The Almanack Of Naval Ravikant: Lessons Learned/

Naval Ravikant is an entrepreneur, philosopher, and investor best known for co-founding AngelList. A prolific early-stage investor, he has backed companies like Twitter, Uber, and Stack Overflow. Beyond his entrepreneurial pursuits, Naval is admired for his insightful reflections on wealth, happiness, and personal growth, shared through his popular podcast appearances, social media, and writings. Naval is a hero of mine that I admire and study often in my own pursuit of mastery.

Do you want to learn how one of the greatest thinkers in Silicon Valley says you can get rich without getting lucky? Do you want to know why ultimately, that wealth is not what you wanted anyways? Then let’s get started.

Understand How Wealth Is Created

Making money is not a thing you do—it’s a skill you learn. Getting rich is about knowing what to do, who to do it with, and when to do it. Understand ethical wealth creation is possible. If you secretly despise wealth, it will elude you.

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. 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.

Specific Knowledge

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 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.

This is a great parallel to Paul Graham’s essay How To Do Great Work where he talks about following your curiosity and doing things that are excitingly ambitious. He also talks about going to the center of innovation in your field. Which in a way making sure you find the right people to play long term games with is also touching on. You need to surround yourself with the right type of people.

Leverage

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

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.

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. 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.

If you can’t code, write books and blogs, record videos and podcasts.
Leverage is a force multiplier for your judgment.

Again and again we learn about the concept of leverage and the power of exponential curves. Leverage helps you to build a career on the foundation of an exponential curve. It allows you to add a force multiplier to the work you are doing. If all you ever do is work for an hourly wage, you will never gain the force multiplier of leverage. You must identify forms of leverage that align with your work and deploy them so that you can create outsized returns. I think about this more and more as an entrepreneur, where in the early days our business had very little value beyond what we would grind to bring in… these days through investing in the leverage of media and our website, we have created an engine for traffic and leads that create a sustained business that continues to grow on its own. This is just one example of the leverage that we are applying but something that is so clear to me but was not so clear in the early days.

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.

I could certainly benefit from reflecting more on this. Identifying what you are truly gifted at is one of the great joys of life and something that continues to evolve as you move through your career.

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

Your summary says “Productize yourself”—what does that mean? “Productize” and “yourself.” “Yourself” has uniqueness. “Productize” has leverage. “Yourself” has accountability. “Productize” has specific knowledge. “Yourself” also has specific knowledge in there. So all of these pieces, you can combine them into these two words.

I think this is a great framing of this section of the book. Productize Yourself. What you You Inc look like as a product? How would you function best in the market, what value do you provide. This is what you at SCALE can provide for the world.

Technology democratizes consumption but consolidates production. The best person in the world at anything gets to do it for everyone.
The internet has massively broadened the possible space of careers. Most people haven’t figured this out yet.

This is a really important concept. You might read this as “I can do anything” but you should be careful as there is also an exponential curve here. Yes, you can do anything, but the best of the best will get the exponential side of the curve. So really you need to work harder than ever to figure out what it is that you can be the best in the world at.

Find and Build Specific Knowledge

No one can compete with you on being you. Most of life is a search for who and what needs you the most.

This is just more support for the concept of Productizing Yourself. Nobody else can compete at being YOU.

Find A Position of Leverage

If it entertains you now but will bore you someday, it’s a distraction. Keep looking.

I really like this quote. It is basically saying the fundamental truth that you need to be ready to stick with things for the long run. Overnight successes and get rich schemes don’t exist, or at least they don’t exist to the degree that you mind as well just consider they don’t. To win in anything significant that will actually bring you fulfillment then you need to be willing to master that which you are working with. You need to be willing to work at it for years, to get to the frontiers of knowledge and push the craft forward.

Forty hour work weeks are a relic of the Industrial Age. Knowledge workers function like athletes—train and sprint, then rest and reassess.

If you want to be part of a great tech company, then you need to be able to SELL or BUILD. If you don’t do either, learn.

Earn with your mind, not your time.

If you’re going to live in a city for ten years, if you’re going to be in a job for five years, if you’re in a relationship for a decade, you should be spending one to two years deciding these things. These are highly dominating decisions. Those three decisions really matter.

Value your time at an hourly rate, and ruthlessly spend to save time at that rate. You will never be worth more than you think you’re worth.

