Recently I read about this book “The Almanack of Naval Ravikant” by Eric Jorgenson. It’s a valuable guide to wealth and happiness, and I think this is an essential reading for everyone to live a fulfilling life.
Key takeaways from this book:
How to Get Rich (without getting lucky)
- Seek wealth, not money or status. Wealth is having assets that earn while you sleep.
- You’re not going to get rich renting out your time. You must own equity- a piece of 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.
- Pick and industry where you can play long term games with long term people.
- The internet has massively broadened the possible space of careers. Most people haven’t figure this out yet.
- Play iterated games. All returns in life, weather in wealth, relationships,or knowledge, come from compound interest.
- Pick business partners with high intelligence, energy and above all, integrity.
- Learn to sell. Learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable.
- 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 b 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.
- When specific knowledge is taught, it’s through apprenticeships, not schools.
- Specific knowledge is often highly technical or creative. It cannot be outsourced or automated.
- Fortunes require leverage. Business leverage comes from capital, people, and products with no marginal cost of replication (code and media).
- Capital means money. To raise money, apply you specific knowledge with accountability and show resulting good judgement.
- Labor means people working for you. It’s the oldest and most fought-over form of leverage. Labor leverage will impress your parents, but don’t waste your life chasing it.
- Capital and labor are permissioned leverage. Everyone is chasing capital, but someone has to give it to you.
- Code and media are permissionless leverage. There’re the leverage behind the newly rich. You can create software and media that works for you while you sleep.
- An army of robots are freely available-it’s just pack in data centers for heat and space efficiency. Use it.
- If you can’t code, write books and blogs, record videos and podcasts.
- Leverage is a force multiplier for your judgement.
- Judgement requires experience but can be built faster by learning foundational skills.
- 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.
- Apply specific knowledge, with leverage, and eventually you will get what you deserve.
- When you are finally wealthy, you’ll realise it wasn’t what you were seeking in the first place. But that is for another day.
- Summary : Productize Yourself.
Specific knowledge = 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. Your mother or your best friend growing up would know. Example:
- sales skills
- obsessive personality: you dive into things and remember them quickly
- love for science fiction: you were into reading sci-fi, which means you absorb a lot of knowledge very quickly
- playing a lot of games, you understand game theory pretty well
The specific knowledge is sort of this weird combination of unique traits from your DNA, your unique upbringing, and you response to it. It’s almost baked into your personality and your identify. Then you can hone it.
” No one can compete with you on being you. Most of life is a search for who and what needs you the most.”
Now you have to come up to speed on a new profession within nine months, and it’s obsolete four years later. But within those three productive years, you can get very wealthy.
Escape competition though authenticity.
If you don’t own a piece of a business, you don’t have a path towards financial freedom. You could own equity as a small shareholder where you bought stocks. You could also own it as an owner where you started the company. Ownership is really important. The real wealth is created by starting your own companies or even by investing. These are routes to wealth. It doesn”t come through the hours.
Knowledge only you know or only a small set of people knows is going to come out of your passions and your hobbies, oddly enough. 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 won 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.
“I am retured, I am not working”. Then, I had the time for whatever was my highest value project in from of me. By doing things for their own sake, I did them at their best.
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 are 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 you work is higher.
Follow your intellectual curiosity. If your curiosity ever leads you to a place where society eventually wants to go, you’ll get paid extremely well.
Think about what product or service society wants but does not yet know how to get. You want to become the person who delivers it and delivers it at scale. This is really the challenge of how to make money.
You are waiting for your moment when something emerges in the world, they need a skill set, and you are uniquely qualified. You build your brand in the meantime on Youtube, by giving away free work. You make name for yourself and you take some risk in the process. When it is time to move on the opportunity, you can do so with leverage- the maximum leverage possible.
Leverage: labour, money, new form of leverage: books, media, movies and code. Coding, writing books, recording podcasts, Youtubing – these kindsof things are permissionless.
