The Almanack of Naval Ravikant by Eric Jorgenson

The book is one of the best gifts I ever got on my birthday. It changed a lot of my mindsets and gave me new insights. Naval is full of wisdom and Eric has done a great job in justifying Naval's work through explanation and compilation of all the Naval's interviews and tweets. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to build wealth in life, and habits to live a happier life.

Fortunately, this book is available for free by the Author here

Below are just the compilation of all the highlights that I found interesting for me in the book: The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: a guide to wealth and happiness by Eric Jorgenson.

Part One: Wealth

BUILDING WEALTH

It's not really about hard work. You can work in a restaurant eight hours a week, and you're not going to get rich. Getting rich is about knowing what to do, who to do it with, and when to do it. It is much more about understanding than purely hard work. Yes, hard work matters, and you can't skimp on it. But it has to be directed in the right way.
Seek wealth, not money or status.
Ethical wealth creation is possible
Ignore people playing status games They gain status by attacking people playing wealth creation games
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.
Productize Yourself: "Yourself" has accountability. "Productize" has specific knowledge.
Wealth is much more businesses and assets that can earn while you sleep.
The best person in the world at anything gets to; do it for everyone.
Society will pay you for creating things it wants.
Society always wants new things. And if you want to be wealthy, you want to figure out which one of those things you can provide for society that it does not yet know how to get but it will want and providing it is natural to you, within your skillset, and within your capabilities.
The best person in the world at anything gets to; do it for everyone.
Society will pay you for creating things it wants. But society doesn't yet know how to create those things, because if it did, they wouldn't need you. They would already be stamped out.

FIND AND BUILD SPECIFIC KNOWLEDGE

Specific knowledge cannot be taught, but it can be learned. When I talk about specific knowledge, I mean figure out what you were doing as a kid or teenager almost effortlessly. Something you didn't even consider a skill, but people around you noticed.
No one can compete with you on being you. Most of life is a search for who and what needs you the most.
Specific knowledge is found much more by pursuing your innate talents, your genuine curiosity, and your passion.
Very often, specific knowledge is at the edge of knowledge.
The internet enables any niche interest, as long as you're the best person at it to scale out. And the great news is because every human is different, everyone is the best at something being themselves.
Escape competition through authenticity.
Best jobs are neither decreed nor degreed. They are creative expressions of continuous learners in free markets
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. You really care about having studied the foundations, so you're not scared of any book. If you go to the library and there's a book you cannot understand, you have to dig down and say, "What is the foundation required for me to learn this?" Foundations are super Important.
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, 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.
You do need to be deep in something because otherwise, you'll be a mile wide and an inch deep and you won't get what you want out of lite. You can only achieve mastery in one or two things. It's usually things you're obsessed about.

PLAY LONG-TERM GAMES WITH LONG-TERM PEOPLE

They've stuck with the business and shown themselves (in a visible and accountable way) to be high-integrity people. Compound interest also happens in your reputation. If you have a sterling reputation and you keep building it for decades upon decades, people will notice. Your reputation will literally end up being thousands or tens of thousands of times more valuable than somebody else who was very talented but is not keeping the compound interest in reputation going.
Intentions don't matter. Actions do. That's why being ethical is hard. When you find the right thing to do, when you find the right people to work with, invest deeply. Sticking with it for decades Is really how you make the big returns in your relationships and in your money. So, compound interest is very important.
99% of effort is wasted.
Most things (relationships, work, even in learning) what you're trying to do is find the thing you can go all-in on to earn compound interest.
when you find the 1 per cent of your discipline which will not be wasted, which you'll be able to invest in for the rest of your life and has meaning to you- go all-in and forget about the rest.

TAKE ON ACCOUNTABILITY

Accountability is a double-edged thing. It allows you to take credit when things go well and to bear the brunt of the failure when things go badly.
Clear accountability is important. Without accountability, you don't have incentives. Without accountability, you can't build credibility. But you take risks. You risk failure. You risk humiliation. You risk failure under your own name.
The people who have the ability to fail in public under their own names actually gain a lot of power.
Accountability does come with real risks, but we're talking about a business context.
People will forgive failures as long as you were honest and made a high-integrity effort. There's not really that much to fear in terms of failure, and so people should take on a lot more accountability than they do.
People seem to think you can create wealth-make money through work. It's probably not going to work. There are many reasons for that.
Without ownership, your inputs are very closely tied to your outputs.
Without ownership, when you're sleeping, you're not earning. When you're retired, you're not earning. When you're on vacation, you're not earning, And you can't earn nonlinearly.
Owning equity in a company basically means you own the upside. When you own debt, you own guaranteed revenue streams and you own the downside. You want to own equity. If you don't own equity in a business, your odds of making money are very slim.

