The Almanack of Naval Ravikant
Silicon Valley angel investor Naval Ravikant's principles and methods for building wealth and a happy life.
This is the ninth book of Zhou Zuoluo’s second reading club. I’d heard of it long ago and assumed it was a thick, hard-to-read book. It turned out to be more like chicken soup for the soul, and it was quite an enjoyable read.
1. Overview
Getting rich isn’t just about luck, and happiness doesn’t fall from the sky. Building wealth and living happily are both skills we can and need to learn.
So what principles and methods should guide that learning? This book provides them. It collects and organizes the wisdom of Naval Ravikant, the well-known Silicon Valley angel investor, especially his principles and methods for building wealth and a happy life.
Over the past decade, Naval has shared his life wisdom through Twitter, blogs, and podcasts: how to succeed without relying on luck, how to use specific knowledge and leverage to build wealth, his philosophy of happiness, and more. His ideas sparked waves of discussion online and won him a large, devoted following. Naval tells us not only how to get rich, but also how to view life and how to be happy. His thinking on wealth and life will help you find your own unique path and live a richer, happier life.
2. Favorite Quotes
2.1 Freedom and happiness: live by choices, priorities, and habits
- Freedom and happiness don’t come from external material satisfaction, but from the choices we make ourselves.
- At every stage of life, the goal is to keep increasing your independence, not to get promoted or raised.
- Happiness = health + wealth + good relationships.
- Whether to do something depends on whether it is one of your priorities.
- We eventually become our habits.
- If there’s something you want to do later, do it now. There is no “later” in life.
- A simple life lesson: when you’re torn on a hard decision, choose the path that is more painful in the short term.
2.2 Wealth and leverage: provide value and scale it (code and media are the strongest)
- Making money isn’t something you can do just because you want to; it’s a skill that has to be learned.
- One path to wealth is to give society what it wants but doesn’t yet know how to get, at scale.
- Business leverage comes from capital, labor, and products with zero marginal cost of replication (code and media).
- Products with zero marginal cost of replication are the leverage most worth studying, and the most important.
- You won’t get rich spending your time saving money. Freeing up time to make money is the right way to think.
- There is no get-rich-quick tutorial. If there is one, it’s just the person selling it trying to make money off you.
2.3 Learning and specific knowledge: fundamentals + full commitment + hands-on practice + genuine passion
- Only what you learn yourself becomes a capability uniquely yours, and only that can make your venture succeed.
- Hands-on practice is the only way to gain real knowledge.
- Only by combining these principles with your own past experience can you deepen your understanding and memory.
- Making reading a habit is the single most important thing.
- If you’re not 100% committed to your research, someone else who is will overtake you.
- Scoring 90 or 100 on the fundamentals beats blindly digging deep.
- To build specific knowledge, pursue your genuine curiosity and passion rather than blindly chasing trends.
2.4 Influence and collaboration: sell × build × produce × a high-quality circle (including how to give feedback)
- Learn to sell, learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable.
- Be a creator; make interesting things people want. Show your skills, practice your skills, and eventually the right people will find you.
- Tweeting helps me distill the essence of what I’ve learned, and helps me review the old to learn the new.
- At work, spend time with people more successful than you.
- At play, spend time with people happier than you.
- If you criticize, don’t criticize a person; criticize the method or a category of behavior. If you praise, find a role model and praise that specific person.
- Praise specifically, criticize generally.
3. Summary
Learn to sell, learn to build. Building and selling products is what can protect you from a midlife crisis. Now that AI has nearly leveled the ability to build products, we should learn more about sales and marketing. This may take a long time and even some luck, but as long as you commit and learn by doing, you will always gain something.