Transcript for:
Naval's Life Philosophy

the almanac of Naval ravikant a guide to wealth and happiness written by Eric Jorgensen forward by Tim Ferriss narrated by vikas Adam about this book I built the navalmanac entirely out of transcripts tweets and talks Naval has shared every attempt is made to present Naval in his own words however there are a few important points the transcripts have been edited for clarity and brevity multiple times not all sources are primary some excerpts are from writers quoting Naval I can't be 100 certain of every source's authenticity please verify phrasing with a primary source before citing Naval from this text Please interpret generously everything in this book is taken out of context interpretations change over time understand the original intent may be different than your interpretation in a different time medium format and context in the process of creating this book I may have mistakenly recontextualized misinterpreted or misunderstood things as content passed through time space and medium some phrasing may have shifted in flight tweets are used throughout the book to summarize and punctuate ideas this is what those tweets will sound like when you hear them there are also questions from great interviewers like Shane Parish Sarah Lacy Joe Rogan and Tim Ferriss for Simplicity and continuity those questions will all sound alike the book was created as a public service Naval is not earning any money from this book it is available for free download in PDF format and digital versions on navalmanac.com including bonus material that was cut from this published version the audio is available for free in a podcast format as well Naval has essays podcasts and more at nav dot Al and is on Twitter at Naval onto the book forward by Tim Ferriss dear listener it feels strange for me to write these words as I committed many years ago to never write forwards I'm making a rare exception in this case for three reasons first a free version of this book is being offered to the world in a digital Kindle ebook format with no strings attached second I've known Naval for more than a decade and have long wanted someone to compile this book third I'm increasing the likelihood of naval's next child being named Tim I'll settle for Timbo if he prefers Naval is one of the smartest people I've ever met and he's also one of the most courageous not in the run into the fire without thinking twice since but in the think twice and then tell everyone they're focusing on the wrong fire sense he is rarely part of any consensus and the uniqueness of his life lifestyle family Dynamics and startup successes is a reflection of conscious choices he's made to do things differently he can be as blunt as a foot to the face but that's part of what I love and respect about him you never have to guess what Naval is thinking I've never had to guess how he's feeling about me someone else or a situation this is a huge relief in a world of double talk and ambiguity we've shared a lot of meals shared a lot of deals and hopped around the world together that's all to say that while I consider myself a good people Watcher I consider myself an excellent Naval watcher he is one of the people I call most for advice and I've watched him in many habitats through many seasons easy Times Hard Times recessions booms you name it sure he's the CEO and a co-founder of angelist sure he previously co-founded vast.com and epinions which went public as part of shopping.com sure he's an angel investor and has invested in many mega successes including Twitter Uber Yammer and open DNS to name it a few that's all great of course and it shows Naval is a world-class operator instead of an armchair philosopher but I don't take his perspectives maxims and thoughts seriously because of the business stuff there are lots of miserable successful people out there be careful about modeling those as you will get all the bath water with the baby I take Naval seriously because he questions nearly everything can think from first principles tests things well is good at not fooling himself changes his mind regularly laughs a lot thinks holistically thinks long term and doesn't take himself too goddamn seriously that last one is important this book will give you a good taste of what that cocktail of bullets looks like in naval's head so pay attention but don't simply parrot his words follow his advice but only if it holds up after scrutiny and stress testing in your own life consider everything but take nothing as gospel Naval would want you to challenge him as long as you bring your A game Naval has changed my life for the better and if you approach the following like a friendly but highly competent sparring partner he might just change yours keep your hands up and your mind open puravida Tim Ferriss Austin Texas Eric's note about this book throughout his career Naval has generously shared his wisdom and millions of people around the world follow his advice on Building Wealth and living happily Naval ravikant is an icon in Silicon Valley and startup culture around the world he founded multiple successful companies opinions during the 2000.com crash angelist in 2010 Naval is also an angel investor betting early on companies like uber Twitter Postmates and hundreds more more than a financial success Naval has been sharing his own philosophy of life and happiness attracting readers and listeners throughout the world Naval is broadly followed because he is a rare combination of successful and happy after a lifetime of study and application of philosophy economics and wealth creation he has proven the impact of his principles today Naval continues to build and invest in companies almost casually in his own artistic way while maintaining a healthy peaceful and Balanced Life this book collects and organizes the pieces of wisdom he has shared and shows you how to achieve the same for yourself naval's life story is instructive an introspective founder self-taught investor capitalist and engineer certainly has something to teach us all as a first principles thinker with no fear of speaking his truth naval's thoughts are often unique and thought-provoking his Instinct for seeing through life's veneer has changed how I see the world I've learned an enormous amount from Naval reading listening and applying his principles of wealth and happiness has given me calm confidence on my path and taught me to enjoy every moment of this journey closely studying his career has shown me how great things are accomplished through small persistent steps and how large an impact one individual can have I refer to his work often and recommend it to friends those conversations inspired me to create this book so people can learn from his perspective whether they're new to naval's ideas or have followed him the past 10 years this book collects the wisdom shared by Naval over the past decade in his own words through Twitter blog posts and podcasts with this book you can get the benefits of a lifetime in a few hours I created this book as a public service tweets podcasts and interviews quickly get buried and lost knowledge this valuable deserves a more permanent accessible format that is my mission with this book I hope this acts as an introduction to naval's ideas I've collected his most powerful and useful ideas in his own words woven them into a readable thread and organized those into sections for easy reference I often find myself reviewing sections of this book before making an investment or opening to the happiness chapter if I'm feeling off creating this book has changed me I feel more clarity confidence and peace through all aspects of life I hope listening to it will do the same for you the almanac is intended as a guide to be read and or listened to and consulted for specific topics if Naval doesn't answer your emails I hope this book gives you the next best advice this book is an introduction to Naval and Dives deeply into his two most explored topics wealth and happiness if you want to continue exploring Naval and his other ideas I encourage you to check out the next on Naval section at the End of This Book I've shared chapters that were edited out of the final book as well as other popular resources be well Eric timeline of Naval ravikant 1974 born in Delhi India 1985 age 11 moved from New Delhi to Queens New York 1989 age 15. attended Stuyvesant High School 1995 age 21 graduated Dartmouth studied computer science and economics 1999 age 25 founder CEO of epinions 2001 age 27 Venture partner at August capital 2003 age 29 founder of vast.com a classified ad Marketplace 2005 age 31 is called radioactive mud in Silicon Valley 2007 age 33 founded hit Forge a small VC fund originally conceived as an incubator 2007 age 32 launched Venture hacks blog 2010 age 36 launched angelist 2010 age 36 invested in Uber 2012 age 38 lobbied Congress to get the jobs Act passed 2018 age 44 is named angel investor of the year now here is Naval in his own words background I grew up in a single parent household with my mom working going to school and raising my brother and me as latchkey kids we were very self-sufficient from a very early age there was a lot of hardship but everyone goes through hardship it did help me in a number of ways we were poor immigrants my dad came to the U.S he was a pharmacist in India but his degree wasn't accepted here so he worked in a hardware store not a great upbringing you know my family split up my mother uniquely provided against the background of hardship unconditional and unfailing love if you have nothing in your life but you have at least one person that loves you unconditionally it'll do wonders for your self-esteem we were in a part of New York City that isn't very safe basically the library was my after school Center after I came back from school I would just go straight to the library and hang out there until they closed then I would come home that was my daily routine we moved to the U.S when we were very young I didn't have many friends so I wasn't very confident I spent a lot of time reading my only real friends were books books make for great friends because the best thinkers of the last few thousand years tell you they're nuggets of wisdom my first job was with an illegal catering company in the back of a van delivering Indian food when I was 15. even when I was younger I had a paper route and I washed dishes in the cafeteria I was a totally unknown kid in New York City from a nothing family and immigrants trying to survive situation then I passed the test to get into Stuyvesant High School that saved my life because once I had the Stuyvesant brand I got into an Ivy League College which led me into Tech Stuyvesant is one of those intelligence Lottery situations where you can break in with instant validation you go from being blue collar to White Collar in one move at Dartmouth I studied economics and computer science there was a time when I thought I was going to be a PhD in economics today I'm an investor personally in about 200 companies advisor to a bunch I'm on a bunch of boards I'm also a small partner in a cryptocurrency fund because I'm really into the potential of cryptocurrencies I'm always cooking up something new I always have a bunch of side projects all that of course in addition to being the founder and chairman of angelist I was born poor and miserable I'm now pretty well off and I'm very happy I worked at those I've learned a few things and some principles I try to lay them out in a Timeless manner where you can figure it out for yourself because at the end of the day I can't quite teach anything I can only inspire you and maybe give you a few hooks so you can remember live on Twitter it's Naval Applause ensues on May 18 2007 part one wealth how to get rich without getting lucky one Building Wealth making money is not a thing you do it's a skill you learn understand how wealth is created I like to think that if I lost all my money and you dropped me on a random street in any English-speaking country within five or ten years I'd be wealthy again because it's just a skill set I've developed that anyone can develop it's not really about hard work you can work in a restaurant 80 hours a week and you're not going to get rich getting rich is about knowing what to do who to do it with and when to do it it is much more about understanding than purely hard work yes hard work matters and you can't skimp on it but it has to be directed in the right way if you don't know yet what you should work on the most important thing is to figure it out you should not grind at a lot of hard work until you figure out what you should be working on I came up with the principles in my tweet storm for myself when I was really young around 13 or 14. I've been carrying them in my head for 30 years and I've been living them over time sadly or fortunately the thing I got really good at was looking at businesses and figuring out the point of Maximum leverage to actually create wealth and capture some of that created wealth this is exactly what I did my famous tweet storm about of course every one of these tweets can be extrapolated into an hour's worth of conversation the Tweet storm below is a good starting point the Tweet storm tries to be information dense very concise high impact and timeless it has all the information and principles so if you absorb these and you work hard over 10 years you'll get what you want how to get rich without getting lucky seek wealth not money or status wealth is having assets that earn while you sleep money is how we transfer time and wealth status is your place in the social hierarchy understand ethical wealth creation is possible if you secretly despise wealth it will elude you ignore people playing status games they gain status by attacking people playing wealth creation games you're not going to get rich renting out your time you must own Equity a piece of a business to gain your financial freedom you will get rich by giving Society what it wants but does not yet know how to get at scale pick an industry where you can play long-term games with long-term people the internet has massively broadened the possible space of careers most people haven't figured this out yet play iterated games all the returns in life whether in wealth relationships or knowledge come from compound interest pick business partners with high intelligence energy and above all integrity don't partner with cynics and pessimists their beliefs are self-fulfilling learn to sell learn to build if you can do both you will be unstoppable arm yourself with specific knowledge accountability and Leverage specific knowledge is knowledge you cannot be trained for if Society can train you it can train someone else and replace you specific knowledge is found by pursuing your genuine curiosity and passion rather than whatever is hot right now building specific knowledge will feel like play to you but will look like work to others when specific knowledge is taught it's through apprenticeships not schools specific knowledge is often highly technical or creative it cannot be outsourced or automated Embrace accountability and take business risks under your own name Society will reward you with responsibility equity and Leverage give me a lever long enough and a place to stand and I will move the Earth Archimedes fortunes require Leverage business leverage comes from Capital people and products with no marginal cost of replication code and media Capital means money to raise money apply your specific knowledge with accountability and show resulting good judgment labor means people working for you it's the oldest and most fought over form of Leverage labor leverage will impress your parents but don't waste your life chasing it capital and labor are permissioned Leverage everyone is chasing Capital but someone has to give it to you everyone is trying to lead but someone has to follow you code and media are permissionless Leverage they're The Leverage behind the newly rich you can create software and media that works for you while you sleep an army of robots is freely available it's just packed in data centers for heat and space efficiency use it if you can't code write books and blogs record videos and podcasts Leverage is a force multiplier for your judgment judgment requires experience but can be built Faster by learning foundational skills there is no skill called business avoid Business magazines and business classes study microeconomics Game Theory psychology persuasion ethics mathematics and computers reading is faster than listening doing is faster than watching you should be too busy to do coffee while still keeping an uncluttered calendar set and enforce an aspirational personal hourly rate if fixing a problem will save less than your hourly rate ignore it if Outsourcing a task will cost less than your hourly rate Outsource it work as hard as you can even though who you work with and what you work on are more important than how hard you work become the best in the world at what you do keep redefining what you do until this is true there are no get rich quick schemes those are just someone else getting rich off you apply specific knowledge with leverage and eventually you will get what you deserve when you're finally wealthy you'll realize it wasn't what you were seeking in the first place but that is for another day summary productize yourself your summary says productize yourself what does that mean productize and yourself yourself has uniqueness productize has Leverage yourself has accountability product ties has specific knowledge yourself also has specific knowledge in there so all of these pieces you can combine them into these two words if you're looking toward the long-term goal of getting wealthy you should ask yourself is this authentic to me is it myself that I'm projecting and then am I productizing it am I scaling it am I scaling with labor or with capital or with code or with media so it's a very handy simple mnemonic this is hard this is why I say it takes decades I'm not saying it takes decades to execute but the better part of a decade may be figuring out what you can uniquely provide what's the difference between wealth and money money is how we transfer wealth money is social credits it is the ability to have credits and debits of other people's time if I do my job right if I create value for society society says oh thank you we owe you something in the future for the work you did in the past here's a little IOU let's call that money wealth is the thing you want wealth is assets that earn while you sleep wealth is the factory the robots cranking out things wealth is the computer program that's running at night serving other customers wealth is even money in the bank that is being reinvested into other assets and into other businesses even a house can be a form of wealth because you can rent it out although that's probably a lower productivity use of land than some commercial Enterprise so my definition of wealth is much more businesses and assets that can earn while you sleep technology democratizes consumption but consolidates production the best person in the world at anything gets to do it for everyone Society will pay you for creating things at once but Society doesn't yet know how to create those things because if it did they wouldn't need you they would already be Stamped Out almost everything in your house in your workplace and on the street used to be technology at one point in time there was a time when oil was a technology that made JD Rockefeller rich there was a time when cars were technology that made Henry Ford rich so technology is the set of things as Alan K said that don't quite work yet correction Danny Hillis once something works it's no longer technology Society always wants new things and if you want to be wealthy you want to figure out which one of those things you can provide for society that it does not yet know how to get but it will want and providing it is natural to you within your skill set and within your capabilities then you have to figure out how to scale it because if you only build one that's not enough you've got to build thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions or billions of them so everybody can have one Steve Jobs and his team of course figured out society would want smartphones a computer in their pocket that had all the phone capability times 100 and was easy to use so they figured out how to build it and then they figured out how to scale it find and build specific knowledge sales skills are a form of specific knowledge there's such a thing as a natural in sales you run into them all the time in startups and venture capital when you meet someone who is a natural at sales you just know they're amazing they're really good at what they do that is a form of specific knowledge obviously they learned somewhere but they didn't learn it in a classroom setting they learned probably in their childhood in the schoolyard or they learned negotiating with their parents maybe some is a genetic component in the DNA but you can improve sales skills you can read Robert cialdini you can go to a sales training seminar you can do door-to-door sales it is brutal but will train you very quickly you can definitely improve your sales skills specific knowledge cannot be taught but it can be learned when I talk about specific knowledge I mean figure out what you were doing as a kid or teenager almost effortlessly something you didn't even consider a skill but people around you noticed your mother or your best friend growing up would know examples of what your specific knowledge could be sales skills musical talents with the ability to pick up any instrument an obsessive personality you dive into things and remember them quickly love for science fiction you were into reading sci-fi which means you absorb a lot of knowledge very quickly playing a lot of games you understand Game Theory pretty well gossiping digging into your friend Network that might make you into a very interesting journalist the specific knowledge is sort of this weird combination of unique traits from your DNA your unique upbringing and your response to it it's almost baked into your personality and your identity then you can hone it no one can compete with you on being you most of life is a search for who and what needs you the most for example I love to read and I love technology I learned very quickly and I get bored fast if I had gone into a profession where I was required to Tunnel