Book Review: The Almanack of Naval Ravikant by Eric Jorgenson

1. If you have nothing in your life, but you have at least one person that loves you unconditionally, it’ll do wonders for your self-esteem.

2. Books make for great friends, because the best thinkers of the last few thousand years tell you their nuggets of wisdom.

3. You’re not going to get rich renting out your time. You must own equity—a piece of a business—to gain your financial freedom. You will get rich by giving society what it wants but does not yet know how to get. At scale.

4. The internet has massively broadened the possible space of careers. Most people haven’t figured this out yet.

5. Learn to sell. Learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable.

6. 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.

7. Code and media are permissionless leverage. They’re the leverage behind the newly rich. You can create software and media that works for you while you sleep. An army of robots is freely available—it’s just packed in data centers for heat and space efficiency. Use it. If you can’t code, write books and blogs, record videos and podcasts. Leverage is a force multiplier for your judgment. Fortunes require leverage.

8. Reading is faster than listening. Doing is faster than watching.

9. The most important skill for getting rich is becoming a perpetual learner. You have to know how to learn anything you want to learn. It’s much more important today to be able to become an expert in a brand-new field in nine to twelve months than to have studied the “right” thing a long time ago.

10. 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. 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.

11. A leveraged worker can out-produce a non-leveraged worker by a factor of one thousand or ten thousand. 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.

12. Earn with your mind, not your time. You start as a salaried employee. But you want to work your way up to try and get higher leverage, more accountability, and specific knowledge. Get paid for your judgement. CEOs are highly paid because of their leverage. Small differences in judgment and capability really get amplified.

13. Value your time at an hourly rate, and ruthlessly spend to save time at that rate. Another way of thinking about something is, if you can outsource something or not do something for less than your hourly rate, outsource it or don’t do it. Set a very high hourly aspirational rate for yourself and stick to it.

14. What is the most important thing to do for younger people starting out? Spend more time making the big decisions. There are basically three really big decisions you make in your early life: where you live, who you’re with, and what you do.

15. What are one or two steps you’d take to surround yourself with successful people? Figure out what you’re good at, and start helping other people with it. Give it away. Pay it forward.

16. Money is not the root of all evil; there’s nothing evil about it. But the lust for money is bad. You make money to solve your money and material problems. I think the best way to stay away from this constant love of money is to not upgrade your lifestyle as you make money.

17. If you’re not getting promoted through the ranks, it gets a lot harder to catch up later in life. It’s good to be in a smaller company early because there’s less of an infrastructure to prevent early promotion. For someone who is early in their career (and maybe even later), the single most important thing about a company is the alumni network you’re going to build.

18. One of the things I think is important to make money is having a reputation that makes people do deals through you. If you are a trusted, reliable, high-integrity, long-term-thinking dealmaker, when other people want to do deals but don’t know how to do them in a trustworthy manner with strangers, they will literally approach you and give you a cut of the deal just because of the integrity and reputation you’ve built up.

19. My co-founder Nivi said, “In a long-term game, it seems that everybody is making each other rich. And in a short-term game, it seems like everybody is making themselves rich.”

20. Your real résumé is just a catalog of all your suffering. If I ask you to describe your real life to yourself, and you look back from your deathbed at the interesting things you’ve done, it’s all going to be around the sacrifices you made, the hard things you did.

21. The really smart thinkers are clear thinkers. They understand the basics at a very, very fundamental level.

22. The number one thing clouding us from being able to see reality is we have preconceived notions of the way it should be. To see the truth, you have to get your ego out of the way because your ego doesn’t want to face the truth. The smaller you can make your ego, the less conditioned you can make your reactions, the less desires you can have about the outcome you want, the easier it will be to see the reality.

23. 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. I also encourage taking at least one day a week (preferably two, because if you budget two, you’ll end up with one) where you just have time to think.

24. Learn the skills of decision-making. Decision-making is everything. In fact, someone who makes decisions right 80 percent of the time instead of 70 percent of the time will be valued and compensated in the market hundreds of times more. If you can be more right and more rational, you’re going to get nonlinear returns in your life.

25. Simple heuristic: If you’re evenly split on a difficult decision, take the path more painful in the short term. If you have two choices to make, and they’re relatively equal choices, take the path more difficult and more painful in the short term.

26. Reading science, math, and philosophy one hour per day will likely put you at the upper echelon of human success within seven years. The genuine love for reading itself, when cultivated, is a superpower. The means of learning are abundant—it’s the desire to learn that is scarce.

27. The three big ones in life are wealth, health, and happiness. We pursue them in that order, but their importance is reverse.

28. Happiness is the state when nothing is missing. To me, happiness is not about positive thoughts. It’s not about negative thoughts. It’s about the absence of desire, especially the absence of desire for external things. A happy person isn’t someone who’s happy all the time. It’s someone who effortlessly interprets events in such a way that they don’t lose their innate peace.

29. When working, surround yourself with people more successful than you. When playing, surround yourself with people happier than you.

30. Most fit and healthy people focus much more on what they eat than how much. Quality control is easier than (and leads to) quantity control. When it comes to medicine and nutrition, subtract before you add.

31. Doctors won’t make you healthy. Nutritionists won’t make you slim. Teachers won’t make you smart. Gurus won’t make you calm. Mentors won’t make you rich. Trainers won’t make you fit. Ultimately, you have to take responsibility. Save yourself.

32. What habit would you say most positively impacts your life? The daily morning workout. That has been a complete game-changer. It’s made me feel healthier, younger.

33. Cold showers: Now, I turn the shower on full-blast, and then I walk right in. I don’t give myself any time to hesitate. As soon as I hear the voice in my head telling me how cold it’s going to be, I know I have to walk in. I learned a very important lesson from this: most of our suffering comes from avoidance. Most of the suffering from a cold shower is the tip-toeing your way in. Your body saying it’s cold is different than your mind saying it’s cold.

34. Time spent undistracted and alone, in self-examination, journaling, meditation, resolves the unresolved and takes us from mentally fat to fit.

35. In 1,000 parallel universes, you want to be wealthy in 999 of them. You don’t want to be wealthy in the fifty of them where you got lucky, so we want to factor luck out of it.