“Earn with you mind , not your time”
“Find work that feels like play”
We just play games in life. When you grow up, you’re playing the school game, or you re playing the social game. Then you’re playing the money game, and then you are playing the status game. These games just have longer lived horizons. At some point, at least I believe, these are all just games. There are games where the outcome really stops mattering once you see through the game.
What you really want is freedom. You want freedom from your money problems, right? I think that’s okay. Once you can solve your money problems, either by lowering you lifestyle or making enough money, you want to retire.
What is your definition of retirement?
Retirement is when you stop sacrificing today for an imaginary tomorrow. When today is complete, in and of itself, you’re retired. Not retirement at 65 year-old, sitting in a nursing home collecting a check retirement-it’s a different definition.
How do you get there?
Well, one way is to have so much money saved that your passive income (without you lifting a finger) covers your burn rate.
A second is you just drive your burn rate down to zero-you become a monk.
A third is 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 fiture out how to map that to what society actually wants. Apply some leverage and put your name on it.
I can create a new business within 3 months:raise the money, assemble a team and luach it. It’s fun for me. It’s really cool to see what can I put together. It makes money almost as a side effect. Creating businesses is the game I became good at.
Even when I invest, it’s because I like the people involved, I learn from them, I think the product is really cool. These days, I will pass on great investments because I don’t find the products interesting.
There are not 100% or nothing things. You can start moving more and more toward that goal in your life. It’s a goal.
Do not upgrade your lifestyle as you make money. You may get so far ahead you actually become financially free.
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.
What making money will do is solve your money problems. It will remove a set of things that could get in the way of being happy, but it is not going to make you happy. I know many very wealthy people who are unhappy. Most of the time, the person you have to become to make money is high-anxiety, high-stress, hardworking, competitive person. When you have done that for twenty, thirty, forty,fifty years, and you suddenly make money, you can’t turn it off. You’ve trained yourself to be a high-anxiety person. Then, you have to learn how to be happy.
Let’s get you rich first. I’m very practical about it because, you know, Buddha was a prince. He started off really rich, then he got to go off in the woods.
In the old days, if you wanted to be peaceful inside, you would become a monk. You would give up everything, and you would go out in the woods by yourself. You had to give everything up to be free inside.
Today, with this wonderful invention called money, you can store it in a bank account. You can work really hard, do great things for society, and society will give you money for things it wants but doesn’t know how to get. You can save money, you can have a little below your means, and you can find a certain freedom.
That will give you the time and the energy to pursue your own internal peace and happiness. I believe the solution to making everybody happy is to give them what they want.
Let’s 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.”
” Doctors won’t make you healthy.”
“Nutritionist won’t make you slim”
“Teachers won’t make you smart”
“Gurus won’t make you calm”
“Mentors won’t make you rich”
“Trainers won’t make you fit.”
“Ultimately, you have to take responsibility.”
“Save yourself.”
“To make an original contribution, you have to be irrationally obsessed with something.”
My number one priority in life, above my happiness, above my family,above my work, is my own health. It starts with my physical health. Second, it’s my mental health. Third, is my spiritual health. Then, it’s my family’s health. Then, it’s my family’s well being. After that, I can go out and do whatever I need to do with the rest of the world.
“Nothing like a health problem to turn up the contrast dial for the rest of life.”
Health problems often make us reevaluate what truly matters in life.
“When everyone is sick, we no longer consider it a disease”
Sugar makes you hungry. Sugar signals to your body, “There’s this incredible food resource in the environment we’re not evolved for”, so you rush out to get sugar. The combination of sugar and fat together is really deadly. You’ve got to watch out for that in your diet.
I am not an expert, and the problem is diet and nutrition are like politics: everybody thinks they’re an expert. Their identity is wrapped up in it because what they’ve been eating or what they think they should be eating is obviously the correct answer.
“World’s simplest diet: the more processed the food, the less one should consume.”
” The harder the workout, the easier the day”
What habit would you say most positively impacts your life?
