14 Oct [Book thoughts] Specialisation is for insects

The Almanack of Naval Ravikant – Book by Eric Jorgenson

Here’s someone who’s figured a few things out. Naval is a rare case of an investor in tech with a solid perspective on life and its priorities. While many obsess over superficial hustle and hype, he offers a deeper view on how to balance things out and build a meaningful, happy life.

This book reads quickly. It’s a collection of brief thoughts, interviews, and “tweet-storms” organised by a fan, grouped around areas of priority: primarily wealth, happiness, and health.

Much of it is a reminder of core life skills I’ve heard before, but it’s put so well and succinctly that it inspired me to practice writing, and spend more time meditating, reading, and thinking.

In a time when people try to put you into a neat, flat category—a little box—this book will remind you that you can be so much more if you play a “longer term game”. It challenges you to find your unique value and shows you how you can pick the right game of life by just being… you.

If you don’t agree with most of it, even better. It will stimulate your thinking. I would challenge anyone to put it down without having many moments of reflection.

My Learnings, in no particular order

Building Wealth

• Wealth is a skill you can learn. Never despise wealth, it will harm your results. Know that ethical wealth creation is possible.
• Give society what it wants, before it figures it out. It’s how you build wealth, at scale.
• Direction beats hard work. Pick the right direction first, then apply maximum effort. What you focus on is more important than your effort. Know that 99% of your effort is wasted, but that’s ok.
• Don’t seek status: Status is a zero-sum game you don’t want to play.
• Wealth is not equal money. Wealth is owning assets that earn while you sleep. You will never become rich by selling your time.
• Long-Term Games: Play long-term games instead, with long-term people. Choose partners with high intelligence, energy, and integrity. Things will compound quickly.
• If it can be taught, someone else will do it. Focus on building your own specific knowledge and unique capabilities. Find them through your genuine curiosity and passion.
• Productise Yourself – Learn to sell or build. Create a unique offering around your identity and skills. If it doesn’t feel like work to you, you’ll be unstoppable.
• Leverage: We’re in the era of leverage— and leverage allows you to build wealth. Leverage used to come from people, tools, and money. Now, the ultimate leverage is code, and it’s “permissionless”.
• Embrace accountability. Take risks under your name and you’ll gain equity. Society rewards accountability. The cost of failure is increasingly low. Failure with ethical behaviour and good intention is easy to be forgiven.
• Build Judgment. Beyond intelligence. Focus on clarity in your thinking, learning the basics – especially in science – and understand effective decision-making. That’s your other leverage.
• Value your time at an insanely high hourly rate (e.g. $5K+ an hour). Use that to delegate what’s not crucial, and tasks that don’t match your value. This mindset will change you deeply.
• Your resume is a catalogue of all your sufferings. Pick the right ones.
• Become a perpetual learner. You’ll likely need to relearn everything very often to stay ahead.
• Retirement is stopping sacrificing today for an imaginary tomorrow. When today is complete in itself, you’re retired.
• Money is not going to make you happy. That’s another skill. Money will remove things that could be in the way of your happiness.

2. Building Judgment

• Judgment is wisdom applied to external problems. You build it through hard work.
• If you can’t explain something to a child you don’t know it. Learn the basics first. See Richard Feynman’s “Six easy pieces”.
• Embrace Suffering. Suffering teaches you about reality and often leads to personal growth. Our preconceived notion of how things “should be” prevents us from seeing reality, and suffering cuts through it.
• Get your ego out of the way. Practice “choiceless awareness”. Don’t wish reality to be different. The more you desire an outcome, the less likely you’re going to see the truth.
• Cynicism is easy. Mimicry is easy. Embrace being an optimist contrarian.
• Identities and labels prevent you from seeing the truth. If your beliefs fit into neat little bundles, you should be highly suspicious. Feynman: “You must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.”
• Praise specifically, criticise generally. Then people’s egos and identities won’t work against you.
• Collect mental models. They will provide compact ways to organise your knowledge.
• Pick the path with the most pain in the short term. Run uphill. Lean into the short term pain for longer term gain.
• Learn to love reading. Avoid bite-sized dopamine snacks. Focus on foundations and new concepts with predictive power.

3. Happiness

• Don’t take yourself too seriously. You’re just a monkey with a plan. Embrace your insignificance and learn to let go.
• Happiness is a Skill. Just like fitness or nutrition. It’s our default state, and you’ll get there through removal rather than addition. It’s more about peace than joy.
• Happiness requires presence. Enlightenment is the space between your thoughts.
• It’s not about positive thoughts. Positive implies and holds a negative. It’s about absence of desire, and peace. Learn from children and their joyful presence.
• Peace is happiness at rest. Happiness is peace in motion.
• Use the placebo effect to your advantage. Have a positive disposition towards reality. “Stop asking why, and start saying wow”
• Desire is a contract you make with yourself: to be unhappy until you get what you want. Pick your desires very carefully.
• Tell your friends you’re a happy person. You’ll have to live to that expectation
• The biggest delusion: thinking there’s something out there that will make you happy and fulfilled forever.
• Pick good habits. Surrounding yourself with positive people, working out, reducing screen time, removing judgement, getting some sunlight, meditating.
• Always find the positive angle. Even if you can’t, appreciate the universe showing you a lesson.
• There’s no legacy. We’re just a blink. Death is coming soon. Our work will be dust. You will be dust. Appreciate it’s all a game, and make it a fun one.

4. Saving Yourself

• Take Responsibility: No one else will make you slim, healthy, or successful—you must take responsibility for your own life. Focus on your own health first and foremost. You can’t help others if you’re sick yourself.
• Choose to be yourself: Stop trying to figure out what people want out of you. Be your authentic self, with passionate intensity. Find the people and businesses that need you ****the most.
• Choose to care for yourself. Prioritise your health. Practice daily exercise, and embrace habits that lead to long-term well-being.
• Choose to build and grow yourself. Commit externally to others. Update your self image. Accept you’re not going to be popular, and that’s ok.
• Be impatient with action but patient with results. Why wait? Life is slipping away. Start now.

5. Philosophy

• What’s the Meaning of Life? No one knows. Asking the question is more important than any specific answer. It’s a personal exploration that will shape your existence.
• If it could be taught through words, we’d be done here. You’ll learn through your own experience.
• Embrace your Core Values. Embrace values like honesty, long-term thinking, and avoiding anger. “Anger is a hot coal you hold in your hand waiting to throw it at somebody”
• Freedom to or from. After you get wealthy, true freedom will become freedom from sadness, from desire, from anger. Free yourself from other people’s expectations. If you’re happy, it will make other people happy.
• Inspiration is perishable. Use it wisely. The present is all we truly have. Embrace the beauty of the fleeting moment, and live with the awareness that life is a transient, precious experience.