FIND A POSITION OF LEVERAGE

Economic rewards for genuine intellectual curiosity have never been higher. Following your genuine intellectual curiosity is a better foundation for a career than following whatever is making money right now.
Knowledge only you know or only a small set of people knows is going to come out of your passions and your hobbies.
If you have hobbies around your intellectual curiosity, you're more likely to develop these passions. If it entertains you now but will bore you someday, it's a distraction. Keep looking.
I only really want to do things for their own sake. That is one definition of art. Whether it's business, exercise, romance, friendship, whatever, I think the meaning of life is to do things for their own sake, Ironically, when you do things for their own sake, you create your best work. Even if you're just trying to make money, you will actually be the most successful.
The less you want something, the less you're thinking about it, the less you're obsessing over it, the more you're going to do it in a natural way. The more you're going to do it for yourself. You're going to do it in a way you're good at, and you're going to stick with it. The people around you will see the quality of your work is higher.
If they can train you to do it, then eventually they will train a computer to do it.
You build your brand in the meantime on Twitter, on YouTube, and by giving away free work. You make a name for yourself, and you take some risk in the process.
If you get good at managing capital, you can manage more and more capital much more easily than you can manage more and more people.
The idea of products that have no marginal cost of replication.
The most interesting thing to keep in mind about new forms of leverage is they are permissionless. 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. They're great equalizers of leverage.
You're never going to get rich renting out your time. Whenever you can in lite, optimize for independence rather than pay. If you have independence and you're accountable on your output, as opposed to your input that's the dream.
Learn to sell, learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable.
Selling has a very broad definition. Selling doesn't necessarily just mean selling to Individual customers, but it can mean marketing, It can mean communicating, it can mean recruiting, It can mean raising money, It can mean inspiring people, it could mean doing PR. It's a broad umbrella category.
The one thing you have to avoid is the risk of ruin.
Avoiding ruin could also mean you stay out of things that could be physically dangerous or hurt your body. You have to watch your health. Stay out of things that could cause you to lose all of your capital, all of your savings. Don't gamble everything on one go. Instead, take rationally optimistic bets with big upsides.

GET PAID FOR YOUR JUDGEMENT

Judgment- especially demonstrated judgment, with high accountability and a clear track record--is critical.
Warren Buffet spends a year deciding and a day acting. That act lasts decades.\

PRIORITIZE AND FOCUS

Value your time at an hourly rate, and ruthlessly spend to save time at that rate. You will never be worth more than you think you're worth. No one is going to value you more than you value yourself. You just have to set a very high personal hourly rate and you have to stick to It.
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. If you can hire someone to do it for less than your hourly rate, hire them.
When you try and do business with somebody, if you have any bad thoughts or any judgments about them, they will feel it. Humans are wired to feel what the other person deep down inside feels. You have to get out of a relative mindset.
Literally, being anti-wealth will prevent you from becoming wealthy.
The business world has many people playing zero-sum games and a few playing positive-sum games searching for each other in the crowd. There are fundamentally two huge games in life that people play. One is the money game. Because money is not going to solve all of your problems, but it's going to solve all of your money problems.
Many of them, deep down, believe they can't make money. They don't want any wealth creation to happen. So, they attack the whole enterprise by saying, "Well, making money is evil. You shouldn't do it.' But they're actually playing the other game, which is the status game. They're trying to be high status in the eyes of other people watching by saying, "Well, I don't need money. We don't want money." Status is your ranking in the social hierarchy.
Status is a zero-sum game. It's a very old game. We've been playing it since monkey tribes. It's hierarchical. Who's number one? Who's number two? Who's number three? And for number three to move to number two, number two has to move out of that slot. So, status is a zero-sum game.
Politics is an example of a status game. Even sports are an example of a status game. To be the winner, there must be a loser, I don't fundamentally love status games. They play an important role in our society, so we can figure out who's in charge. But fundamentally, you play them because they're a necessary evil.
The problem is, to win at a status game, you have to put somebody else down. That's why you should avoid status games in your life- they make you into an angry, combative person. You're always fighting to put other people down, to put yourself and the people you like up.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
Spend more time making the big decisions.
Where you live, who you're with, and what you do. Advice to a young engineer considering moving to San Francisco: "Do you want to leave your friends behind? Or be the one left behind?"
Figure out what you're good at, and start helping other people with it. Give it away. Pay it forward. Karma works because people are consistent. On a long enough timescale, you will attract what you project. But don't measure- your patience will run out if you count.
An old boss once warned: "you'll never be rich since you're obviously smart, and someone will always offer you a job that's just good enough."

