The Almanack of Naval Ravikant

Getting rich is a skill you learn, not a lottery you win.
Effort alone won't do it: a cook working eighty-hour weeks stays poor.
What matters is knowing what to work on, who to work with, and when.
Until you know what to work on, figuring that out is the work.

Wealth, money and status are different things:
Wealth is assets that keep earning while you sleep.
Money is just how we move time and wealth between people.
Status is your rank in the pecking order.
Go after wealth.

If part of you looks down on wealth, you won't build it.
People can feel your contempt when you try to do business with them.

Status is an ancient zero-sum game: someone rises only when someone else falls.
Creating wealth is a newer, positive-sum game.
When people attack wealth creators, they're usually just climbing the status ladder.
Ignore them, and stay out of status games yourself. They make you combative.

You'll never get rich renting out your hours.
You need ownership: a piece of a product, a business, or some intellectual property.
Equity owns the upside. Debt owns the downside. A salary owns neither.

Society pays you for giving it something it wants but can't get yet.
Then you have to deliver it at scale.

Pick long games, and play them with people who'll be around for the long run.
Every big return in life compounds: money, relationships, reputation, knowledge.
In a partner, look for intelligence, energy and, above everything, integrity.
Avoid cynics. Their pessimism comes true.

Get good at making things and at selling them.
Manage both and nothing can stop you.
Making covers design, engineering and operations. Selling covers marketing, recruiting, fundraising and inspiring people.

The three ingredients: specific knowledge, accountability, leverage.

Specific knowledge:
It's the knowledge nobody can train you for, because anything they can train you for, they can train your replacement for. Eventually a computer.
You find it by following your real curiosity, not whatever is fashionable.
It feels like play to you and looks like work to everyone else.
It's passed on by apprenticeship, not school.
Often it's what you did effortlessly as a kid. Your mother or your oldest friend could name it.
I wanted to be an astrophysicist. My mom, talking from the kitchen, said I'd end up in business. She was right. (story)

Nobody can outcompete you at being you.
Competition comes from copying. Authenticity is the way out.
Much of life is a search for the people and the work that need you most.

The best careers aren't assigned or certified.
They belong to people who keep learning in open markets.
Learn to get good at a brand-new field in under a year.
Be excellent at the foundations: arithmetic, plain clear language, persuasion.
Then go deep on the one or two things you're obsessed with.

Almost all effort is wasted, at least toward any particular goal.
The point is to find the small slice worth going all-in on, then let the rest go.
The moment you know a relationship or a class is going nowhere, leave.

What you meant doesn't count. What you did does.

A fellow investor always rounds every deal in my favor and quietly covers small costs himself.
So I bring him every deal I can, and try to look after him too. That's trust compounding. (story)

Accountability:
Take risks under your own name.
You get the credit when it works and the blame when it doesn't.
We're wired to fear failing in public, so the people who can stand it gain outsized power.
The real downside today is small. There's no debtors' prison, and people forgive honest failure.

Leverage comes in three kinds:

1. Labor, people working for you. The oldest and messiest kind; you're always one mutiny away from trouble.
2. Capital, which multiplies every decision you make. It built the last century's fortunes.
3. Products that cost nothing to copy: code, books, podcasts, videos. The newest kind.
   The first two need someone's permission. The third doesn't.
   Fleets of robots sit in data centers waiting for instructions. Put them to work.
   If you can't code, write or record.

The real divide now isn't rich and poor. It's leveraged and unleveraged.
A leveraged worker can outproduce an unleveraged one a thousand times over.
When inputs and outputs come apart, judgment matters far more than hours.
Pick work where you're judged on output, not time in the chair.
Choose independence over a bigger paycheck.

The forty-hour week is a factory relic.
Knowledge workers should work like athletes: sprint, rest, reassess.

Get paid for your thinking, not your hours.

