Almanac of Naval
Distillation of Naval's best lines
Since 2017, I’ve benefited from the aphorisms of Naval Ravikant, entrepreneur, investor, and thinker. His thread, How to Get Rich (without getting lucky), helped me achieve a relatively high level of financial freedom. He also introduced me to other writers, thinkers, and authors who inspired me on my pathless path.
When I find someone I admire, I read what they’ve read, listen to who they’re listening to, and write about them.
These are my highlights from the book Almanac of Naval by Naval and Eric Jorgensen. It’s cool that Eric created a bestselling book by harvesting and editing Naval’s best tweets and podcasts. This essay is a distillation of Eric’s distillation of Navalisms. The full book can be downloaded here, free. Naval posts on X.
All is Naval’s words unless specified otherwise.
The modern struggle:
Lone individuals summoning inhuman willpower, fasting, meditating, and exercising…
Up against armies of scientists and statisticians weaponizing abundant food, screens, and medicine into junk food, clickbait news, infinite porn, endless games, and addictive drugs.
Naval
How to Get Rich (Without Getting Lucky) [Distillation]
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.
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.
Specific knowledge is found by pursuing your genuine curiosity and passion rather than whatever is hot right now.
Building specific knowledge will feel like play to you but will look like work to others.
Fortunes require leverage. Business leverage comes from capital, people, and products with no marginal cost of replication (code and media).
If you can’t code, write books and blogs, record videos and podcasts. Leverage is a force multiplier for your judgment.
There is no skill called “business.” Avoid business magazines and business classes. Study microeconomics, game theory, psychology, persuasion, ethics, mathematics, and computers.
Reading is faster than listening. Doing is faster than watching.
Become the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until this is true.
There are no get-rich-quick schemes. Those are just someone else getting rich off you.
Apply specific knowledge, with leverage, and eventually you will get what you deserve.
When you’re finally wealthy, you’ll realize it wasn’t what you were seeking in the first place. But that is for another day.
What is money?
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.”
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.
Embrace accountability and take business risks under your own name. Society will reward you with responsibility, equity, and leverage. To get rich, you need leverage. Leverage comes in labor, comes in capital, or it can come through code or media. But most of these, like labor and capital, people have to give to you. For labor, somebody has to follow you. For capital, somebody has to give you money, assets to manage, or machines. So to get these things, you have to build credibility, and you have to do it under your own name as much as possible,
If you don’t own a piece of a business, you don’t have a path towards financial freedom.
If they can train you to do it, then eventually they will train a computer to do it.
The new generation’s fortunes are all made through code or media. Joe Rogan making $50 million to $100 million a year from his podcast. You’re going to have PewDiePie. I don’t know how much money he’s rolling in, but he’s bigger than the news. And of course, there’s Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs. Their wealth is all code-based leverage. [78]
Coding, writing books, recording podcasts, tweeting, YouTubing—these kinds of things are permissionless. You don’t need anyone’s permission to do them, and that’s why they are very egalitarian.
Learn to sell, learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable.
People are oddly consistent. Karma is just you, repeating your patterns, virtues, and flaws until you finally get what you deserve. Always pay it forward. And don’t keep count.
Look at the kids who are born rich—they have no meaning to their lives.
My definition of wisdom is knowing the long-term consequences of your actions. Wisdom applied to external problems is judgment. They’re highly linked; knowing the long-term consequences of your actions and then making the right decision to capitalize on that. [78] In an age of leverage, one correct decision can win everything.
I think the smartest people can explain things to a child. If you can’t explain it to a child, then you don’t know it.
One definition of a moment of suffering is “the moment when you see things exactly the way they are.” This whole time, you’ve been convinced your business is doing great, and really, you’ve ignored the signs it’s not doing well. Then, your business fails
The good news is, the moment of suffering—when you’re in pain—is a moment of truth. 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. The hard thing is seeing the truth. 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. What we wish to be true clouds our perception of what is true. Suffering is the moment when we can no longer deny reality.
[if you’re always busy] you’re not going to be able to have good ideas for your business. You’re not going to be able to make good judgments. I 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. It’s only after you’re bored you have the great ideas. It’s never going to be when you’re stressed, or busy, running around or rushed. Make the time. [7]
You have to accept being an athlete is not your entire identity, and maybe you can forge a new identity as a philosopher.
“You should never, ever fool anybody, and you are the easiest person to fool.” The moment you tell somebody something dishonest, you’ve lied to yourself. Then you’ll start believing your own lie, which will disconnect you from reality and take you down the wrong road.
praise specifically, criticize generally. I try to follow this. I don’t always follow it, but I think I follow it enough to have made a difference in my life.…find the person who is the best example of what you’re praising and praise the person, specifically. Then people’s egos and identities, which we all have, don’t work against you. They work for you.
Charisma is the ability to project confidence and love at the same time. It’s almost always possible to be honest and positive.
The more you know, the less you diversify.
Mental models are really just compact ways for you to recall your own knowledge.
…sperm is abundant and eggs are scarce.
