I became unemployed in June 2020, and I was determined to use my free time to learn from great minds of the past and present. I wanted to understand psychology, the hard sciences, decision-making, and myself. As Charlie Munger emphasizes, I want to become a multi-disciplinary thinker. I want to be unbiased, informed, and open to change. I want to understand myself and others better. It is a lifelong quest.

This year, some books have substantially changed me. These books have empowered my mind and self, and I hope to guide you a bit to take the reins yourself in your quest for knowledge and whatever else you’re looking for!

First up, Naval.

Summary of The Almanack of Naval Ravikant

I was introduced to Naval (Na-vahl) Ravikant (Rahv-ah-kahnt) on Twitter (@naval), but I didn’t think too much of the tweets I read as so many on Twitter want to be philosophers yet they just copy and paste others. So I lumped him in with that crowd of Twitter.

Then I read his “How To Get Rich” tweet thread, and I realized this guy was an original. His way of approaching topics and connecting ideas is brilliant.

Eric Jorgensen’s recently edited a book, The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, (which can be downloaded for FREE! or purchased for $2.99 on Kindle), which compiles many of Naval’s tweets, podcasts, and interviews into three main subjects: Wealth, Judgment, and Happiness.

Naval writes efficiently. No wasted words. To the point.

I’ve never highlighted a book more. Half the book is highlighted! Naval thinks deeply yet speaks simply. You can read this book in a day. You will reread it over and over again. Your brain will ruminate on the ways he thinks for days. He will make you want to improve. And you will.

One of the great aspects of a book like this is the trust that it engenders between the reader and author. The people Naval cites (like Wim Hof, Nassim Taleb, Will & Ariel Durant, Matt Ridley, Charlie Munger, and so many more) are people I want to dig in further. This creates a web of connection for resources to read and learn. I will be reviewing the books of many of these authors.

I thank Naval (and Blas Moros for creating The Latticework and Charlie Munger, whose Almanack will be my next reviewed book) for being the jet fuel for my exploration into my mind and life.

My “Notes and Quotes” part of this “book review” highlights the many passages that resonated. Everything in “Notes and Quotes” is verbatim or close to verbatim from the book unless otherwise specified. I hope this will give you a good feeling for the book, and I cannot recommend getting a copy yourself!

Notes & Quotes

The Almanack of Naval Ravikant

Wealth

How To Get Rich (Without Getting Lucky)
- Seek wealth, not money or status
- Ignore people playing status games
- You must own equity to gain financial freedom
- Give society what it wants but doesn’t know how to get it. At scale.
- All returns in life come from compound interest
- Don’t partner with cynics or pessimists. Their beliefs are self-fulfilling
- Need specific knowledge - Cannot be trained and must be found by pursuing your genuine curiosity and passion
- Study microeconomics, game theory, psychology, persuasion, ethics, mathematics, and computers.
- Escape competition through authenticity.
Difference between Wealth and Money - Money is how we transfer wealth. Money is social credits. Wealth is assets that earn while you sleep.
The most important skill for getting rich is being a perpetual learner
Four Kinds of Luck
- Blind luck.
- Luck through persistence, hard work, hustle, and motion.
- You become very good about spotting luck.
- You build a unique character, unique brand, a unique mindset, which causes luck to find you.

Judgment

The direction you’re headed in matters more than how fast you move, especially with leverage.
- Picking the direction you’re moving in is far, far more important than how much force you apply.
- Any belief you took in a package (Catholic, Democrat, American) is suspect and should be re-evaluated from base principles. Ideologies can be dangerous.

Ego

Our egos are constructed in our first two decades. They get constructed by our environment, parents, society. Then we spend the rest of our life trying to make our ego happy...We accumulate all these habits as part of our ego and get attached to them.
When we're older, we’re a collection of thousands of habits constantly running subconsciously. We have a little bit of extra brain power in our neocortex for solving new problems. You become your habits.
- It’s really important to uncondition yourself and take your habits apart and ask, “Does it still serve me? Does it make me happier? Healthier? Does it make me accomplish whatever I set out to accomplish?
  1. My Note: Exercise To Do: What are my habits that I can change / improve?
To see the truth you have to get your ego out of the way
The smaller you can make your ego, the less conditioned you can make your reactions, the less desires you can have about the outcomes you want, the easier it will be to see reality.
What you feel tells you nothing about the facts - it merely tells you something about your estimate of the facts
Suffering helps make your ego change in an extremely hard way.
What % of your thoughts are fear-based? What % are desire-based?
- My Note: Exercise To Do: Make a journal each night that guesstimates these %s to get a feel for how your monkey mind is functioning