The real estate ladder: laborer, contractor, developer, fund manager, then the founder of a Zillow.
Each rung adds leverage, accountability and specific knowledge, and the upside grows with it. (story)

Above all, avoid ruin.
Nothing illegal, no all-in bets, nothing that wrecks your health.
Take sensible, optimistic bets with big upside instead.

The goal is to be paid for your judgment.
Someone who's right 85% of the time instead of 75% is worth a fortune when steering a huge company.
Buffett has earned so much trust that nobody asks how many hours he works.
He takes a long time deciding and a moment acting, and the action lasts for decades.

Solve a problem once by iterating, then get paid every time it repeats.

My first small fortune vanished in the stock market. The second went to partners who cheated me. The third finally stuck.
It came in small piles, never one jackpot. (story)

Set an aspirational hourly rate that feels absurd, then raise it.
If outsourcing something costs less than your rate, outsource it.
Long before I had money I told myself I was worth $5,000 an hour, and I'd throw broken things away rather than spend time returning them. (story)
Nobody will value your time more than you do.

Spend real time on the three big early decisions: where you live, who you're with, and what you work on.
A decade-long choice deserves a year or two of thought.

To meet successful people, get good at something and give it away.
Over a long enough time, you attract what you project. Just don't keep score.

An old boss warned me that smart people rarely get rich, because someone always offers them a job that's just good enough.

I told everyone at work I was leaving to start a company, then kept not leaving, until the embarrassment pushed me out the door. (story)
Better a failed entrepreneur than someone who never tried.

Retirement isn't an age.
It's the day you stop trading today for an imaginary tomorrow.
Get there with passive income that covers your costs, by cutting your costs to nothing, or by doing work you'd do anyway.

Art is anything done for its own sake.
I build companies like an artist now, and I'm better at it than when I was desperate.
When work feels like play, you can do it sixteen hours a day, and nobody working out of duty can keep up.

Loving money is a bottomless pit. The craving doesn't switch off at any number.
Keep your lifestyle fixed as your income rises, and you might actually get free.
Money is good exactly to the extent it buys freedom.

Four kinds of luck:

1. Blind luck.
2. Luck from hustle: stir things up until something happens.
3. Luck from a prepared mind that notices what others miss.
4. Luck that finds you because of who you've become. The world's best deep-sea diver gets the call when someone finds a sunken treasure.
   Aim for the fourth. Build your character until it becomes your destiny.
   You want to be rich in nearly all of a thousand parallel lives, not just the lucky few.

In long games, everybody makes each other rich. In short games, everybody tries to get rich off each other.

Skip networking.
Make something interesting, show your craft, and the right people will find you.

Be wary of anyone who keeps telling you how honest they are.
Predators eat well, but they live among predators.
Warn someone once about how they treat people, then step away. People rarely change.
The closer someone wants to get, the better their values need to be.

Great people get great outcomes, just never on the schedule they want.
If you keep count, you'll quit too early.
"You're too young" is bad advice. Young people built most of history and got the credit later.

Your real résumé is the list of hard things you got through.

Money solves money problems, not unhappiness.
Many people who get rich trained themselves into anxiety along the way and can't switch it off.
The Buddha started as a prince. Get rich, get fit, then work on being happy.

Judgment:
Effort gets too much credit. Judgment gets too little.
Wisdom is seeing where your actions lead in the long run. Judgment is applying that to the outside world.
With leverage, one right call can win everything.
Direction matters far more than speed.

Being called a clear thinker beats being called smart.
If you can't explain it to a child, you don't really understand it.
Master the basics until you can rebuild the advanced material yourself. Otherwise you're just memorizing.

What we want to be true clouds what is true.
Suffering is the moment you can't deny reality anymore, and progress only starts from reality.
The smaller your ego and the fewer your preferences about the outcome, the clearer you see.
When something is going badly, say so out loud, so you can't hide it from yourself.
Feelings are your estimate of the facts, not the facts.

