The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness

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It’s the kind of information you can’t learn. If society can train you, it can also train another person to take your position. Naval Ravikant is an entrepreneur, philosopher, and investor whose wealth-building and long-term happiness philosophies have captivated the world. Making money is not only a necessary chore for survival, but it is also a skill that can be learned. Knowing what to do, who to do it with, and when to do it is the key to becoming wealthy. Marcus Aurelius was absolutely life changing for me. It's the personal diary of the Emperor of Rome. Here's a guy who was probably the most powerful human being on Earth at the time he lived. He’s writing a diary to himself, never expecting it to be published. When you open this book, you realize he had all the same issues and all the same mental struggles, he was trying to be a better person. Right there, you figure out success and power don't improve your internal state, you still have to work on it. [6] This includes books, media, movies, and code. Code is probably the most powerful form of permissionless leverage. All you need is a computer—you don’t need anyone’s permission.[1]

This is a great book I really liked which summarizes some of the larger themes of history, very incisive. And unlike most history books, it's actually really small, and it covers a lot of ground. [7] I will tell you an anecdote before going into the review. In India, IITs are the premier technical institutions with around 1% acceptance rate and .1% for the top 1000 ranks. Kids can become minor celebrities in their circles just by clearing the exam - which is no easy feat. With launch of Quora, I came across several such cringey questions related to people who got into IIT. They hadn't achieved a lot in life till then. Snow Crash is an amazing, amazing book. There’s nothing quite similar to Snow Crash. Snow Crash is in a league of its own. Stephenson also wrote The Diamond Age.

The Five Big Ideas

And finally is integrity. Because if you have someone who is high intelligence and high energy but they’re low integrity, what you’ve got is a hard working, smart crook. [31]

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. [...] Accountability is a double-edged thing. It allows you to take credit when things go well and to bear the brunt of the failure when things go badly. [...]It’s much more important today to be able to become an expert in a brand new field in 9 to 12 months than to have studied the 'right' thing a long time ago.” Building any product and selling any product fits this description. And fundamentally, what else is there? Where you don’t necessarily want to be is a support role, like customer service. In customer service, unfortunately, inputs and outputs relate relatively close to each other, and the hours you put in matter.[10] Being at the extreme in your art is crucial in the age of leverage. 3. Learn the Skills of Decision-Making Read science, math, and philosophy. But be selective. Read the fundamentals like On The Origin of Species and The Wealth of Nations. Then reread them; it’s better to read a book that you’re excited about a hundred times than it is to read one hundred average books that don’t. Forget about rich vs. poor, white-collar vs. blue-collar. It’s now a leveraged versus. unleveraged situation.’ Naval Ravikant (Naval Ravikant) (Naval Ravikant) (

You’re more likely to have skills society does not yet know how to train other people to do. If someone can train other people how to do something, then they can replace you. If they can replace you, then they don’t have to pay you a lot. You want to know how to do something other people don’t know how to do at the time period when those skills are in demand.[1] Someone who states, “Actually, I want to bring the maximum leverage to bear in this market and the maximum specific knowledge.” is a level above that. That person could be an expert in everything from fundamental housing construction to property development and sales, real estate markets, and the technology industry. However, it is clear that no one knows how to do everything. They’ll need to put together a team to execute it, with each member contributing distinct skill sets. People would devote their lives to the company’s name and take major risks in exchange for high profits, thus this person would have a lot of responsibility. You will not get rich by renting out your time. To gain financial freedom, you must own equity—a piece of a business. Give society what it wants but does not yet know how to get at scale. 2. Build Judgment It scales very, very well. If you get good at managing capital, you can manage more and more capital much more easily than you can manage more and more people.[78] Specific knowledge is frequently technical or artistic in nature. It cannot be automated or outsourced.I was trained on the efficient markets hypothesis, and yet every market that I've seen up close has been anything but. [11] Obviously, not a single person may know this. You may pull a team together to do it where each have different skill sets, but that combined entity would have specific knowledge in technology and in real estate. It would have massive accountability because that company’s name would be a very high-risk, high-reward effort attached to the whole thing, and people would devote their lives to it and take on significant risk. It would have leverage in code with lots of developers. It would have capital with investors putting money in and the founder’s own capital. It would have some of the highest-quality labor you can find, which is high-quality engineers, designers, and marketers who are working on the company. Huspeni, Alyson Shontell, Andrea. "The 50 Early Stage Investors In Silicon Valley You Need To Know". Business Insider . Retrieved April 26, 2020. {{ cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list ( link) Avoiding ruin means stay out of jail. So, don’t do anything illegal. It’s never worth it to wear an orange jumpsuit. Stay out of total catastrophic loss. Avoiding ruin could also mean you stay out of things that could be physically dangerous or hurt your body. You have to watch your health.