your craft, and the right people will eventually find you.” (Page 82)
• The most common bad advice I hear is: “You’re too young.” Most of history was built by young people. They just got credit when they were older. The only way to truly learn something is by doing it. Yes, listen to guidance. But don’t wait. (Page 85)
• You have to put in the time, but the judgment is more important. The direction you’re heading in matters more than how fast you move, especially with leverage. Picking the direction you’re heading in for every decision is far, far more important than how much force you apply. (Page 91)
• Imagine we’re going through something difficult like a breakup, a job loss, a business failure, or a health problem, and our friends are advising us. When we’re advising them, the answer is obvious. It comes to us in a minute, and we tell them exactly, “Oh that girl, get over her, she wasn’t good for you anyway. You’ll be happier. Trust me. You’ll find someone.” You know the correct answer, but your friend can’t see it, because they’re in the moment of suffering and pain. They’re still wishing reality was different. The problem isn’t reality. The problem is their desire is colliding with reality and preventing them from seeing the truth, no matter how much you say it. (Page 93)
• Very smart people tend to be weird since they insist on thinking everything through for themselves. (Page 95)
• 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. Then people’s egos and identities, which we all have, don’t work against you. They work for you. (Page 101)
• The best mental models I have found came through evolution, game theory, and Charlie Munger. (Page 102)
• Try to eliminate what’s not going to work. I think being successful is just about not making mistakes. It’s not about having correct judgment. It’s about avoiding incorrect judgments. (Page 104)
• The smaller the company, the more everyone feels like a principal. The less you feel like an agent, the better the job you’re going to do. The more closely you can tie someone’s compensation to the exact value they’re creating, the more you turn them into a principal, and the less you turn them into an agent. (Page 105)
• Reading science, math, and philosophy one hour per day will likely put you at the upper echelon of human success within seven years. (Page 110)
• The means of learning are abundant—it’s the desire to learn that is scarce. (Page 110)
• I don’t care about things that don’t really matter. I don’t get involved in politics. I don’t hang around unhappy people. (Page 128)
• Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want. (Page 133)
• The first rule of handling conflict is: Don’t hang around people who constantly engage in conflict. (Page 143)
• A personal metric: how much of the day is spent doing things out of obligation rather than out of interest? (Page 145)
• 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. (Page 147)
• I know people who have read one hundred regurgitated books on evolution and they’ve never read Darwin. Think of the number of macroeconomists out there. I think most of them have read tons of treatises in economics but haven’t read any Adam Smith. At some level, you’re doing it for social approval. You’re doing it to fit in with the other monkeys. You’re fitting in to get along with the herd. That’s not where the returns are in life. The returns in life are being out of the herd. Social approval is inside the herd. If you want social approval, definitely go read what the herd is reading. It takes a level of contrarianism to say, “Nope. I’m just going to do my own thing. Regardless of the social outcome, I will learn anything I think is interesting.” (Page 181)
• Don’t spend your time making other people happy. Other people being happy is their problem. It’s not your problem. (Page 185)