I have a lot of respect for Naval Ravikant. At times, I feel his approach is reductionist, but I learnt a lot from him.
It’s not really possible to summarize the book - it’s extremely dense (Naval follows his own advice). I just wanted to write out my reflections & comments. There’s plenty that I just wholeheartedly agreed with (& had nothing more to say, so I omitted it. Go read the book!)
It’s not really about hard work. You can work in a restaurant eighty hours a week, and you’re not going to get rich. Getting rich is about knowing what to do, who to do it with, and when to do it. It is much more about understanding than purely hard work. Yes, hard work matters, and you can’t skimp on it. But it has to be directed in the right way.
A lot of people seem to either ignore or fight this fact and don’t follow the implications- I need to understand why.
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.
There is no skill called “business.” Avoid business magazines and business classes.
When specific knowledge is taught, it’s through apprenticeships, not schools
^ For those planning on enrolling in business schools, doing it as a concentration, doing it as a masters. Applies also to data science / CS to some extent, but mostly from the lens of:
Specific knowledge is found much more by pursuing your innate talents, your genuine curiosity, and your passion. It’s not by going to school for whatever is the hottest job; it’s not by going into whatever field investors say is the hottest.
Counterpoint-ish: the recipe for genius is to have a disinterested obsession with something that matters
You should be too busy to “do coffee” while still keeping an uncluttered calendar.
Being restless makes me restless. Some of the best things that happened to me are a) not going to college b) being so sick I couldn’t work for months. Having an excess of time and a lack of energy means you spend a lot of time thinking, “Hold on… what are we doing here?”
Later on he says:
“I think a lot of us have this low-level pervasive feeling of anxiety. If you pay attention to your mind, sometimes you’re just running around doing your thing and you’re not feeling great, and you notice your mind is chattering and chattering about something. Maybe you can’t sit still…There’s this “nexting” thing where you’re sitting in one spot thinking about where you should be next.
It’s always the next thing, then the next thing, the next thing after that, then the next thing after that creating this pervasive anxiety.
It’s most obvious if you ever just sit down and try and do nothing, nothing. I mean nothing, I mean not read a book, I mean not listen to music, I mean literally just sit down and do nothing. You can’t do it, because there’s anxiety always trying to make you get up and go, get up and go, get up and go. I think it’s important just being aware the anxiety is making you unhappy.
The anxiety is just a series of running thoughts.
How I combat anxiety: I don’t try and fight it, I just notice I’m anxious because of all these thoughts. I try to figure out, “Would I rather be having this thought right now, or would I rather have my peace?” Because as long as I have my thoughts, I can’t have my peace.”
The hardest thing is not doing what you want—it’s knowing what you want.
Technology democratizes consumption but consolidates production. The best person in the world at anything gets to do it for everyone.
I now see this as a Bad Thing that we actively need to fight against. We should learn from the best person in the world, but we should be try our hardest to democratize the means of production.
- Example: LMNT makes great tasting, bloat-free, super convenient electrolyte mixes, but they’re expensive. So LMNT freely shares their exact recipe you can make it at home in bulk for cheap.
Society will pay you for creating things it wants. But society doesn’t yet know how to create those things, because if it did, they wouldn’t need you. They would already be stamped out.”
Technology is the set of things, as
Alan Kay[correction: Danny Hillis] said, that don’t quite work yet.
Related: Schlep Blindness
Money vs Wealth
“Money is how we transfer wealth. Money is social credits. It is the ability to have credits and debits of other people’s time. If I do my job right, if I create value for society, society says, “Oh, thank you. We owe you something in the future for the work you did in the past. Here’s a little IOU. Let’s call that money.” [78]
Wealth is the thing you want. Wealth is assets that earn while you sleep. Wealth is the factory, the robots, cranking out things. Wealth is the computer program that’s running at night, serving other customers. Wealth is even money in the bank that is being reinvested into other assets, and into other businesses.
Even a house can be a form of wealth, because you can rent it out, although that’s probably a lower productivity use of land than some commercial enterprise. So, my definition of wealth is much more businesses and assets that can earn while you sleep.
It took me a long time to truly internalize this; to start thinking in terms of wealth instead of money. Although, what Naval doesn’t mention here is this: it’s possible for you to create immense value for society, yet capture little to none of that value for yourself, because either…
- a) the work is illegible or hard to quantify (eg being a teacher, parent, or a nurse), or
- b) because you lack leverage.
Society, business, & money are downstream of technology, which is itself downstream of science. Science applied is the engine of humanity. Corollary: Applied Scientists are the most powerful people in the world. This will be more obvious in the coming years.