The daily morning workout. That has been a complete game changer. It’s made me feel healthier, younger. It’s made me not go out late. It came from one simple thing, which is everybody says,” I don’t have time.”. Basically, whenever you throw any so-called good habit at somebody, they’ll have an excuse for themselves. Usually the most common is ” I don’t have time.”. “I don’t have time” is just another way of saying ” It’s not my priority.” What you really have to do is say whether it is a priority or not. If something is your number one priority, then you will do it. That’s just the way life works. If you have got a fuzzy basket of ten or fifteen different priorities, you are going to end up getting none of them.
What I did was decide my number one priority in life, above my happiness, above my family, above my work, is my own health.
It starts with physical health, because my physical health became my number one priority, then I could never say I don’t have time. In the morning, I work out, and however long it takes is how long it takes. I do not start my day until I’ve worked out.
” One month of consistent yoga, and I feel 10 years younger. To stay flexible is to stay young”
How you make a habit doesn’t matter. Do something everyday. 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 or whatever. They’re missing the point. The important things is to do something everyday. It doesn’t matter what it is. The best workout for you is one you’re excited enough to do every day.
Like everything in life, if you are willing to make the short term sacrifice, you will have the long term benefit.
“Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life.”
Basically, if you are making the hard choices right now in what to eat, you’re not eating all the junk food you want, and making the hard choice to work out. So, your life long-term will be easy. You won’t be sick. You won’t be unhealthy. The same true of values. The same is true of saving up for a rainy day. the same is true of how you approach your relationships. If you make the easy choices right now, your overall life will be a lot harder.
Why is meditation so powerful?
Your breath is one of the few places where you autonomic nervous system meets your voluntary nervous system. It’s involuntary, but you can also control it.
Relaxed breathing tells your body you’re safe. Then, your forebrain doesn’t need as many resources as it normally does. Now, the extra energy can e sent to your hindbrain, and it can reroute those resources to the rest of your body.
Life hack: when in bed, meditate. Either you will have a deep meditation or fall asleep. Victory either way.
Meditation method is just sit there and you close your eyes for at least one hour a day. You surrender to what ever happens- don’t make any effort whatsoever. You make no effort for something, and you make no effort against anything. If there are thoughts running through your mind, you let the thoughts run.
For your entire life, things have been happening to you. Some good, some bad, most of which you have processed and dissolved, but a few stuck with you. Over time, more and more stuck with you, and they almost became like these barnacles stuck to you.
You lost you childhood sense of wonder and of being present and happy. You lost your inner happiness because you built up this personality of unresolved pain, errors, fears, and desires that glommed onto you like a bunch of barncales.
How do you get those barnacles off you? What happens in meditation is you’re sitting there and not resisting your mind. these things will start bubbling up. It’s like a giant inbox of unanswered emails, going back to your childhood. They will come out one by one, and you will be forced to deal with them.
You will be forced to resolve them. Resolving them doesn’t take any work-you just observe them. Now you’re an adult with some distance, time, and space from previous events, and you can just resolve them. You can be much more objective about how you view them.
Overtime, you will resolve a lot of these deep-seated unresolved things you have in your mind. Once they’re resolved, there will come a day when you sit down to meditate, and you’ll hit a mental “inbox zero”. When you open your mental “email” and there are none, that is pretty amazing feeling.
It’s a state of joy and bliss and peace. Once you have it, you don’t want to give it up. If you can get a free hour of bliss every morning, just by sitting closing your eyes, that is worth its weight in gold. It will change your life.
I recommend meditating one hour each morning because anything less is not enough time to really get deep into it. I would recommend if you really want to try meditation, try sixty days, you will be tired of listening to your own mind. You will have resolved a lot of the issues, or you have heard them enough to see through those fears and issues.
Meditation isn’t hard. All you have to do is sit there and do nothing. Just sit down. Close your eyes and say, ” I am just going to give myself a break for an hour. This is my hour off from life. This is the hour I’m not going to do anything.