down for 20 years into the same topic it wouldn't have worked I'm in Venture investing which requires me to come up to speed very very quickly on new technologies and I'm rewarded for getting bored because new technologies come along it matches up pretty well with my specific knowledge and skill sets I wanted to be a scientist that is where a lot of my moral hierarchy comes from I view scientists as being at the top of the production chain for Humanity the group of scientists who have made real breakthroughs and contributions probably added more to Human Society I think than any single other class of human beings not to take away anything from art or politics or engineering or business but without science we'd still be scrambling in the dirt fighting with sticks and trying to start fires Society business and money are Downstream of technology which is itself Downstream of science applied is the engine of humanity Corollary applied scientists are the most powerful people in the world this will be more obvious in the coming years my whole value system was built around scientists and I wanted to be a great scientist but when I actually look back at what I was uniquely good at and what I ended up spending my time doing it was more around making money tinkering with technology and selling people on things explaining things and talking to people I have some sales skills which is a form of specific knowledge I have some analytical skills on how to make money and I have this ability to absorb data obsess about it and break it down that is a specific skill that I have I also love tinkering with technology and all of this stuff feels like play to me but it looks like work to others there are other people to whom these things would be hard and they say well how do I get good at being pithy and selling ideas well if you're not already good at it or if you're not really into it maybe it's not your thing focus on the thing that you are really into the first person to actually point out my real specific knowledge was my mother she did it as an aside talking from the kitchen and she said it when I was 15 or 16 years old I was telling a friend of mine that I want to be an astrophysicist and she said no you're going to go into business I was like what my mom's telling me I'm going to be in business I'm going to be an astrophysicist mom doesn't know what she's talking about mom knew exactly what she was talking about specific knowledge is found much more by pursuing your innate talents your genuine curiosity and your passion it's not by going to school for whatever is the hottest job it's not by going into whatever field investors say is the hottest very often specific knowledge is at the edge of knowledge it's also stuff that's only now being figured out or is really hard to figure out if you're not 100 into it somebody else who is 100 into it will outperform you and they won't just outperform You by a little bit they'll outperform You by a lot because now we're operating the domain of ideas compound interest really applies and leverage really applies the internet has massively broadened the possible space of careers most people haven't figured this out yet you can go on the internet and you can find your audience and you can build a business and create a product and build wealth and make people happy just uniquely expressing yourself through the internet the internet enables any Niche interest as long as you're the best person at it to scale out and the great news is because every human is different everyone is the best at something being themselves another tweet I had that is worth weaving in but didn't go into the how to get rich tweet storm was very simple Escape competition through authenticity basically when you're competing with people it's because you're copying them it's because you're trying to do the same thing but every human is different don't copy if you are fundamentally building and marketing something that is an extension of who you are no one can compete with you on that who's going to compete with Joe Rogan or Scott Adams it's impossible is somebody else going to come along and write a better Dilbert no is someone going to compete with Bill Watterson and create a better Calvin and Hobbes no they're being authentic the best jobs are neither decreed nor degrade they are Creative Expressions of continuous Learners in free markets the most important skill for getting rich is becoming a Perpetual learner you have to know how to learn anything you want to learn the old model of making money is going to school for four years getting your degree and working as a professional for 30 years but things change fast now now you have to come up to speed on a new profession within nine months and it's obsolete four years later but within those three productive years you can get very wealthy 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 you really care about having studied the foundations so you're not scared of any book if you go to the library and there's a book you cannot understand you have to dig down and say what is the foundation required for me to learn this foundations are super important basic arithmetic and numeracy are way more important in life than doing calculus similarly being able to convey yourself simply using ordinary English words is far more important than being able to write poetry having an extensive vocabulary or speaking seven different foreign languages knowing how to be persuasive when speaking is far more important than being an expert digital marketer or click optimizer foundations are key it's much better to be at 9 out of 10 or 10 out of 10 on foundations than to try and get super deep into things you do need to be deep in something because otherwise you'll be a mile wide and an inch deep and you won't get what you want out of life you can only achieve Mastery in one or two things it's usually things you're obsessed about play long-term games with long-term people you said all the returns in life whether in wealth relationships or knowledge come from compound interest how does one know if they're earning compound interest compound interest is a very powerful concept compound interest applies to more than just compounding capital compounding capital is just the beginning compounding in business relationships is very important look at some of the top roles in society like why someone is a CEO of a public company or managing billions of dollars it's because people trust them they are trusted because the relationships they've built and the work they've done has compounded they've stuck with the business and shown themselves in a visible and accountable way to be high integrity people compound interest also happens in your reputation if you have a sterling reputation and you keep building it for decades upon decades people will notice your reputation will literally end up being thousands or tens of thousands of times more valuable than somebody else who was very talented but is not keeping the compound interest in reputation going this is also true when you're working with individual people if you've worked with somebody for five or ten years and you still enjoy working with them obviously you trust them and the little foibles are gone all the normal negotiations and business relationships can work very simply because you trust each other you know it will work out for example there's another angel in Silicon Valley named elad gill who I like to do deals with I love working with ilad because I know when the deal is being done he will bend over backward to give me extra he will always round off in my favor if there's an extra dollar being delivered here or there if there's some cost to pay he will pay it out of his own pocket and he won't even mention it to me because he goes so far out of his way to treat me so well I send him every deal I have I try to include him in everything then I go out of my way to try and pay for him compounding in those relationships is very valuable intentions don't matter actions do that's why being ethical is hard when you find the right thing to do when you find the right people to work with invest deeply sticking with it for decades is really how you make the big returns in your relationships and in your money so compound interest is very important 99 of effort is wasted obviously nothing is ever completely wasted because it's all a learning moment you can learn from anything but for example when you go back to school 99 of the term papers you did books you read exercises you did things you learned They Don't Really apply you might have read geography and history you never reuse you might have studied a language you don't speak anymore you might have studied a branch of mathematics you completely forgot of course these are learning experiences you did learn you learned the value of hard work you might have learned something that went deep into your psyche and became a piece of what you're doing now but at least when it comes to the goal-oriented life only about one percent of the efforts you made paid off another example is all the people you dated until you met your husband or wife it was wasted time in the goal sense not wasted in exponential sense not wasted in the learning sense but definitely wasted in the goal sense the reason I say this is not to make some glib comment about how 99 of your life is wasted and only one percent is useful I say this because you should be very thoughtful and realize in most things relationships work even in learning what you're trying to do is find the thing you can go all in on to earn compound interest when you're dating the instant you know this relationship is not going to be the one that leads to marriage you should probably move on when you're studying something like a geography or history class and you realize you are never going to use the information drop the class it's a waste of time it's a waste of your brain energy I'm not saying don't do the 99 because it's very hard to identify what the one percent is what I'm saying is when you find the one percent of your discipline which will not be wasted which you'll be able to invest in for the rest of your life and has meaning to you go all in and forget about the rest intentions don't matter actions do take on accountability Embrace accountability and take business risks under your own name Society will reward you with responsibility equity and Leverage to get rich you need Leverage leverage comes in labor comes in capital or it can come through code or media but most of these like labor and capital people have to give to you for labor somebody has to follow you for Capital somebody has to give you money assets to manage or machines so to get these things you have to build credibility and you have to do it under your own name as much as possible which is risky so 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 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 luckily in modern society there's no more debtors prison and people aren't imprisoned or executed for losing other people's money but we're still socially hardwired to not fail in public under our own names the people who have the ability to fail in public under their own names actually gain a lot of power I'll give a personal anecdote up until about 2013 2014 my public Persona was entirely around startups and investing only around 2014 2015 did I start talking about philosophy and psychological things and broader things it made me a little nervous because I was doing it under my own name there were definitely people in the industry who sent me messages through the back Channel like what are you doing you're ending your career this is stupid I kind of just went with it I took a risk same with crypto early on I took a risk but when you put your name out there you take a risk with certain things you also get to reap the rewards you get the benefits in the old days the captain was expected to go down with the ship if the ship was sinking then literally the last person to get off was the captain accountability does come with real risks but we're talking about a business context the risk here would be you would probably be the last one to get your Capital back out you'd be the last one to get paid for your time the time that you put in the capital you put into the company these are at risk realize that in modern society the downside risk is not that large even personal bankruptcy can wipe the debts clean in good ecosystems I'm most familiar with Silicon Valley but generally people will forgive failures as long as you were honest and made a high integrity effort there's not really that much to fear in terms of failure and so people should take on a lot more accountability than they do build or buy equity in a business if you don't own a piece of a business you don't have a path towards Financial Freedom why is owning equity in a business important to becoming rich its ownership versus wage work if you are paid for renting out your time even lawyers and doctors you can make some money but you're not going to make the money that gives you Financial Freedom you're not going to have passive income where a business is earning for you while you are on vacation this is probably one of the most important points people seem to think you can create wealth make money through work it's probably not going to work there are many reasons for that without ownership your inputs are very closely tied to your outputs in almost any salaried job even one paying a lot per hour like a lawyer or a doctor you're still putting in the hours and every hour you get paid without ownership when you're sleeping you're not earning when you're retired you're not earning when you're on vacation you're not earning and you can't earn non-linearly if you look at even doctors who get rich like really rich it's because they open a business they open a private practice the Private Practice builds a brand and the brand attracts people or they build some kind of a medical device a procedure or a process with an intellectual property essentially you're working for somebody else and that person is taking on the risk and has the accountability the intellectual property and the brand they're not going to pay you enough they're going to pay you the bare minimum they have to to get you to do their job that can be a high bare minimum but it's still not going to be true wealth where you're retired but still earning owning equity in a company basically means you own the upside when you own debt you own guaranteed revenue streams and you own the downside you want to own equity if you don't own equity in a business your odds of making money are very slim you have to work up to the point where you can own equity in a business you could own Equity as a small shareholder where you bought stock you could also own it as an owner where you started the company ownership is really important everybody who really makes money at some point owns a piece of a product a business or some IP that can be through stock options if you work at a tech company that's a fine way to start but usually the real wealth is created by starting your own companies or even by investing in an investment firm they're buying equity these are the routes to wealth it doesn't come through the hours find a position of Leverage we live in an age of infinite leverage and the economic rewards for genuine intellectual curiosity have never been higher following your genuine intellectual curiosity is a better foundation for a career than following whatever is making money right now knowledge only you know or only a small set of people knows is going to come out of your passions and your hobbies oddly enough if you have hobbies around your intellectual curiosity you're more likely to develop these passions if it entertains you now but will bore you someday it's a distraction keep looking I only really want to do things for their own sake that is one definition of Art whether it's business exercise romance friendship whatever I think the meaning of life is to do things for their own sake ironically when you do things for their own sake you create your best work even if you're just trying to make money you will actually be the most successful the year I generated the most wealth for myself was actually the year I worked the least hard and cared the least about the future I was mostly doing things for the sheer fun of it I was basically telling people I'm retired I'm not working then I had the time for whatever was my highest valued project in front of me by doing things for their own sake I did them at their best the less you want something the less you're thinking about it the less you're obsessing over it the more you're going to do it in a natural way the more you're going to do it for yourself you're going to do it in a way you're good at and you're going to stick with it the people around you will see the quality of your work is higher follow your intellectual curiosity more than whatever is hot right now if your curiosity ever leads you to a place where Society eventually wants to go you'll get paid extremely well 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 if they can train you to do it then eventually they will train a computer to do it you get rewarded by Society for giving it what it wants and doesn't know how to get elsewhere a lot of people think you can go to school and study for how to make money but the reality is there's no skill called business think about what product or service Society wants but does not yet know how to get you want to become the person who delivers it and delivers it at scale that is really the challenge of how to make money now the problem is becoming good at whatever it is it moves around from generation to generation but a lot of it happens to be in technology you are waiting for your moment when something emerges in the world they need a skill set and you're uniquely qualified you build your brand in the meantime on Twitter on YouTube and by giving away free work you make a name for yourself and you take some risk in the process when it is time to move on the opportunity you can do so with Leverage the maximum leverage possible there are three broad classes of Leverage one form of Leverage is labor other humans working for you it is the oldest form of Leverage and actually not a great one in the modern world I would argue this is the worst form of Leverage that you could possibly use managing other people is incredibly messy it requires tremendous leadership skills your one short hop from a mutiny or getting eaten or torn apart by the mob money is good as a form of Leverage it means every time you make a decision you multiply it with money capital is a trickier form of Leverage to use it's more modern it's the one that people have used to get fabulously wealthy in the last century it's probably been the dominant form of Leverage in the last century you can see this by looking for the richest people it's Bankers politicians in corrupt countries who print money essentially people who move large amounts of money around if you look at the top of very large companies outside of technology companies in many many large old companies the CEO job is really a financial job 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 the final form of Leverage is brand new the most democratic form it is product with no marginal cost of replication 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 forget Rich versus poor White Collar versus blue it's now leveraged versus unleveraged the most interesting and the most important form of Leverage is the idea of products that have no marginal cost of replication this is the new form of Leverage this was only invented in the last few hundred years it started with the printing press it accelerated with broadcast media and now it's really blown up with the internet and with coding now you can multiply your efforts without involving other humans and without needing money from other humans this book is a form of Leverage long ago I would have had to sit in a lecture hall and lecture each of you personally I would have maybe reached a few hundred people and that would have been that this newest form of Leverage is where all the new fortunes are made all the new billionaires for the last generation fortunes were made by capital the people who made fortunes were the Warren buffets of the world but the new generations fortunes Are All Made through code or media Joe Rogan making 50 million to 100 million dollars a year from his podcast you're going to have PewDiePie I don't know how much money he's rolling in but he's bigger than the news and of course there's Jeff Bezos Mark Zuckerberg Larry Page Sergey Brin Bill Gates and Steve Jobs their wealth is all code-based Leverage probably the most interesting thing to keep in mind about new forms of Leverage is they are permissionless they don't require somebody else's permission for you to use them or succeed for labor leverage somebody has to decide to follow you for Capital leverage somebody has to give you money to invest or to turn into a product coding writing books recording podcasts tweeting youtubing these kinds of things are permissionless you don't need anyone's permission to do them and that's why they are very egalitarian they're great equalizers of Leverage every great software developer for example now has an army of robots working for him at night time while he or she sleeps after they've written the code and it's cranking away you're never going to get rich renting out your time whenever you can in life optimize for Independence rather than pay if you have Independence and you're accountable on your output as opposed to your input that's the dream humans evolved in societies where there was no Leverage if I was chopping wood or carrying water for you you knew eight hours put in would be equal to about eight hours of output now we've invented leverage through Capital cooperation technology productivity all these means we live in an age of Leverage as a worker you want to be as leveraged as possible so you have a huge impact without as much time or physical effort a leveraged worker can outproduce a non-leveraged worker by a factor of one thousand or ten thousand with a leveraged worker judgment is far more important than how much time they put in or how hard they work forget 10x programmers 1000 x programmers really exist we just don't fully acknowledge it see at ID underscore AA underscore Carmack at