Agree very hard on this. (Complexity) scientists, (software) engineers, mathematicians - almost every industry will be forced to learn their (tacit) skills. It’ll be like English literacy or internet literacy.
Very often, specific knowledge is at the edge of knowledge. It’s also stuff that’s only now being figured out or is really hard to figure out. If you’re not 100 percent into it, somebody else who is 100 percent into it will outperform you. And they won’t just outperform you by a little bit—they’ll outperform you by a lot because now we’re operating the domain of ideas, compound interest really applies and leverage really applies.
Related: most competitions follow exponential distributions
Escape competition through authenticity. Basically, when you’re competing with people, it’s because you’re copying them. It’s because you’re trying to do the same thing. But every human is different. Don’t copy.
Peter Thiel likes Mimetic Theory by Rene Girard which says something similar.
The most important skill for getting rich is becoming a perpetual learner. You have to know how to learn anything you want to learn. The old model of making money is going to school for four years, getting your degree, and working as a professional for thirty years. But things change fast now. Now, you have to come up to speed on a new profession within nine months, and it’s obsolete four years later. But within those three productive years, you can get very wealthy.
This will grow even more true every year going forwards because of AI.
“You really care about having studied the foundations, so you’re not scared of any book. If you go to the library and there’s a book you cannot understand, you have to dig down and say, “What is the foundation required for me to learn this?” Foundations are super important.”
We have to be brave and have faith that we can understand anything, given enough time and effort.
“You can only achieve mastery in one or two things. It’s usually things you’re obsessed about.”
Related Life’s barely long enough to get good at one thing, so be careful what you get good at.
All the returns in life, whether in wealth, relationships, or knowledge, come from compound interest.
It was only after I hit my twenties that I started seeing the true power of compounding— some things only become possible/productive/pleasant after years of compounding - you can’t replace the time it takes with more effort. For instance, (in most cases) you simply cannot speed-run a relationship.
99% of effort is wasted.
Obviously, nothing is ever completely wasted because it’s all a learning moment. You can learn from anything. But for example, when you go back to school, 99 percent of the term papers you did, books you read, exercises you did, things you learned, they don’t really apply.
The reason I say this is not to make some glib comment about how 99 percent of your life is wasted and only 1 percent is useful. I say this because you should be very thoughtful and realize in most things (relationships, work, even in learning) what you’re trying to do is find the thing you can go all-in on to earn compound interest.
If you are idealistic, balance this with “You cannot connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them backwards.” and When decisions are irreversible, slow them down. Also,
“Simple heuristic: If you’re evenly split on a difficult decision, take the path more painful in the short term.
Humans evolved in societies where there was no leverage. If I was chopping wood or carrying water for you, you knew eight hours put in would be equal to about eight hours of output. Now we’ve invented leverage—through capital, cooperation, technology, productivity, all these means. We live in an age of leverage. As a worker, you want to be as leveraged as possible so you have a huge impact without as much time or physical effort.
Good prompt: What thing can you do that has the most leverage right now? Which position in your industry has the most leverage? See Naval’s breakdown of the real estate industry:
“The worst kind of job is someone who’s doing labor to repair a house. Maybe you get paid ten dollars or twenty dollars an hour. You go to people’s houses, your boss demands you’re there at 8:00 a.m., and you repair your piece of the house. Here, you have zero leverage. You have some accountability, but not really, because your accountability is to your boss, not to the client. You don’t have any real specific knowledge, since what you’re doing is labor lots of people can do. You’re not going to get paid a lot. You’re getting paid minimum wage plus a little bit for your skill and your time.”
“The next level up might be the general contractor working on the house for the owner. “How do we know it’s better? Well, we know it’s better because this person has some accountability. They’re responsible for the outcome, they have to sweat at night if things aren’t working. Contractors have leverage through laborers working for them. They also have little bit more specific knowledge: how to organize a team, make them show up on time, and how to deal with city regulations.
“The next level up might be a real estate developer. A developer is someone who’s going to buy a property, hire a bunch of contractors, and transform it into something higher value. Notice what is required from the developer: a very high level of accountability.
The developer takes on more risk, more accountability, has more leverage, and needs to have more specific knowledge. They need to understand fundraising, city regulations, where the real estate market is headed, and whether they should take the risk or not. It is more difficult.”
Next level up might be someone who’s managing money in a real estate fund. They have an enormous amount of capital leverage. They’re dealing with lots and lots of developers, and they’re buying huge amounts of housing inventory.”