If thoughts come, thoughts come. I am not going to fight them. I am not going to embrace them. I am not going to think harder about them. I am not going to reject them. I am just going to sit here for an hour with my eyes closed, and I’m going to do nothing. – like watching movie in the cinema, if i see myself into the screen, I will get back to my seat, take up the popcorn and continue watching it.
“The greatest superpower is the ability to change yourself”
Habits are everything – everything we are. We are trained into habits from when we are children, including potty training, when to cry and when not to. These things become habits- behaviors we learn and integrate into ourselves.
When we’re older, we’re collection of thousands of habits constantly running subconsciously. We have a little bit of extra brainpower in our neocortex for solving new problems. You become your habits.
This came to light for me when my trainer gave me a routine to do every single day. I had never worked out every single day before. It’s a light workout. It’s not tough on your body, but I did this workout every single day. I realised the incredible, astonishing transformation it had on my both physically and mentally.
To have peace of mind, you have to have peace of body first.
“I’ll set a more reasonable goal for myself. I can commit to that externally. I am going to work on that for the 3 or 6 months. When I get there, I’ll take the next step, as opposed to beating myself up over it.”
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 ultimately aren’t part of your mission.
When you have inspiration, act on it right then and there.
When you do them, you want to do them as quickly as you can while doing them well with your full attention. But then, you just have to be patient with the results because you’re dealing with complex systems and many people.
Choosing to grow yourself
Set up systems, not goals.
Use your judgement to figure out what kinds of environment you can thrive in, and then create an environment around you so you’re statistically likely to succeed.
I am not going to be the most successful person on the planet nor do I want to be. I just want to be the most successful version of myself while working the least hard possible.
The hardest thing is not doing what you want – it’s knowing what you want
Value your time. It’s all you have. It’s more important than your money. It’s more important than anything. Your time is all you have. Do not waste your time.
This doens’t means that you can’t relax. As long as you are doing what you want, it’s not a waste of your time. But if you are not spending your time doing what you want, and you are not earning, and you are not learning-what the heck are you doing?
Don’t spend your time making other people happy. Other people being happy is their problem. It’s not your problem. If you are happy, it makes other people happy. If you’re happy, other people will ask you how you became happy and they might learn from it, but you are not responsible for making other people happy.
Freedom from anger.
Anger is a way to signal as strongly as you can to the other party you’re capable of violence. Anger is pre-cursor to viloence. Observe when you’re angry- anger is a lost of control over situation. Anger is a contract you make with yourself to be in physical and mental and emotional turmoil until reality changes.
“Anger is its own punishments. An angry person trying to push your head below water is drowning at the same time.”
Freedom from employment
People who live far below their means enjoy a freedom that people busy upgrading their lifestyles can’t fathom.
Once you’ve truly controlled your own fate, for better or for worse, you’ll never let anyone else tell you what to do.
There is no endpoint to self-awareness and self discovery. It’s a lifelong process and you hopefully keep getting better and better at. There is no one meaningful answer, and no one is going to fully solve it unless you’re one of these enlightened characters.
Wisdom
Wisdom is understanding the long-term consequences of your actions.
The present is all we have.
There is actually nothing but this moment. No one has ever gone back in time, and no one has ever been able to successfully predict the future in any way that matters. Literally, the only thing that exists is this exact point where you are in space in the exact time you happen to be here.
Like all great profound truths, it’s all paradoxes. Any two points are infinitely different. Any moment is perfectly unique. Each moment itself slips by so quickly you can’t grab it.
You are dying and reborn at every moment. It’s up to you whether to forget or remember that.
If you had to pass down to your kids one or two principles, what would they be?
Number one:read. Read everything you can. Just read for its own sake. Develop a love for it. Just read it all. Eventually you’ll guide yourself to the things that you should and want to be reading.
Number two mathematics. 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 economics or investments or computers, all these things have mathematics at the core. It’s foundational language of nature.
Number three: persuasion. Persuasion is important because you can influence your fellow human beings, you can get a lot done. I think persuasion is an actual skill. So you can learn it, and it’s not that hard to do so.