Notch Satoshi Nakamoto Etc for example a good software engineer just by writing the right little piece of code and creating the right little application can literally create half a billion dollars worth of value for a company but 10 Engineers working 10 times as hard just because they choose the wrong model the wrong product wrote it the wrong way or put in the wrong viral Loop have basically wasted their time inputs don't match outputs especially for leveraged workers what you want in life is to be in control of your time you want to get into a leveraged job where you control your own time and you're tracked on the outputs if you do something incredible to move the needle on the business they have to pay you especially if they don't know how you did it because it's innate to your obsession or your skill or your innate abilities they're going to have to keep paying you to do it if you have specific knowledge you have accountability and you have leverage they have to pay you what you're worth if they pay you what you're worth then you can get your time back you can be hyper efficient you're not doing meetings for meetings sake you're not trying to impress other people you're not writing things down to make it look like you did work all you care about is the actual work itself when you do just the actual work itself you'll be far more productive far more efficient you'll work when you feel like it when you're high energy and you won't be trying to struggle through when you're low energy you'll gain your time back 40 hour work weeks are a relic of the Industrial Age knowledge workers function like athletes train and Sprint then rest and reassess sales is an example especially very high-end sales if you're a real estate agent out there Selling Houses it's not a great job necessarily it's very crowded but if you're a top tier real estate agent you know how to Market yourself and you know how to sell houses it's possible you could sell 5 million dollar mansions in one tenth of the time while somebody else is struggling to sell one hundred thousand dollar apartments or condos real estate agent is a job with input and output disconnected 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 tools and leverage create this disconnection between inputs and outputs the higher the creativity component of a profession the more likely it is to have disconnected inputs and outputs if you're looking at professions where your inputs and your outputs are highly connected it's going to be very hard to create wealth and make wealth for yourself in that process if you want to be part of a great tech company then you need to be able to sell or build if you don't do either learn to sell learn to build if you can do both you will be unstoppable these are two very broad categories one is building the product this is hard and it's multivariate it can include design it can include development it can include manufacturing Logistics procurement and it can even be designing and operating a service it has many many definitions but in every industry there is a definition of the Builder in our tech industry it's the CTO it's the programmer it's the software engineer or Hardware engineer but even in the laundry business it could be the person who's building the laundry service who is making the trains run on time who's making sure all the clothes end up in the right place at the right time and so on the other side of it is sales again selling has a very broad definition selling doesn't necessarily just mean selling to individual customers but it can mean marketing it can mean communicating it can mean recruiting it can mean raising money it can mean inspiring people it could mean doing PR it's a broad umbrella category earn with your mind not your time let's talk more about the real estate business the worst kind of job is someone who's doing labor to repair a house maybe you get paid ten dollars or twenty dollars an hour you go to people's houses your boss demands you're there at 8am and you repair your piece of the house here you have zero Leverage you have some accountability but not really because your accountability is to your boss not to the client you don't have any real specific knowledge since what you're doing is labor lots of people can do you're not going to get paid a lot you're getting paid minimum wage plus a little bit for your skill and your time the next level up might be the general contractor working on the house for the owner they may be getting paid fifty thousand dollars to do the whole project then they're paying the labor fifteen dollars an hour and they're keeping the difference a general contractor is obviously a better place to be but how do we measure it how do we know it's better well we know it's better because this person has some accountability they're responsible for the outcome they have to sweat at night if things aren't working contractors have leverage through laborers working for them they also have a little bit more specific knowledge how to organize a team make them show up on time and how to deal with city regulations the next level up might be a real estate developer a developer is someone who's going to buy a property hire a bunch of contractors and transform it into something higher value they probably have to take out a loan to buy a house or go to investors to raise money they buy the old house tear it down rebuild it and sell it instead of fifty thousand dollars like the general contractor or fifteen dollars an hour like the laborer the developer might be able to make a million dollars or half a million dollars in profit when they sell the house for more than they bought it for including the expenses of construction but now notice what is required from the developer a very high level of accountability the developer takes on more risk more accountability has more leverage and needs to have more specific knowledge they need to understand fundraising city regulations where the real estate market is headed and whether they should take the risk or not it is more difficult the next level up might be someone who's managing money in a real estate fund they have an enormous amount of capital Leverage they're dealing with lots and lots of developers and they're buying huge amounts of housing inventory one level beyond that might be somebody who says actually I want to bring the maximum leverage to bear in this market and the maximum specific knowledge that person would say well I understand real estate and I understand everything from basic housing construction to building properties and selling them to how real estate markets move and Thrive and I also understand the technology business I understand how to recruit developers how to write code and how to build a good product and I understand how to raise money from Venture capitalists how to return it and how all of that works 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 then you may end up with a Trulia Redfin or Zillow company and then the upside could potentially be in the billions of dollars or the hundreds of millions of dollars each level has increasing leverage increasing accountability increasingly specific knowledge you're adding in money-based leverage on top of labor-based Leverage adding in code-based leverage on top of money and labor allows you to actually create something bigger and bigger and get closer and closer to owning all the upside not just being paid a salary you start as a salaried employee but you want to work your way up to try and get higher leverage more accountability and specific knowledge the combination of those over a long period of time with the magic of compound interest will make you wealthy the one thing you have to avoid is the risk of ruin 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 stay out of things that could cause you to lose all of your Capital all of your savings don't gamble everything on one go instead take rationally optimistic Bets with big upsides earn with your mind not your time get paid for your judgment choosing what kinds of jobs careers or Fields you get into and what sort of deals you're willing to take from your employer will give you much more free time then you don't have to worry as much about time management I would love to be paid purely for my judgment not for any work I want a robot capital or computer to do the work but I want to be paid for my adjustment I think every human should aspire to being knowledgeable about certain things and being paid for our unique knowledge we have as much leverage as is possible in our business whether it's through robots or computers or what have you then we can remasters of our own time because we are just being tracked on outputs and not inputs imagine someone comes along who demonstrably has slightly better judgment they're right 85 percent of the time instead of 75 percent you will pay them 50 million dollars 100 million dollars 200 million dollars whatever it takes because 10 percent better judgment steering a 100 billion dollar ship is very valuable CEOs are highly paid because of their Leverage small differences in judgment and capability really get Amplified demonstrated judgment credibility around the judgment is so critical Warren Buffett wins here because he has massive credibility he's been highly accountable he's been right over and over in the public domain he's built a reputation for very high integrity so you can trust him people will throw infinite leverage behind him because of his judgment nobody asks him how hard he works nobody asks him when he wakes up or when he goes to sleep they're like Warren just do your thing judgment especially demonstrated judgment with high accountability and a clear track record is critical we waste our time with short-term thinking and busy work Warren Buffett spends a year deciding and a day acting that act lasts decades just from being marginally better like running a quarter mile a fraction of a second faster some people get paid a lot more orders of magnitude more leverage magnifies those differences even more being at the extreme in your art is very important in the age of Leverage solve via iteration then get paid via repetition prioritize and focus I've encountered plenty of bad luck along the way the first little Fortune I made I instantly lost in the stock market the second little Fortune I made or should have made I basically got cheated out of it by my business partners it's only the third time around that has been a charm even then it has been a slow and steady struggle I haven't made money in my life in one giant payout it has always been a whole bunch of small things piling up it's more about consistently creating wealth by creating businesses creating opportunities and creating Investments it hasn't been a giant one-off thing my personal wealth has not been generated by one big year it just Stacks up a little bit a few chips at a time more options more businesses more Investments more things I can do thanks to the internet opportunities are massively abundant in fact I have too many ways to make money I don't have enough time I literally have opportunities pouring out of my ears and I keep running out of time there are so many ways to create wealth to create products to create businesses and to get paid by society as a byproduct I just can't handle them all value your time at an hourly rate and ruthlessly spend to save time at that rate you will never be worth more than you think you're worth no one is going to Value you more than you value yourself you just have to set a very high personal hourly rate and you have to stick to it even when I was young I just decided I was worth a lot more than the market thought I was worth and I started treating myself that way always Factor your time into every decision how much time does it take it's going to take you an hour to get across town to get something if you value yourself at one hundred dollars an hour that's basically throwing 100 out of your pocket are you going to do that fast forward to your wealthy self and pick some intermediate hourly rate for me believe it or not back when you could have hired me which now obviously you can't but back when you could have hired me this was true a decade ago or even two decades ago before I had any real money my hourly rate I used to say to myself over and over is five thousand dollars an hour today when I look back really it was about one thousand dollars an hour of course I still ended up doing stupid things like arguing with the electrician or returning the broken speaker but I shouldn't have and I did a lot less than any of my friends would I would make a theatrical show out of throwing something in the trash pile or giving it to Salvation Army rather than trying to return it or handing something to people rather than trying to fix it I would argue with my girlfriend and even today it's my wife I don't do that that's not a problem that I solve I still argue that with my mother when she hands me little to do's I just don't do that I would rather hire you an assistant this was true even when I didn't have money another way of thinking about something is if you can Outsource something or not do something for less than your hourly rate Outsource it or don't do it if you can hire someone to do it for less than your hourly rate hire them that even includes things like cooking you may want to eat your healthy home-cooked meals but if you can Outsource it do that instead set a very high hourly aspirational rate for yourself and stick to it it should seem and feel absurdly high if it doesn't it's not high enough whatever you picked my advice to you would be to raise it like I said for myself even before I had money for the longest time I used five thousand dollars an hour and if you extrapolate that out into what it looks like as an annual salary it's multiple millions of dollars per year ironically I actually think I've beaten it I'm not the hardest working person I'm actually a lazy person I work through bursts of energy where I'm really motivated with something if I actually look at how much I've earned per actual hour that I've put in it's probably quite a bit higher than that can you expand on your statement if you secretly despise wealth it will elude you if you get into a relative mindset you're always going to hate people who do better than you you're always going to be jealous or envious of them they'll sense those feelings when you try and do business with them when you try and do business with somebody if you have any bad thoughts or any judgments about them they will feel it humans are wired to feel what the other person deep down inside feels you have to get out of a relative mindset literally being anti-wealth will prevent you from becoming wealthy because you will not have the right mindset for it you won't have the right spirit and you won't be dealing with people on the right level be optimistic be positive it's important optimists actually do better in the long run the business world has many people playing zero-sum games and a few playing positive some games searching for each other in the crowd there are fundamentally two huge games in life that people play one is the money game because money is not going to solve all of your problems but it's going to solve all of your money problems people realize that so they want to make money but at the same time many of them deep down believe they can't make money they don't want any wealth creation to happen so they attacked the whole Enterprise by saying well making money is evil you shouldn't do it but they're actually playing the other game which is the status game they're trying to be high status in the eyes of other people watching by saying well I don't need money we don't want money status is your ranking in the social hierarchy wealth creation is an evolutionarily recent positive sum game status is an old zero-sum game those attacking wealth creation are often just seeking status is a zero-sum game it's a very old game we've been playing it since monkey tribes it's hierarchical who's number one who's number two who's number three and for number three to move to number two number two has to move out of that slot so status is a zero-sum game politics is an example of a status game even sports are an example of a status game to be the winner there must be a loser I don't fundamentally love status games they play an important role in our society so we can figure out who's in charge but fundamentally you play them because they're a necessary evil the problem is to win at a status game you have to put somebody else down that's why you should avoid status games in your life they make you into an angry combative person you're always fighting to put other people down to put yourself and the people you like up status games are always going to exist there's no way around it but realize most of the time when you're trying to create wealth and you're getting attacked by someone else they're trying to increase their own status at your expense they're playing a different game and it's a worse game it's a zero-sum game instead of a positive sum game play stupid games Win stupid prizes what is the most important thing to do for younger people starting out spend more time making the big decisions there are basically three really big decisions you make in your early life where you live who you're with and what you do we spend very little time deciding which relationship to get into we spend so much time in a job but we spend so little time deciding which job to get into choosing what city to live in can almost completely determine the trajectory of your life but we spend so little time trying to figure out what city to live in advice to a young engineer considering moving to San Francisco do you want to leave your friends behind or be the one left behind if you're going to live in a city for 10 years if you're going to be in a job for five years if you're in a relationship for a decade you should be spending one to two years deciding these things these are highly dominating decisions those three decisions really matter you have to say no to everything and free up your time so you can solve the important problems those three are probably the three biggest ones what are one or two steps you'd take to surround yourself with successful people figure out what you're good at and start helping other people with it give it away pay it forward Karma works because people are consistent on a long enough time scale you will attract what you project but don't measure your patience will run out if you count an old boss once warned you'll never be rich since you're obviously smart and someone will always offer you a job that's just good enough how did you decide to start your first company I was working at this tech company called at home network and I told everybody around me my boss co-workers my friends in Silicon Valley all of these other people are starting companies it looks like they can do it I'm going to start a company I'm just here temporarily I'm an entrepreneur I didn't actually mean to trick myself into it it wasn't a deliberate calculated thing I was just venting talking out loud being overly honest but I didn't actually start a company this was in 1996. it was a much scarier more difficult proposition to start a company then sure enough everyone started saying what are you still doing here I thought you were leaving to start a company and wow you're still here I was literally embarrassed into starting my own company yes I know some people aren't necessarily ready to be entrepreneurs but long term where did we come up with this idea the correct logical thing to do is for everybody to work for somebody else it is a very hierarchical model find work that feels like play humans evolved as hunters and gatherers where we all worked for ourselves it's only at the beginning of Agriculture we became more hierarchical the Industrial Revolution and factories made us extremely hierarchical because one individual couldn't necessarily own or build a factory but now thanks to the internet we're going back to an age where more and more people can work for themselves I would rather be a failed entrepreneur than someone who never tried because even a failed entrepreneur has the skill set to make it on their own there are almost 7 billion people on this planet someday I hope there will be almost 7 billion companies I learned how to make money because it was a necessity after it stopped being a necessity I stopped caring about it at least for me work was a means to an end making money was a means to an end I'm much more interested in solving problems than I am in making money any end goal will just lead to another goal lead to another goal we just play games in life when you grow up you're playing the school game or you're playing the social game then you're playing the money game and then you're playing the status game these games just have longer and longer and longer lived Horizons at some point at least I believe these are all just games these are games where the outcome really stops mattering once you see through the game then you just get tired of games I would say I'm at the stage where I'm just tired of games I don't think there is any end goal or purpose I'm just living life as I want to I'm literally just doing it moment to moment I want to be off the hedonic treadmill what you really want is freedom you want freedom from your money problems right I think that's okay once you can solve your money problems either by lowering your lifestyle or by making enough money you want to retire not retirement at 65 years old sitting in a nursing home collecting a Czech retirement it's a different definition what is your definition of retirement retirement is when you stop sacrificing today for an imaginary tomorrow when today is complete in and of itself you're retired how do you get there well one way is to have so much money saved that your passive income Without You lifting a finger covers your burn rate a second is you just drive your burn rate down to zero you become a monk a third is you're doing something you love you enjoy it so much it's not about the money so there are multiple ways to retirement the way to get out of the competition trap is to be authentic to find the thing you know how to do better than anybody you know how to do it better because you love it and no one can compete with you if you love to do it be authentic and then figure out how to map that to what Society