“Then, you may end up with a Trulia, Redfin, or Zillow company, and then the upside could potentially be in the billions of dollars, or the hundreds of millions of dollars. [78]
Each level has increasing leverage, increasing accountability, increasingly specific knowledge. You’re adding in money-based leverage on top of labor-based leverage. Adding in code-based leverage on top of money and labor allows you to actually create something bigger and bigger and get closer and closer to owning all the upside, not just being paid a salary.”
What you want in life is to be in control of your time. You want to get into a leveraged job where you control your own time and you’re tracked on the outputs. Especially if they don’t know how you did it because it’s innate to your obsession or your skill or your innate abilities, they’re going to have to keep paying you to do it.
I’m reminded once again to make friends with magicians
There are basically three really big decisions you make in your early life: where you live, who you’re with, and what you do.
We spend very little time deciding which relationship to get into. We spend so much time in a job, but we spend so little time deciding which job to get into. Choosing what city to live in can almost completely determine the trajectory of your life, but we spend so little time trying to figure out what city to live in.
You have to say no to everything and free up your time so you can solve the important problems. Those three are probably the three biggest ones.
“I’m much more interested in solving problems than I am in making money. Any end goal will just lead to another goal, lead to another goal. We just play games in life. When you grow up, you’re playing the school game, or you’re playing the social game. Then you’re playing the money game, and then you’re playing the status game. These games just have longer and longer and longer-lived horizons. At some point, at least I believe, these are all just games. These are games where the outcome really stops mattering once you see through the game.
Then you just get tired of games. I would say I’m at the stage where I’m just tired of games. I don’t think there is any end goal or purpose. I’m just living life as I want to. I’m literally just doing it moment to moment.”
The sooner we get here, the better. Related essay: The Box
What is your definition of retirement? Retirement is when you stop sacrificing today for an imaginary tomorrow. When today is complete, in and of itself, you’re retired.
Related prompt I use on myself: “If you had all the time in the world; if nothing stopped you; if you could (and had) to play the same game over and over, what would you do?” Another reason to ask this: because 99% of winning is having enough stamina to not drop out.
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. It takes time—even once you have all of these pieces in place, there is an indeterminate amount of time you have to put in. If you’re counting, you’ll run out of patience before success actually arrives.
“The winners of any game are the people who are so addicted they continue playing even as the marginal utility from winning declines.”
“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.”
Disagree with the order here, but I agree overall.
Part of making effective decisions boils down to dealing with reality. How do you make sure you’re dealing with reality when you’re making decisions? 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 number one thing clouding us from being able to see reality is we have preconceived notions of the way it should be.
Suffering is the moment when you see things exactly the way they are. It is a moment where you’re forced to embrace reality the way it actually is. Then, you can make meaningful change and progress. You can only make progress when you’re starting with the truth.
Related Inner Game of Tennis, The Fountainhead, Nonjudgemental Awareness
The more desire I have for something to work out a certain way, the less likely I am to see the truth.
“Charisma is the ability to project confidence and love at the same time.”
Wow.
“I was really into complexity theory back in the mid-90s. The more I got into it, the more I understand the limits of our knowledge and the limits of our prediction capability. Complexity has been super helpful to me. It has helped me come to a system that operates in the face of ignorance. I believe we are fundamentally ignorant and very, very bad at predicting the future.”
21st century belongs to the science of complexity or something. - Stephen Hawking
The number of books completed is a vanity metric. As you know more, you leave more books unfinished. Focus on new concepts with predictive power.
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. In that absence, for a moment, you have internal silence. When you have internal silence, then you are content, and you are happy. Feel free to disagree. Again, it’s different for everybody.
“There are no external forces affecting your emotions—as much as it may feel that way.”
Another book that takes the same viewpoint: The Courage To Be Disliked. It’s true, but not true enough. I don’t know if Naval would say the same if he was severely hungover, on medication with severe side effects, or if he had long covid/cancer. The mental model breaks down at some point. Robert Sapolsky and Douglas Hofstadaer explain the “opposing” viewpoint pretty well.
In general: people downgrade the importance of what they have because they stop noticing it altogether. Example - you don’t usually think about your stomach unless it hurts. Applies to: money, health, and a few other privileges.
I mean, he says as much himself:
“Nothing like a health problem to turn up the contrast dial for the rest of life.”
Our lives are a blink of a firefly in the night. You’re just barely here. You have to make the most of every minute, which doesn’t mean you chase some stupid desire for your entire life. What it means is every second you have on this planet is very precious, and it’s your responsibility to make sure you’re happy and interpreting everything in the best possible way.