I could probably benefit from reflecting on this more. Let’s say today if I am building a business that is going to be worth over 1M USD. Then my time is work maybe $1,000 per hour. I should not be working for less than that. The time that I spend should be on building the systems that can run without me. It would probably benefit me a lot to ask “what am I doing that could be automated or could be improved with a new team member”

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.

Whether in commerce, science, or politics—history remembers the artists. Art is creativity. Art is anything done for its own sake.

This is exactly how I feel about podcasting and creating content about topics I am actually interested in. Way too early to say anything but I feel really good about what we are focused on. I also feel this way about building businesses. I just love business and always have.

I value freedom above everything else. All kinds of freedom: freedom to do what I want, freedom from things I don’t want to do, freedom from my own emotions or things that may disturb my peace. For me, freedom is my number one value.

The winners of any game are the people who are so addicted they continue playing even as the marginal utility from winning declines.

What is he really saying here. He is saying that originally you make a killing doing this. But as you go on you make less and less. Instead of 10K per day you only make 2K per day. This does not impact your drive since you are doing it for the sake of doing it, not for the return. This also reminds me a bit of Paul Graham talking about how the early days of an exponential curve feel like a boring flat curve… but in reality they are building blocks of a beautiful exponential curve.

How To Get Lucky

I think business networking is a complete waste of time.
“Be a maker who makes something interesting people want. Show your craft, practice your craft, and the right people will eventually find you.”
Ways 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. Refine what you do until this is true. Opportunity will seek you out. Luck becomes your destiny.

I like that this goes again conventional wisdom of networking… it is more simple. Just build something great and your network will find you.

Be Patient

One thing I figured out later in life is generally (at least in the tech business in Silicon Valley), great people have great outcomes. You just have to be patient. Every person I met at the beginning of my career twenty years ago, where I looked at them and said, “Wow, that guy or gal is super capable—so smart and dedicated”… all of them, almost without exception, became extremely successful. You just had to give them a long enough timescale. It never happens in the timescale you want, or they want, but it does happen.

It never happens in the timeline you want. You should learn this from a young age. It will help you to be a lot happier in life. As Jensen Huang the founder of Nvidia says, people with high expectations are usually very unhappy… because in life you will meet failure and you it will take longer than you want. People with really high expectations doing handle these setbacks well, they break. It is those that can keep moving forward that realize their grand visions.

Everybody wants to get rich immediately, but the world is an efficient place; immediate doesn’t work. You do have to put in the time. You do have to put in the hours, and so I think you have to put yourself in the position with the specific knowledge, with accountability, with leverage, with the authentic skill set you have, to be the best in the world at what you do. You have to enjoy it and keep doing it, keep doing it, and keep doing it. Don’t keep track, and don’t keep count because if you do, you will run out of time.

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 a high-anxiety, high-stress, hard-working, 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.

Judgement

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.

Hard work is really overrated. How hard you work matters a lot less in the modern economy. What is underrated? Judgment. Judgment is underrated.

Can you define judgment? 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. In an age of leverage, one correct decision can win everything. Without hard work, you’ll develop neither judgment nor leverage. You have to put in the time, but the judgment is more important. The direction you’re heading in matters more than how fast you move, especially with leverage. Picking the direction you’re heading in for every decision is far, far more important than how much force you apply. Just pick the right direction to start walking in, and start walking.

How To Develop Good Judgement

Naval repeatedly underscores that reading, thinking, and learning from mistakes are the primary ways to refine judgment. He urges people to read widely (philosophy, science, economics, history) and think deeply about what they’re reading so that over years—decades—you develop a highly calibrated “gut” that discerns what’s important and what’s not.

Charlie Munger is famous for his idea of a “latticework of mental models.” Essentially, you develop good judgment by understanding fundamental principles from multiple disciplines—psychology, biology, mathematics, engineering—and then apply them to real-world scenarios. Munger’s brand of “worldly wisdom” aligns well with Naval’s emphasis on reading widely.

Charlie Munger is famous for his idea of a “latticework of mental models.” Essentially, you develop good judgment by understanding fundamental principles from multiple disciplines—psychology, biology, mathematics, engineering—and then apply them to real-world scenarios. Munger’s brand of “worldly wisdom” aligns well with Naval’s emphasis on reading widely.

