The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, written by Eric Jorgenson and foreword by Tim Ferris, is a collection of Naval’s wisdom and experience from his entrepreneurial journey, shared as a curation of his most insightful interviews and poignant reflections. Here are three lessons I found most inspiring and applicable in my search for wealth and happiness:
Building Wealth Through Authenticity
Elements of building wealth:
- find something you love doing;
- which is also something society needs;
- and find a way to do it at scale.
Authenticity – finding something that you’re genuinely interested in, is fundamental to creating perfect work and generating wealth. By being authentic, you find the thing that you know how to do better than anybody. Better not just in terms of skill and knowledge, but also in connection. If you have a genuine connection and love towards what you’re doing, you’ll do it better than anyone else. This is because what feels like play to you will feel like work to them. Authenticity helps you escape competition, no one can compete with you on being you.
This is how you productize yourself. And the best part about living in this modern-day, as long as you have an internet connection and a computer, it is almost permissionless to leverage and capitalize on the unique knowledge you have.
Building Clear Judgment
Wisdom is acknowledging the long-term consequences of your actions, judgment is wisdom applied to external problems
Elements of Clear Judgment
1. Understand the basics
- Prioritize understanding the fundamentals rather than memorizing complex details. You should be able to make complicated concepts understandable to a 5-year-old.
2. Shed your ‘identity’ to see reality
- Shedding your identity means seeing the world unfiltered by your ego.
- Be an optimistic contrarian: speak independently and resist conformity.
- Practice radical honesty: Speak your truth even if your local tribe rejects it. When you are dishonest to others just to conform, you start believing in your own lie, disconnecting yourself from your reality.
3. Practice the skill of decision making
- For important decisions, discard memory and identity and focus on the problem
- If you cannot decide, the answer is no
- If you have two relatively equal choices to make, take the path more difficult in the short term
Building Happiness
The three big ones in life are wealth, health, and happiness. We pursue them in that order, but their importance is reversed.
Elements of Happiness
1. Happiness is a skill you develop and a choice you make
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. Knowing this, we have the power to choose what happiness really means to us. More so, reality is largely neutral and a reflection of our own feelings back to us.
2. Happiness requires peace and acceptance
According to Tao Te Ching’s concept of duality, if you say you are happy, it means that you were sad at some point. Therefore, a happy person isn’t someone who is happy all the time; it’s someone who acknowledges and accepts the ebb and flow of life.
3. Happiness is the absence of desire
Happiness simply exists when you remove the sense of something missing in your life. Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.
Faced with any scenario, we always have three choices: to change, to accept, or to leave. Wanting to change something creates desire, meaning it will cause you suffering until successfully changed. While desiring change indeed fuels purpose and motivation, it is important to be mindful about having too many of these desires to minimize compromising present happiness.
4. Happiness is overcoming envy
Know that when you wish you were living the life of someone else, you can’t just select aspects of their life. All the people you hold envy or jealousy towards, you can’t just say you want their body, money or personality. You have to be that person entirely. Naval stated that if you’re not willing to do a 100% swap with who that person is, inheriting their reactions, desires, family, self-image, then there is no point in being jealous.
Concluding thoughts
Being in my early twenties, fresh out of grad school, and trying to figure out how to start an independent life (during a pandemic), I must admit it has been quite an exciting yet nerve-wracking time. Hence, I appreciated how the book highlights the balance between staying grounded and being optimistic when trying to build a contributional life. While Naval is known for being a successful entrepreneur and investor, his outlook on life as a whole is truly admirable. I mostly enjoyed his emphasis on how things like success and happiness are learnable skills. Bringing these learnings into my life, I close off this piece with one of my favorite quotes from the book.
Tension is who you think you should be. Relaxation is who you are.
Great news! You can download the ebook for free at https://www.navalmanack.com/
