The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness

by Eric Jorgenson

Getting rich is about knowing what to do, who to do it with, and when to do it.

The tweetstorm tries to be information-dense, very concise, high-impact, and timeless. It has all the information and principles, so if you absorb these and you work hard over ten years, you’ll get what you want. [77] How to Get Rich (Without Getting Lucky): ↓ Seek wealth, not money or status. Wealth is having assets that earn while you sleep. Money is how we transfer time and wealth. Status is your place in the social hierarchy. ↓ Understand ethical wealth creation is possible. If you secretly despise wealth, it will elude you. ↓ Ignore people playing status games. They gain status by attacking people playing wealth creation games. ↓ 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. ↓ Pick an industry where you can play long-term games with long-term people. ↓ The internet has massively broadened the possible space of careers. Most people haven’t figured this out yet. ↓ Play iterated games. 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. ↓ Don’t partner with cynics and pessimists. Their beliefs are self-fulfilling. ↓ Learn to sell. Learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable. ↓ Arm yourself with specific knowledge, accountability, and leverage. ↓ Speci...

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.

Study microeconomics, game theory, psychology, persuasion, ethics, mathematics, and computers.

Reading is faster than listening. Doing is faster than watching.

Become the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until this is true.

When you’re finally wealthy, you’ll realize it wasn’t what you were seeking in the first place. But that is for another day. [11] Summary: Productize Yourself

Your summary says “Productize yourself”—what does that mean? “Productize” and “yourself.” “Yourself” has uniqueness. “Productize” has leverage. “Yourself” has accountability. “Productize” has specific knowledge. “Yourself” also has specific knowledge in there. So all of these pieces, you can combine them into these two words. If you’re looking toward the long-term goal of getting wealthy, you should ask yourself, “Is this authentic to me? Is it myself that I am projecting?” And then, “Am I productizing it? Am I scaling it? Am I scaling with labor or with capital or with code or with media?” So it’s a very handy, simple mnemonic. [78] This is hard. This is why I say it takes decades—I’m not saying it takes decades to execute, but the better part of a decade may be figuring out what you can uniquely provide. [10]

Money is how we transfer wealth. Money is social credits. It is the ability to have credits and debits of other people’s time. If I do my job right, if I create value for society, society says, “Oh, thank you. We owe you something in the future for the work you did in the past. Here’s a little IOU. Let’s call that money.” [78]

Wealth is the thing you want. 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.

Society will pay you for creating things it wants. But society doesn’t yet know how to create those things, because if it did, they wouldn’t need you. They would already be stamped out.

Once something works, it’s no longer technology. 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.

Steve Jobs (and his team, of course) figured out society would want smartphones. A computer in their pocket that had all the phone capability times one hundred and was easy to use. So, they figured out how to build it, and then they figured out how to scale it. [78]

you can improve sales skills. You can read Robert Cialdini, you can go to a sales training seminar, you can do door-to-door sales. It is brutal but will train you very quickly. You can definitely improve your sales skills.

I wanted to be a scientist. That is where a lot of my moral hierarchy comes from. I view scientists as being at the top of the production chain for humanity. The group of scientists who have made real breakthroughs and contributions probably added more to human society, I think, than any single other class of human beings. Not to take away anything from art or politics or engineering or business, but without science, we’d still be scrambling in the dirt fighting with sticks and trying to start fires.

My whole value system was built around scientists, and I wanted to be a great scientist. But when I actually look back at what I was uniquely good at and what I ended up spending my time doing, it was more around making money, tinkering with technology, and selling people on things. Explaining things and talking to people.

I have some sales skills, which is a form of specific knowledge. I have some analytical skills on how to make money. And I have this ability to absorb data, obsess about it, and break it down—that is a specific skill that I have. I also love tinkering with technology. And all of this stuff feels like play to me, but it looks like work to others.

Specific knowledge is found much more by pursuing your innate talents, your genuine curiosity, and your passion. It’s not by going to school for whatever is the hottest job; it’s not by going into whatever field investors say is the hottest.

Another tweet I had that is worth weaving in, but didn’t go into the “How to Get Rich” tweetstorm, was very simple: “Escape competition through authenticity.” Basically, when you’re competing with people, it’s because you’re copying them. It’s because you’re trying to do the same thing. But every human is different. Don’t copy. [78]

Is someone going to compete with Bill Watterson and create a better Calvin and Hobbes? No. They’re being authentic. [78]

The most important skill for getting rich is becoming a perpetual learner. You have to know how to learn anything you want to learn.

