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

by Eric Jorgenson

Judgment—especially demonstrated judgment, with high accountability and a clear track record—is critical.

Value your time at an hourly rate, and ruthlessly spend to save time at that rate. You will never be worth more than you think you’re worth.

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

Humans evolved as hunters and gatherers where we all worked for ourselves. It’s only at the beginning of agriculture we became more hierarchical. The Industrial Revolution and factories made us extremely hierarchical because one individual couldn’t necessarily own or build a factory, but now, thanks to the internet, we’re going back to an age where more and more people can work for themselves. I would rather be a failed entrepreneur than someone who never tried. Because even a failed entrepreneur has the skill set to make it on their own.

Retirement is when you stop sacrificing today for an imaginary tomorrow. When today is complete, in and of itself, you’re retired.

Well, one way is to have so much money saved that your passive income (without you lifting a finger) covers your burn rate. A second is you just drive your burn rate down to zero—you become a monk. A third is you’re doing something you love. You enjoy it so much, it’s not about the money. So there are multiple ways to retirement.

Art is creativity. Art is anything done for its own sake. What are the things that are done for their own sake, and there’s nothing behind them? Loving somebody, creating something, playing. To me, creating businesses is play. I create businesses because it’s fun, because I’m into the product. [77] I can create a new business within three months: raise the money, assemble a team, and launch it. It’s fun for me. It’s really cool to see what can I put together. It makes money almost as a side effect.

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. Because I’m just playing, for sixteen hours a day. If others want to compete with me, they’re going to work, and they’re going to lose because they’re not going to do it for sixteen hours a day, seven days a week.

The lust for money is not bad in a social sense. It’s not bad in the sense of “you’re a bad person for lusting for money.” It’s bad for you. Lusting for money is bad for us because it is a bottomless pit. It will always occupy your mind. If you love money, and you make it, there’s never enough. There is never enough because the desire is turned on and doesn’t turn off at some number. It’s a fallacy to think it turns off at some number.

You make money to solve your money and material problems. I think the best way to stay away from this constant love of money is to not upgrade your lifestyle as you make money. It’s very easy to keep upgrading your lifestyle as you make money. But if you can hold your lifestyle fixed and hopefully make your money in giant lump sums as opposed to a trickle at a time, you won’t have time to upgrade your lifestyle.

The most successful class of people in Silicon Valley on a consistent basis are either the venture capitalists (because they are diversified and control what used to be a scarce resource) or people who are very good at identifying companies that have just hit product/market fit. Those people have the

BOOOOOOOM

BOOOOOOOOOOM

When Zuckerberg was just starting to scale his company and panicked, he was like, “I don’t know how to do this.” And he called Jim Breyer [venture capitalist and founder of Accel Partners]. And Jim Breyer said, “Well, I have this really great head of product at this other company, and you need this person.” Those people tend to do the best, risk-adjusted over a long period of time, other than the venture investors themselves. [30] Some of the most successful people I’ve seen in Silicon Valley had breakouts very early in their careers. They got promoted to VP, director, or CEO, or started a company that did well fairly early. If you’re not getting promoted through the ranks, it gets a lot harder to catch up later in life. It’s good to be in a smaller company early because there’s less of an infrastructure to prevent early promotion. [76] For someone who is early in their career (and maybe even later), the single most important thing about a company is the alumni network you’re going to build. Think about who you will work with and what those people are going on to do.

The first kind of luck is blind luck where one just gets lucky because something completely out of their control happened. This includes fortune, fate, etc.

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.

A third way is you become very good at spotting luck. If you are very skilled in a field, you will notice when a lucky break happens in your field, and other people who aren’t attuned to...

The last kind of luck is the weirdest, hardest kind, where you build a unique character, a unique brand, a unique mindset, which causes luck to find you.

BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOOOOOOOOOM.

One of the things I think is important to make money is having a reputation that makes people do deals through you. Remember the example of being a great diver where treasure hunters will come and give you a piece of the treasure for your diving skills. If you are a trusted, reliable, high-integrity, long-term-thinking dealmaker, when other people want to do deals but don’t know how to do them in a trustworthy manner with strangers, they will literally approach you and give you a cut of the deal just because of the integrity and reputation you’ve built up.

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.”

