The Book in 3 Sentences

1. Everyone is capable of living a rich, happy and fulfilled life.
2. All you need to achieve your ideal lifestyle is the right knowledge and habits.
3. Its all in your hands.

Impressions

The Almanack of Naval Ravikant is a collection of entrepreneur, philosopher and investor Naval Ravikant’s wisdom and experience from the last ten years, shared as a curation of his most insightful interviews and reflections. It’s probably the best book I’ve read all year and easily one I would recommend to anyone. The book dives into topics such as wealth creation, happiness and changing your life in a perspicacious and easy to digest manner. It is full of insightful nuggets of wisdom, practical advice, and relatable anecdotes that will make you think and inspire you to take action. Genuinely worth the read.

Summary, Quotes & Notes

I. Wealth

How to Get Rich (without getting lucky):

Seek wealth, not money or status. Wealth is having assets that earn while you sleep. Money is how we transfer time and wealth. Status is your place in the social hierarchy.

Understand that ethical wealth creation is possible. If you secretly despise wealth, it will elude you.

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.

Pick an 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 figured this out yet.

Play iterated games. All the returns in life, whether in wealth, relationships, or knowledge, come from compound interest.

Pick business partners with high intelligence, energy, and, above all, integrity. Don't partner with cynics and pessimists. Their beliefs are self-fulfilling.

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 that you cannot be trained for. If society can train you, it can train someone else, and replace you.

Specific knowledge is found by pursuing your genuine curiosity and passion rather than whatever is hot right now.

Building specific knowledge will feel like play to you but will look like work to others.

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.

Embrace accountability, and take business risks under your own name. Society will reward you with responsibility, equity, and leverage.

The most accountable people have singular, public, and risky brands: Oprah, Trump, Kanye, Elon.

“Give me a lever long enough, and a place to stand, and I will move the earth.” - Archimedes

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 your specific knowledge, with accountability, and show resulting good judgment.

Capital means money. To raise money, apply your specific knowledge, with accountability, and show resulting good judgment.

Capital and labor are permissioned leverage. Everyone is chasing capital, but someone has to give it to you. Everyone is trying to lead, but someone has to follow you.

Code and media are permissionless leverage. They're the leverage behind the newly rich. You can create software and media that works for you while you sleep.

An army of robots is freely available - it's just packed in data centers for heat and space efficiency. Use it.

If you can't code, write books and blogs, record videos and podcasts.

Leverage is a force multiplier for your judgement.

Judgement requires experience, but can be built faster by learning foundational skills.

There is no skill called “business.” Avoid business magazines and business classes.

Study microeconomics, game theory, psychology, persuasion, ethics, mathematics, and computers.

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

You should be too busy to “do coffee," while still keeping an uncluttered calendar.

Set and enforce an aspirational personal hourly rate. If fixing a problem will save less than your hourly rate, ignore it. If outsourcing a task will cost less than your hourly rate, outsource it.

Work as hard as you can. Even though who you work with and what you work on are more important than how hard you work.

Become the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until this is true.

There are no get rich quick schemes. That's just someone else getting rich off you.

Apply specific knowledge, with leverage, and eventually you will get what you deserve.

When you're finally wealthy, you'll realise that it wasn't what you were seeking in the first place.

How 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. Luck becomes your destiny.

Always pay it forward and don’t keep count.

The direction you’re heading in matters more than how fast you move.

Its only after you get bored that you have great ideas.

Minimise your identity.

If faced with a difficult choice and you can’t decide, the answer is no.

Read what you love until you love to read.

Read the greats in math, science and philosophy.

No book in the library should scare you.

II. Happiness

Lower your identity, lower the chattering of your mind, don’t care about things that don’t really matter, don’t get involved in politics, don’t hang around unhappy people, value your time on this earth, read philosophy, meditate, hang around happy people, always positively interpret negative situations, get more sunlight, smile, be in awe of every moment, work out every day, drop caffeine, don’t keep secrets, listen to music, minimise screen activities, maximise off-screen activities, don’t take yourself so seriously, realise the news is designed to make you anxious and angry, stay optimistic, accept everything, step back and list bits of previous suffering in your life to put things in perspective, embrace death, don’t bother trying to leave a legacy - a whole civilisation is only a firefly blink in the night, think of life as a game, make someone laugh, do your work.

Happiness is a skill that can be learned.

Happiness is there when you remove the sense of something missing in your life.

Happiness is built by habits.

Happiness becomes easier over time.

Happiness requires presence.

Every desire is chosen unhappiness.

Success comes from dissatisfaction. Happiness is being satisfied with what you have. Choose.

Envy is the enemy of happiness.

Tell your friends you’re a happy person and you’ll be forced to conform to it.

Hedonic adaptation is more powerful for man-made things (cars, clothes) than natural things (food, exercise).

Changing habits: Pick one thing, cultivate a desire, visualise it. Plan a sustainable path. Identify needs, triggers and substitutes. Tell your friends. Track meticulously. Bake in the new self-image.

III. Saving yourself

You have to take responsibility for changing your life.

All you should do is what you want to do.

You’re never going to be good at being someone else.

Health should be your #1 priority.

Diet and nutrition are like politics - everyone thinks they’re an expert.

Daily morning exercise is the habit with the biggest positive impact on your life.

Cold exposure is important because it can activate your immune system.

Most of our suffering comes from avoidance.

Meditation is like intermittent fasting for the mind.

Life hack: when in bed, meditate. Either you will have a deep meditation or fall asleep. Victory either way.

One way of meditating is just closing your eyes and letting your thoughts run through your head. You will process and dissolve the experiences that have happened to you over your life. One day you will reach inbox zero and it will feel amazing.

Your mind can be trained and conditioned.

We’re a collection of thousands of habits constantly running subconsciously.

Set up systems, not goals.

For self-improvement without self-discipline, update your self-image.

Read everything you can.

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