Confucius – Ritual and Proper Conduct (Li): Confucius places emphasis on performing daily rituals and social interactions with respect and mindfulness. By practicing “li,” you cultivate a sense of harmony and moral awareness.

Study and Emulate Role Models: Learning from those who exemplify virtue—teachers, elders, and historical figures—is central. Confucius himself said, “By three methods we may learn wisdom: first, by reflection; second, by imitation; and third, by experience.”

Nassim Taleb – you need to have skin in the game in order for you to gain true wisdom or mastery. Any career or occupation where you don’t have direct skin in the game will not give you the adversity you need to really refine your skill against reality.

How To Think Clearly

“Clear thinker” is a better compliment than “smart.”

Real knowledge is intrinsic, and it’s built from the ground up. To use a math example, you can’t understand trigonometry without understanding arithmetic and geometry. Basically, if someone is using a lot of fancy words and a lot of big concepts, they probably don’t know what they’re talking about. I think the smartest people can explain things to a child. If you can’t explain it to a child, then you don’t know it. It’s a common saying and it’s very true.

The more desire I have for something to work out a certain way, the less likely I am to see the truth. Especially in business, if something isn’t going well, I try to acknowledge it publicly and I try to acknowledge it publicly in front of my co-founders and friends and co-workers. Then, I’m not hiding it from anybody else. If I’m not hiding it from anybody, I’m not going to delude myself from what’s actually going on.

It’s actually really important to have empty space. If you don’t have a day or two every week in your calendar where you’re not always in meetings, and you’re not always busy, then you’re not going to be able to think.

It’s only after you’re bored you have the great ideas. It’s never going to be when you’re stressed, or busy, running around or rushed. Make the time.

I need to be much more disciplined about this. I notice how powerful it is when I really give myself the space and time to think but I am not as good about keeping the routine.

Very smart people tend to be weird since they insist on thinking everything through for themselves.

Shed Your Identity to See Reality

Facebook redesigns. Twitter redesigns. Personalities, careers, and teams also need redesigns. There are no permanent solutions in a dynamic system.

This is the fundamental truth of evolution. We must evolve to win in our ecosystem. We must be looking to rethink ourselves from the ground up.

Learn the Skills of Decision-Making

It’s really important for me to be honest. I don’t go out of my way volunteering negative or nasty things. I would combine radical honesty with an old rule Warren Buffett has, which is praise specifically, criticize generally. I try to follow this. I don’t always follow it, but I think I follow it enough to have made a difference in my life.

Decision-making is everything. In fact, someone who makes decisions right 80 percent of the time instead of 70 percent of the time will be valued and compensated in the market hundreds of times more.

Again the power of judgement. This is a super Important concept… something to really think more about. Jeff Bezos has a great saying that you should be careful of 1 way doors and quick with revolving doors. Really slow to make decisions that are hard or impossible to go back on and really quick with decisions you can easily change.

The more you know, the less you diversify.

Collect Mental Models

The best mental models I have found came through evolution, game theory, and Charlie Munger.
Inversion I don’t believe I have the ability to say what is going to work. Rather, I try to eliminate what’s not going to work. I think being successful is just about not making mistakes. It’s not about having correct judgment. It’s about avoiding incorrect judgments.
Complexity Theory I was really into complexity theory back in the mid-90s. The more I got into it, the more I understand the limits of our knowledge and the limits of our prediction capability. Complexity has been super helpful to me. It has helped me come to a system that operates in the face of ignorance. I believe we are fundamentally ignorant and very, very bad at predicting the future.
Julius Caesar famously said, “If you want it done, then go. And if not, then send.” What he meant was, if you want it done right, then you have to go yourself and do it. When you are the principal, then you are the owner—you care, and you will do a great job. When you are the agent and you are doing it on somebody else’s behalf, you can do a bad job. You just don’t care. You optimize for yourself rather than for the principal’s assets.
The more closely you can tie someone’s compensation to the exact value they’re creating, the more you turn them into a principal, and the less you turn them into an agent.
Reading science, math, and philosophy one hour per day will likely put you at the upper echelon of human success within seven years.

Learn To Love To Read

The genuine love for reading itself, when cultivated, is a superpower. We live in the age of Alexandria, when every book and every piece of knowledge ever written down is a fingertip away. The means of learning are abundant—it’s the desire to learn that is scarce.