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.
arithmetic, probability, and statistics are extremely important. Crack open a basic math book, and make sure you are really good at multiplying, dividing, compounding, probability, and statistics.
Reading science, math, and philosophy one hour per day will likely put you at the upper echelon of human success within seven years.
Every piece of knowledge ever written down is a fingertip away. The means of learning are abundant—it’s the desire to learn that is scarce.
Reading was my first love.
for books, blogs, tweets, or whatever—anything with ideas and information and learning—the best ones to read are the ones you’re excited about reading all the time.
“As long as I have a book in my hand, I don’t feel like I’m wasting time.” —Charlie Munger
Everyone’s brain works differently. Some people love to take notes. Actually, my notetaking is Twitter.
I’ll start [a book] at the beginning, but I’ll move fast. If it’s not interesting, I’ll just start flipping ahead, skimming, or speed reading. If it doesn’t grab my attention within the first chapter in a meaningful, positive way, I’ll either drop the book or skip ahead a few chapters.
hard sciences are a solid foundation. Microeconomics is a solid foundation. The moment you start wandering outside of these solid foundations you’re in trouble because now you don’t know what’s true and what’s false. I would focus as much as I could on having solid foundations. It’s better to be really great at arithmetic and geometry than to be deep into advanced mathematics. I would read microeconomics all day long—Microeconomics 101.
On Happiness
Maybe happiness is not something you inherit or even choose, but a highly personal skill that can be learned, like fitness or nutrition.
If you ever want to have peace in your life, you have to move beyond good and evil.
Real happiness only comes as a side-effect of peace. Most of it is going to come from acceptance,
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]
What if this life is the paradise we were promised, and we’re just squandering it?
man’s troubles arise because he cannot sit in a room quietly by himself.” If you could just sit for thirty minutes and be happy, you are successful. That is a very powerful place to be, but very few of us get there.
jealousy faded away because I don’t want to be anybody else. I’m perfectly happy being me. By the way, even that is under my control. To be happy being me. It’s just there are no social rewards for it. [4]
HAPPINESS IS BUILT BY HABITS
My most surprising discovery in the last five years is that peace and happiness are skills. These are not things you are born with. Yes, there is a genetic range. And a lot of it is conditioning from your environment, but you can un-condition and recondition yourself. You can increase your happiness over time, and it starts with believing you can do it.
He wrote about this body-energy exercise. You lie down and you feel the energy moving around your body. At that point, the old me would have put the book down and said, “Well, that’s BS.” But the new me said, “Well, if I believe it, maybe it’ll work.” I went into it with a positive mindset. I laid down and tried the meditation. You know what? It felt really good.
Not drinking alcohol will keep your mood more stable. Not eating sugar will keep your mood more stable. Not going on Facebook, Snapchat, or Twitter will keep your mood more stable. Playing video games will make you happier in the short run—and I used to be an avid gamer—but in the long run, it could ruin your happiness.
Caffeine is another one where you trade long term for the short term. Essentially, you have to go through your life replacing your thoughtless bad habits with good ones, making a commitment to be a happier person. At the end of the day, you are a combination of your habits and the people who you spend the most time with.
The more you judge, the more you separate yourself. You’ll feel good for an instant, because you feel good about yourself, thinking you’re better than someone. Later, you’re going to feel lonely. Then, you see negativity everywhere. The world just reflects your own feelings back at you. [77]
The more secrets you have, the less happy you’re going to be.
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]
Keeping death at the forefront and not denying it is very important.
To make an original contribution, you have to be irrationally obsessed with something.
When in bed, meditate. Either you will have a deep meditation or fall asleep. Victory either way. Another method I’ve learned is to just sit there and you close your eyes for at least one hour a day.
Meditation is turning off society and listening to yourself. It only “works” when done for its own sake. Hiking is walking meditation. Journaling is writing meditation. Praying is gratitude meditation. Showering is accidental meditation. Sitting quietly is direct meditation.
CHOOSING TO BUILD YOURSELF
The greatest superpower is the ability to change yourself.
Science is, to me, the study of truth. It is the only true discipline because it makes falsifiable predictions. It actually changes the world. Applied science becomes technology, and technology is what separates us from animals and allows us to have things like cell phones, houses, cars, heat, and electricity.
The hardest thing is not doing what you want—it’s knowing what you want.
Courage isn’t charging into a machine gun nest. Courage is not caring what other people think.
Value your time. It is all you have. It’s more important than your money. It’s more important than your friends. It is more important than anything. Your time is all you have. Do not waste your time. This doesn’t mean you can’t relax. As long as you’re doing what you want, it’s not a waste of your time.
Once you’ve truly controlled your own fate, for better or for worse, you’ll never let anyone else tell you what to do. [11] A taste of freedom can make you unemployable.
[My wife and I] ended up together because she saw my values. I am lucky I had developed them by that point. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have gotten her. I wouldn’t have deserved her. As investor Charlie Munger says, “To find a worthy mate, be worthy of a worthy mate.” [4]
The democratization of technology allows anyone to be a creator, entrepreneur, scientist. The future is brighter.
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