actually wants apply some leverage and put your name on it you take the risks but you gain the rewards have ownership and equity in what you're doing and just crank it up did your motivation to earn money drop after you became financially independent yes and no it did in the sense the desperation was gone but if anything creating businesses and making money are now more of an art whether in Commerce science or politics history remembers the artists art is creativity art is anything done for its own sake what are the things that are done for their own sake and there's nothing behind them loving somebody creating something playing to me creating businesses is play I create businesses because it's fun because I'm into the product I can create a new business within three months raise the money assemble a team and launch it it's fun for me it's really cool to see what can I put together it makes money almost as a side effect creating businesses is the game I became good at it's just my motivation has shifted from being goal oriented to being artistic ironically I think I'm much better at it now even when I invest it's because I like the people involved I like hanging out with them I learn from them I think the product is really cool these days I will pass on great Investments because I don't find the products interesting these are not 100 or nothing things you can start moving more and more toward that goal in your life it's a goal when I was younger I used to be so desperate to make money that I would have done anything if you'd shown up and said hey I've got a sewage trucking business want to go into that I would have said great I want to make money thank God no one gave me that opportunity I'm glad I went down the road of technology and science which I genuinely enjoy I got to combine my vocation and my avocation I'm always working it looks like work to others but it feels like play to me and that's how I know no one can compete with me on it because I'm just playing for 16 hours a day if others want to compete with me they're going to work and they're going to lose because they're not going to do it for 16 hours a day seven days a week what was your figure where you thought you were financially safe money is not the root of all evil there's nothing evil about it but the lust for money is bad the lust for money is not bad in a social sense it's not bad in the sense of you're a bad person for lusting for money it's bad for you lusting for money is bad for us because it is a bottomless pit it will always occupy your mind if you love money and you make it there's never enough there is never enough because the desire is turned on and doesn't turn off at some number it's a fallacy to think it turns off at some number the punishment for the love of money is delivered at the same time as the money as you make money you just want even more and you become paranoid and fearful of losing what you do have there's no free lunch you make money to solve your money and material problems I think the best way to stay away from this constant love of money is to not upgrade your lifestyle as you make money it's very easy to keep upgrading your lifestyle as you make money but if you can hold your lifestyle fixed and hopefully make your money in giant lump sums as opposed to a trickle at a time you won't have time to upgrade your lifestyle you may get so far ahead you actually become financially free another thing that helps I value Freedom above everything else all kinds of freedom freedom to do what I want freedom from things I don't want to do freedom from my own emotions or things that may disturb my peace for me freedom is my number one value to the extent money buys Freedom it's great but to the extent it makes me less free which it definitely does at some level as well I don't like it the winners of any game are the people who are so addicted they continue playing even as the marginal utility from winning declines do I have to start a company to be successful the most successful class of people in Silicon Valley on a consistent basis are either the Venture capitalists because they are Diversified and control what used to be a scarce resource or people who are very good at identifying companies that have just hit product Market fit those people have the background expertise and references those companies really want to help them scale then they go into the latest Dropbox or the latest Airbnb the people who were at Google then joined Facebook when it was 100 people and then joined stripe when it was 100 people when Zuckerberg was just starting to scale his company and panicked he was like I don't know how to do this and he called Jim Breyer venture capitalist and founder of Axel partners and Jim Breyer said well I have this really great head of product at this other company and you need this person those people tend to do the best risk adjusted over a long period of time other than the Venture investors themselves some of the most successful people I've seen in Silicon Valley had breakouts very early in their careers they got promoted to VP director or CEO or started a company that did well fairly early if you're not getting promoted through the ranks it gets a lot harder to catch up later in life it's good to be in a smaller company early because there's less of an infrastructure to prevent early promotion for someone who is early in their career and maybe even later the single most important thing about a company is the Alumni network you're going to build think about who you will work with and what those people are going on to do how to get lucky why do you say get rich without getting lucky in one thousand parallel universes you want to be wealthy in 999 of them you don't want to be wealthy in the 50 of them where you got lucky so we want to factor luck out of it but getting lucky would help right just recently babak nivi my co-founder and I were talking on Twitter about how one gets lucky and there are really four kinds of luck we were talking about the first kind of luck is blind luck where one just gets lucky because something completely out of their control happened this includes Fortune fate Etc then there's luck through persistence hard work hustle and motion this is when you're running around creating opportunities you're generating a lot of energy you're doing a lot to stir things up it's almost like mixing a petri dish or mixing a bunch of reagents and seeing what combines you're just generating enough Force hustle and energy for luck to find you a third way is you become very good at spotting luck if you are very skilled in a field you will notice when a lucky break happens in your field and other people who aren't attuned to it won't notice so you become sensitive to luck the last kind of luck is the weirdest hardest kind where you build a unique character a unique brand a unique mindset which causes luck to find you for example let's say you're the best person in the world at deep sea diving you're known to take on deep sea Dives nobody else believe and dare to attempt by sheer luck somebody finds a sunken treasure ship off the coast they can't get to well their luck just became your luck because they're going to come to you to get to the treasure and you're going to get paid for it this is an extreme example but it shows how one person had blind luck finding the treasure them coming to you to extract it and give you half is not blind luck you created your own luck you put yourself in a position to capitalize on luck or to attract luck when nobody else created the opportunity for themselves to get rich without getting lucky we want to be deterministic we don't want to leave it to chance 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 it starts becoming so deterministic it stops being luck the definition starts fading from luck to Destiny to summarize the fourth type build your character in a certain way then your character becomes your destiny one of the things I think is important to make money is having a reputation that makes people do deals through you remember the example of being a great diver where treasure hunters will come and give you a piece of the treasure for your diving skills if you are a trusted reliable high integrity long-term thinking deal maker when other people want to do deals but don't know how to do them in a trustworthy manner with strangers they will literally approach you and give you a cut of the deal just because of the integrity and reputation you've built up Warren Buffett gets offered deals to buy companies buy warrants bailout Banks and do things other people can't do because of his reputation of course he has accountability on the line and he has a strong brand on the line your character and your reputation are things you can build which will let you take advantage of opportunities other people may characterize as lucky but you know it wasn't luck my co-founder nivi said in a long-term game it seems that everybody is making each other rich and in a short-term game it seems like everybody is making themselves rich I think that is a brilliant formulation in a long-term game it's positive sum we're all baking the pie together we're trying to make it as big as possible and in a short-term game we're cutting up the pie how important is networking I think business networking is a complete waste of time and I know there are people in companies popularizing this concept because it serves them and their business model well but the reality is if you're building something interesting you will always have more people who will want to know you trying to build business relationships well in advance of doing business is a complete waste of time I have a much more comfortable philosophy be a maker who makes something interesting people want show your craft practice your craft and the right people will eventually find you and once you've met someone how do you determine if you can trust someone what signals do you pay attention to if someone is talking a lot about how honest they are they're probably dishonest that is just a little Telltale indicator I've learned but when someone spends too much time talking about their own values or they're talking themselves up they're covering for something sharks eat well but live a life surrounded by sharks I have great people in my life who are extremely successful very desirable like everybody wants to be their friend very smart yet I've seen them do one or two things slightly not great to other people the first time I'll say hey I don't think you should do this to that other person not because you won't get away with it you will get away with it but because it will hurt you in the end not in some Cosmic Karma kind of way but I believe deep down we all know who we are you cannot hide anything from yourself your own failures are written within your psyche and they are obvious to you if you have too many of these moral shortcomings you will not respect yourself the worst outcome in this world is not having self-esteem if you don't love yourself who will I think you just have to be very careful about doing things you are fundamentally not going to be proud of because they will damage you the first time someone acts this way I will warn them by the way nobody changes then I just distanced myself from them I cut them out of my life I just have this saying inside my head the closer you want to get to me the better your values have to be give me a lever long enough and a place to stand and I will move the Earth be patient one thing I figured out later in life is generally at least in the tech business in Silicon Valley great people have great outcomes you just have to be patient every person I met at the beginning of my career 20 years ago where I looked at them and said wow that guy or gal is super capable so smart and dedicated all of them almost without exception became extremely successful you just had to give them a long enough time scale it never happens in the time scale you want or they want but it does happen apply specific knowledge with leverage and eventually you will get what you deserve it takes time even once you have all of these pieces in place there is an indeterminate amount of time you have to put in if you're counting you'll run out of patience before success actually arrives everybody wants to get rich immediately but the world is an efficient Place immediate doesn't work you do have to put in the time you do have to put in the hours and so I think you have to put yourself in the position with the specific knowledge with accountability with leverage with the authentic skill set you have to be the best in the world at what you do you have to enjoy it and keep doing it keep doing it and keep doing it don't keep track and don't keep count because if you do you will run out of time the most common bad advice I hear is you're too young most of History was built by young people they just got credit when they were older the only way to truly learn something is by doing it yes listen to guidance but don't wait people are oddly consistent karma is just you repeating your patterns virtues and flaws until you finally get what you deserve always pay it forward and don't keep count this is not to say it's easy it's not easy it's actually really freaking hard it is the hardest thing you will do but it's also rewarding look at the kids who are born rich they have no meaning to their lives your real resume is just a catalog of all your suffering if I ask you to describe your real life to yourself and you look back from your deathbed at the interesting things you've done it's all going to be around the sacrifices you made the hard things you did however anything you're given doesn't matter you have your four limbs your brain your head your skin that's all for granted you have to do hard things anyway to create your own meaning in life making money is a fine thing to choose go struggle it is hard I'm not going to say it's easy it's really hard but the tools are all available it's all out there money buys you freedom in the material world it's not going to make you happy it's not going to solve your health problems it's not going to make your family great it's not going to make you fit it's not going to make you calm but it will solve a lot of external problems it's a reasonable step to go ahead and make money what making money will do is solve your money problems it will remove a set of things that could get in the way of being happy but it is not going to make you happy I know many very wealthy people who are unhappy most of the time the person you have to become to make money is a high anxiety high stress hard-working competitive person when you have done that for 20 30 40 50 years and you suddenly make money you can't turn it off you've trained yourself to be a high anxiety person then you have to learn how to be happy let's get you rich first I'm very practical about it because you know Buddha was a prince he started off really rich then he got to go off in the woods in the old days if you wanted to be peaceful inside you would become a monk you would give up everything renowned sex children money politics science technology everything and you would go out in the woods by yourself you had to give everything up to be free inside today with this wonderful invention called money you can store it in a bank account you can work really hard do great things for society and Society will give you money for things it wants but doesn't know how to get you can save money you can live a little below your means and you can find a certain freedom that will give you the time and the energy to pursue your own internal peace and happiness I believe the solution to making everybody happy is to give them what they want let's get them all rich let's get them all fit and healthy then let's get them all happy amazing how many people confuse wealth and wisdom building judgment there's no shortcut to smart judgment if you want to make the maximum amount of money possible if you want to get rich over your life in a deterministically predictable way stay on the bleeding edge of Trends and study technology design and art become really good at something you don't get rich by spending your time to save money you get rich by saving your time to make money hard work is really overrated how hard you work matters a lot less in the modern economy what is underrated judgment judgment is underrated can you define judgment my definition of wisdom is knowing the long-term consequences of your actions wisdom applied to external problems is judgment they're highly linked knowing the long-term consequences of your actions and then making the right decision to capitalize on that in an age of Leverage one correct decision can win everything without hard work you'll develop neither judgment nor Leverage you have to put in the time but the judgment is more important the direction you're heading in matters more than how fast you move especially with Leverage picking the direction you're heading in for every decision is far far more important than how much force you apply just pick the right direction to start walking in and start walking how to think clearly clear thinker is a better compliment than smart real knowledge is intrinsic and it's built from the ground up to use a math example you can't understand trigonometry without understanding arithmetic and geometry basically if someone is using a lot of fancy words and a lot of big Concepts they probably don't know what they're talking about I think the smartest people can explain things to a child if you can't explain it to a child then you don't know it it's a common saying and it's very true Richard Feynman very famously does this in six easy pieces one of his early physics lectures he basically explains mathematics in three pages he starts from the number line counting and then he goes all the way up to pre-calculus he just builds it up through an unbroken chain of logic he doesn't rely on any definitions the really smart thinkers are clear thinkers they understand the basics at a very very fundamental level I would rather understand the basics really well than memorize all kinds of complicated Concepts I can't stitch together and can't rederive from the basics if you can't rederive Concepts from the basics as you need them you're lost you're just memorizing the advanced concepts in a field are less proven we use them to Signal Insider knowledge but we'd be better off nailing the basics clear thinkers appeal to their own authority part of making effective decisions boils down to dealing with reality how do you make sure you're dealing with reality when you're making decisions by not having a strong sense of self or judgments or mind presence the monkey mind will always respond with this regurgitated emotional response to what it thinks the world should be those desires will Cloud your reality this happens a lot of times when people are mixing politics in business the number one thing clouding us from being able to see reality is we have preconceived notions of the way it should be one definition of a moment of suffering is the moment when you see things exactly the way they are this whole time you've been convinced your business is doing great and really you've ignored the signs it's not doing well then your business fails and you suffer because you've been putting off reality you've been hiding it from yourself the good news is the moment of suffering when you're in pain is a moment of truth it is a moment where you're forced to embrace reality the way it actually is then you can make meaningful change and progress you can only make progress when you're starting with the truth the hard thing is seeing the truth to see the truth you have to get your ego out of the way because your ego doesn't want to face the truth the smaller you can make your ego the less conditioned you can make your reactions the less desires you can have about the outcome you want the easier it will be to see the reality what we wish to be true clouds our perception of what is true suffering is the moment when we can no longer deny reality imagine we're going through something difficult like a breakup a job loss a business failure or a health problem and our friends are advising us when we're advising them the answer is obvious it comes to us in a minute and we tell them exactly Oh that girl get over her she wasn't good for you anyway you'll be happier trust me you'll find someone you know the correct answer but your friend can't see it because they're in the moment of suffering and pain they're still wishing reality was different the problem isn't reality the problem is their desire is colliding with reality and preventing them from seeing the truth no matter how much you say it the same thing happens when I make decisions the more desire I have for something to work out a certain way the less likely I am to see the truth especially in business if something isn't going well I try to acknowledge it publicly and I try to acknowledge it publicly in front of my co-founders and friends and co-workers then I'm not hiding it from anybody else if I'm not hiding it from anybody I'm not going to delude myself from what's actually going on what you feel tells you nothing about the facts it merely tells you something about your estimate of the facts it's actually really important to have empty space if you don't have a day or two every week in your calendar where you're not always in meetings and you're not always busy then you're not going to be able to think you're not going to be able to have good ideas for your business you're not going to be able to make good judgments I also encourage taking at least one day a week preferably two because if you budget two you'll end up with one where you just have time to think it's only after you're bored you have the great ideas it's never going to be when you're stressed or busy running around or rushed make the time very smart people tend to be weird since they insist on thinking everything through for themselves a contrarian isn't one who always objects that's a conformist of a different sort a contrarian reasons independently from the ground up and resists pressure to conform cynicism is easy mimicry is easy optimistic contrarians are the rarest breed shed your identity to see reality our egos are constructed in our formative years our first two decades they get constructed by our environment our parents Society then we spend the rest of our life trying