FIND WORK THAT FEELS LIKE PLAY

I would rather be a failed entrepreneur than someone who never tried. Because even a failed entrepreneur has the skill set to make it on their own.
There are almost 7 billion people on this planet. Someday, I hope, there will be almost 7 billion companies.
I'm much more interested in solving problems than I am in making money.
I don't think there is any end goal or purpose. I'm just living life as I want to. I'm literally just doing it moment to moment.
Retirement is when you stop sacrificing today for an imaginary tomorrow. When today is complete, in and of itself, you're retired.
You're doing something you love. You enjoy it so much, it's not about the money. So there are multiple ways to retirement.
The way to get out of the competition trap is to be authentic, to find the thing you know how to do better than anybody, You know how to do it better because you love it, and no one can compete with you. If you love to do it, be authentic, and then figure out how to map that to what society actually wants. Apply some leverage and put your name on it. You take the risks, but you gain the rewards, have ownership and equity in What you're doing, and just crank it up.
Creating businesses and making money are now more of an "art.'
Whether in commerce, science, or politics - history remembers the artists
Art is creativity. Art is anything done for its own sake.
Loving somebody, creating something, playing. To me, creating businesses is play. I create businesses because it's fun, because I'm into the product.
It's just my motivation has shifted from being goal-oriented to being artistic. Ironically, I think I'm much better at it now.
Money is not the root of all evil; there's nothing evil about it. But the lust for money is bad. The lust for money is not bad in a social sense. It's not bad in the sense of "you're a bad person for lusting for money? It's bad for you. Lusting for money is bad for us because it is a bottomless pit. It will always occupy your mind. If you love money, and you make it, there's never enough! There is never enough because the desire is turned on and doesn't turn off at some number. It's a fallacy to think it turns off at some number.
As you make money, you just want even more, and you become paranoid and fearful of losing what you do have. There's no free lunch.
I think the best way to stay away from this constant love of money is to not upgrade your lifestyle as you make money. If you can hold your lifestyle fixed and hopefully make your money in giant lump sums as opposed to a trickle at a time, you won't have time to upgrade your lifestyle. You may get so far ahead you actually become financially free.
I value freedom above everything else. All kinds of freedom: freedom to do what I want, freedom from things I don't want to do, freedom from my own emotions or things that may disturb my peace. For me, freedom is my number one value. To the extent money buys freedom.
The winners of any game are the people who are so addicted they continue playing even as the marginal utility from winning declines
It's good to be in a smaller company early because there's less of an infrastructure to prevent early promotion.
Single most important thing about a company is the alumni network you're going to build. Think about who you will work with and what those people are going on to do.

HOW TO GET LUCKY

First kind of luck is blind luck where one just gets lucky because something completely out of their control happened. This includes fortune, fate, etc. Then, there's luck through persistence, hard work, hustle, and motion. This is when you're running around creating opportunities. You're generating a lot of energy, you're doing a lot to stir things up. You're just generating enough force, hustle, and energy for luck to find you. A third way is you become very good at spotting luck. If you are very skilled in a field, you will notice when a lucky break happens in your field, and other people who aren't attuned to it won't notice. So, you become sensitive to luck, The last kind of luck is the weirdest, hardest kind, where you build a unique character, a unique brand, a unique mindset, which causes luck to find you.
Ways to get lucky: Hope luck finds you. Hustle until you stumble into it. Prepare the mind and be sensitive to chances others miss
Become the best at what you do. Refine what you do until this is true. Opportunity will seek you out. Luck becomes your destiny.
Build your character in a certain way, then your character becomes your destiny.
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.
"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. In a long-term game, It's positive-sum. We're all baking the pie together. We're trying to make it as big as possible. And in a short-term game, we're cutting up the pie.
I think business networking is a complete waste of time. If you're building something interesting, you will always have more people who will want to know you. "Be a maker who makes something interesting people want. Show your craft, practice your craft, and the right people will eventually find you.
If someone is talking a lot about how honest they are, they're probably dishonest. That is just a little telltale indicator I've learned. When someone spends too much time talking about their own values or they're talking themselves up, they're covering for something.
Sharks eat well but live a life surrounded by sharks
The worst outcome in this world is not having self-esteem. If you don't love yourself, who will? think you just have to be very careful about doing things you are fundamentally not going to be proud of, because they will damage you.
"The closer you want to get to me, the better your values have to be."

BE PATIENT

Great people have great outcomes. You just have to be patient.
It never happens in the timescale you want, or they want, but it does happen. It takes time--even once you have all of these pieces in place, there is an indeterminate amount of time you have to put in. If you're counting, you'll run out of patience before success actually arrives.
You do have to put in the time. You do have to put in the hours, and so I think you have to put yourself in the position with the specific knowledge, with accountability, with leverage, with the authentic skillset you have, to be the best in the world at what you do. You have to enjoy it and keep doing it, keep doing it, and keep doing it. Don't keep track, and don't keep count because if you do, you will run out of time.
The most common bad advice I hear is: "You're too young. Most of history was built by young people. "they just got credit when they were older. The only way to truly learn something, Is by doing it. Yes, listen to guidance. But don't wait.
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
Money buys you freedom in the material world. It's not going to make you happy, it's not going to solve your health problems, it's not going to make your family great, it's not going to make you fit, it's not going to make you calm. But it will solve a lot of external problems. It's a reasonable step to go ahead and make money.
I believe the solution to making everybody happy is to give them what they want. Let's get them all rich. Let's get them all fit and healthy, Then, let's get them all happy. Amazing how many people confuse wealth and wisdom.

