A book that immediately made it to my ‘To be read’ list because of its premise, as well as its promise. And stayed there for most of 2021, largely because of my own laziness, before I finally got around to it. But a book that I once picked up, there was simply no going back. It is in fact one of the few books I wish I had read ten years ago. Or at least as soon as it was released. So if you have Eric Jorgenson’s ‘The Almanack of Naval Ravikant’ gathering dust on your shelf, I will strongly recommend you pick it up right away.
No one can compete with you on being you. Most of life is a search for who and what needs you the most.
Naval Ravikant
What you should know before reading The Almanack of Naval Ravikant
Before getting into the book in itself, it may be worth noting that The Almanack of Naval Ravikant isn’t a book about his life. Although it does touch upon certain aspects of it. Nor does the book claim to be an all-encompassing text that will change your life. Even if it does have the potential to significantly impact the way you look at your life, your decisions, your priorities, and everything around you. The Almanack of Naval Ravikant is in fact not your conventional narrative in any way.
Focusing on wealth and happiness, each chapter is a combination of Naval Ravikant’s tweets collected over the years, interviews, and transcripts that have been paraphrased, and at times even interpreted and edited by Eric Jorgenson. All put together to make this rather one-of-its-kind book. Another aspect that makes this book special is that you don’t really need to – although you will most likely want to – read it from one end to the other. With chapters dedicated to a range of topics including wealth creation, hard work, technology, and philosophy, you can pick out what you like and skip what you don’t, without feeling any sense of disconnect at any point.
Answers to questions beyond wealth and happiness
While The Almanack of Naval Ravikant may have been constructed to focus on two aspects – wealth and happiness –it is so much more. It isn’t a book about getting wealthy, but a guide to think about wealth from a different and more clear manner. What wealth creation demands beyond your hard work. The difference between wisdom and wealth. The role of luck, and the best ways to turn luck in your favor.
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.
The book also isn’t a tool with a few tips, tricks or wisdom that will suddenly unlock your happiness. Rather it makes you look at happiness from a completely new perspective. One that makes you look out yourself, where your happiness really lies, what it demands, and how the key to finding it can lie in the simplest habits.
The three big ones in life are wealth, health, and happiness. We pursue them in that order, but their importance is reverse.
Naval Ravikant
And in sharing his thoughts on wealth, health, and happiness, the book also touches on Naval Ravikant’s opinions on knowledge, ethics, philosophy, Buddhism, and more. All stitched together to form a priceless collection of ideas that can hopefully elevate your mind to a new world of control and power.
Lessons from The Almanack of Naval Ravikant
Like I mentioned earlier, this isn’t a book that you need to read in its entirety if you don’t want to. You can choose to read (and reread) the pages and chapters that you like. The ones that leave an impact on you. But it is also a book that can and will have different takeaways for each of us. That’s an entirely personal perspective as well.
Unlike most books from the genre, not only does The Almanack of Naval Ravikant have different takeaways for different individuals, but the same chapters can also be interpreted in more ways than once. Which again is influenced by our personal experiences, philosophies, and beliefs.
Here are my 9 key takeaways from The Almanack of Naval Ravikant
- Creating wealth
Contrary to popular belief, wealth is not the money we own. Instead, according to Naval, wealth is the things that can be productive and continue earning money, even when you sleep. Inventions, business ideas, software, intellectual property, products. Something the world needs but hasn’t realized, made available on a large scale, without you having to sell it to yourself. That undoubtedly requires you to work hard. But more importantly, it requires you to work hard the right way. In the right direction. - Specific knowledge and talent
We live in an age where learning something and gaining new knowledge is, quite literally, within the reach of our hands. All thanks to the internet that has given us the power to build cultivate on interests and build unique niches for ourselves. Build these hobbies, interests, and passions into skills that people need and will pay for. - Creating Leverage
All our lives, we’ve heard everyone around us, for most part, tell us to get a job, earn a sustainable living, and settle down. Working hard at your job seemed to be the only way to acquiring wealth. Nobody, at least nobody I can remember, mentioned wealth.
Leverage is a away to amplify your efforts. Something that when deployed can be worth more than just your time or earning money.