We accept the voice in our head as the source of all truth. But all of it is malleable, and every day is new. Memory and identity are burdens from the past preventing us from living freely in the present.
I wish everyone to experience, at least once in their lives, to listen to “the voice in your head”, and feel “what your gut says”, and to realize: “Wait a minute, that just now was utter crap”. (On average, it’s probably more right than wrong. But the point is to be liberated from the tyranny.)
Naval says something along those lines later:
“The first thing to realize is you can observe your mental state. Meditation doesn’t mean you’re suddenly going to gain the superpower to control your internal state. The advantage of meditation is recognizing just how out of control your mind is. It is like a monkey flinging feces, running around the room, making trouble, shouting, and breaking things. It’s completely uncontrollable. It’s an out-of-control madperson.”
“You have to see this mad creature in operation before you feel a certain distaste toward it and start separating yourself from it. In that separation is liberation. You realize, “Oh, I don’t want to be that person. Why am I so out of control?” Awareness alone calms you down. ”
I try to keep an eye on my internal monologue. It doesn’t always work. In the computer programming sense, I try to run my brain in “debugging mode” as much as possible. When I’m talking to someone, or when I’m engaged in a group activity, it’s almost impossible because your brain has too many things to handle.”
Related: psychedelics help speed run this process; Terence McKenna has a video somewhere where he says something like “willing schizophrenia” - that psychedelics reveal how malleable our perception of reality is. He argued that the key difference was agency - the psychedelic explorer chooses when to enter and exit these states, while someone with mental illness doesn’t have that choice.
Today, the way we think you get peace is by resolving all your external problems. But there are unlimited external problems. The only way to actually get peace on the inside is by giving up this idea of problems.
“The first rule of handling conflict is: Don’t hang around people who constantly engage in conflict. I’m not interested in anything unsustainable or even hard to sustain, including difficult relationships.”
In any situation in life, you always have three choices: you can change it, you can accept it, or you can leave it.
If you want to change it, then it is a desire. It will cause you suffering until you successfully change it. So don’t pick too many of those. Pick one big desire in your life at any given time to give yourself purpose and motivation.
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.” [8] You always have three options: you can change it, you can accept it, or you can leave it. What is not a good option is to sit around wishing you would change it but not changing it, wishing you could leave it but not leaving it and not accepting it. That struggle or aversion is responsible for most of our misery.
“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”
Milk is the only exception I know of, and that’s meant for rapidly growing babies. Naval is wrong about bananas and mangoes, see below. EDIT: Some fatty foods like coconuts & nuts might seem to contain some carbs but very little of that is actually digestible. ~~In (dry) coconut meat, there’s about 6.23g sugar/15g carbs vs 33g fat (80:16 fat:carb calorie ratio). For mangoes and bananas, only <3% of calories are fat (vs ~93% carbs). But other carby+fatty exception are milk (50:30 fat:carb in cow milk) and some nuts like cashews (67:21 fat:carb).
“World’s simplest diet: The more processed the food, the less one should consume.”
Stating the obvious: other than basic cooking & removing/deactivating anti-nutrients. Plants rarely want to be eaten; parasites/bacteria/larvae can’t wait to be eaten.
“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. It’s pretty much every day. ”
I’ve had real trouble making time for workouts. Fingers crossed that morning workouts will be a success for me [this year](^ee4521).
“For your entire life, things have been happening to you. Some good, some bad, most of which you have processed and dissolved, but a few stuck with you. Over time, more and more stuck with you, and they almost became like these barnacles stuck to you. You lost your childhood sense of wonder and of being present and happy. You lost your inner happiness because you built up this personality of unresolved pain, errors, fears, and desires that glommed onto you like a bunch of barnacles. 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. “Over time, you will resolve a lot of these deep-seated unresolved things you have in your mind. Once they’re resolved, there will come a day when you sit down to meditate, and you’ll hit a mental “inbox zero.” When you open your mental “email” and there are none, that is a pretty amazing feeling.”
Your starting state of consciousness can vary and will affect the quality of meditation. It doesn’t feel linear, so I doubt there’s a “okay I’ve done it, from now on it’ll always be bliss” endpoint.
“There’s a great Osho lecture, titled “The Attraction for Drugs Is Spiritual.” He talks about why do people do drugs (everything from alcohol to psychedelics to cannabis). They’re doing it to control their mental state. They’re doing it to control how they react. Some people drink because it helps them not care as much, or they’re potheads because they can zone out, or they do psychedelics to feel very present or connected to nature. The attraction of drugs is spiritual. 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.”
Sounds about right.