BUILDING JUDGEMENT

There's no shortcut to smart.

JUDGEMENT

Stay on the bleeding edge of trends and, study technology, design, and art- become really good at something.
You don't get rich by spending your time to save money. You get rich by saving your time to make money.
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.
In an age of leverage, one correct decision can win everything.
Without hard work, you'll develop neither judgment nor leverage
Just pick the right direction to start walking in, and start walking.

HOW TO THINK CLEARLY

"Clear thinker" is a better compliment than "smart."
The really smart thinkers are clear thinkers. They understand the basics at a very, very fundamental level.
Clear thinkers appeal to their own authority.
The "monkey mind' will always respond with this regurgitated emotional response to what it thinks the world should be. Those desires will cloud your reality. This happens a lot of times when people are mixing politics and business.
We have preconceived notions of the way it should be. 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, and you suffer because you've been putting off reality. You've been hiding it from yourself.
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.
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.
The more desire I have for something to work out a certain way, the less likely I am to see the truth.
If I'm not hiding it from anybody, I'm not going to delude myself from what's actually going on.
What you feel tells you nothing about the facts-it merely tells you something about your estimate of the facts. 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. 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.
Very smart people tend to be weird since they insist on thinking everything through for themselves.
À contrarian isn't one who always objects--that's a conformist of a different sort. A contrarian reasons independently from the ground up and resists pressure to conform.
Cynicism is easy. Mimicry is easy. Optimistic contrarians are the rarest breed.

SHED YOUR IDENTITY TO SEE REALITY

Our egos are constructed in our formative years- our first two decades. They get constructed by our environment, our parents, society. Then, we spend the rest of our life trying to make our ego happy. We interpret anything new through our ego: "How do I change the external world to make it more how I would like it to be?"
"Tension is who you think you should be. Relaxation is who you are." -Buddhist saying
Any belief you took in a package (ex. Democrat, Catholic, American) is suspect and should be re-evaluated from base principles.
To be honest, speak without identity.
We each have a contrarian belief society rejects. But the more our own identity and local tribe reject it, the more real it likely is.
Facebook redesigns. Twitter redesigns. Personalities, careers, and teams also need redesigns. There are no permanent solutions in a dynamic system

LEARN THE SKILLS OF DECISION-MAKING

Self-serving conclusions should have a higher bar.
"You should never, ever fool anybody, and you are the easiest person to fool."
I never ask if "I like it" or "I don't like it." I think "this is what it is" or "this is what it isn't." - Richard Feynman
Praise specifically, criticize generally.
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.

COLLECT MENTAL MODELS

Mental models are really just compact ways for you to recall your own knowledge.

EVOLUTION

Evolution, thermodynamics, information theory, and complexity have explanatory and predictive power in many aspects of life.

INVERSION

I think being successful is just about not making mistakes. It's not about having correct judgment. It's about avoiding incorrect judgments.

COMPLEXITY THEORY

I believe we are fundamentally ignorant and very, very bad at predicting the future.

ECONOMICS

Microeconomics and game theory are fundamental. I don't think you can be successful in business or even navigate most of our modern capitalist society without an extremely good understanding of supply-and-demand, labor-versus-capital, game theory, and those kinds of things.
Ignore the noise. The market will decide.

PRINCIPAL-AGENT PROBLEM

If you do not understand the principal-agent problem, you will not know how to navigate your way through the world.
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 you turn them into a principal, and the less you turn them into an agent.
We're attracted to principals, and we all bond with principals, but the media and modern society spend a lot of time brainwashing you about needing an agent, an agent being important, and the agent being knowledgeable.

COMPOUND INTEREST

It's worth reading a microeconomics textbook from start to finish.
In the intellectual domain, compound interest rules.

BASIC MATH

You want arithmetic, probability and statistics. Those are extremely important. Crack open a basic math book and make sure you are really good at multiplying, dividing, compounding, probability, and statistics.

CALCULUS

Calculus is useful to know, to understand the rates of change and how nature works, But it's more important to understand the principles of calculus- where you're measuring the change in small discrete or small continuous events.

IF YOU CAN'T DECIDE, THE ANSWER IS NO

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.
It's very, very important we only say yes when we are pretty certain. You're never going to be absolutely certain, but you're going to be very certain.

RUN UPHILL

If you're evenly split on a difficult decision, take the path more painful in the short term. If the two are even and one has short-term pain, that path has long-term gain associated. With the law of compound interest, long-term gain is what you want to go towards.
Most of the gains in life come from suffering in the short term so you can get paid in the long term. Working out for me is not fun; I suffer in the short term, I feel pain. But then in the long term, I'm better off because I have muscles or I'm healthier.
What are the most efficient ways to build new mental models? Read a lot- just read.
Reading science, math, and philosophy one hour per day will likely put you at the upper echelon of human success within seven years.

