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

by Eric Jorgenson

A calm mind, a fit body, and a house full of love. These things cannot be bought. They must be earned.

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.

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.

Happiness to me is mainly not suffering, not desiring, not thinking too much about the future or the past, really embracing the present moment and the reality of what is, and the way it is.

Nature has no concept of happiness or unhappiness. Nature follows unbroken mathematical laws and a chain of cause and effect from the Big Bang to now. Everything is perfect exactly the way it is. It is only in our particular minds we are unhappy or not happy, and things are perfect or imperfect because of what we desire.

The world just reflects your own feelings back at you. Reality is neutral. Reality has no judgments. To a tree, there is no concept of right or wrong, good or bad. You’re born, you have a whole set of sensory experiences and stimulations (lights, colors, and sounds), and then you die. How you choose to interpret them is up to you—you have that choice.

We think of ourselves as fixed and the world as malleable, but it’s really we who are malleable and the world is largely fixed.

Happiness, love, and passion…aren’t things you find—they’re choices you make.

The mind is just as malleable as the body. We spend so much time and effort trying to change the external world, other people, and our own bodies—all while accepting ourselves the way we were programmed in our youths.

The idea you’re going to change something in the outside world, and that is going to bring you the peace, everlasting joy, and happiness you deserve, is a fundamental delusion we all suffer from, including me. The mistake over and over and over is to say, “Oh, I’ll be happy when I get that thing,” whatever it is. That is the fundamental mistake we all make, 24/7, all day long.

One thing I’ve learned recently: it’s way more important to perfect your desires than to try to do something you don’t 100 percent desire.

When you’re young and healthy, you can do more. By doing more, you’re actually taking on more and more desires. You don’t realize this is slowly destroying your happiness. I find younger people are less happy but more healthy. Older people are more happy but less healthy.

When you’re young, you have time. You have health, but you have no money. When you’re middle-aged, you have money and you have health, but you have no time. When you’re old, you have money and you have time, but you have no health. So the trifecta is trying to get all three at once. By the time p...

Happiness is being satisfied with what you have. Success comes from dissatisfaction. Choose.

Confucius says you have two lives, and the second one begins when you realize you only have one. When and how did your second life begin?

To me, the real winners are the ones who step out of the game entirely, who don’t even play the game, who rise above it. Those are the people who have such internal mental and self-control and self-awareness, they need nothing from anybody else.

You can get almost anything you want out of life, as long as it’s one thing and you want it far more than anything else.

One of the things I’m trying to get rid of is the word “should.” Whenever the word “should” creeps up in your mind, it’s guilt or social programming. Doing something because you “should” basically means you don’t actually want to do it. It’s just making you miserable, so I’m trying to eliminate as many “shoulds” from my life as possible.

The reality is life is a single-player game. You’re born alone. You’re going to die alone. All of your interpretations are alone. All your memories are alone. You’re gone in three generations, and nobody cares. Before you showed up, nobody cared. It’s all single player.

Once I came to that realization, jealousy faded away because I don’t want to be anybody else. I’m perfectly happy being me. By the way, even that is under my control. To be happy being me. It’s just there are no social rewards for

When working, surround yourself with people more successful than you. When playing, surround yourself with people happier than you.

Many distinctions between people who get happier as they get older and people who don’t can be explained by what habits they have developed. Are they habits that will increase your long-term happiness rather than your short-term happiness? Are you surrounding yourself with people who are generally positive and upbeat people? Are those relationships low-maintenance? Do you admire and respect but not envy them?

There’s the “five chimps theory” where you can predict a chimp’s behavior by the five chimps it hangs out with the most.

If you can’t see yourself working with someone for life, don’t work with them for a day.

When we get something, we assume the world owes it to us. If you’re present, you’ll realize how many gifts and how much abundance there is around us at all times. That’s all you really need to do. I’m here now, and I have all these incredible things at my disposal. [8]

I think dropping caffeine made me happier. It makes me more of a stable person.

Why not two? You’ll be distracted. Even one is hard enough. Being peaceful comes from having your mind clear of thoughts. And a lot of clarity comes from being in the present moment. It’s very hard to be in the present moment if you’re thinking, “I need to do this. I want that. This has got to change.”