These days, I find myself rereading as much (or more) as I do reading. A tweet from @illacertus said, “I don’t want to read everything. I just want to read the 100 great books over and over again.” I think there’s a lot to that idea. It’s really more about identifying the great books for you because different books speak to different people. Then, you can really absorb those.

Reading a book isn’t a race—the better the book, the more slowly it should be absorbed.

It’s not about “educated” vs. “uneducated.” It’s about “likes to read” and “doesn’t like to read.” What can I do for the next sixty days to become a clearer, more independent thinker? Read the greats in math, science, and philosophy. Ignore your contemporaries and news. Avoid tribal identification. Put truth above social approval.

No book in the library should scare you. Whether it’s a math, physics, electrical engineering, sociology, or economics book. You should be able to take any book down off the shelf and read it. A number of them are going to be too difficult for you. That’s okay—read them anyway. Then go back and reread them and reread them.

I certainly feel that I should be pushing myself more to read more technical and mathmatical material. Math is quite simple once you get it. The symbols just throw you off because you are like wait… what is that symbol… some strange alien language. When actually it is just a + symbol that you don’t know yet. Sure a bit more complicated but it is just a derivative 🙂

The best way to have a high-quality foundation (you may not love this answer), but the trick is to stick to science and to stick to the basics. Generally, there are only a few things you can read people don’t disagree with. Very few people disagree 2 + 2 = 4, right? That is serious knowledge. Mathematics is a solid foundation.

You know that song you can’t get out of your head? All thoughts work that way. Careful what you read.

A calm mind, a fit body, and a house full of love. These things cannot be bought. They must be earned.

Part II: Happiness

The three big ones in life are wealth, health, and happiness. We pursue them in that order, but their importance is reverse.

Maybe happiness is not something you inherit or even choose, but a highly personal skill that can be learned, like fitness or nutrition.

Happiness is a very evolving thing, I think, like all the great questions. When you’re a little kid, you go to your mom and ask, “What happens when we die? Is there a Santa Claus? Is there a God? Should I be happy? Who should I marry?” Those kinds of things. There are no glib answers because no answers apply to everybody. These kinds of questions ultimately do have answers, but they have personal answers. The answer that works for me is going to be nonsense to you, and vice versa. Whatever happiness means to me, it means something different to you. I think it’s very important to explore what these definitions are.

For some people I know, it’s a flow state. For some people, it’s satisfaction. For some people, it’s a feeling of contentment. My definition keeps evolving. The answer I would have given you a year ago will be different than what I tell you now. Today, I believe happiness is really a default state. Happiness is there when you remove the sense of something missing in your life. We are highly judgmental survival-and-replication machines. We constantly walk around thinking, “I need this,” or “I need that,” trapped in the web of desires. Happiness is the state when nothing is missing. When nothing is missing, your mind shuts down and stops running into the past or future to regret something or to plan something.

To me, happiness is not about positive thoughts. It’s not about negative thoughts. It’s about the absence of desire, especially the absence of desire for external things. The fewer desires I can have, the more I can accept the current state of things, the less my mind is moving, because the mind really exists in motion toward the future or the past. The more present I am, the happier and more content I will be. If I latch onto a feeling, if I say, “Oh, I’m happy now,” and I want to stay happy, then I’m going to drop out of that happiness. Now, suddenly, the mind is moving. It’s trying to attach to something. It’s trying to create a permanent situation out of a temporary situation.

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. You’re born, you have a whole set of sensory experiences and stimulations (lights, colors, and sounds), and then you die. How you choose to interpret them is up to you—you have that choice. 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.

I’ve also come to believe in the complete and utter insignificance of the self, and I think that helps a lot. For example, if you thought you were the most important thing in the Universe, then you would have to bend the entire Universe to your will. If you’re the most important thing in the Universe, then how could it not conform to your desires. If it doesn’t conform to your desires, something is wrong. However, if you view yourself as a bacteria or an amoeba—or if you view all of your works as writing on water or building castles in the sand, then you have no expectation for how life should “actually” be. Life is just the way it is. When you accept that, you have no cause to be happy or unhappy. Those things almost don’t apply

Don’t take yourself so seriously. You’re just a monkey with a plan.

These concepts remind me of Jensen talking about people with high expectations are not very happy as then inevitably face failure and are not able to handle it. You should have a process that will lead to mastery and will lead to doing great work. However, don’t take yourself so seriously along the way. Just be grateful and enjoy the ride. You are just dust in the wind.

