Before you read…

1. What’s this book about? This is a distilation of the wisdom and principles shared by Naval Ravikant through social media, which have been carefully compilated and crafted into a life-changing book by author Eric Jorgenson.

2. How should you read it? This is a book built on transcripts, tweets and interviews. Every word in this book is a literal excerpt from something Naval said, so eventhough it´s a book, it should be understood as a compilation of ideas divided into chapters.

Who is Naval Ravikant?

Ask ChatGPT and it will tell you that Naval is a entrepreneur, angel investor, and philosopher known for his profound insights on wealth, happiness, and life. He is the co-founder of AngelList, a platform that connects startups with investors, and has invested early in companies like Twitter, Uber, and Yammer.

But in reality, he’s much more than that.

As entrepreneur and award winning author Tim Ferris puts it: Naval is one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, and he’s also one of the most courageous.

His intelect, bluntness, curiosity, track record of business success and above all, his insights of what success trully stands for, has placed Naval in the pedestal of modern thinkers and rightfully earned him the reputation he so deeply deserves.

The pillars of prosperity

Condisering the philosophical and business savant is Naval, he could spend countless hours preaching about a myriad of subjects, yet this books deals specifically with two pivotal yet contentious subjects.

Wealth & Happiness

Just like Prometheus stealing fire from Mount Olympus to deliver it to humanity in order to deliver them from their suffering and release them from the darkness, Naval brings with him a series of burning insights gained from endless research and personal experience on how to achieve both wealth and happiness without losing oneself in the process, thus offering a roadmap to living a more meaningful and succesfull life.

Wealth: The skill of making money

Seldom would you find a word so overused yet so micsonceived as success.

Often associated with financial abundance and a life of overindulgance, success true meaning has been butchered to a simple yet egregious definition for what we should aspire in life.

Naval takes a different approach, paying no mind to modern interpretations and instead offers a “handbook” for how-to achieve a life filled with financial independence, personal fulfillment and inner peace.

True success, if you will.

And how can you attain such prosperous life style?

Well, thanks to Eric Jorgenson’s fantastic distilation on Naval’s teachings, the book is divided into the two subjects mentioned before, thought that may be an oversimplifaction of a more nuanced book. In reality there’s 5 core ideas:

1. Building wealth

2. Building judgement

3. Learning happiness

4. Saving yourself

5. Philosophy

Each with a myriad of teachings and lessons to be learned.

So without further adue, let’s get to it.

Building Wealth

Reading Naval’s tips on building wealth feels like a mixture of a “Building wealth for dummies” book while being lectured by your dad.

At first sight, the concepts he introduces are pretty simple and dare to say basic, yet every single time he delivers life-changing lessons.

Think about it this way.

As Naval puts it:

It’s easy to get rich, as long as you know how to do it.

And make no mistake, this isn’t a book focused on becoming a millionaire, but rather a how-to-guide on living a successful life while not worrying about money.

Naval does a fantastic job defying traditional believes that becoming rich is a nearly impossible endeavour yet at the same time showing how difficult it truly is to acquire wealth.

So, as an attempt not to extend this postfurther than it should, here’s some basic principles you should follow.

• Embrace compound interest in every aspect of your life: Anything good that can be multiplied is something we should all strive for.

• Productize yourself: A good reputation is not key to success, it’s a requirement.

• Play iterated games (positive sum games): Relationships, money, and business, are examples of long-term games that require you to seek a win-win situation.

• Optimize yourself: Don’t grind at a lot of hard work until you figure out what that is: It’s better to try everything and know your path than to grind hard at the wrong rock.

• Find and build specific knowledge: You’re as valuable as people make you. A master of none may be usefull, but highly specific knowledge is what will make you rich.

• Follow your inner talents, curiosity and passion: “Escape competition through authenticity. No one can beat you at being you.

• Take on accoutnability: We’re hardwired to avoid failing in public, but doing so gives you credibility, and that’s something you can’t put a price on,.

• Build or buy equity in a business: It’s all about passive income. Your inputs should never be closely tied to your outputs.

• Find a position of leverage: “Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand, and I will move the earth.” — Archimedes. Following your genuine intellectual curiosity is a better foundation of a career than whatever is making money right now.

• Earn with your mind, not your time: Build specific knowledge and create passive income out of it.

• Get paid for your judgment: Getting paid on your judgment means people don’t carfe about the how or what, they just care about the outputs.

• Impatience for action, patience for results: “True wealth is built over time. Not in a single moment.

• Spend time making big decisions: Where to live, who to marry, and what to do are dicisons that will shape your life for decades to come. Never take them lightly.

• Find work that feels like play: You’ll know what that is because you love it, not because you’re better at it.

• Learn to get lucky: Leave nothing to chance. Be the best at what you do and opportunity will seek you out.

• Shape your Karma: People are oddly consistent. They repeat their patterns, virtues and flaws until you get what you deserve.

Building Judgment

It was Naval who said “specific knowledge cannot be taught, it must be learned”, the same applies to judgment.

What is judgment if nothing more than a skill to develop. An assortment of all our learnings condensed into the ability to ponder and analyse effectively.

But judgment is so much more than that.

Mirriam Webster’s dictionary define judgment as “the process of forming an opinion or evaluation by discerning and comparing”, but honestly, I’ll stick with Naval’s definition.

“My definition of wisdom is knowing the long-term consequences of your actions. Wisdom applied to external problems is judgment. They’re highly linked; knowing the long-term consequences of your actions and then making the right decision to capitalize on that.”

Thus, judgment is one of the most if not the most valuable skill we must develop.

It is the compilation of all our expertise and our ability to condense our forecasting abilities into one simple decision.

So, how do you harness it?

• Thinking clearly: Schedule time to think. How can you have better ideas if you don’t give yourself time for them.

