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

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If you are fundamentally building and marketing something that is an extension of who you are, no one can compete with you on that.” I think the most common mistake for humanity is believing you’re going to be made happy because of some external circumstance.” We are such social creatures, we’re externally programmed and driven. We don’t know how to play and win these single-player games anymore. We compete purely in multiplayer games.” Naval is only 47, so it’s not like he’s coming at this with 90 years or 100 years behind him. I think that is quite inspiring, that you can find that level of acceptance and peace and the ability to have fun and enjoy things, without necessarily having lived your whole life to have that perspective. As you get older, the sum of preferences you’ve accumulated is very, very large. These habitual reactions end up as runaway freight trains controlling your mood. We should control our own moods. Why don’t we study how to control our moods? What a masterful thing it would be if you could say, “Right now I would like to be in the curious state,” and then you can genuinely get yourself into the curious state. Or say, “I want to be in a mourning state. I’m mourning a loved one, and I want to grieve for them. I really want to feel that. I don’t want to be distracted by a computer programming problem due tomorrow.”

What you really want is freedom. You want freedom from your money problems. One way is to have so much money saved that your passive income (without you lifting a finger) covers your burn rate. The second is you just drive your burn rate down to zero—you become a monk. A third is that you're doing something you love. You enjoy it so much, and it's not about the money. So there are multiple ways to retirement. 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.”Eric Jorgenson is an entrepreneur, writer, and investor. He is on the founding team of Zaarly, and has been publishing online since 2014. His blog has educated and entertained over a million readers. You can very slowly but steadily and methodically improve your happiness baseline, just like you can improve your fitness.” You’re going to die one day, and none of this is going to matter. So enjoy yourself. Do something positive. Project some love. Make someone happy. Laugh a little bit. Appreciate the moment. And do your work. [8]”

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.” What habit would you say most positively impacts your life? The daily morning workout. I decided my number one priority in life, above my happiness, above my family, above my work, is my health. To have peace of mind, you have to have peace of body first. Meditation is turning off society and listening to yourself. It only ‘works’ when done for its own sake.”Society, business, & money are downstream of technology, which is itself downstream of science. Science applied is the engine of humanity.“ Small example (Product): Instead of doing 5 hour-long 1:1 meetings, spend one hour writing a document about priorities and principles for them to read. Here are 3 of Naval’s secrets on how to “make it” both on the outside and inside, thanks to smart thinking and self-awareness: If you’re a perpetual learning machine, you will never be out of options for how to make money. You can always see what’s coming up in society, what the value is, where the demand is, and you can learn to come up to speed.”

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.” The 25-year-old person who wants to advance in their career without losing sight of their true persona, the 30-year-old entrepreneur who wants to find a balance between their work and what matters to them in their personal life, or the 40-year-old life coach who wants to expand their knowledge in the field and offer better advice. Increase serotonin in the brain without drugs: Sunlight, exercise, positive thinking, and tryptophan. 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. Retirement is when you stop sacrificing today for an imaginary tomorrow. When today is complete, in and of itself, you’re retired.”Coming to the content itself, one of Naval's philosophy is to "productize yourself". Which actually clears the intention of why this almanac came out, he is productizing himself. Maybe he wants to build a brand of himself as a motivational speaker, personal coach, mentor or whatever.

It’s a state of joy and bliss and peace. Once you have it, you don’t want to give it up. If you can get a free hour of bliss every morning just by sitting and closing your eyes, that is worth its weight in gold. It will change your life.Money is how we transfer wealth. Money is social credits. It is the ability to have credits and debits of other people’s time.” 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. 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.” All of society does this to some extent. People chasing thrills in action sports or flow states or orgasms—any of these states people strive for are people trying to get out of their own heads. They’re trying to get away from the voice in their heads—the overdeveloped sense of self. 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.”