It’s much more important today to be able to become an expert in a brand-new field in nine to twelve months than to have studied the “right” thing a long time ago.

Basic arithmetic and numeracy are way more important in life than doing calculus. Similarly, 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.

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.

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. 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. This is also true when you’re working with individual people. If you’ve worked with somebody for five or ten years and you still enjoy working with them, obviously you trust them, and the little foibles are gone. All the normal negotiations in business relationships can work very simply because you trust each other—you know it will work out.

when it comes to the goal-oriented life, only about 1 percent of the efforts you made paid off.

you should be very thoughtful and realize in most things (relationships, work, even in learning) what you’re trying to do is find the thing you can go all-in on to earn compound interest.

To get rich, you need leverage. Leverage comes in labor, comes in capital, or it can come through code or media.

For labor, somebody has to follow you. For capital, somebody has to give you money, assets to manage, or machines.

you have to build credibility, and you have to do it under your own name as much as possible, which is risky. So, accountability is a double-edged thing. It allows you to take credit when things go well and to...

Clear accountability is important. Without accountability, you don’t have incentives. Without accountability, you can’t build credibility. But you take risks. You risk failure. You risk...

People seem to think you can create wealth—make money through work. It’s probably not going to work. There are many reasons for that. Without ownership, your inputs are very closely tied to your outputs. In almost any salaried job, even one paying a lot per hour like a lawyer or a doctor, you’re still putting in the hours, and every hour you get paid.

Everybody who really makes money at some point owns a piece of a product, a business, or some IP. That can be through stock options if you work at a tech company. That’s a fine way to start.

It doesn’t come through the hours. [78]

Knowledge only you know or only a small set of people knows is going to come out of your passions and your hobbies, oddly enough. If you have hobbies around your intellectual curiosity, you’re more likely to develop these passions. [1]

Whether it’s business, exercise, romance, friendship, whatever, I think 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.

The year I generated the most wealth for myself was actually the year I worked the least hard and cared the least about the future. I was mostly doing things for the sheer fun of it. I was basically telling people, “I’m retired, I’m not working.” Then, I had the time for whatever was my highest valued project in front of me. By doing things for their own sake, I did them at their best. [74]

You get rewarded by society for giving it what it wants and doesn’t know how to get elsewhere. A lot of people think you can go to school and study for how to make money, but the reality is, there’s no skill called “business.” [1]

Think about what product or service society wants but does not yet know how to get. You want to become the person who delivers it and delivers it at scale. That is really the challenge of how to make money.

The final form of leverage is brand new—the most democratic form. It is: “products with no marginal cost of replication.” This includes books, media, movies, and code. Code is probably the most powerful form of permissionless leverage. All you need is a computer—you don’t need anyone’s permission. [1]

Whenever you can in life, optimize for independence rather than pay. If you have independence and you’re accountable on your output, as opposed to your input—that’s the dream. [10]

The higher the creativity component of a profession, the more likely it is to have disconnected inputs and outputs. 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 and make wealth for yourself in that process. [78]

Learn to sell, learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable.

You start as a salaried employee. But you want to work your way up to try and get higher leverage, more accountability, and specific knowledge. The combination of those over a long period of time with the magic of compound interest will make you wealthy. [74]

The one thing you have to avoid is the risk of ruin. Avoiding ruin means stay out of jail. So, don’t do anything illegal. It’s never worth it to wear an orange jumpsuit. Stay out of total catastrophic loss. Avoiding ruin could also mean you stay out of things that could be physically dangerous or hurt your body. You have to watch your health.

No one is going to value you more than you value yourself. You just have to set a very high personal hourly rate and you have to stick to it. Even when I was young, I just decided I was worth a lot more than the market thought I was worth, and I started treating myself that way.

For me, believe it or not, back when you could have hired me…Which now obviously you can’t, but back when you could have hired me…this was true a decade ago or even two decades ago, before I had any real money. My hourly rate, I used to say to myself over and over, is $5,000 an hour. Today when I look back, really it was about $1,000 an hour.

Another way of thinking about something is, if you can outsource something or not do something for less than your hourly rate, outsource it or don’t do it. If you can hire someone to do it for less than your hourly rate, hire them. That even includes things like cooking. You may want to eat your healthy home cooked meals, but if you can outsource it, do that instead. [78]

Set a very high hourly aspirational rate for yourself and stick to it. It should seem and feel absurdly high. If it doesn’t, it’s not high enough. Whatever you picked, my advice to you would be to raise it. Like I said, for myself, even before I had money, for the longest time I used $5,000 an hour.