LEARN TO LOVE TO READ

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.
Reading was my first love.
Read what you love until you love to read.
There's no mission here to accomplish. Just read because you enjoy it.
Reading a book isn't a race -the better the book, the more slowly it should be absorbed
I probably read one to two hours a day. That puts me in the top .00001 per cent. I think that alone accounts for any material success I've had in my life and any intelligence I might have.
It almost doesn't matter what you read. Eventually, you will read enough things (and your interests will lead you there) that it will dramatically improve your life. Just like the best workout for you is one you're excited enough to do every day, I would say 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
Pointing out obvious exceptions implies either the target isn't smart or you aren't.
As you know more, you leave more books unfinished. Focus on new concepts with predictive power.
Most books have one point to make.
If they wrote it to make money, don't read it.
Explain what you learned to someone else. Teaching forces learning.
It's not about "educated" vs "uneducated." It's about "likes to read" and "doesn't like to read.
Read the greats in math, science, and philosophy. Ignore your contemporaries and news. Avoid tribal identification. Put truth above social approval.
Study logic and math, because once you've mastered them, you won't fear any book.
When you're reading a book and you're confused, that confusion is similar to the pain you get in the gym when you're working out. But you're building mental muscles instead of physical muscles. Learn how to learn and read the books.
Your foundation is critical. Because most people are intimidated by math and can't independently critique it, they overvalue opinions backed with math/pseudoscience.
Mathematics 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.
If you're interested in evolution, read Charles Darwin. Don't begin with Richard Dawkins. 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.
Twitter has made me a worse reader but a much better writer.
I grew up on books, then I switched to blogs, then I switched to Twitter and Facebook, and I realized I wasn't actually learning anything. I was just taking little dopamine snacks all day long.
At any given time, I'm reading somewhere tween ten and twenty books. I'm flipping through them.
When solving problems: the older the problem, the older the solution.
If you're talking about an old problem like how to keep your body healthy, how to stay calm and peaceful, what kinds of value systems are good, how you raise a family, and those kinds of things, the older solutions are probably better.
You know that song you can't get out of your head? All thoughts work that way. Careful what you read.
The truth is, I don’t read for self-improvement. I read out of curiosity and interest. The best book is the one you’ll devour.

Part Two: Happiness

A calm mind, a fit body, and a house full of love. These things cannot be bought. They must be earned.
The three big ones in life are wealth, health, and happiness. We pursue them in that order, but their importance is reverse.

LEARN HAPPINESS

Don’t take yourself so seriously. You’re just a monkey with a plan.

HAPPINESS IS LEARNED

Maybe happiness is not something you inherit or even choose, but a highly personal skill that can be learned, like fitness or nutrition.
I believe happiness is really a default state. Happiness is there when you remove the sense of something missing in your life.
Happiness is the state when nothing is missing. When nothing is missing, your mind shuts down and stops running into the past or future to regret something or to plan something.
If I say I’m happy, that means I was sad at some point. If I say he’s attractive, then somebody else is unattractive. Every positive thought even has a seed of a negative thought within it and vice versa, which is why a lot of greatness in life comes out of suffering. You have to view the negative before you can aspire to and appreciate the positive.
It’s about the absence of desire, especially the absence of desire for external things.
The more present I am, the happier and more content I will be.
Happiness to me is mainly not suffering, not desiring, not thinking too much about the future or the past, really embracing the present moment and the reality of what is, and the way it is.
If you ever want to have peace in your life, you have to move beyond good and evil.
Everything is perfect exactly the way it is. It is only in our particular minds we are unhappy or not happy, and things are perfect or imperfect because of what we desire.
There are no external forces affecting your emotions—as much as it may feel that way
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.
Every second you have on this planet is very precious, and it’s your responsibility to make sure you’re happy and interpreting everything in the best possible way.
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.
Real happiness only comes as a side-effect of peace. Most of it is going to come from acceptance, not from changing your external environment.

HAPPINESS IS A CHOICE

Happiness, love, and passion…aren’t things you find—they’re choices you make.

HAPPINESS REQUIRES PRESENCE

We crave experiences that will make us be present, but the cravings themselves take us from the present moment.
A lot of our unhappiness comes from comparing things from the past to the present.
“Enlightenment is the space between your thoughts."
What if this life is the paradise we were promised, and we’re just squandering it?

HAPPINESS REQUIRES PEACE

There’s this “nexting” thing where you’re sitting in one spot thinking about where you should be next.
I don’t try and fight it, I just notice
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

EVERY DESIRE IS A CHOSEN UNHAPPINESS

The idea you’re going to change something in the outside world, and that is going to bring you the peace, everlasting joy, and happiness you deserve, is a fundamental delusion we all suffer from, including me.
Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.
I find younger people are less happy but more healthy. Older people are more happy but less healthy

SUCCESS DOES NOT EARN HAPPINESS

Happiness is being satisfied with what you have. Success comes from dissatisfaction. Choose.
The problem with getting good at a game, especially one with big rewards, is you continue playing it long after you should have outgrown it.
To me, the real winners are the ones who step out of the game entirely, who don’t even play the game, who rise above it. Winning or losing does not matter to them.
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.
You can get almost anything you want out of life, as long as it’s one thing and you want it far more than anything else.
If you’re a peaceful person, anything you do will be a happy activity.