Naval talks about three kinds of leverage – Labour, where you have people working for you. Money, where you invest capital or hold equity in a business that earns money, even as you sleep. And products with no marginal cost of replication, which in the digital age, largely centers around content, code, or media
In the digital age, can you build something that can be easily replicated and sold? - Play long-term games
Find ideas that work in the long run. Similarly, surround yourself with people who you want to stick to and work with for the long run. Playing the long-term game means looking beyond the next few months and distance yourself from the ones who don’t share these principles. And when you find the right people, invest deeply.
A true believer of the power of compounding, Naval believes that its power isn’t just limited to money and wealth. But to most important things in life. Including friendships and relationships. Whether in business, friendships, or relationships, both parties stand to gain more if they are in it for the long run. And if you can’t see a long-term future with any of them, it’s don’t bother wasting your time. - Don’t search for happiness. Learn it.
What makes you happy? The answer is of course different for each of us. In fact, you will yourself have a different answer to this question at different stages of your life. What made you happy when you were 10 will not make you happy at 30. Happiness is matter of perspective.
Naval believes that happiness is not a temporary state of mind to be pursued with material things. But a skill that can be learnt. It is the absence of desire. When we crave for something, we tend to get unhappy when we don’t get it. But if we can train ourselves to stop craving for things we don’t have, we can take the first steps towards developing the skill called happiness. - Be yourself
Perhaps one of the most common pieces of advice given out. We’ve all heard it. We’ve all probably said this to others at some point as well. And yet, we are constantly trying to shape ourselves to fit structures designed by societies and the people whose approvals we seek.
Truly being yourself, building your passions and interests can take you a long way towards building specific knowledge and leverage, and in turn creating wealth. - Freedom
Another one of Naval’s ideas that can have subjective interpretations. We’re all looking for freedom, even if we don’t realize it. We want to be wealthy to be free from financial pressures. Free to do what we want to do and be what we want to be.
Naval’s own meaning of freedom has evolved over the years. As will our own. The question we need to answer for ourselves is, ‘What is the freedom we are seeking?’ - Peace from mind
Peace of mind is what we all believe is a big step towards happiness. And for good reason. Naval unsurprisingly takes this a step further by talking about peace from the mind.
Essentially the freedom from all the anxiety, stress, and overthinking that we subject ourselves to when our minds are not at rest. And as a serial overthinker, that certainly rings a bell.
Earning some peace from your own mind according to Naval begins by being more conscious about the information you consume and the habits you build. - The meaning of life
A question so many around the world have been asking for centuries now. What is the meaning of life? Naval himself doesn’t prefer to give a concrete answer here. Perhaps because of his belief in falsifiable data as opposed to speculation. And the meaning of life can be looked at in more than one way.
One is to believe that the universe will eventually decay to nothing, and nobody will remember us or anything we did. Not as romantic of course.
Another way of looking at it is that the meaning of life is again very personal and subjective. What gives my life meaning can be very different to what gives your life meaning. And the key is to find out what matters to you.
Naval Ravikant on Inspiration, priorities, and the will to act
Inspiration is perishable. Act on it now.
Naval Ravikant
Undoubtedly my biggest eye-opener from The Almanack of Naval Ravikant. Why is it that we are unable to do so many of the little things we aim to do?
Want to work out? Too busy today.
Want to read a new book? Just don’t have the time.
Want to start a new blog? It’s going to take too much time.
All just different ways of telling ourselves, rather, convincing ourselves, that we just don’t have the time. What’s interesting however, is that the excuse ‘I don’t have time.’ is in most cases a response to the suggestion of a good habit.
We don’t have the time to work out. But have the time to spend an hour at a pub.
We don’t have the time to read a book. But have the time to binge an entire season of the latest Netflix series over a single weekend.
’I don’t have the time’ is just another way of saying ‘It’s not a priority.’
Naval Ravikant
The last word
Despite all that it says, this article is just a small part of Naval’s wisdom and experience that Eric Jorgenson tries to bring out in The Almanack of Naval Ravikant. And it wouldn’t be an overstatement to say that this is a book that should make it to your ‘must-read’ list.
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Its simplicity, clarity, and unconventional thoughts have so much to offer. My only advice. Don’t be in a hurry to finish this book. As Naval Ravikant himself says, “The number of books completed is a vanity metric. Focus on new concepts with predictive power” And that is precisely what this book delivers.