Keep empty days on your calendar. Block out two to protect one.
Good ideas arrive when you're bored, never when you're rushing.

A real contrarian isn't someone who disagrees with everything.
It's someone who reasons from scratch and doesn't bend to pressure.
Optimistic contrarians are the rarest kind.

Your ego and habits were assembled in your first twenty years.
Take them apart and ask whether each one still serves you.
Beliefs that came as a bundle (party, religion, nation) deserve a fresh look.
If all your opinions line up neatly with a tribe, be suspicious.
The harder your own tribe rejects one of your beliefs, the more likely it's true.

Most biases are time-saving shortcuts. For big decisions, set memory and identity aside and look at the problem itself.
Conclusions that flatter you deserve extra scrutiny.

Honesty is freedom: you say what you think and think what you say.
To lie to someone else, you first have to lie to yourself.
Praise individuals by name. Criticize behaviors in general.
Charisma is projecting confidence and love at the same time.

Being right 80% of the time instead of 70% can be worth hundreds of times more.

Collect mental models from evolution, game theory, Munger, Taleb and Franklin.
A pithy maxim only works as a pointer to experience you already have. Otherwise it's a poster.
Inversion: success is mostly not making mistakes.
Complexity teaches humility. We're terrible at predicting.
Learn microeconomics and game theory. The principal-agent problem explains why owners do better work than hired hands.
Know arithmetic, probability and statistics cold. Skip the calculus drills.
If a claim can't be proven wrong, it isn't science.

When you can't decide, it's a no.
Big decisions lock you in for years, and modern life offers endless options.
If you're building a pros-and-cons spreadsheet, you already have your answer.

When two paths look equal, take the one that hurts more now.
Your brain is dodging short-term pain, and the painful path usually holds the long-term gain.

An hour a day of science, math and philosophy can put you near the top within seven years.

Reading:
Ways to learn are everywhere now. The desire to learn is what's scarce.
Read whatever you enjoy until you enjoy reading.
Reread the great books instead of always chasing new ones. The better the book, the slower you should go.
An hour or two a day already puts you in a tiny minority.
Most nonfiction makes one point, then repeats it with examples. Once you've got it, put the book down.
The number of books you've finished is a vanity metric.
Skip books written mainly to make money.
Teach what you read. That's how it sticks.
Read the originals: Darwin before his commentators, Adam Smith before the economists.
With solid foundations in math and logic, no book in the library is out of reach.
Confusion while reading is just mental muscle soreness.
I fixed my broken reading habit by treating books like blog posts: dozens open at once, skipping freely, no duty to finish.
For old problems like health, calm, values and family, old books have better answers. Time has already filtered them.
Thoughts get stuck in your head like songs. Choose what you read carefully.

A calm mind, a fit body and a loving home can't be bought. They have to be earned.

Happiness:
We chase wealth, health and happiness in that order, but they matter in reverse.

Don't take yourself so seriously. You're a primate with plans.

Ten years ago I'd have rated my happiness at 2 or 3 out of 10. Today I'm at 9.
Money is a small part of it. Mostly I decided happiness mattered, and practiced.
Happiness is a skill, like fitness or nutrition.

Happiness is the default state that's left when you stop feeling something is missing.
The mind quiets, stops running to the past and the future, and you're content.
It isn't positive thinking. Every positive carries its opposite.
It's the absence of desire.

Reality is neutral. Nature has no opinion about good or bad.
Meaning comes from how you interpret it, and that's your choice.

If you think you're the center of the universe, the universe has to bend to you, and it won't.
See yourself as tiny and temporary, and life is simply what it is.
Children live this way, absorbed in the moment.

We treat ourselves as fixed and the world as changeable. It's the other way around.

Meditation helps less than you'd hope. It's light dumbbells, and life drops a loaded barbell on you.
Real happiness is a side effect of peace, and peace mostly comes from acceptance.

What worked for me: less identity, less mental chatter, no politics, no unhappy company, philosophy, meditation, happy friends.
It works slowly, like raising a fitness baseline.