ENVY IS THE ENEMY OF HAPPINESS

Doing something because you “should” basically means you don’t actually want to do it. It’s just making you miserable, so I’m trying to eliminate as many “shoulds” from my life as possible.
The enemy of peace of mind is expectations drilled into you by society and other people.
Perhaps one reason why yoga and meditation are hard to sustain is they have no extrinsic value. Purely single-player games.
All the real scorecards are internal.
If you’re not willing to do a wholesale, 24/7, 100 percent swap with who that person is, then there is no point in being jealous.
By the way, even that is under my control. To be happy being me. It’s just there are no social rewards for it.

HAPPINESS IS BUILT BY HABITS

It’s a skill. Just like nutrition is a skill, dieting is a skill, working out is a skill, making money is a skill, meeting girls and guys is a skill, having good relationships is a skill, even love is a skill. It starts with realizing they’re skills you can learn. When you put your intention and focus on it, the world can become a better place.
When working, surround yourself with people more successful than you. When playing, surround yourself with people happier than you.
It’s all trial and error.
You can build good habits. 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
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.
Are they habits that will increase your long-term happiness rather than your short-term happiness? Are you surrounding yourself with people who are generally positive and upbeat people? Are those relationships low maintenance? Do you admire and respect but not envy them?
The people who are the most happy and optimistic choose the right five chimps.
The first rule of handling conflict is: Don’t hang around people who constantly engage in conflict. I’m not interested in anything unsustainable or even hard to sustain, including difficult relationships.
If you can’t see yourself working with someone for life, don’t work with them for a day.
“Stop asking why and start saying wow.” The world is such an amazing place. As humans, we’re used to taking everything for granted. Like what you and I are doing right now. We’re sitting indoors, wearing clothes, well-fed, and communicating with each other through space and time. We should be two monkeys sitting in the jungle right now watching the sun going down, asking ourselves where we are going to sleep. When we get something, we assume the world owes it to us. If you’re present, you’ll realize how many gifts and how much abundance there is around us at all times. That’s all you really need to do. I’m here now, and I have all these incredible things at my disposal. The most important trick to being happy is to realize happiness is a skill you develop and a choice you make. You choose to be happy, and then you work at it. It’s just like building muscles. It’s just like losing weight. It’s just like succeeding at your job. It’s just like learning calculus. You decide it’s important to you. You prioritize it above everything else. You read everything on the topic.

HAPPINESS HABITS

If I catch myself judging somebody, I can stop myself and say, “What’s the positive interpretation of this?” I used to get annoyed about things. Now I always look for the positive side of it. It used to take a rational effort. It used to take a few seconds for me to come up with a positive. Now I can do it sub-second. I try to get more sunlight on my skin. I look up and smile. Every time you catch yourself desiring something, say, “Is it so important to me I’ll be unhappy unless this goes my way?” You’re going to find with the vast majority of things it’s just not true. I think dropping caffeine made me happier. It makes me more of a stable person. I think working out every day made me happier. If you have peace of body, it’s easier to have peace of mind. 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. Tell your friends you’re a happy person. Then, you’ll be forced to conform to it. You’ll have a consistency bias. You have to live up to it. Your friends will expect you to be a happy person. Recover time and happiness by minimizing your use of these three smartphone apps: phone, calendar, and alarm clock. The more secrets you have, the less happy you’re going to be.
No exceptions—all screen activities linked to less happiness, all non-screen activities linked to more happiness. A personal metric: how much of the day is spent doing things out of obligation rather than out of interest?
Politics, academia, and social status are all zero-sum games. Positive-sum games create positive people.
Increase serotonin in the brain without drugs: Sunlight, exercise, positive thinking, and tryptophan.

CHANGING HABITS

Pick one thing. Cultivate a desire. Visualize it. Plan a sustainable path. Identify needs, triggers, and substitutes. Tell your friends. Track meticulously. Self-discipline is a bridge to a new self-image. Bake in the new self-image. It’s who you are—now.
First, you know it. Then, you understand it. Then, you can explain it. Then, you can feel it. Finally, you are it

