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

by Eric Jorgenson

If all your beliefs line up into neat little bundles, you should be highly suspicious.

There are two attractive lessons about suffering in the long term. It can make you accept the world the way it is. The other lesson is it can make your ego change in an extremely hard way. Maybe you’re a competitive athlete, and you get injured badly, like Bruce Lee. You have to accept being an athlete is not your entire identity, and maybe you can forge a new identity as a philosopher. [8]

Facebook redesigns. Twitter redesigns. Personalities, careers, and teams also need redesigns. There are no permanent solutions in a dynamic system.

Almost all biases are time-saving heuristics. For important decisions, discard memory and identity, and focus on the problem.

Theoretical physicist Richard Feynman famously said, “You should never, ever fool anybody, and you are the easiest person to fool.” The moment you tell somebody something dishonest, you’ve lied to yourself. Then you’ll start believing your own lie, which will disconnect you from reality and take you down the wrong road.

I never ask if “I like it” or “I don’t like it.” I think “this is what it is” or “this is what it isn’t.” —Richard Feynman

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. Then people’s egos and identities, which we all have, don’t work against you. They work for you. [4]

Charisma is the ability to project confidence and love at the same time. It’s almost always possible to be honest and positive. [71]

I think being successful is just about not making mistakes. It’s not about having correct judgment. It’s about avoiding incorrect judgments. [4]

I believe we are fundamentally ignorant and very, very bad at predicting the future. [4]

Ignore the noise. The market will decide.

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. [12]

If you can’t decide, the answer is no.

When you choose something, you get locked in for a long time. Starting a business may take ten years. You start a relationship that will be five years or maybe more. You move to a city for ten to twenty years. These are very, very long-lived decisions. It’s very, very important we only say yes when we are pretty certain. You’re never going to be absolutely certain, but you’re going to be very certain.

If you find yourself creating a spreadsheet for a decision with a list of yes’s and no’s, pros and cons, checks and balances, why this is good or bad…forget it. If you cannot decide, the answer is no. [10]

Simple heuristic: If you’re evenly split on a difficult decision, take the path more painful in the short term.

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. What’s actually going on is one of these paths requires short-term pain. And the other path leads to pain further out in the future. And what your brain is doing through conflict-avoidance is trying to push off the short-term pain. By definition, if the two are even and one has short-term pain, that path has long-term gain associated. With the law of compound interest, long-term gain is what you want to go toward. Your brain is overvaluing the side with the short-term happiness and trying to avoid the one with short-term pain.

most of the gains in life come from suffering in the short term so you can get paid in the long term.

What are the most efficient ways to build new mental models? Read a lot—just read. [2]

Reading science, math, and philosophy one hour per day will likely put you at the upper echelon of human success within seven years.

I would say for books, blogs, tweets, or whatever—anything with ideas and information and learning—the best ones to read are the ones you’re excited about reading all the time. [4]

“As long as I have a book in my hand, I don’t feel like I’m wasting time.” —Charlie Munger

If they wrote it to make money, don’t read it.

It’s not about “educated” vs. “uneducated.” It’s about “likes to read” and “doesn’t like to read.”

What can I do for the next sixty days to become a clearer, more independent thinker? Read the greats in math, science, and philosophy. Ignore your contemporaries and news. Avoid tribal identification. Put truth above social approval. [11]

Study logic and math, because once you’ve mastered them, you ...

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. A number of them are going to be too difficult for you. That’s okay—read them anyway. Then go back and reread them and reread them. When you’re reading a book and you’re confused, that confusion is similar to the pain you get in the gym when you’re ...

Because most people are intimidated by math and can’t independently critique it, they overvalue opinions backed with math/pseudoscience.

Twitter has made me a worse reader but a much better writer.

When solving problems: the older the problem, the older the solution.

Any book that survived for two thousand years has been filtered through many people. The general principles are more likely to be correct.

You know that song you can’t get out of your head? All thoughts work that way. Careful what you read.

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.

Don’t take yourself so seriously. You’re just a monkey with a plan.

Maybe happiness is not something you inherit or even choose, but a highly personal skill that can be learned, like fitness or nutrition.

Whatever happiness means to me, it means something different to you. I think it’s very important to explore what these definitions are.

Today, I believe happiness is really a default state. Happiness is there when you remove the sense of something missing in your life.

Happiness is the state when nothing is missing. When nothing is missing, your mind shuts down and stops running into the past or future to regret something or to plan something.

People mistakenly believe happiness is just about positive thoughts and positive actions. The more I’ve read, the more I’ve learned, and the more I’ve experienced (because I verify this for myself), every positive thought essentially holds within it a negative thought. It is a contrast to something negative. The Tao Te Ching says this more articulately than I ever could, but it’s all duality and polarity. 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.