If someone is talking a lot about how honest they are, they’re probably dishonest. That is just a little telltale indicator I’ve learned. When someone spends too much time talking about their own values or they’re talking themselves up, they’re covering for something.

One thing I figured out later in life is generally (at least in the tech business in Silicon Valley), great people have great outcomes. You just have to be patient. Every person I met at the beginning of my career twenty years ago, where I looked at them and said, “Wow, that guy or gal is super capable—so smart and dedicated”…all of them, almost without exception, became extremely successful. You just had to give them a long enough timescale. It never happens in the timescale you want, or they want, but it does happen.

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.

Your real résumé is just a catalog of all your suffering. If I ask you to describe your real life to yourself, and you look back from your deathbed at the interesting things you’ve done, it’s all going to be around the sacrifices you made, the hard things you did.

Today, with this wonderful invention called money, you can store it in a bank account. You can work really hard, do great things for society, and society will give you money for things it wants but doesn’t know how to get. You can save money, you can live a little below your means, and you can find a certain freedom. That will give you the time and the energy to pursue your own internal peace and happiness. I believe the solution to making everybody happy is to give them what they want. Let’s get them all rich. Let’s get them all fit and healthy. Then, let’s get them all happy.

Judgment. Judgment is underrated.

My definition of wisdom is knowing the long-term consequences of your actions. Wisdom applied to external problems is judgment. They’re highly linked; knowing the long-term consequences of your actions and then making the right decision to capitalize on that.

“Clear thinker” is a better compliment than “smart.”

Okay this has to be moral code. "Clear thinker". How do I become a clear thinker. That's the whole game.

Basically, if someone is using a lot of fancy words and a lot of big concepts, they probably don’t know what they’re talking about. I think the smartest people can explain things to a child. If you can’t explain it to a child, then you don’t know it. It’s a common saying and it’s very true.

By not having a strong sense of self or judgments or mind presence. The “monkey mind” will always respond with this regurgitated emotional response to what it thinks the world should be. Those desires will cloud your reality. This happens a lot of times when people are mixing politics and business.

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. The smaller you can make your ego, the less conditioned you can make your reactions, the less desires you can have about the outcome you want, the easier it will be to see the reality.

Our egos are constructed in our formative years—our first two decades. They get constructed by our environment, our parents, society. Then, we spend the rest of our life trying to make our ego happy. We interpret anything new through our ego: “How do I change the external world to make it more how I would like it to be?”

I try not to have too much I’ve pre-decided. I think creating identities and labels locks you in and keeps you from seeing the truth.

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.

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

During decision-making, the brain is a memory prediction machine.

A lousy way to do memory prediction is “X happened in the past, therefore X will happen in the future.” It’s too based on specific circumstances. What you want is principles. You want mental models.

I don’t believe I have the ability to say what is going to work. Rather, I 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.

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

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.

I think there’s a tendency among parents and teachers to say, “Oh, you should read this, but don’t read that.” I read a lot which (by today’s standards) would be considered mental junk food. [4] Read what you love until you love to read. You almost have to read the stuff you’re reading, because you’re into it. You don’t need any other reason. There’s no mission here to accomplish. Just read because you enjoy it.

I don’t know about you, but I have very poor attention. I skim. I speed read. I jump around. I could not tell you specific passages or quotes from books. At some deep level, you absorb them, and they become threads in the tapestry of your psyche. They kind of weave in there.

The reality is, I don’t actually read much compared to what people think. I probably read one to two hours a day. That puts me in the top .00001 percent. I think that alone accounts for any material success I’ve had in my life and any intelligence I might have. Real people don’t read an hour a day. Real people, I think, read a minute a day or less. Making it an actual habit is the most important thing.

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

Only read books written, because the author had a point to make

Explain what you learned to someone else. Teaching forces learning.

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

Study logic and math, because once you’ve mastered them, you won’t fear any book.

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 working out. But you’re building mental muscles instead of physical muscles. Learn how to learn and read the books.

When it comes to reading, make sure your foundation is very, very high quality. The best way to have a high-quality foundation (you may not love this answer), but the trick is to stick to science and to stick to the basics. Generally, there are only a few things you can read people don’t disagree with. Very few people disagree 2+2=4, right? That is serious knowledge. Mathematics is a solid foundation.

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

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