FIND HAPPINESS IN ACCEPTANCE

In any situation in life, you always have three choices: you can change it, you can accept it, or you can leave it. If you want to change it, then it is a desire. It will cause you suffering until you successfully change it. So don’t pick too many of those. Pick one big desire in your life at any given time to give yourself purpose and motivation.
It’s to be okay whatever the outcome is. It’s to be balanced and centered. It’s to step back and to see the grander scheme of things.
Even if you can’t come up with something positive, you can say, “Well, the Universe is going to teach me something now. Now I get to listen and learn.”
Death is the most important thing that is ever going to happen to you. When you look at your death and you acknowledge it, rather than running away from it, it’ll bring great meaning to your life. We spend so much of our life trying to avoid death. So much of what we struggle for can be classified as a quest for immortality.
Here’s a hot tip: There is no legacy. There’s nothing to leave. We’re all going to be gone. Our children will be gone. Our works will be dust. Our civilizations will be dust. Our planet will be dust. Our solar system will be dust. In the grand scheme of things, the Universe has been around for ten billion years. It’ll be around for another ten billion years.
If you fully acknowledge the futility of what you’re doing, then I think it can bring great happiness and peace because you realize this is a game. But it’s a fun game. All that matters is you experience your reality as you go through life. Why not interpret it in the most positive possible way
Keeping death on the forefront and not denying it is very important.
You’re going to die one day, and none of this is going to matter. So enjoy yourself. Do something positive. Project some love. Make someone happy. Laugh a little bit. Appreciate the moment. And do your work.

SAVING YOURSELF

CHOOSING TO BE YOURSELF

I never met my greatest mentor. I wanted so much to be like him. But his message was the opposite: Be yourself, with passionate intensity
Your goal in life is to find the people, business, project, or art that needs you the most. There is something out there just for you.
You’re never going to be them. You’ll never be good at being somebody else.
To make an original contribution, you have to be irrationally obsessed with something.

CHOOSING TO CARE FOR YOURSELF

Nothing like a health problem to turn up the contrast dial for the rest of life.
When everyone is sick, we no longer consider it a disease.

DIET

The combination of sugar and fat together is really deadly. You’ve got to watch out for that in your diet.
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.
My trainer sends me photos of his meals, and it reminds me we are all flavor addicts.
World’s simplest diet: The more processed the food, the less one should consume.

EXERCISE

The harder the workout, the easier the day.
I don’t care if the world is imploding and melting down, it can wait another thirty minutes until I’m done working out.
How you make a habit doesn’t matter. Do something every day. It almost doesn’t matter what you do. The people who are obsessing over whether to do weight training, tennis, Pilates, the high-intensity interval training method, “The Happy Body,” or whatever. They’re missing the point. The important thing is to do something every day. It doesn’t matter what it is. The best workout for you is one you’re excited enough to do every day.
Walking meetings: Brain works better Exercise & sunlight Shorter, less pleasantries More dialogue, less monologue No slides End easily by walking back
“Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life.” If you make the easy choices right now, your overall life will be a lot harder.

MEDITATION + MENTAL STRENGTH

I was very inspired by him (Wim Hof), not only because he’s capable of super-human physical feats, but because he does it while being incredibly kind and happy—which is not easy to accomplish.
Most of our suffering comes from avoidance.
Too much sugar leads to a heavy body, and too many distractions lead to a heavy mind.
Choiceless Awareness, or Nonjudgmental Awareness. As you’re going about your daily business (hopefully, there’s some nature) and you’re not talking to anybody else, you practice learning to accept the moment you’re in without making judgments. You don’t think, “Oh, there’s a homeless guy over there, better cross the street” or look at someone running by and say, “He’s out of shape, and I’m in better shape than him.”
Why am I laughing at him to make me feel better about myself? And why am I trying to make me feel better about my own hair? Because I’m losing my hair, and I’m afraid it’s going to go away. What I find is 90 percent of thoughts I have are fear-based. The other 10 percent may be desire-based.
you can just very keenly and very alertly be aware of your thoughts as they happen. As you watch your thoughts, you realize how many of them are fearbased. The moment you recognize a fear, without even trying it goes away. After a while, your mind quiets.
When your mind quiets, you stop taking everything around you for granted. You start to notice the details.
You surrender to whatever happens—don’t make any effort whatsoever.
The advantage of meditation is recognizing just how out of control your mind is.

CHOOSING TO BUILD YOURSELF

The greatest superpower is the ability to change yourself.
You’re born, you have a set of sensory experiences, and then you die. How you choose to interpret those experiences is up to you, and different people interpret them in different ways.
If you take a very long-term point of view and take the emotion out of it, I wouldn’t consider those things mistakes anymore.
Habits are everything—everything we are. We are trained in habits from when we are children, including potty training, when to cry and when not to, how to smile and when not to.
. At any given time, I’m either trying to pick up a good habit or discard a previous bad habit. It takes time.
One of the things Krishnamurti talks about is being in an internal state of revolution. You should always be internally ready for a complete change. Whenever we say we’re going to try to do something or try to form a habit, we’re wimping out.
Commit externally to enough people.
When you really want to change, you just change. But most of us don’t really want to change—we don’t want to go through the pain just yet. At least recognize it, be aware of it, and give yourself a smaller change you can actually carry out.
Anything you have to do, just get it done. Why wait? You’re not getting any younger. Your life is slipping away. You don’t want to spend it waiting in line. You don’t want to spend it traveling back and forth. You don’t want to spend it doing things you know ultimately aren’t part of your mission.
Impatience with actions, patience with results.
When you have inspiration, act on it right then and there.