Walking down the street, only a sliver of your mind is in the present.
Even cravings for present-moment experiences pull you out of the present.
Vices pull you into the future. Dropping them makes it easier to stay here.
Enlightenment can be as small as the gap between two thoughts, available any moment.
Maybe this life is the paradise we were promised, and we're wasting it.

For me, happiness means peace more than joy.
Notice the restless what's-next anxiety. Ask: do I want this thought, or my peace?
A happy person isn't happy all the time. They interpret events in ways that don't cost them their calm.

I ordered a new car and spent nights reading forums about it, knowing I'd stop caring the day it arrived. I was hooked on the wanting. (story)
Believing something out there will make you happy forever is the core delusion.
A desire is an agreement to stay unhappy until you get the thing.
So choose your desires carefully, and hold only one big one at a time.

Young: time and health, no money. Middle-aged: money and health, no time. Old: money and time, no health.

Being content means being satisfied. Success comes from being dissatisfied. You have to choose.

Once I reached material success, I noticed the successful people around me weren't any happier, and that I adapted to anything fast.
Happiness is internal.
Getting good at a lucrative game keeps you playing long after you should have outgrown it.
The real winners step out of the game entirely and need nothing from anyone.
If you can sit alone in a room for half an hour and be happy, you've succeeded.

You can get almost anything you want, as long as it's one thing and you want it more than everything else.
Peace is happiness at rest. Happiness is peace in motion.
External problems never run out. Peace comes from letting go of the idea of problems.

Drop the word "should." It's guilt or social programming talking.
Looking good and getting rich are multiplayer games. Happiness is single-player.
You're born alone, you die alone, and within a few generations nobody remembers.
Buffett's question: would you rather be the best lover known as the worst, or the worst known as the best? Keep an inner scorecard.

I got over jealousy when I noticed I couldn't take just one piece of someone's life.
I'd have to swap everything: their mind, their family, their desires, their outlook. I didn't want that. (story)

Peace and happiness are skills. You can uncondition and recondition yourself.
Work with people more successful than you. Play with people happier than you.
Experiment until something works, and go in believing it might. For the mind, the placebo effect is fully effective.
Alcohol, sugar, social media, video games and caffeine all trade long-term mood for short-term hits.
You become your habits and the five people you spend the most time with. Choose them on purpose.
Stay away from people who are always in conflict.
If you couldn't work with someone for life, don't work with them for a day.
A friend's whole philosophy: trade "why?" for "wow."

Small daily tricks:
Catch every judgment and look for the generous interpretation. With practice it takes under a second.
Get sun on your skin. Look up and smile.
When you want something, ask whether you'd really be unhappy without it. Usually not.
Quit caffeine. Exercise every day.
Judging others feels good for a moment, then lonely.
Tell your friends you're a happy person. You'll feel obliged to live up to it.
Use your phone, calendar and alarm clock less.
The more secrets you keep, the less happy you are.
Screens make you less happy. Almost everything off-screen makes you happier.
Measure how much of your day goes to obligations versus interests.
The news exists to make you anxious and angry. The long-term trends are good.
Positive-sum games make positive people.

To change a habit: pick one, really want it, plan something sustainable, map your triggers and substitutes, tell your friends, track it, and let discipline carry you until the new self-image sticks.

Every situation gives you three options: change it, accept it, or leave it.
The miserable option is wishing for change without changing, and wishing to leave without leaving.
Hold only one big desire to change things at a time.
The word I say to myself most is "accept."
To accept, look back at past pain and the growth that came from it.
For small annoyances, ask what the upside is. Late for a meeting means a few minutes watching birds.

Underneath acceptance is facing death.
There's no legacy. Everything turns to dust eventually. Try naming a single Sumerian.
Your unhappiness doesn't help anyone.
So enjoy yourself, be kind, laugh, and do your work.

