The Almanack of Naval Ravikant

Specific knowledge is found by pursuing your genuine curiosity and passion rather than whatever is hot right now. (Location 234)

If you can’t code, write books and blogs, record videos and podcasts. (Location 254)

You should be too busy to “do coffee” while still keeping an uncluttered calendar. (Location 262)

Set and enforce an aspirational personal hourly rate. If fixing a problem will save less than your hourly rate, ignore it. If outsourcing a task will cost less than your hourly rate, outsource (Location 264)

Become the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until this is true. (Location 268)

The best jobs are neither decreed nor degreed. They are creative expressions of continuous learners in free markets. (Location 357)

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. (Location 360)

“What is the foundation required for me to learn this?” Foundations are super important. [74] (Location 364)

Basic arithmetic and numeracy are way more important in life than doing calculus. Similarly, being able to convey yourself simply using ordinary English words is far more important than being able to write poetry, having an extensive vocabulary, or speaking seven different foreign languages. (Location 365)

Note: What basics do i need to learn?

Knowing how to be persuasive when speaking is far more important than being an expert digital marketer or click optimizer. Foundations are key. It’s much better to be at 9/10 or 10/10 on foundations than to try and get super deep into things. (Location 368)

When you’re dating, the instant you know this relationship is not going to be the one that leads to marriage, you should probably move on. When you’re studying something, like a geography or history class, and you realize you are never going to use the information, drop the class. It’s a waste of time. It’s a waste of your brain energy. (Location 403)

Status games are always going to exist. There’s no way around it, but realize most of the time, when you’re trying to create wealth and you’re getting attacked by someone else, they’re trying to increase their own status at your expense. They’re playing a different game. And it’s a worse game. It’s a zero-sum game instead of a positive-sum game. [78] (Location 671)

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. (Location 716)

Most of the time, the person you have to become to make money is a high-anxiety, high-stress, hard-working, competitive person. When you have done that for twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years, and you suddenly make money, you can’t turn it off. You’ve trained yourself to be a high-anxiety person. Then, you have to learn how to be happy. [11] (Location 853)

Let’s get you rich first. I’m very practical about it because, you know, Buddha was a prince. He started off really rich, then he got to go off in the woods. (Location 857)

Let’s get them all rich. Let’s get them all fit and healthy. Then, let’s get them all happy. [77] (Location 864)

The really smart thinkers are clear thinkers. They understand the basics at a very, very fundamental level. I would rather understand the basics really well than memorize all kinds of complicated concepts I can’t stitch together and can’t rederive from the basics. If you can’t rederive concepts from the basics as you need them, you’re lost. You’re just memorizing. [4] (Location 890)

It’s actually really important to have empty space. If you don’t have a day or two every week in your calendar where you’re not always in meetings, and you’re not always busy, then you’re not going to be able to think. (Location 918)

I don’t like to self-identify on almost any level anymore, which keeps me from having too many of these so-called stable beliefs. [4] (Location 946)

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. (Location 985)

I use my tweets and other people’s tweets as maxims that help compress my own learnings and recall them. The brain space is finite—you have finite neurons—so you can almost think of these as pointers, addresses, or mnemonics to help you remember deep-seated principles where you have the underlying experience to back it up. (Location 989)

It’s a very simple concept. Julius Caesar famously said, “If you want it done, then go. And if not, then send.” What he meant was, if you want it done right, then you have to go yourself and do it. When you are the principal, then you are the owner—you care, and you will do a great job. When you are the agent and you are doing it on somebody else’s behalf, you can do a bad job. You just don’t care. You optimize for yourself rather than for the principal’s assets. The smaller the company, the more everyone feels like a principal. The less you feel like an agent, the better the job you’re going to do. The more closely you can tie someone’s compensation to the exact value they’re creating, the more you turn them into a principal, and the less you turn them into an agent. [12] (Location 1011)

If I’m faced with a difficult choice, such as: Should I marry this person? Should I take this job? Should I buy this house? Should I move to this city? Should I go into business with this person? If you cannot decide, the answer is no. And the reason is, modern society is full of options. There are tons and tons of options. We live on a planet of seven billion people, and we are connected to everybody on the internet. There are hundreds of thousands of careers available to you. There are so many choices. (Location 1042)

Read what you love until you love to read. (Location 1083)

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. (Location 1084)

Reading a book isn’t a race—the better the book, the more slowly it should be absorbed. (Location 1088)

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. (Location 1097)

Everyone’s brain works differently. Some people love to take notes. Actually, my notetaking is Twitter. I read and read and read. If I have some fundamental “ah-ha” insight or concept, Twitter forces me to distill it into a few characters. (Location 1103)

If you start with the originals as your foundations, then you have enough of a worldview and understanding that you won’t fear any book. Then you can just learn. 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. [74] (Location 1149)

However, if you view yourself as a bacteria or an amoeba—or if you view all of your works as writing on water or building castles in the sand, then you have no expectation for how life should “actually” be. Life is just the way it is. When you accept that, you have no cause to be happy or unhappy. Those things almost don’t apply. (Location 1230)

I just don’t believe in anything from my past. Anything. No memories. No regrets. No people. No trips. Nothing. A lot of our unhappiness comes from comparing things from the past to the present. [4] (Location 1266)

Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want. (Location 1305)

I don’t think life is that hard. I think we make it hard. 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. (Location 1358)

know people who have read one hundred regurgitated books on evolution and they’ve never read Darwin. Think of the number of macroeconomists out there. I think most of them have read tons of treatises in economics but haven’t read any Adam Smith. (Location 1812)

Don’t spend your time making other people happy. Other people being happy is their problem. It’s not your problem. If you are happy, it makes other people happy. If you’re happy, other people will ask you how you became happy and they might learn from it, but you are not responsible for making other people happy. [10] (Location 1863)

What we do as living systems accelerates getting to that state. The more complex system you create, whether it’s through computers, civilization, art, mathematics, or creating a family—you actually accelerate the heat death of the Universe. You’re pushing us towards this point where we end up as one thing. [4] (Location 1927)

Note: Can internet communities assist in singularity?

Another one is I only believe in peer relationships. I don’t believe in hierarchical relationships. I don’t want to be above anybody, and I don’t want to be below anybody. If I can’t treat someone like a peer and if they can’t treat me like peer, I just don’t want to interact with them. (Location 1940)

Try everything, test it for yourself, be skeptical, keep what’s useful, and discard what’s not. (Location 1972)

Inspiration is perishable—act on it immediately. (Location 1992)