CHOOSING TO GROW YOURSELF

I think almost everything that people read these days is designed for social approval.
At some level, you’re doing it for social approval. You’re doing it to fit in with the other monkeys. You’re fitting in to get along with the herd. That’s not where the returns are in life. The returns in life are being out of the herd.
If you view yourself as a loser, as someone who was cast out by society and has no role in normal society, then you will do your own thing and you’re much more likely to find a winning path.
For self-improvement without self-discipline, update your self-image.
I think motivation is relative, so you just have to find the thing you’re into.
Grind and sweat, toil and bleed, face the abyss. It’s all part of becoming an overnight success.
Read. Read everything you can. And not just the stuff that society tells you is good or even books that I tell you to read. Just read for its own sake. Develop a love for it. Even if you have to read romance novels or paperbacks or comic books. There’s no such thing as junk. Just read it all. Eventually, you’ll guide yourself to the things that you should and want to be reading.
Mathematics helps with all the complex and difficult things in life. If you want to make money, if you want to do science, if you want to understand game theory or politics or economics or investments or computers, all of these things have mathematics at the core. It’s a foundational language of nature.
The good news is you don’t have to know a lot of math. You just have to know basic statistics, arithmetic, etc. You should know statistics and probability forwards and backwards and inside out.

CHOOSING TO FREE YOURSELF

The hardest thing is not doing what you want—it’s knowing what you want.
Be aware there are no “adults.” Everyone makes it up as they go along. You have to find your own path, picking, choosing, and discarding as you see fit.
Advice to my younger self: “Be exactly who you are.” Holding back means staying in bad relationships and bad jobs for years instead of minutes.

FREEDOM FROM EXPECTATIONS

Courage isn’t charging into a machine gun nest. Courage is not caring what other people think.
I don’t like to wait. I hate wasting time. I’m very famous for being rude at parties, events, dinners, where the moment I figure out it’s a waste of my time, I leave immediately. Value your time. It is all you have. It’s more important than your money.
As long as you’re doing what you want, it’s not a waste of your time.
If you are happy, it makes other people happy.
You are not responsible for making other people happy.

FREEDOM FROM ANGER

Anger is a loss of control over the situation.
Anger is its own punishment. An angry person trying to push your head below water is drowning at the same time.

FREEDOM FROM EMPLOYMENT

A taste of freedom can make you unemployable.

FREEDOM FROM UNCONTROLLED THOUGHTS

There is no endpoint to self-awareness and self-discovery. It’s a lifelong process you hopefully keep getting better and better at.
I am in the rat race. The best case is I’m a rat who might be able to look up at the clouds once in a while.
I think just being aware you’re a rat in a race is about as far as most of us are going to get.

PHILOSOPHY

The real truths are heresies. They cannot be spoken. Only discovered, whispered, and perhaps read.

THE MEANING OF LIFE

Answer 1: It’s personal. You have to find your own meaning. It might take you years or decades. When you find an answer you’re happy with, it will be fundamental to your life.
Answer 2: There is no meaning to life. There is no purpose to life. No one is going to remember you past a certain number of generations, whether you’re an artist, a poet, a conqueror, a pauper, or anyone else. There’s no meaning.
There is no fundamental, intrinsic purposeful meaning to the Universe.
There is no answer you could give that wouldn’t have another “why."
Answer 3: Maybe there is a meaning to life, but it’s not a very satisfying purpose.

LIVE BY YOUR VALUES

Honesty is a core, core, core value. By honesty, I mean I want to be able to just be me.
Before you can lie to another, you must first lie to yourself.
I don’t believe in any short-term thinking or dealing.
All benefits in life come from compound interest, whether in money, relationships, love, health, activities, or habits. I only want to be around people I know I’m going to be around for the rest of my life. I only want to work on things I know have long-term payout.
Another one is I only believe in peer relationships. I don’t believe in hierarchical relationships.
I don’t believe in anger anymore. Anger was good when I was young and full of testosterone, but now I like the Buddhist saying, “Anger is a hot coal you hold in your hand while waiting to throw it at somebody.” I don’t want to be angry, and I don’t want to be around angry people. I find if people are fighting or quarreling about something, it’s because their values don’t line up. If their values lined up, the little things wouldn’t matter.
“To find a worthy mate, be worthy of a worthy mate.” - Charlie Munger
Your values inherently become a lot less selfish.

RATIONAL BUDDHISM

The older the question, the older the answers.
Try everything, test it for yourself, be skeptical, keep what’s useful, and discard what’s not.
Everyone starts out innocent. Everyone is corrupted. Wisdom is the discarding of vices and the return to virtue, by way of knowledge.
If wisdom could be imparted through words alone, we’d all be done here.

THE PRESENT IS ALL WE HAVE

You’re dying and being reborn at every moment. It’s up to you whether to forget or remember that.
All death really means is that there are no more future moments.

All credit goes to The Almanack of Naval Ravikant by Eric Jorgenson

It is freely available on navalmanack.com