to make our ego happy we interpret anything new through our ego how do I change the external world to make it more how I would like it to be tension is who you think you should be relaxation is who you are Buddhist saying you absolutely need habits to function you cannot solve every problem in life as if it is the first time it's thrown at you we accumulate all these habits we put them in the bundle of identity ego ourselves and then we get attached to them I'm Naval this is the way I am it's really important to be able to uncondition yourself to be able to take your habits apart and say okay this is a habit I probably picked up when I was a toddler trying to get my parents attention now I've reinforced it and reinforced it and I call it a part of my identity does it still serve me does it make me happier does it make me healthier does it make me accomplish whatever I set out to accomplish I'm less habitual than most people I don't like to structure my day to the extent I have habits I try to make them more deliberate rather than accidents of History any belief you took in a package example Democrat Catholic American is suspect and should be reevaluated from base principles I try not to have too much I've pre-decided I think creating identities and labels locks you in and keeps you from seeing the truth to be honest speak without identity I used to identify as libertarian but then I would find my self-defending positions I hadn't really thought through because they're a part of the libertarian Canon if all your beliefs line up into neat little bundles you should be highly suspicious I don't like to self-identify on almost any level anymore which keeps me from having too many of these so-called stable beliefs we each have a contrarian belief Society Rejects but the more our own identity and local tribe reject it the more real it likely is there are two attractive lessons about suffering in the long term it can make you accept the world the way it is the other lesson is it can make your ego change in an extremely hard way maybe you're a competitive athlete and you get injured badly like Bruce Lee you have to accept being an athlete is not your entire identity and maybe you can forge a new identity as a philosopher Facebook redesigns Twitter redesigns personalities careers and teams also need redesigns there are no permanent Solutions in a dynamic system tension is who you think you should be relaxation is who you are learn the skills of decision making the classical virtues are all decision-making heuristics to make one optimize for the long term rather than for the short term self-serving conclusions should have a higher bar I do view a lot of my goals over the next few years of unconditioning previous learned responses or habituated responses so I can make decisions more cleanly in the moment without relying on memory or pre-packaged heuristics and judgments almost all biases are time-saving heuristics for important decisions discard memory and identity and focus on the problem radical honesty just means I want to be free part of being free means I can say what I think and think what I say they're highly congruent and integrated theoretical physicist Richard vineman famously said you should never ever fool anybody and you are the easiest person to fool the moment you tell somebody something dishonest you've lied to yourself then you'll start believing your own lie which will disconnect you from reality and take you down the wrong road I never ask if I like it or I don't like it I think this is what it is or this is what it isn't Richard Feynman it's really important for me to be honest I don't go out of my way volunteering negative or nasty things I would combine radical honesty with an old rule Warren Buffett has which is praise specifically criticize generally I tried to follow this I don't always follow it but I think I follow it enough to have made a difference in my life if you have a criticism of someone then don't criticize the person criticize the general approach or criticize the class of activities if you have to praise somebody then always try and find the person who is the best example of what you're praising and praise the person specifically then people's Egos and identities which we all have don't work against you they work for you any advice on developing capacity for instinctual blunt honesty tell everyone start now it doesn't have to be blunt Charisma is the ability to project confidence and love at the same time it's almost always possible to be honest and positive as an investor and CEO of angelist you're paid to be right when other people are wrong do you have a process around how you make decisions yes decision making is everything in fact someone who makes decisions right eighty percent of the time instead of seventy percent of the time will be valued and compensated in the market hundreds of times more I think people have a hard time understanding a fundamental fact of Leverage if I manage one billion dollars and I'm right ten percent more often than somebody else my decision making creates 100 million dollars worth of value on a judgment call with modern technology and large workforces and capital our decisions are leveraged more and more if you can be more right and more rational you're going to get non-linear returns in your life I love the blog Farnam Street because it really focuses on helping you be more accurate an overall better decision maker decision making is everything the more you know the less you diversify collect mental models during decision making the brain is a memory prediction machine a lousy way to do memory prediction is X happened in the past therefore X will happen in the future it's too based on specific circumstances what you want is principles you want mental models the best mental models I have found came through Evolution game theory and Charlie Munger Charlie Munger is Warren Buffett's partner very good investor he has tons and tons of great mental models author and Trader Nasim taleb has great mental models Benjamin Franklin had great mental models I basically load my head full of mental models I use my tweet and other people's tweets as maxims that help compress my own learnings and recall them the brain space is finite you have finite neurons so you can almost think of these as pointers addresses or mnemonics to help you remember deep-seated principles where you have the underlying experience to back it up if you don't have the underlying experience then it just reads like a collection of quotes it's cool it's inspirational for a moment maybe you'll make a nice poster out of it but then you forget it and move on mental models are really just compact ways for you to recall your own knowledge evolution I think a lot of modern society can be explained through Evolution one theory is civilization exists to answer the question of who gets to mate if you look around from a purely sexual selection perspective sperm is abundant and eggs are scarce it's an allocation problem literally all of the works of mankind and womankind can be traced down to people trying to solve this problem Evolution thermodynamics information Theory and complexity have explanatory and predictive power in many aspects of life inversion I don't believe I have the ability to say what is going to work rather I try to eliminate what's not going to work I think being successful is just about not making mistakes it's not about having correct judgment it's about avoiding incorrect judgments complexity Theory I was really into complexity Theory back in the mid 90s the more I got into it the more I understand the limits of our knowledge and the limits of our prediction capability complexity has been super helpful to me it has helped me come to a system that operates in the face of ignorance I believe we are fundamentally ignorant and very very bad at predicting the future economics microeconomics and Game Theory are fundamental I don't think you can be successful in business or even navigate most of our modern capitalist Society without an extremely good understanding of supply and demand labor versus Capital game theory and those kinds of things ignore the noise the market will decide principal agent problem to me the principal agent problem is the single most fundamental problem in microeconomics if you do not understand the principal agent problem you will not know how to navigate your way through the world it is important if you want to build a successful company or be successful in your dealings it's a very simple concept Julius Caesar famously said if you want it done then go and if not then send what he meant was if you want it done right then you have to go yourself and do it when you are the principal then you are the owner you care and you will do a great job when you are the agent and you are doing it on somebody else's behalf you can do a bad job you just don't care you optimize for yourself rather than for the principal's assets the smaller the company the more everyone feels like a principal the less you feel like an agent the better the job you're going to do the more closely you can tie someone's compensation to the exact value they're creating the more you turn them into a principle and the less you turn them into an agent I think at a core fundamental level we understand this we're attracted to principles and we all bond with principles but the media and modern society spend a lot of time brainwashing you about needing an agent an agent being important and the agent being knowledgeable compound interest compound interest most of you should know it in the finance context if you don't crack open a microeconomics textbook it's worth reading a microeconomics textbook from start to finish an example of compound interest let's say you're earning 10 a year on your one dollar the first year you make 10 and you end up with one dollar and ten cents the next year you end up with 1.21 cents and the next year 1.33 cents it keeps adding on to itself if you're compounding at thirty percent per year for 30 years you don't just end up with 10 or 20 times your money you end up with thousands of times your money in the intellectual domain compound interest rules when you look at a business with 100 users growing at a compound rate of 20 per month it can vary very quickly stack up to having millions of users sometimes even the founders of these companies are surprised by how large the business scales basic math I think basic mathematics is really underrated if you're going to make money if you're going to invest money your basic math should be really good you don't need to learn geometry trigonometry calculus or any of the complicated stuff if you're just going into business but you want arithmetic probability and statistics those are extremely important crack open a basic math book and make sure you are really good at multiplying dividing compounding probability and statistics black swans there's a new branch of probability statistics which is really around tail events black swans are extreme probabilities again I have to refer back to Nasim taleb who I think is one of the greatest philosopher scientists of our times he's really done a lot of pioneering work on this calculus calculus is useful to know to understand the rates of change and how nature works but it's more important to understand the principles of calculus where you're measuring the change in small discrete or small continuous events it's not important you solve integrals or do derivations on demand because you're not going to need to in the business world falsifiability least understood but the most important principle for anyone claiming science on their side falsifiability if it doesn't make falsifiable predictions it's not science for you to believe something is true it should have predictive power and it must be falsifiable I think macroeconomics because it doesn't make falsifiable predictions which is the Hallmark of science has become corrupted you never have a counter example when studying the economy you can never take the US economy and run two different experiments at the same time if you can't decide the answer is no if I'm faced with a difficult Choice such as should I marry this person should I take this job should I buy this house should I move to the city should I go into business with this person if you cannot decide the answer is no and the reason is modern society is full of options there are tons and tons of options we live on a planet of seven billion people and we are connected to everybody on the internet there are hundreds of thousands of careers available to you there are so many choices you're biologically not built to realize how many choices there are historically we've all evolved in tribes of 150 people when someone comes along they may be your only option for a partner when you choose something you get locked in for a long time starting a business may take 10 years you start a relationship that will be five years or maybe more you move to a city for 10 to 20 years these are very very long-lived decisions it's very very important we only say yes when we are pretty certain you're never going to be absolutely certain but you're going to be very certain if you find yourself creating a spreadsheet for a decision with a list of yeses and no's pros and cons checks and balances why this is good or bad forget it if you cannot decide the answer is no run uphill simple heuristic if you're evenly split on a difficult decision take the path more painful in the short term if you have two choices to make and they're relatively equal choices take the path more difficult and more painful in the short term what's actually going on is one of these paths requires short-term pain and the other path leads to pain further out in the future and what your brain is doing through conflict avoidance is trying to push off the short-term pain by definition if the two are even and one has short-term pain that path has long-term gain associated with the law of compound interest long-term gain is what you want to go toward your brain is overvaluing the side with the short-term happiness and trying to avoid the one with short-term pain so you have to cancel the tendency out it's a powerful subconscious tendency by leaning into the pain as you know most of the gains in life come from suffering in the short term so you can get paid in the long term working out for me is not fun I suffer in the short term I feel pain but then in the long term I'm better off because I have muscles or I'm healthier if I'm reading a book and I'm getting confused it is just like working out and the muscle getting sore or tired except now my brain is being overwhelmed in the long run I'm getting smarter because I'm absorbing new Concepts from working at the limit or edge of my capability so you generally want to lean into things with short-term pain but long-term gain what are the most efficient ways to build new mental models read a lot just read ing science math and philosophy one hour per day will likely put you at the upper echelon of human success within seven years learn to love to read specific recommendations for books blogs and more are in naval's recommended reading section the genuine love for reading itself when cultivated is a superpower we live in the age of Alexandria when every book and every piece of knowledge ever written down is a fingertip away the means of learning are abundant it's the desire to learn that is scarce reading was my first love I remember my grandparents house in India I'd be a little kid on the floor going through all of my grandfather's readers digests which is all he had to read now of course there's a smorgasbord of information out there anybody can read anything all the time back then it was much more limited I would read comic books story books whatever I could get my hands on I think I always love to read because I'm actually an anti-social introvert I was lost in the world of words and ideas from an early age I think some of it comes from the happy circumstance that when I was young nobody forced me to read certain things I think there's a tendency among parents and teachers to say oh you should read this but don't read that I read a lot which by today's standards would be considered mental junk food read what you love until you love to read you almost have to read the stuff you're reading because you're into it you don't need any other reason there's no Mission here to accomplish just read Because you enjoy it these days I find myself rereading as much or more as I do reading a tweet from at illicertus said I don't want to read everything I just want to read the 100 great books over and over again I think there's a lot to that idea it's really more about identifying the great books for you because different books speak to different people then you can really absorb those reading a book isn't a race the better the book The more slowly it should be absorbed I don't know about you but I have very poor attention I skim I speed read I jump around I could not tell you specific passages or quotes from books at some deep level you absorb them and they become threads in the tapestry of your psyche they kind of weave in there I'm sure you've had this feeling where you pick up a book and start reading it and you're like this is pretty interesting this is pretty good you're getting this increasing sense of deja vu then halfway through the book you realize I've read this book before that's perfectly fine it means you were ready to reread it I don't actually read a lot of books I pick up a lot of books and only get through a few which form the foundation of my knowledge the reality is I don't actually read much compared to what people think I probably read one to two hours a day that puts me in the top point zero zero zero zero one percent I think that alone accounts for any material success I've had in my life and any intelligence I might have real people don't read an hour a day real people I think read a minute a day or less making it an actual habit is the most important thing it almost doesn't matter what you read eventually you will read enough things and your interests will lead you there that it will dramatically improve your life just like the best workout for you is one you're excited enough to do every day I would say for books blogs tweets or whatever anything with ideas and information and learning the best ones to read are the ones you're excited about reading all the time as long as I have a book in my hand I don't feel like I'm wasting time Charlie Munger everyone's brain works differently some people love to take notes actually my note-taking is Twitter I read and read and read if I have some fundamental aha Insight or concept Twitter forces me to distill it into a few characters then I try and put it out there as an aphorism then I get attacked by random people who point out all kinds of obvious exceptions and jump down my throat then I think why did I do this again pointing out obvious exceptions implies either the target isn't smart or you aren't when you first pick up a book are you skimming for something interesting how do you go about reading it do you just flip to a random page and start reading what's your process I'll start at the beginning but I'll move fast if it's not interesting I'll just start flipping ahead skimming or speed reading if it doesn't grab my attention within the first chapter in a meaningful positive way I'll either drop the book or skip ahead a few chapters I don't believe in delayed gratification when there are an infinite number of books out there to read there are so many great books the number of books completed is a vanity metric as you know more you leave more books unfinished focus on New Concepts with predictive power generally I'll skim I'll fast forward I'll try and find a part to catch my attention most books have one point to make obviously this is non-fiction I'm not talking about fiction they have one point to make they make it and then they give you example after example after example after example and they apply it to explain everything in the world once I feel like I've gotten the gist I feel very comfortable putting the book down there's a lot of these what I would call pseudoscience bestsellers people are like oh did you read this book I always say yes but the reality is I read maybe two chapters of it I got the gist if they wrote it to make money don't read it what practices do you follow to internalize organize information from reading books explain what you learned to someone else teaching forces learning it's not about educated versus uneducated it's about likes to read and doesn't like to read what can I do for the next 60 days to become a clearer more independent thinker read the greats in math science and philosophy ignore your contemporaries and news avoid tribal identification put truth above social approval study logic and math because once you've mastered them you won't fear any book no book in the library should scare you whether it's a math physics electrical engineering sociology or economics book you should be able to take any book down off the shelf and read it a number of them are going to be too difficult for you that's okay read them anyway then go back and re-read them and reread them when you're reading a book and you're confused that confusion is similar to the pain you get in the gym when you're working out but you're building mental muscles instead of physical muscles learn how to learn and read the books the problem with saying just read is there is so much junk out there there are as many different kinds of authors as there are people many of them are going to write lots of junk I have people in my life I consider to be very well read who aren't very smart the reason is because even though they're very well read they read the wrong things in the wrong order they started out reading a set of false or just weekly true things and those formed the axioms of the foundation for their world view then when new things come they judge the new idea based on a foundation they already built your foundation is critical because most people are intimidated by math and can't independently critique it they overvalue opinions backed with Math slash pseudoscience when it comes to reading make sure your foundation is very very high quality the best way to have a high quality Foundation you may not love this answer but the trick is to stick to science and to stick to the basics