The Almanack of Naval Ravikant
My notes from The Almanack of Naval Ravikant. Also available free here.
Table of contents
Wealth
Building wealth means having assets that earn while you sleep. You can’t get rich from renting out your time. Get rich by giving society what it wants but doesn’t know how to get. Learn to sell + build.
Productize yourself. For long-term wealth, ask: -Is it authentic to me? -Am I productizing it? Am I scaling it?
Find and build specific knowledge.
Figure out what you were doing as a teen or kid almost effortlessly. If you are fundamentally building something that’s an extension of who you are, no one can compete with you. You can go on the internet, you can find your audience, create a business, create a product, building an audience just by uniquely expressing yourself through the internet. Escape competition through authenticity. The best jobs are creative expressions of continuous learners in free markets. Find the thing you can go all in on or earn compound interest. Build out or buy equity in a business.
For intellectual curiosity, the economic rewards have never been higher. Following that curiosity is a better foundation for a career than whatever is making $ right now.
When you do things for your own sake, you can create your best work. Learn to do something other people don’t know how to do.
If they can train you, they’ll train a computer to do it eventually.
Think about what product or service society wants but does not yet know how to get. You need to become the person who delivers it—at scale.
3 forms of leverage: Labor (others working for you.) Capital Products (books, code, media)
This new form of leverage, products, is how all the new fortunes are made—code or media. They are all permissionless.
Earn with your mind, not your time.
Demonstrated judgement with high accountability + clear track record. Figure out what you’re good at, then help others with it and give it away. Find work that feels like play.
Retirement: when you stop sacrificing today for an imaginary tomorrow.
Most important thing when joining a company is their alum network.
4 types of luck:
- Blind luck.
- Hard work.
- Identifying luck.
- Luck finds you, through your brand.
Judgement
Wisdom: Knowing the long-term consequences of your actions. Wisdom applied to external problems is judgement
More desire you have for something to work out a certain way, less likely you are to see the truth.
What you feel tells you nothing about facts—it tells you something about your estimate of the facts.
Great ideas come after you’re bored.
Shed your identity to see reality. Your identity can be resigned. Collect mental models through reading. Read fundamentals of science, Math and Philosophy. People with good mental models—Charlie Munger, Ben Franklin, Taleb. With reading, focus on new concepts with predictive power.
Learn about microeconomics, game theory, compound interest. Compound interest in a nutshell—it adds to itself.
WHen deciding between 2 choice sand one has short-term pain, choose it. It likely has long-term gain.
To internalize information, explain what you learned to someone else.
Read the greats in Math, science, philosophy. Ignore the news. Study logic and Math. For macroeconomics read Smith, Mises, Hayek.
The older a problem is, the older the solution.
Happiness
Happiness is the state when nothing is missing. It’s embracing the present moment, and a choice. Happiness, love and passion are choices you make.
Each positive thought has a seed of negative in it.
To make an original contribution, you have to be irrational obsessed with something.
If you make the easy choice now, your overall life will be harder.
The ability to singularity focus is related to the ability to lose yourself and be present, happy and (ironically) more effective.
Your mind is a program you can rewrite.
When you want to change, you do. Most of us don’t, and we don’t want to go through the pain of changing.
Impatience with actions, patience with results.
Nature speaks in mathematics, and applied science becomes tech.
Inspiration is perishable, act on it immediately.
Join my coding club.
The CodeBookClub is a club for new and intermediate developers. We host live events such as a bi-monthly book club meeting and group programming. Sign up to become a member of the club and learn with us.