Happiness

Happiness is what’s there when you remove the sense that something is missing in your life.
We are trapped in a web of desires (“I need this / I need that”). 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.
- Happiness is about the absence of desire, especially external things, because then you accept the current state of things, the less your mind moves towards the future or back to the past.
The world reflects your own feelings back at you. Reality is neutral. Reality has no judgments. There are no external forces affecting your emotions.
The neutral state is the existence little children live. Children are immersed in the environment and the moment without any thought of how it should be.
A rational person can find peace by cultivating indifference to things outside of their control.
We spend so much time and effort trying to change the external world, other people, and our own bodies - all while accepting ourselves the way we are programmed in our youths.
Happiness requires presence. You can literally destroy your happiness if you spend all of your time living in delusions of the future.
A lot of our unhappiness comes from comparing things from the past to the present.
When I say happiness, I mean peace.
Peace is happiness at rest, and happiness is peace in motion.
Today the way we think you get peace is by resolving all your external problems. But there are unlimited external problems. The only way to actually get a piece on the inside is by giving up this idea of problems.
The enemy of peace of mind is expectations drilled into you by society and other people.
I think the most common mistake for humanity is believing you're going to be made happy because of some external circumstance.
Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.
Happiness is being satisfied with what you have.
Many distinctions between people who get happier as they get older and people who don't can be explained by what habits they have developed. Are they habits that will increase your long-term happiness rather than your short-term happiness?
The most important trick to being happy is to realize happiness is a skill you develop and a choice you make.
If you fully acknowledge the futility of what you're doing, then I think I can bring great happiness and peace because you realize this is a game. But it's a fun game.
Happiness habits:
- Being very aware in every moment. If I catch myself judging somebody, I can stop myself and say, "what's the positive interpretation of this?”
- Every time you catch yourself desiring something, say, "is it so important to me I'll be unhappy unless this goes my way?”
- The more you judge, the more you separate yourself. You'll feel good for an instant, because you feel good about yourself, thinking you're better than someone. Later, you're going to feel lonely. Then, you see negativity everywhere. The world just reflects your own feelings back at you.
- Tell your friends you're a happy person. Then you'll be forced to conform to it. You'll have a consistency bias.
- Positive-sum games create positive people.
Confucius says you have two lives, and the second one begins when you realize you only have one. When and how did you second life begin?
Acceptance is being OK with whatever the outcome is. It's to be balanced and centered. It's a step back and to see the grander scheme of things. Achieving acceptance is very difficult.
The ability to singularly focus is related to the ability to lose yourself and be present, happy, and (ironically) more effective.

Freedom

From expectations: If you hurt other people because they have expectations of you, that's their problem. If they have an agreement with you, it's your problem.
Don't spend your time making other people happy. Other people being happy is their problem. It's not your problem. If you were happy, it makes other people happy.
Freedom from uncontrolled thinking: a big habit I'm working on is trying to turn off my "monkey mind." When we're children, we're pretty blank slates. We live very much in the moment. We essentially just react to our environment through our instincts. We live in what I would call the "real world." Puberty is the onset of desire - the first time you really, really want something and you start long-range planning. You start thinking a lot, building an identity and an ego to get what you want…If you walk down the street and there are 1000 people in the street, all thousand or talking to themselves in their head at any given point. They're just pulled out of base reality… I think it's actually very bad for your happiness. To me, the mind should be a servant and a tool not a master. My monkey mind should not control and drive me 24/7…I want to break the habit of uncontrolled thinking, which is hard.

Mental Models - Compact ways for you to recall your own knowledge

Evolution
Game theory
Munger
Nassim Taleb - Probability, Risk / Skin in the game
Ben Franklin

Definitions

Wisdom - knowing the long-term consequences of your actions
Judgment - making the right decisions to capitalize on wisdom
Contrarian - Reasons independently from the ground up and resists pressure from the ground up.
- Optimistic contrarians are the rarest breed.
Charisma - The ability to project confidence and love at the same time. (It’s almost always possible to be honest and positive).
Principal-agent problem: If you want it done right, go do it yourself. The more closely you can tie someone’s compensation to the exact value they’re creating, the more you turn them into a principal.
Happiness - Peace in motion
Peace - Happiness at rest
Science - The study of truth. The only true discipline because it makes falsifiable predictions.
Mathematics - The language of science and nature.
Anger - The way to signal as strongly as you can that you’re capable of violence.

Quotes by Naval

To be honest, speak without identity.
Tension is who you think you should be. Relaxation is who you are.
For important decisions, discard memory and identity, and focus on the problem.
Praise specifically, criticize generally.
I think the meaning of life is to do things for their own sakes.
Most of the gains in life come from suffering in the short term so you can get paid in the long term.
Avoid status games in your life. They make you into an angry, combative person.
Money is not the root of all evil; But the lust for money is bad.
Be patient. If you’re counting, you’ll run out of patience before success arrives. Everyone wants to get rich immediately, but the world is an efficient place; immediate doesn’t work.
“Clear thinker” is a better compliment than “smart”
Your real resume is just a catalog of all your suffering.
Amazing how people confuse wealth and wisdom
Health, love, and your mission, in that order. Nothing else matters.
Most of the gains in life come from suffering in the short term so you can get paid in the long term.
Put truth above social approval
A calm mind, a fit body, and a house full of love. These things cannot be bought. They must be earned.
Impatience with actions, patience with results.
The returns in life are being out of the herd. Social approval is inside the herd.
The hardest thing is not doing what you want - it’s knowing what you want.
Health, love, and your mission, in that order. Nothing else matters.

Quotes by Others

All of man's troubles arise because he cannot sit in a room quietly by himself. - Blaise Pascal
Stop asking why and start saying wow. - Friend of Naval’s.
Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life. - Jerzy Gregorek, Naval’s trainer.
Anger is a hot coal you hold in your hand while waiting to throw it at somebody. - Buddhist saying