generally there are only a few things you can read people don't disagree with very few people disagree two plus two equals four right that is serious knowledge mathematics is a solid foundation similarly the hard Sciences are a solid foundation microeconomics is a solid foundation the moment you start wandering outside of these solid foundations you're in trouble because now you don't know what's true and what's false I would focus as much as I could on having solid foundations it's better to be really great at arithmetic and geometry than to be deep into advanced mathematics I would read microeconomics all day long microeconomics 101 another way to do this is to read originals and read classics if you're interested in evolution read Charles Darwin don't begin with Richard Dawkins even though I think he's great read him later read Darwin first if you want to learn macroeconomics first read Adam Smith read Von mises or read Hayek start with the original philosophers of the economy if you're into communist or socialist ideas which I'm personally not start by reading Karl Marx don't read the current interpretation someone is feeding you about how things should be done and run if you start with the originals as your foundations then you have enough of a world view and understanding that you won't fear any book then you can just learn if you're a Perpetual learning machine you will never be out of options for how to make money you can always see what's coming up in society what the value is where the demand is and you can learn to come up to speed to think clearly understand the basics if you're memorizing advanced concepts without being able to rederive them as needed you're lost we're now in a day and age of Twitter and Facebook we're getting bite-sized pithy wisdom which is really hard to absorb books are very difficult to read as a modern person because we've been trained we have two contradictory pieces of training one is our attention span has gone through the floor because we're hit with so much information all the time we want to skip summarize and cut to the chase Twitter has made me a worse reader but a much better writer on the other hand we're also taught from a young age to finish your books books are sacred when you go to school and you're assigned to read a book you have to finish the book over time we forget how to read books everyone I know is stuck on some book I'm sure you're stuck on something right now it's page 332 you can't go any further but you know you should finish the book so what do you do you give up reading books for a while for me giving up reading was a tragedy I grew up on books then I switched to blogs then I switched to Twitter and Facebook and I realized I wasn't actually learning anything I was just taking little dopamine snacks all day long I was getting my little 140 character burst of dopamine I would tweet then look to see who retweeted my tweet it's a fun and wonderful thing but it's a game I was playing I realized I had to go back to reading books I knew it was a very hard problem because my brain had now been trained to spend time on Facebook Twitter and these other bite-sized pieces I came up with this hack where I started treating books as throwaway blog posts or bite-sized tweets or posts I felt no obligation to finish any book now when someone mentions a book to me I buy it at any given time I'm reading somewhere between 10 and 20 books I'm flipping through them if the book is getting a little boring I'll skip ahead sometimes I start reading a book in the middle because some paragraph caught my eye I'll just continue from there and I feel no obligation whatsoever to finish the book all of a sudden books are back into my reading Library that's great because there is ancient wisdom in books when solving problems the older the problem the older the solution if you're trying to learn how to drive a car or fly a plane you should read something written in the modern age because this problem was created in the Modern Age and the solution is great in the Modern Age if you're talking about an old problem like how to keep your body healthy how to stay calm and peaceful what kinds of value systems are good how you raise a family and those kinds of things the older Solutions are probably better any book that survived for two thousand years has been filtered through many people the general principles are more likely to be correct I wanted to get back into reading these sorts of books you know that song you can't get out of your head all thoughts work that way careful what you read a Calm Mind a Fit Body and a house full of love these things cannot be bought they must be earned part two happiness the three big ones in life are wealth health and happiness we pursue them in that order but their importance is reverse learning happiness don't take yourself so seriously you're just a monkey with a plan happiness is learned ten years ago if you would have asked me how happy I was I would have dismissed the question I didn't want to talk about it on a scale of one to ten I would have said 2 out of ten or three out of 10. maybe four out of ten on my best days but I did not value being happy today I am a 9 out of ten and yes having money helps but it's actually a very small piece of it most of it comes from learning over the years my own happiness is the most important thing to me and I've cultivated it with a lot of techniques maybe happiness is not something you inherit or even choose but a highly personal skill that can be learned like Fitness or nutrition happiness is a very evolving thing I think like all the great questions when you're a little kid you go to your mom and ask what happens when we die is there a Santa Claus is there a God should I be happy who should I marry those kinds of things there are no glib answers because no answers apply to everybody these kinds of questions ultimately do have answers but they have personal answers the answer that works for me is going to be nonsense to you and vice versa whatever happiness means to me it means something different to you I think it's very important to explore what these definitions are for some people I know it's a flow state for some people it's satisfaction for some people it's a feeling of contentment my definition keeps evolving the answer I would have given you a year ago will be different than what I tell you now today I believe happiness is really a default state happiness is there when you remove the sense of something missing in your life we are highly judgmental survival and replication machines we constantly walk around thinking I need this or I need that trapped in the web of desires 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 in that absence for a moment you have internal silence when you have internal silence then you are content and you are happy feel free to disagree again it's different for everybody people mistakenly believe happiness is just about positive thoughts and positive actions The more I've read The more I've learned and The more I've experienced because I verify this for myself every positive thought essentially holds within it a negative thought it is a contrast to something negative the Tau de Ching says this more articulately than I ever could but it's all Duality and polarity if I say I'm happy that means I was sad at some point if I say he's attractive then somebody else is unattractive every positive thought even has a seed of a negative thought within it and vice versa which is why a lot of greatness in life comes out of suffering you have to view the negative before you can aspire to and appreciate the positive to me happiness is not about positive thoughts it's not about negative thoughts it's about the absence of Desire especially the absence of desire for external things the fewer desires I can have the more I can accept the current state of things the less my mind is moving because the mind really exists in motion toward the future or the past the more present I am the happier and more content I will be if I latch onto a feeling if I say oh I'm happy now and I want to stay happy then I'm going to drop out of that happiness now suddenly the mind is moving it's trying to attach to something it's trying to create a permanent situation out of a temporary situation happiness to me is mainly not suffering not Desiring not thinking too much about the future or the past really embracing the present moment and the reality of what is and the way it is if you ever want to have peace in your life you have to move Beyond Good and Evil Nature has no concept of happiness or unhappiness nature follows unbroken mathematical laws and a chain of cause and effect from The Big Bang to now everything is perfect exactly the way it is it is only in our particular Minds we are unhappy or not happy and things are perfect or imperfect because of what we desire the world just reflects your own feelings back at you reality is neutral reality has no judgments to a tree there is no concept of right or wrong good or bad you're born you have a whole set of sensory experiences and stimulations lights colors and sounds and then you die how you choose to interpret them is up to you you have that choice this is what I mean when I say happiness is a choice if you believe it's a choice you can start working on it there are no external forces affecting your emotions as much as it may feel that way I've also come to believe in the complete and utter insignificance of the self and I think that helps a lot for example if you thought you were the most important thing in the universe then you would have to bend the entire universe to your will if you're the most important thing in the universe then how could it not conform to your desires if it doesn't conform to your desires something is wrong however if you view yourself as a bacteria or an amoeba or if you view all of your works as riding on water or building castles in the sand then you have no expectation for how life should actually be life is just the way it is when you accept that you have no cause to be happy or unhappy those things almost don't apply happiness is what's there when you remove the sense that something is missing in your life what you're left with in that neutral state is not neutrality I think people believe neutrality would be a very Bland existence no this is the existence little children live if you look at little children on balance they're generally pretty happy because they are really immersed in the environment and the moment without any thought of how it should be given their personal preferences and desires I think the neutral state is actually a Perfection state one can be very happy as long as one isn't too caught up in their own head our lives are a blink of a firefly in the night you're just barely here you have to make the most of every minute which doesn't mean you chase some stupid desire for your entire life what it means is every second you have on this planet is very precious and it's your responsibility to make sure you're happy and interpreting everything in the best possible way we think of ourselves as fixed and the world as malleable but it's really we who are malleable and the world is largely fixed can practicing meditation help you accept reality yeah but it's amazing how little it helps you can be a long time meditator but if someone says the wrong thing in the wrong way you go back to your ego driven self it's almost like you're lifting one pound weights but then somebody drops a huge barbell with a stack of plates on your head it's absolutely better than doing nothing but when the actual moment of mental or emotional suffering arrives it's still never easy real happiness only comes as a side effect of peace most of it is going to come from acceptance not from changing your external environment a rational person can find Peace by cultivating indifference to things outside of their control I have lowered my identity I have lowered the chattering of my mind I don't care about things that don't really matter I don't get involved in politics I don't hang around unhappy people I really value my time on this Earth I read philosophy I meditate I hang around with happy people and it works you can very slowly but steadily and methodically improve your happiness Baseline just like you can improve your Fitness happiness is a choice happiness love and passion aren't things you find they're choices you make happiness is a choice you make and a skill you develop the mind is just as malleable as the body 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 Were programmed in our youths we accept the voice in our head as the source of all truth but all of it is malleable and every day is new memory and identity are burdens from the past preventing us from living freely in the present happiness requires presence at any given time when you're walking down the streets a very small percentage of your brain is focused on the present the rest is planning the future or regretting the past this keeps you from having an incredible experience it's keeping you from seeing the beauty in everything and for being grateful for Where You Are you can literally destroy your happiness if you spend all of your time living in delusions of the future We crave experiences that will make us be present but the Cravings themselves take us from the present moment I just don't believe in anything from my past anything no memories no regrets no people no trips nothing a lot of our unhappiness comes from comparing things from the past to the present anticipation for our vices pulls us into the future eliminating vices makes it easier to be present there's a great definition I read Enlightenment is the space between your thoughts it means Enlightenment isn't something you achieve after 30 years sitting on a Mountaintop it's something you can achieve moment to moment and you can be enlightened to a certain percent every single day what if this life is the paradise we were promised and we're just squandering it happiness requires peace our happiness and purpose interconnected happiness is such an overloaded word I'm not even sure what it means for me these days happiness is more about peace than it is about Joy I don't think peace and purpose go together if it's your internal purpose the thing you most want to do then sure you'll be happy doing it but an externally inflicted purpose like Society wants me to do X I am the first son of the first son of this so I should do why or I have this debt or burden I took on I don't think it will make you happy I think a lot of us have this low level pervasive feeling of anxiety if you pay attention to your mind sometimes you're just running around doing your thing and you're not feeling great and you notice your mind is chattering and chattering about something maybe you can't sit still there's this nexting thing where you're sitting in one spot thinking about where you should be next it's always the next thing then the next thing the next thing after that then the next thing after that creating this pervasive anxiety it's most obvious if you ever just sit down and try and do nothing nothing I mean nothing I mean not read a book I mean not listen to music I mean literally just sit down and do nothing you can't do it because there's anxiety always trying to make you get up and go get up and go get up and go I think it's important just being aware the anxiety is making you unhappy the anxiety is just a series of running thoughts how I combat anxiety I don't try and fight it I just notice I'm anxious because of all these thoughts I try to figure out would I rather be having this thought right now or would I rather have my peace because as long as I have my thoughts I can't have my peace you'll notice when I say happiness I mean peace when a lot of people say happiness they mean Joy or Bliss but I'll take peace a happy person isn't someone who's happy all the time it's someone who effortlessly interprets events in such a way that they don't lose their innate peace desire is a contract that you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want every desire is a chosen unhappiness I think the most common mistake for Humanity is believing you're going to be made happy because of some external circumstance I know that's not original that's not new its fundamental Buddhist wisdom I'm not taking credit for it I think I really just recognize it on a fundamental level including in myself we bought a new car now I'm waiting for the new car to arrive of course every night I'm on the forums reading about the car why it's a silly object it's a silly car it's not going to change my life much or at all I know the instant the car arrives I won't care about it anymore the thing is I'm addicted to the Desiring I'm addicted to the idea of this external thing bringing me some kind of happiness and joy and this is completely delusional looking outside yourself for anything is the fundamental delusion not to say you shouldn't do things on the outside you absolutely should you're a living creature there are things you do you locally reverse entropy that's why you're here you're meant to do something you're not just meant to lie there in the sand and meditate all day long you should self-actualize you should do what you are meant to do the idea you're going to change something in the outside world and that is going to bring you the peace Everlasting joy and happiness you deserve is a fundamental delusion we all suffer from including me the mistake over and over and over is to say oh I'll be happy when I get that thing whatever it is that is the fundamental mistake we all make 24 7 all day long the fundamental delusion there is something out there that will make me happy and fulfilled forever desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want I don't think most of us realize that's what it is I think we go about Desiring things all day long and then wonder why we're unhappy I like to stay aware of it because then I can choose my desires very carefully I try not to have more than one big desire in my life at any given time and I also recognize it as the axis of my suffering I realize the area where I've chosen to be unhappy desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want one thing I've learned recently it's way more important to perfect your desires than to try to do something you don't 100 desire when you're young and healthy you can do more by doing more you're actually taking on more and more desires you don't realize this is slowly destroying your happiness I find younger people are less happy but more healthy older people are more happy but less healthy when you're young you have time you have health but you have no money when you're middle-aged you have money and you have health but you have no time when you're old you have money and you have time but you have no health so the trifecta is trying to get all three at once by the time people realize they have enough money they've lost their time and their health success does not earn happiness happiness is being satisfied with what you have success comes from dissatisfaction choose Confucius says you have two lives and the second one begins when you realize you only have one when and how did your second life begin that's a very deep question most people who are past a certain age have had this feeling or phenomenon they've gone through life a certain way and then gotten to a certain stage and had to make some pretty big changes I'm definitely also in that boat I struggled for a lot of my life to have certain material and social successes when I achieved those material and social successes or at least was beyond a point where they didn't matter as much I realized the people around me who had achieved similar successes and were on their way to achieving more didn't seem all that happy in my case there was definitely hedonic adaptation I'd very quickly get used to anything this led me to the conclusion which seems trite that happiness is internal that conclusion set me on a path of working more on my internal self and realizing all real success is internal and has very little to do with external circumstances one has to do the external thing anyway were biologically hardwired it's glib to say you can just turn it off your own life experience will bring you back to the internal path the problem with getting good at a game especially one with big rewards is you continue playing it long after you should have outgrown it survival and replication Drive put us on the work treadmill hedonic adaptation keeps us there the trick is knowing when to jump off and play instead who do you think of as successful most people think of someone as successful when they win a game whatever game they play themselves if you're an athlete you're going to think of a top athlete if you're in business you might think Elon Musk a few years ago I would have said Steve Jobs because he was part of the driving force creating something that changed lives for all of humanity I think Mark Andreessen is successful not because of his recent Incarnation as a venture capitalist but because of the incredible work he did with Netscape Satoshi Nakamoto is successful in that he created bitcoin which is this incredible technological creation that will have repercussions for decades to come of course Elon Musk because he changed everyone's viewpoint on what is possible with modern technology and Entrepreneurship I consider those creators and commercializers successful to me the real winners are the ones who step out of the game entirely who don't even play the game Who rise above it those are the people who have such internal mental and self-control and self-awareness they need nothing from anybody else there are a couple of these characters I know in my life Jersey gregoric I would consider him successful because he doesn't need anything from anybody he's at peace he's healthy and whether he makes more money or less money compared to the next person has no effect on his mental state historically I would say the legendary Buddha or krishnamurti whose stuff I like reading they are successful in the sense that they step out of the game entirely winning or losing does not matter to them there's a line from Blaise Pascal I read basically it says all of man's troubles arise because he cannot sit in a room quietly by himself if you could just sit for 30 minutes and be happy you are successful that is a very powerful place to be but very few of