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

by Eric Jorgenson

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.

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

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.

The internet enables any niche interest, as long as you’re the best person at it to scale out. And the great news is because every human is different, everyone is the best at something—being themselves.

Intentions don’t matter. Actions do. That’s why being ethical is hard.

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. [78]

We waste our time with short-term thinking and busywork. Warren Buffett spends a year deciding and a day acting. That act lasts decades.

and you won’t be dealing with people on the right level. Be optimistic, be positive. It’s important. Optimists actually do better in the long run. [10]

The problem is, to win at a status game, you have to put somebody else down. That’s why you should avoid status games in your life—they make you into an angry, combative person. You’re always fighting to put other people down, to put yourself and the people you like up.

There are basically three really big decisions you make in your early life: where you live, who you’re with, and what you do.

An old boss once warned: “You’ll never be rich since you’re obviously smart, and someone will always offer you a job that’s just good enough.”

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. If you love to do it, be authentic, and then figure out how to map that to what society actually wants. Apply some leverage and put your name on it. You take the risks, but you gain the rewards, have ownership and equity in what you’re doing, and just crank it up. [77]

In 1,000 parallel universes, you want to be wealthy in 999 of them. You don’t want to be wealthy in the fifty of them where you got lucky, so we want to factor luck out of it.