I have another hack I use for minor annoyances. When they happen, a part of me will instantly react negatively. But I’ve learned to mentally ask myself, “What is the positive of this situation?”

How do you learn to accept things you can’t change? Fundamentally, it boils down to one big hack: embracing death.

Doctors won’t make you healthy. Nutritionists won’t make you slim. Teachers won’t make you smart. Gurus won’t make you calm. Mentors won’t make you rich. Trainers won’t make you fit. Ultimately, you have to take responsibility. Save yourself.

Your goal in life is to find the people, business, project, or art that needs you the most. There is something out there just for you. What you don’t want to do is build checklists and decision frameworks built on what other people are doing. You’re never going to be them. You’ll never be good at being somebody else.

To make an original contribution, you have to be irrationally obsessed with something.

In terms of exercise, we’re probably meant to play instead of running on a treadmill. We’re probably evolved to use all of our five senses equally as opposed to favoring the visual cortex. In modern society, almost all of our inputs and communication are visual. We’re not meant to walk in shoes. A lot of back and foot problems come from shoes. We’re not meant to have clothes keep us warm all of the time. We’re meant to have some cold exposure. It kickstarts your immune system. We’re not evolved to live in a perfectly sterile and clean environment. It leads to allergies and an untrained immune system. This is known as the hygiene hypothesis.

Sugar makes you hungry. Sugar signals to your body, “There’s this incredible food resource in the environment we’re not evolved for,” so you rush out to get sugar. The problem is the sugar effect dominates the fat effect. If you eat a fatty meal and you throw some sugar in, the sugar is going to deliver hunger and fat is going to deliver the calories and you’re just going to binge. That’s why all desserts are large combinations of fat and carbs together.

In nature, it’s very rare to find carbs and fat together. In nature, I find carbs and fat together in coconuts, in mangoes, maybe in bananas, but it’s basically tropical fruits. The combination of sugar and fat together is really deadly. You’ve got to watch out for that in your diet.

I’m not an expert, and the problem is diet and nutrition are like politics: everybody thinks they’re an expert. Their identity is wrapped up in it because what they’ve been eating or what they think they should be eating is obviously the correct answer. Everybody has a little religion—it’s just a really difficult topic to talk about. I wil...

Ditch the extremists and any food invented in the last few hundred years. [11] When it comes to medicine and nutrition, subtract before you add.

The harder the workout, the easier the day.

What I did was decide my number one priority in life, above my happiness, above my family, above my work, is my own health. It starts with my physical health. [4] Because my physical health became my number one priority, then I could never say I don’t have time. In the morning, I work out, and however long it takes is how long it takes. I do not start my day until I’ve worked out. I don’t care if the world is imploding and melting down, it can wait another thirty minutes until I’m done working out.

Why is meditation so powerful? Your breath is one of the few places where your autonomic nervous system meets your voluntary nervous system. It’s involuntary, but you can also control it.

You can do it just by breathing. Relaxed breathing tells your body you’re safe. Then, your forebrain doesn’t need as many resources as it normally does. Now, the extra energy can be sent to your hindbrain, and it can reroute those resources to the rest of your body.

Too much sugar leads to a heavy body, and too many distractions lead to a heavy mind.

What I find is 90 percent of thoughts I have are fear-based. The other 10 percent may be desire-based.

You don’t make any decisions. You don’t judge anything. You just accept everything. If I do that for ten or fifteen minutes while walking around, I end up in a very peaceful, grateful state. Choiceless Awareness works well for me.

As you watch your thoughts, you realize how many of them are fear-based. The moment you recognize a fear, without even trying it goes away. After a while, your mind quiets.

Another method I’ve learned is to just sit there and you close your eyes for at least one hour a day. You surrender to whatever happens—don’t make any effort whatsoever. You make no effort for something, and you make no effort against anything. If there are thoughts running through your mind, you let the thoughts run.

How do you get those barnacles off you? What happens in meditation is you’re sitting there and not resisting your mind. These things will start bubbling up. It’s like a giant inbox of unanswered emails, going back to your childhood. They will come out one by one, and you will be forced to deal with them. You will be forced to resolve them. Resolving them doesn’t take any work—you just observe them. Now you’re an adult with some distance, time, and space from previous events, and you can just resolve them. You can be much more objective about how you view them.