us get there I think of Happiness as an emergent property of peace if you're peaceful inside and out that will eventually result in happiness but peace is a very hard thing to come by the irony is the way most of us try to find peace is through War when you start a business in a way you're going to war when you struggle with your roommates as to who should clean the dishes you're going to war you're struggling so you can have some sense of security and peace later in reality peace is not a guarantee it's always flowing it's always changing you want to learn the core skill set of flowing with life and accepting it in most cases you can get almost anything you want out of life as long as it's one thing and you want it far more than anything else in my own personal experience the place I end up the most is wanting to be at peace peace is happiness at rest and happiness is peace in motion you can convert peace into happiness anytime you want but peace is what you want most of the time if you're a peaceful person anything you do will be a happy activity 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 peace on the inside is by giving up this idea of problems Envy is the enemy of happiness I don't think life is that hard I think we make it hard one of the things I'm trying to get rid of is the word should whenever the word should creeps up in your mind it's guilt or social programming doing something because you should basically means you don't actually want to do it it's just making you miserable so I'm trying to eliminate as many shoulds from my life as possible the enemy of peace of mind is expectations drilled into you by society and other people socially we're told go work out go look good that's a multiplayer competitive game other people can see if I'm doing a good job or not we're told go make money go buy a big house again external multiplayer competitive game training yourself to be happy is completely internal there is no external progress no external validation you're competing against yourself it is a single player game we're like bees or ants we are such social creatures we're externally programmed and driven we don't know how to play and win these single player games anymore we compete purely in multiplayer games the reality is life is a single player game you're born alone you're going to die alone all of your interpretations are alone all your memories are alone you're gone in three generations and nobody cares before you showed up nobody cared it's all single player perhaps one reason why yoga and meditation are hard to sustain is they have no extrinsic value purely single player games Buffett has a great example when he asks if you want to be the world's best lover and known as the worst or the world's worst lover and known as the best paraphrased in reference to an inner or external scorecard exactly right all the real scorecards are internal jealousy was a very hard emotion for me to overcome when I was young I had a lot of jealousy by and by I learned to get rid of it it still crops up every now and then it's such a poisonous emotion because at the end of the day you're no better off with jealousy you're unhappier and the person you're jealous of is still successful or good looking or whatever they are one day I realized with all these people I was jealous of I couldn't just choose little aspects of their life I couldn't say I want his body I want her money I want his personality you have to be that person do you want to actually be that person with all of their reactions their desires their family their happiness level their outlook on life their self-image if you're not willing to do a wholesale 24 7 100 swap with who that person is then there is no point in being jealous once I came to that realization jealousy faded away because I don't want to be anybody else I'm perfectly happy being me by the way even that is under my control to be happy being me it's just there are no social rewards for it happiness is built by habits my most surprising discovery in the last five years is that peace and happiness are skills these are not things you are born with yes there is a genetic range and a lot of it is conditioning from your environment but you can uncondition and recondition yourself you can increase your happiness over time and it starts with believing you can do it it's a skill just like nutrition is a skill dieting is a skill working out is a skill making money is a skill meeting girls and guys is a skill having good relationships is a skill even love is a skill it starts with realizing their skills you can learn when you put your intention and focus on it world can become a better place when working surround yourself with people more successful than you when playing surround yourself with people happier than you what type of skill is happiness it's all trial and error you just see what works you can try sitting meditation did that work for you was it Tantra meditation or was it vipassana meditation was it a 10-day Retreat or was 20 minutes enough okay none of those worked but what if I tried yoga what if I kitesurfed what if I go car racing what about cooking does that make me Zen you literally have to try all of these things until you find something that works for you when it comes to medicines for the mind the placebo effect is 100 effective when it comes to your mind you want to be positively inclined not incredulous in belief if it is fully internal you should have a positive mindset for example I was reading The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle which is a fantastic introduction to being present for people who are not religious he shows you the single most important thing is to be present and hammers at home over and over again until you get it he wrote about this body energy exercise you lie down and you feel the energy moving around your body at that point the old me would have put the book down and said well that's BS but the new me said well if I believe it maybe it'll work I went into it with a positive mindset I laid down and tried the meditation you know what it felt really good how does someone build the skill of happiness you can build good habits not drinking alcohol will keep your mood more stable not eating sugar will keep your mood more stable not going on Facebook Snapchat or Twitter will keep your mood more stable playing video games will make you happier in the short run and I used to be an avid gamer but in the long run it could ruin your happiness you're being fed dopamine and having dopamine withdrawn from you in these little uncontrollable ways caffeine is another one where you trade long term for the short term essentially you have to go through your life replacing your thoughtless bad habits with good ones making a commitment to be a happier person at the end of the day you are a combination of your habits and the people who you spend the most time with when we're kids we have very few habits over time we learn the things we are not supposed to do we become self-conscious we start forming habits and routines 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 are you surrounding yourself with people who are generally positive and upbeat people are those relationships low maintenance do you admire and respect but not envy them there's the five chimp Theory where you can predict achimp's Behavior by the five chimps it hangs out with the most I think that applies to humans as well maybe it's Politically Incorrect to say you should choose your friends very wisely but you shouldn't choose them haphazardly based on who you live next to or who you happen to work with the people who are the most happy and optimistic choose the right five chimps the first rule of handling conflict is don't hang around people who constantly engage in conflict I'm not interested in anything unsustainable or even hard to sustain including difficult relationships if you can't see yourself working with someone for life don't work with them for a day there's a friend of mine a Persian guy named bezad he just loves life and he has no time for anybody who is not happy if you ask bazad what's his secret he'll just look up and say stop asking why and start saying wow the world is such an amazing place as humans we're used to taking everything for granted like what you and I are doing right now we're sitting indoors wearing clothes well fed and communicating with each other through space and time we should be two monkeys sitting in the jungle right now watching the sun going down asking ourselves where we are going to sleep when we get something we assume the world owes it to us if you're present you'll realize how many gifts and how much abundance there is around us at all times that's all you really need to do I'm here now and I have all these incredible things at my disposal the most important trick to being happy is to realize happiness is a skill you develop and a choice you make you choose to be happy and then you work at it it's just like building muscles it's just like losing weight it's just like succeeding at your job it's just like learning calculus you decide it's important to you you prioritize it above everything else you read everything on the topic happiness habits I have a series of tricks I use to try and be happier in the moment at first they were Silly and difficult and required a lot of attention but now some of them have become second nature by doing them religiously I've managed to increase my happiness level quite a bit the obvious one is meditation Insight Meditation working toward a specific purpose on it which is to try and understand how my mind works just 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 I used to get annoyed about things now I always look for the positive side of it it used to take a rational effort it used to take a few seconds for me to come up with a positive now I can do it sub second I try to get more sunlight on my skin I look up and smile every time you catch yourself Desiring something say is it so important to me I'll be unhappy unless this goes my way you're going to find with the vast majority of things it's just not true I think dropping caffeine made me happier it makes me more of a stable person I think working out every day made me happier if you have peace of body it's easier to have peace of mind 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 you have to live up to it your friends will expect you to be a happy person recover time and Happiness by minimizing your use of these three smartphone apps phone calendar and alarm clock the more secrets you have the less happy you're going to be caught in a funk use meditation music and exercise to reset your mood then choose a new path to commit emotional energy for the rest of the day hedonic adaptation is more powerful for man-made things cars houses clothes money then for Natural Things food sex exercise no exceptions all screen activities linked to less happiness all non-screen activities linked to more happiness a personal metric how much of the day is spent doing things out of obligation rather than out of Interest it's the news's job to make you anxious and angry but its underlying scientific economic education and conflict Trends are positive stay optimistic politics Academia and social status are all zero-sum games positive some games create positive people increase serotonin in the brain without drugs sunlight exercise positive thinking and tryptophan changing habits pick one thing cultivate a desire visualize it plan a sustainable path identify needs triggers and substitutes tell your friends track meticulously self-discipline is a bridge to a new self-image bake in the new self-image it's who you are now first you know it then you understand it then you can explain it then you can feel it finally you are it find happiness in acceptance in any situation in life you always have three choices you can change it you can accept it or you can leave it if you want to change it then it is a desire it will cause you suffering until you successfully change it so don't pick too many of those pick one big desire in your life at any given time to give yourself purpose and motivation why not two you'll be distracted even one is hard enough being peaceful comes from having your mind clear of thoughts and a lot of clarity comes from being in the present moment it's very hard to be in the present moment if you're thinking I need to do this I want that this has got to change you always have three options you can change it you can accept it or you can leave it what is not a good option is to sit around wishing you would change it but not changing it wishing you could leave it but not leaving it and not accepting it that struggle or aversion is responsible for most of our misery the phrase I probably use the most to myself in my head is just one word except what does acceptance look like to you it's to be okay whatever the outcome is it's to be balanced and centered it's to step back and to see the grander scheme of things we don't always get what we want but sometimes what is happening is for the best the sooner you can accept it as a reality the sooner you can adapt to it achieving acceptance is very difficult I have a couple of hacks I try but I wouldn't say they are totally successful one hack is stepping back and looking at previous bits of suffering I've had in my life I write them down last time you broke up with somebody last time you had a business failure last time you had a health issue what happened I can trace the growth and Improvement that came from it years later I have another hack I use for minor annoyances when they happen a part of me will instantly react negatively but I've learned to mentally ask myself what is the positive of this situation okay I'll be late for a meeting but what is the benefit to me I get to relax and watch the birds for a moment I'll also spend less time in that boring meeting there's almost always something positive even if you can't come up with something positive you can say well the universe is going to teach me something now now I get to listen and learn to give you the simplest example I was at an event and afterward someone flooded my inbox with a whole bunch of photos they took there was a tiny instant judgment saying come on couldn't you have just selected a few of the best who sends a hundred photos but then immediately I asked myself what is the positive the positive is that I get to pick my five favorite photos I get to use my judgment over the last year by practicing this hack enough I've managed to go from taking a couple of seconds to think of a response to now my brain doing it almost instantaneously that's a habit you can train yourself to do how do you learn to accept things you can't change fundamentally it boils down to one big hack embracing death is the most important thing that is ever going to happen to you when you look at your death and you acknowledge it rather than running away from it it'll bring great meaning to your life we spend so much of our life trying to avoid death so much of what we struggle for can be classified as a quest for immortality if you're religious and believe there is an afterlife then you'll be taken care of if you're not religious maybe you'll have kids if you're an artist a painter or businessman you want to leave a legacy behind here's a hot tip there is no Legacy there's nothing to leave we're all going to be gone our children will be gone our works will be dust our civilizations will be dust our planet will be dust our solar system will be dust in the grand scheme of things the universe has been around for 10 billion years it'll be around for another 10 billion years your life is a firefly blink in a night you're here for such a brief period of time if you fully acknowledge the futility of what you're doing then I think it can bring great happiness and peace because you realize this is a game but it's a fun game all that matters is you experience your reality as you go through life why not interpret it in the most positive possible way any moment where you're not having a great time when you're not really happy you're not doing anyone any favors it's not like your unhappiness makes them better off somehow all you're doing is wasting this incredibly small and precious time you have on this Earth keeping death on the Forefront and not denying it is very important whenever I get caught up in my ego battles I just think of entire civilizations that have come and gone for example take the Sumerians I'm sure they were important people and did great things but go ahead and name me a single Sumerian tell me anything interesting or important Sumerians did that lasted nothing so maybe 10 000 years from now or a hundred thousand years from now people will say oh yeah Americans I've heard of Americans you're going to die one day and none of this is going to matter so enjoy yourself do something positive project some love make someone happy laugh a little bit appreciate the moment and do your work easy choices easy life hard choices hard life saving yourself doctors won't make you healthy nutritionists won't make you slim teachers won't make you smart gurus won't make you calm mentors won't make you rich trainers won't make you fit ultimately you have to take responsibility save yourself choosing to be yourself a lot of what goes on today is what many of you are doing right now beating yourself up and scribbling notes and saying I need to do this and I need to do that and I need to do no you don't need to do anything all you should do is what you want to do if you stop trying to figure out how to do things the way other people want you to do them you get to listen to the little voice inside your head that wants to do things a certain way then you get to be you I never met my greatest mentor I wanted so much to be like him but his message was the opposite be yourself with passionate intensity no one in the world is going to beat you at being you you're never going to be as good at being me as I am I'm never going to be as good at being you as you are certainly listen and absorb but don't try to emulate it's a Fool's errand instead each person is uniquely qualified at something they have some specific knowledge capability and desire nobody else in the world does purely from the combinatorics of human DNA and development the combinatorics of human DNA and experience are staggering you will never meet any two humans who are substitutable for each other your goal in life is to find the people business project or art that needs you the most there is something out there just for you what you don't want to do is build checklists and decision Frameworks built on what other people are doing you're never going to be them you'll never be good at being somebody else to make an original contribution you have to be irrationally obsessed with something choosing to care for yourself my number one priority in life above my happiness above my family above my work is my own health it starts with my physical health second it's my mental health third it's my spiritual health then it's my family's health then it's my family's well-being after that I can go out and do whatever I need to do with the rest of the world nothing like a health problem to turn up the contrast dial for the rest of life what about the modern world steers us away from the way humans are meant to live there are many many things there are a number on the physical side we have diets we are not evolved to eat a correct diet should probably look closer to a paleo diet mostly eating vegetables with a small amount of meat and berries in terms of exercise we're probably meant to play instead of running on a treadmill would probably evolve to use all of our five senses equally as opposed to favoring the visual cortex in modern society almost all of our inputs and communication are visual we're not meant to walk in shoes a lot of back and foot problems come from shoes We're Not Meant to have clothes that keep us warm all of the time we're meant to have some cold exposure it kick-starts your immune system we're not evolved to live in a perfectly sterile and clean environment it leads to allergies and an untrained immune system this is known as the hygiene hypothesis we're evolved to live in much smaller tribes and to have more family around us I partially grew up in India and in India everybody is in your business there's a cousin an aunt an uncle who is in your face which makes it hard to be depressed because you are never alone I'm not referring to people with chemical depression I'm talking more about the existential angst and malays teenagers seem to go through but on the other hand you have no privacy so you can't be free there are trade-offs we're not meant to check our phone every five minutes the constant mood swings of getting alike that an angry comment makes us into anxious creatures we evolved for scarcity but live in abundance there's a constant struggle to say no when your genes always want to say yes yes to Sugar yes to staying in this relationship yes to alcohol yes to drugs yes yes yes our bodies don't know how to say no when everyone is sick we no longer consider it a disease diet outside of math physics and chemistry there isn't much settled science we're still arguing over what the optimal diet is do you have an opinion on the ketogenic diet it seems really difficult to follow it makes sense for the brain and the body to have a backup mechanism for example in the ice ages humans evolved without many plants available at the same time we have been eating plants for thousands of years I don't think plants are bad for you but something closer to the paleo diet is probably correct I think the interplay between sugar and fat is really interesting fat is what makes you satiated fatty foods make you feel full the easiest way to feel full is to go on a ketogenic diet where you're eating tons of bacon all the time and you're going to feel almost nauseous and not want to look at fat anymore sugar makes you hungry sugar signals to your body there's this incredible food resource in the environment we're not evolved for so you rush out to get sugar the problem is the sugar effect dominates the fat effect if you eat a fatty meal and you throw some sugar in the sugar is going to deliver hunger and fat is going to deliver the calories and you're just going to binge that's why all desserts are large combinations of fat and carbs together in nature it's very rare