Almanack of Naval Ravikant

A collection of Naval Ravikant's wisdom on building wealth, finding happiness, and achieving success through specific knowledge, accountability, leverage, and authentic self-discovery.

Find and build specific knowledge

Specific knowledge is found much more by pursuing your innate talents, your genuine curiosity, and your passion. It's not by going to school for whatever is the hottest job, nor is it by going into whatever field investors say is the hottest.

Foundations are super important.

Accountability

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.

We're still socially hardwired to not fail in public under our own names. The people who have the ability to fail in public under their own names actually gain a lot of power.

Find a position of leverage

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.

If you have hobbies around your intellectual curiosity, you're more likely to develop these passions. New forms of leverage are permissionless.

If you have specific knowledge, you have accountability, and you have leverage, then they have to pay you what you're worth.

Tools and leverage create this disconnection between inputs and outputs. The higher the creativity component of a profession, the more likely it is to have disconnected inputs and outputs.

Get paid for your judgment

I think every human should aspire to being knowledgeable about certain things and being paid for our unique knowledge. Judgment—especially demonstrated judgment, with high accountability and a clear track record—is critical.

Prioritize and focus

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. Always factor your time into every decision. How much time does it take?

Find work that feels like play

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.

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 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.

For someone who is early in their career and maybe even later, the 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

The 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. It's almost like mixing a petri dish or mixing a bunch of reagents and seeing what combines. 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.

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.

Be patient

Your real résumé is just a catalog of all your suffering.

Building judgment

If you want to make the maximum amount of money possible, if you want to get rich over your life in a deterministically predictable way, stay on the bleeding edge of trends and study technology, design, and art—become really good at something.

My definition of wisdom is knowing the long-term consequences of your actions. Wisdom applied to external problems is judgment.

How to think clearly

I think the smartest people can explain things to a child. A contrarian reasons independently from the ground up and resists pressure to conform. Optimistic contrarians are the rarest breed.

Learn the skills of decision-making

Radical honesty just means I want to be free.

I would combine radical honesty with an old rule Warren Buffett has, which is praise specifically, criticize generally. If you have a criticism of someone, then don't criticize the person—criticize the general approach or criticize the class of activities. If you have to praise somebody, then always try and find the person who is the best example of what you're praising and praise the person specifically. Then people's egos and identities, which we all have, don't work against you. They work for you.

Charisma is the ability to project confidence and love at the same time. It's almost always possible to be honest and positive.

Collect mental models

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

If you can't decide, the answer is no.

Happiness

You're just a monkey with a plan. Nature has no concept of happiness or unhappiness. Nature follows unbroken mathematical laws and a chain of cause and effect from the Big Bang to now. 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.

The world just reflects your own feelings back at you. Reality is neutral. Reality has no judgments. To a tree, there is no concept of right or wrong, good or bad.

Happiness requires presence

We're like bees or ants. We are such social creatures, we're externally programmed and driven. We don't know how to play and win these single-player games anymore. We compete purely in multiplayer games.

Happiness is built by habits

Essentially, you have to go through your life replacing your thoughtless bad habits with good ones, making a commitment to be a happier person. Identify your own values and manage your expectations.

Choosing to care for yourself

Usually the most common excuse is "I don't have time." "I don't have time" is just another way of saying "It's not a 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.

Meditation and mental strength

I'm strongly against the idea of ice baths. But Wim inspired me to give cold showers a try. And I did so by using the Wim Hof breathing method. It involves hyperventilating to get more oxygen into your blood, which raises your core temperature. Then you can go into the shower.

I learned a very important lesson from this: most of our suffering comes from avoidance. Understanding the long-term consequences of your actions is how you define wisdom.