We think of ourselves as fixed and the world as malleable, but it’s really we who are malleable and the world is largely fixed.

I have lowered my identity. I have lowered the chattering of my mind. I don’t care about things that don’t really matter. I don’t get involved in politics. I don’t hang around unhappy people. I really value my time on this earth. I read philosophy. I meditate. I hang around with happy people. And it works.

Happiness, love, and passion… aren’t things you find—they’re choices you make.

Happiness is a choice you make and a skill you develop.

We crave experiences that will make us be present, but the cravings themselves take us from the present moment.

I just don’t believe in anything from my past. Anything. No memories. No regrets. No people. No trips. Nothing. A lot of our unhappiness comes from comparing things from the past to the present.

There’s a great definition I read: “Enlightenment is the space between your thoughts.” It means enlightenment isn’t something you achieve after thirty years sitting on a mountaintop. It’s something you can achieve moment to moment, and you can be enlightened to a certain percent every single day.

This reminds me of The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle and how he finds job in just being.

What if this life is the paradise we were promised, and we’re just squandering it?

The kingdom of heaven is here now.

I think a lot of us have this low-level pervasive feeling of anxiety. If you pay attention to your mind, sometimes you’re just running around doing your thing and you’re not feeling great, and you notice your mind is chattering and chattering about something. Maybe you can’t sit still… There’s this “nexting” thing where you’re sitting in one spot thinking about where you should be next. It’s always the next thing, then the next thing, the next thing after that, then the next thing after that creating this pervasive anxiety. It’s most obvious if you ever just sit down and try and do nothing, nothing. I mean nothing, I mean not read a book, I mean not listen to music, I mean literally just sit down and do nothing. You can’t do it, because there’s anxiety always trying to make you get up and go, get up and go, get up and go. I think it’s important just being aware the anxiety is making you unhappy. The anxiety is just a series of running thoughts.

Every Desire Is a Chosen Unhappiness

I think the most common mistake for humanity is believing you’re going to be made happy because of some external circumstance. I know that’s not original. That’s not new. It’s fundamental Buddhist wisdom—I’m not taking credit for it. I think I really just recognize it on a fundamental level, including in myself.

The fundamental delusion: There is something out there that will make me happy and fulfilled forever.

One thing I’ve learned recently: it’s way more important to perfect your desires than to try to do something you don’t 100 percent desire.
By the time people realize they have enough money, they’ve lost their time and their health.

Success Does Not Earn Happiness

The trick is knowing when to jump off and play instead.

To me, the real winners are the ones who step out of the game entirely, who don’t even play the game, who rise above it. Those are the people who have such internal mental and self-control and self-awareness, they need nothing from anybody else.

I am on the hamster wheel even now. I do not jump off and just play enough. Yes it will slow down the business. Yes, it might not be conventional wisdom. But I believe that in this play and joy I will really cultivate the life that I am looking for.

There’s a line from Blaise Pascal I read. Basically, it says: “All of man’s troubles arise because he cannot sit in a room quietly by himself.” If you could just sit for thirty minutes and be happy, you are successful. That is a very powerful place to be, but very few of us get there.

In reality, peace is not a guarantee. It’s always flowing. It’s always changing. You want to learn the core skill set of flowing with life and accepting it in most cases.

Envy is the Enemy of Happiness

I don’t think life is that hard. I think we make it hard. One of the things I’m trying to get rid of is the word “should.” Whenever the word “should” creeps up in your mind, it’s guilt or social programming. Doing something because you “should” basically means you don’t actually want to do it. It’s just making you miserable, so I’m trying to eliminate as many “shoulds” from my life as possible.

The enemy of peace of mind is expectations drilled into you by society and other people.

Happiness Is Built by Habits

If you can’t see yourself working with someone for life, don’t work with them for a day.

No exceptions—all screen activities linked to less happiness, all non-screen activities linked to more happiness. 11 A personal metric: how much of the day is spent doing things out of obligation rather than out of interest?

This concludes my favorite lessons and thoughts from my readings of The Almanack Of Naval Ravikant. Naval is one of my all time favorite thinkers, someone I go back to again and again. I hope that this gave you at least some inspiration or a new way of thinking that will allow you to continue in your pursuit of mastery. Cheers!