• Shed your identity: Ego is the enemy. Don’t be afraid to change and redesign yourself. There are no permanent solutions in a dynamic system.

• Improve your decision-making skills: Almost all biases are time-saving heuristics. The ability to look at things unbiased is a rare one, but incredibly powerful as well.

• Collect mental models: This are just compact ways to recall your own knowledge. Whether that be books, lessons or else, find ways to keep it close.

• Love to read: The world is no longer about “educated” vs. “uneducated.” It’s about “likes to read” and “doesn’t like to read”. If you’re a perpetual learning machine, you will never be out of options for how to make money.

Happiness: Choice or emotion?

Such a small word yet it carries with it a myriad of definitions, tons of philosophical debates and has encouraged thousands of scholars throughout history to dedicate their lives to such endeavor.

So, one would hope, given the amount of remarkably intelligent individuals who have dedicated their research to such “concept”, a unified definition and clear understanding would’ve been achieved.

Unfortunately, you couldn’t be further from the truth.

It was the ancient Greeks with the help or Aristotle who offered a seminal definition of happiness, something they called “eudamonia”, the ultimate life’s goal.

He argued that true happiness would be achieved by living a life of virtue and fulfilling ones unique human potential.

Every since, Western notions of what it means to be happy have changed throughout history arriving to it’s latest definition:

The state of showing pleasure or contentment.

An emotion, if you will.

Though happiness is so much more than that...

Though there isn´t a perfect step-by-step recipe for achieving hapiness, Naval offers some guidance that you can use to be happier.

Learning happiness

Before moving on to more complicated concepts, we must first understand Naval´s definition of happiness.

“Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.” - Naval Ravikant

It´s clear that there´s a significant connection between happines and desire, an inversely proportional connection to be precise.

The more desires we have, the less happy we are.

It´s actually a pretty straightforward equation and the reason is quite simple. Once you have a desire for something, it means you want to change the way things are, thus, you´re unhappy with what you have.

So, for you to be truly happy, you must be accept and appreciate what you haveand not rely on a future happiness that might not arrive.

We must practice gratitude. Something even science concluded is an effective tool for increasing happiness.

And if happiness really depends on us, that means we can harness it, we can train it, we can ultimately….learn it.

“This is what I mean when I say happiness is a choice. If you believe it’s a choice, you can start working on it.” - Naval Ravikant

So here I present to you Naval tips on learning true happiness:

• Happiness requires pressence: We crave experiences that will make us be present, but the cravings themselves take us from the present moment. It’s only now that we can be trully happy.

• Happiness requires peace: “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 most common mistake for humanity is believing you’re going to be made happy because of some external circumstance.

• Success does not earn happiness: “Happiness is being satisfied with what you have. Success comes from dissatisfaction. Choose.”

• Envy is the enemy of happiness: “The enemy of peace of mind is expectations drilled into you by society and other people.”

• Happiness is built by habbits: “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…You decide it’s important to you. You prioritize it above everything else. You read everything on the topic.”

• Find happiness in acceptance: “One great hack to achieve acceptance is to look back at previous bits of suffering and see what good came out of them. Or asking yourself as something bad happens “what good will come out of this?”. There’s always something good.”

As if that wasn’t enough, here’s some habits you can develop to improve your own perception of happiness, as discussed by Naval:

HAPPINESS HABITS

1. Meditation: Understanding how your mind works

2. More sunlight on your skin

3. Dropping caffeine

4. Working out every day

5. Judge less

6. Tell people you’re a happy person. Then you’ll be forced to conform to it.

7. Minimize the use of the following apps: phone, calendar, and alarm clock.

8. The more secrets you have, the less happy you’re going to be.

9. More non-screen activities.

10. Try to lower the amount of things yo do out of obligation rather than out of interest.

Save yourself

If there’s one thing, one concept that you should take away from this book is that:

EVERYTHING IS A SKILL. EVERYTHING CAN BE LEARNED.

A rather empowering statement if you ask me.

This is one of the reasons I’ve come to appreciate Naval as much as I have. Because of all that he preaches, choosing to build yourself, to work on yourself, is the most important one of all.

As Naval has tirelessly repeated throughout his book, everything from business to happiness can be learned, thus it can he practiced, and it can be improved.

If you find you’re lacking in one area, then it’s your responsibility to work on it, improve it, do everything in your power to change the way things are.

Not because you should, but because you can.

Because every dollar, every minute you invest in yourself it’s gonna be multiplied in the future.That’s the beauty of compound interest.

So if there’s one thing you must remember is that you’re most powerfull asset, it’s not your money, your skills, your job, it’s you.

You should be your number 1 priority.

Rational Budhism

Take nothing for granted.

So is the concept of Rational Budhism introduced by naval.

A mixture between Budhism and rational thinking in which he doesn´t rely on mystical or religious elements but rather tries and tests everything for himself.

Because at the end of the day, this are just words, and for you to experience actua; change, you must transform them into actions.

And remember:

THE PRESENT IS ALL WE HAVE.

This was a summay of a fantastic book by bestselling author Eric Jorgenson called The Almanack of Naval Ravikant.

Naval Ravikant is aNaval Ravikant is an entrepreneur, investor, and thinker known for his insights on wealth, happiness, and startups. He co-founded AngelList, has invested early in companies like Twitter and Uber, and shares wisdom on philosophy, business, and personal development. His principles on wealth creation and self-improvement have gained widespread influence, especially through his podcast and writings.

If you wish to learn more about sleep I strongly encourage you to read his book.

Also, here’s a link of my personal notes on his book in case you want a quicker dive into it:

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Morning Bites

Small Bites. Big Ideas.

As always, thank you so much for reading, and I’ll see you next week.

Live for more,
Luis Beltran
Quito, Ecuador