Nobody is coming to save you.
Doctors, trainers, gurus and mentors can't do it for you.

You don't have to do anything. Do what you actually want.
My greatest mentor, whom I never met, taught one thing: be yourself, with intensity.
No one can beat you at being you, so don't imitate.
To make an original contribution, you have to be irrationally obsessed.

My priorities: my own health (body, then mind, then spirit), then my family's, then everything else.
A health scare turns up the contrast on everything else.

Modern life fights our evolution: processed food, shoes, constant warmth, sterility, isolation, phones.
We evolved for scarcity and live in abundance, so our genes keep saying yes.
When everyone is sick, we stop calling it a disease.

Fat fills you up. Sugar makes you hungry, and sugar wins. Don't eat them together.
Watch what you eat more than how much.
Fasting is easier than portion control.
Ignore the diet extremists and anything invented in the last few hundred years.
The more processed a food is, the less of it you should eat.
In medicine and nutrition, take things away before you add things.

"No time" really means "not a priority."
I made my health my top priority, so the morning workout became non-negotiable.
The best workout is the one you'll actually do every day.
The harder the workout, the easier the day.
Make the hard choices now and life gets easy. Make the easy ones and life gets hard.

Meditation is a fast for the mind.
Cold showers taught me that most suffering is hesitation. Once you're in, it's just cold. (story)
My favorite practice: walk around noticing without judging. Most thoughts turn out to be fear.
Or sit for an hour with your eyes closed and let old, unresolved things surface until the mental inbox is empty. Try it for sixty days.
Meditation's real gift is seeing how out of control your mind is. That distance is freedom.
Run your mind in debug mode. Most of what it chases doesn't need solving right now.
Keep the anxious monkey mind switched off until you actually need it.
Hiking, journaling, praying, showering and sitting quietly are all meditation.

Being able to change yourself is the ultimate superpower.
My regret isn't what I did. It's the anger I did it with.
Getting fit is a ten-year project of swapping bad habits for good ones.
Saying you'll "try" is buying time. If you really wanted it, you'd already be doing it.
Commit publicly, or commit to a smaller step you'll actually keep.
Rush the work. Wait patiently for the results.
Inspiration spoils quickly. Act on it while it's fresh.
Build systems, not goals, and choose environments where you're likely to succeed.
If you want to do something later, do it now.

Most reading is done for social approval. The returns are outside the herd.
Many of the most successful people started out as outcasts with nothing to lose.
To improve without willpower, change your self-image.
Everyone is motivated by something. Find yours.

What I'd pass on to my kids: read anything and everything, then learn math and persuasion.

The hard part isn't doing what you want. It's knowing what you want.
There are no real adults. Everyone is improvising.
Freedom used to mean freedom to do anything. Now it means freedom from anger, reaction and obligation.
Holding back keeps you in bad jobs and relationships for years instead of minutes.
Other people's expectations are their problem. Your agreements are yours.
Real courage is not caring what other people think.
Your time is all you have. Leave the moment something is wasting it.
Anger is a promise to suffer until reality changes.
Live well below your means and you'll know a freedom others can't imagine.
Once you've run your own life, it's hard to take orders again.
A busy mind makes time fly.

The meaning of life, three answers:

1. It's personal. Sit with the question until you find yours.
2. There isn't one. You were absent for billions of years before and will be after. Make your own.
3. Living things reverse entropy locally while speeding the universe toward sameness.

My values: total honesty, no short-term dealing, only peer relationships, no anger.
When values line up, small disagreements stop mattering.
To earn a worthy partner, become worthy of one.
Having a child moves the most important thing in the world out of your own body.

Rational Buddhism: keep what you can verify for yourself, and drop the rest.
If wisdom could be handed over in words, we'd all be done already.
There is only this moment.

Start with: Sapiens, The Beginning of Infinity, anything by Matt Ridley, Taleb, Krishnamurti, Marcus Aurelius and Feynman.