to find carbs and fat together in nature I find carbs and fat together in coconuts in mangoes maybe in bananas but it's basically tropical fruits the combination of sugar and fat together is really deadly you've got to watch out for that in your diet I'm not an expert and the problem is diet and nutrition are like politics everybody thinks they're an expert their identity is wrapped up in it because what they've been eating or what they think they should be eating is obviously the correct answer everybody has a little religion it's just a really difficult topic to talk about I will just say in general any sensible diet avoids the combination of sugar and fat together dietary fat drives satiety dietary sugar drives hunger the sugar effect dominates control your appetite accordingly most fit and healthy people focus much more on what they eat than how much quality control is easier than and leads to quantity control ironically fasting from a low carb paleo base is easier than portion control once the body detects food it overrides the brain what I wonder about Wonder Bread is how it can stay soft at room temperature for months if bacteria won't eat it should you it has been five thousand years and we're still arguing over whether meat is poisonous or plants are poisonous ditch the extremists and any food invented in the last few hundred years when it comes to medicine and nutrition subtract before you add my trainer sends me photos of his meals and it reminds me we are all flavor addicts world's simplest diet the more processed the food the less one should consume exercise the harder the workout the easier the day what habit would you say most positively impacts your life the daily morning workout that has been a complete Game Changer it's made me feel healthier younger it's made me not go out late it came from one simple thing which is everybody says I don't have time basically whenever you throw any so-called good habit at somebody they'll have an excuse for themselves usually the most common is I don't have time I don't have time is just another way of saying it's not a priority what you really have to do is say whether it is a priority or not if something is your number one priority then you will do it that's just the way life works if you've got a fuzzy basket of 10 or 15 different priorities you're going to end up getting none of them what I did was decide my number one priority in life above my happiness above my family above my work is my own health it starts with my physical health because my physical health became my number one priority then I could never say I don't have time in the morning I work out and however long it takes is how long it takes I do not start my day until I've worked out I don't care if the world is imploding and melting down it can wait another 30 minutes until I'm done working out it's pretty much every day there are a few days where I've had to take a break because I'm traveling or I'm injured or sick or something I can count on one hand the number of breaks I take every year one month of consistent yoga and I feel 10 years younger to stay flexible is to stay young how you make a habit doesn't matter do something every day it almost doesn't matter what you do the people who are obsessing over whether to do weight training tennis Pilates the high intensity interval training method the happy body or whatever they're missing the point the important thing is to do something every day it doesn't matter what it is the best workout for you is one you're excited enough to do every day walking meetings brain works better exercise and sunlight shorter less pleasantries more dialogue less monologue no slides end easily by walking back like everything in life if you are willing to make the short-term sacrifice you'll have the long-term benefit my physical trainer Jersey gregoric is a really wise brilliant guy he always says easy choices hard life hard choices easy life basically if you are making the hard choices right now and what to eat you're not eating all the junk food you want and making the hard choice to work out so your life long term will be easy you won't be sick you won't be unhealthy the same is true of values the same is true of saving up for a rainy day the same is true of how you approach your relationships if you make the easy choices right now your overall life will be a lot harder meditation is intermittent fasting for the mind Meditation Plus mental strength an emotion is our evolved biology predicting the future impact of a current event in modern settings it's usually exaggerated or wrong why is meditation so powerful your breath is one of the few places where your autonomic nervous system meets your voluntary nervous system it's involuntary but you can also control it I think a lot of meditation practices put an emphasis on the breath because it is a gateway into your autonomic nervous system there are many many cases in the medical and spiritual literature of people controlling their bodies at levels that should be autonomous your mind is such a powerful thing what's so unusual about your forebrain sending signals to your hind brain and your hindbrain routing resources to your entire body you can do it just by breathing relaxed breathing tells your body you're safe then your forebrain doesn't need as many resources as it normally does now the extra energy can be sent to your hindbrain and it can reroute those resources to the rest of your body I'm not saying you can beat whatever illness you have just because you activated your hind brain but you're devoting most of the energy normally required to care about the external environment to the immune system I highly recommend listening to Tim ferriss's podcast with Wim Hof he is a walking miracle wim's nickname is the Iceman he holds the world record for the longest time spent in an ice bath and swimming in freezing cold water I was very inspired by him not only because he's capable of superhuman physical Feats but because he does it while being incredibly kind and happy which is not easy to accomplish he Advocates cold exposure Because he believes people are too separate from their natural environment we're constantly clothed fed and warm our bodies have lost touch with the cold the cold is important because it can activate the immune system so he Advocates taking long ice baths being from the Indian subcontinent I'm strongly against the idea of ice baths but whim inspired me to give cold showers a try and I did so by using the Wim Hof breathing method it involves hyperventilating to get more oxygen into your blood which raises your core temperature then you can go into the shower the first few cold showers were hilarious because I'd slowly ease myself in wincing the entire way I started about four or five months ago now I turn the shower on full blast and then I walk right in I don't give myself any time to hesitate as soon as I hear the voice in my head telling me how cold it's going to be I know I have to walk in I learned a very important lesson from this most of our suffering comes from avoidance most of the suffering from a cold shower is the tiptoeing your way in once you're in you're in it's not suffering it's just cold your body's saying it's cold is different than your mind saying it's cold acknowledge your body saying it's cold look at it deal with it accept it but don't mentally suffer over it taking a cold shower for two minutes isn't going to kill you having a cold shower helps you relearn that lesson every morning now hot showers are just one less thing I need out of life meditation is intermittent fasting for the mind too much sugar leads to a heavy body and too many distractions lead to a heavy mind time spent undistracted and alone in self-examination journaling meditation resolves the unresolved and takes us from mentally fat to fit do you have a current meditation practice I think meditation is like dieting where everyone is supposedly following a regimen everyone says they do it but nobody actually does it the real set of people who meditate on a regular basis I found are pretty rare I've identified and tried at least four different forms of meditation the one I found works best for me is called choiceless awareness or non-judgmental awareness as you're going about your daily business hopefully there's some nature and you're not talking to anybody else you practice learning to accept the moment you're in without making judgments you don't think oh there's a homeless guy over there better across the street or look at someone running by and say he's out of shape and I'm in better shape than him if I saw a guy with a bad hair day I would at first think haha he has a bad hair day well why am I laughing at him to make me feel better about myself and why am I trying to make me feel better about my own hair because I'm losing my hair and I'm afraid it's going to go away what I find is 90 of thoughts I have are fear-based the other 10 percent may be desire based you don't make any decisions you don't judge anything you just accept everything if I do that for 10 or 15 minutes while walking around I end up in a very peaceful grateful state choiceless awareness works well for me you could also do Transcendental Meditation which is where you're using repetitive chanting to create a white noise in your head to bury your thoughts or you can just very keenly and very alertly be aware of your thoughts as they happen as you watch your thoughts you realize how many of them are fear-based the moment you recognize a fear without even trying it goes away after a while your mind quiets when your mind quiets you stop taking everything around you for granted you start to notice the details you think wow I live in such a beautiful place it's so great that I have clothes and I can go to Starbucks and get a coffee anytime look at these people each one has a perfectly valid and complete life going on in their own heads it pops us out of the story we're constantly telling ourselves if you stop talking to yourself for even 10 minutes if you stop obsessing over your own story you'll realize we are really far up Maslow's hierarchy of needs and life is pretty good life hack when in bed meditate either you will have a deep meditation or fall asleep Victory either way another method I've learned is to just sit there and you close your eyes for at least one hour a day you surrender to whatever happens don't make any effort whatsoever you make no effort for something and you make no effort against anything if there are thoughts running through your mind you let the thoughts run for your entire life things have been happening to you some good some bad most of which you have processed and dissolved but a few stuck with you over time more and more stuck with you and they almost became like these Barnacles stuck to you you lost your childhood sense of wonder and of being present and happy you lost your inner happiness because you built up this personality of unresolved pain errors fears and desires that glommed onto you like a bunch of barnacles how do you get those Barnacles off you what happens in meditation is you're sitting there and not resisting your mind these things will start bubbling up it's like a giant inbox of unanswered emails going back to your childhood they will come out one by one and you will be forced to deal with them you will be forced to resolve them resolving them doesn't take any work you've just observed them now you're an adult with some distance time and space from previous events and you can just resolve them you can be much more objective about how you view them over time you will resolve a lot of these deep-seated unresolved things you have in your mind once they're resolved there will come a day when you sit down to meditate and you'll hit a mental inbox zero when you open your mental email and there are none that is a pretty amazing feeling it's a state of joy and Bliss and peace once you have it you don't want to give it up if you can get a free hour of bliss every morning just by sitting and closing your eyes that is worth its weight in gold it will change your life I recommend meditating one hour each morning because anything less is not enough time to really get deep into it I would recommend if you really want to try meditation try 60 days of one hour a day first thing in the morning after about 60 days you will be tired of listening to your own mind you will have resolved a lot of issues or you have heard them enough to see through those fears and issues meditation isn't hard all you have to do is sit there and do nothing just sit down close your eyes and say I'm just going to give myself a break for an hour this is my hour off from life this is the hour I'm not going to do anything if the thoughts come thoughts come I'm not going to fight them I'm not going to embrace them I'm not going to think harder about them I'm not going to reject them I'm just going to sit here for an hour with my eyes closed and I'm going to do nothing how hard is that why can you not do anything for an hour what's so hard about giving yourself an hour-long break was there a moment you realized you could control how you interpreted things I think one problem people have is not recognizing they can control how they interpret and respond to a situation I think everyone knows it's possible there's a great Osho lecture titled the attraction for drugs is spiritual he talks about why do people do drugs everything from alcohol to psychedelics to cannabis they're doing it to control their mental state they're doing it to control how they react some people drink because it helps them not care as much or their potheads because they can zone out or they do psychedelics to feel very present or connected to Nature the attraction of drugs is spiritual all of society does this to some extent people chasing Thrills in action sports or flow States or orgasms any of these states people strive for are people trying to get out of their own heads they're trying to get away from The Voice in their heads the overdeveloped sense of self at the very least I do not want my sense of self to continue to develop and strengthen as I get older I want it to be weaker and more muted so I can be more in present everyday reality except nature and the world for what it is and appreciate it very much as a child would the first thing to realize is you can observe your mental state meditation doesn't mean you're suddenly going to gain the superpower to control your internal state the advantage of meditation is recognizing just how out of control your mind is it is like a monkey flinging feces running around the room making trouble shouting and breaking things it's completely uncontrollable it's an out of control mad person you have to see this mad creature in operation before you feel a certain distaste toward it and start separating yourself from it in that separation is liberation you realize oh I don't want to be that person why am I so out of control awareness alone calms you down Insight Meditation lets you run your brain in debug mode until you realize you're just a subroutine in a larger program I try to keep an eye on my internal monologue it doesn't always work in the computer programming sense I try to run my brain in debugging mode as much as possible when I'm talking to someone or when I'm engaged in a group activity it's almost impossible because your brain has too many things to handle if I'm by myself like just this morning I'm brushing my teeth and I start thinking forward to a podcast I started going through this little fantasy where I imagined Shane asking me a bunch of questions and I was fantasy answering them then I caught myself I put my brain in debug mode and just watched Every Little Instruction go by I said why am I fantasy future planning why can't I just stand here and brush my teeth it's the awareness my brain was running off in the future and planning some fantasy scenario out of ego I was like well do I really care if I embarrass myself who cares I'm going to die anyway this is all going to go to zero and I won't remember anything so this is pointless then I shut down and I went back to brushing my teeth I was noticing how good the toothbrush was and how good it felt then the next moment I'm off to thinking something else I have to look at my brain again and say do I really need to solve this problem right now 95 of what my brain runs off and tries to do I don't need to tackle in that exact moment if the brain is like a muscle I'll be better off resting it being at peace when a particular problem arises I'll immerse myself in it right now as we're talking I'd rather dedicate myself to being completely lost in the conversation and to being 100 focused on this as opposed to thinking about oh when I brushed my teeth did I do it the right way the ability to singularly focus is related to the ability to lose yourself and be present happy and ironically more effective it's almost like you're taking yourself out of a certain frame and you're watching things from a different perspective even though you're in your own mind Buddhists talk about awareness versus the ego they're really talking about how you can think of your brain your Consciousness as a multi-layered mechanism there's a core base kernel level OS running then there are applications running on top I like to think of it as computer and geek speak I'm actually going back to my awareness level of os which is always calm always peaceful and generally happy and content I'm trying to stay in Awareness mode and not activate the monkey mind which is always worried frightened and anxious it serves incredible purpose but I try not to activate the monkey mind until I need it when I need it I want to just focus on that if I run it 24 7 I waste energy and the monkey mind becomes me I am more than my monkey mind another thing spirituality religion Buddhism or anything you follow will teach you over time you are more than just your mind you are more than just your habits you are more than just your preferences you're a level of awareness you're a body modern humans we don't live enough in our bodies we don't live enough in our awareness we live too much in this internal monologue in our heads all of which is just programmed into you by society and by the environment when you were younger you are basically a bunch of DNA that reacted to environmental effects when you were younger you recorded the good and bad experiences and you use them to pre-judge everything thrown against you then you're using those experiences constantly trying to predict and change the future as you get older the sum of preferences you've accumulated is very very large these habitual reactions end up as runaway freight trains controlling your mood we should control our own moods why don't we study how to control our moods what a masterful thing it would be if you could say right now I would like to be in the Curious State and then you can genuinely get yourself into the Curious state or say I want to be in a morning state I'm mourning a loved one and I want to grieve for them I really want to feel that I don't want to be distracted by a computer programming problem due tomorrow the Mind itself is a muscle it can be trained and conditioned it has been haphazardly conditioned by Society to be out of our control if you look at your mind with awareness and intent a 24 7 job you're working at every moment I think you can unpack your own mind your emotions thoughts and reactions then you can start reconfiguring you can start rewriting this program to what you want meditation is turning off society and listening to yourself it only works when done for its own sake hiking is walking meditation journaling is writing meditation praying is gratitude meditation showering is accidental meditation sitting quietly is direct meditation choosing to build yourself the greatest superpower is the ability to change yourself what's the biggest mistake you've made in your life and how did you recover I've made a class of mistakes I would summarize the same way the mistakes were obvious only in hindsight through one exercise which is asking yourself when you're 30 what advice would you give your 20 year old self and when you're 40 what advice would you give your 30 year old self maybe if you're younger you can do it by every five years sit down and say okay 2007 what was I doing how was I feeling 2008 what was I doing how was I feeling 2009 what was I doing how was I feeling life is going to play out the way it's going to play out there will be some good and some bad most of it is actually just up to your interpretation you're born you have a set of sensory experiences and then you die how you choose to interpret those experiences is up to you and different people interpret them in different ways really I wish I'd done all of the same things but with less emotion and less anger the most celebrated example would be when I was younger I started a company this company did well but I didn't do well so I sued some of the people involved it was a good outcome for me in the end and everything worked out okay but there was a lot of angst and a lot of anger today I wouldn't have The Angst and the anger I would have just walked up to the people and said look this is what happened this is what I'm going to do this is how I'm going to do it this is what's fair this is what's not I would have realized the anger and emotions are a huge completely unnecessary consequence now I'm trying to learn from that and do the same things I think are the right things to do but without anger and with a very long-term point of view if you take a very long-term point of view and take the emotion out of it I wouldn't consider those things mistakes anymore again habits are everything everything we are we are trained in habits from when we are children including potty training when to cry and when not to how to smile and when not to these things become habits behaviors we learn and integrate into ourselves 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 this came to light for me when my trainer gave me a routine to do every single day I had never worked out every single day before it's a light workout it's not tough on your body but I did this workout every single day I realized the incredible astonishing transformation it had on me both physically and mentally to have peace of mind you have to have peace of body first this taught me the power of habits I started realizing it's all about habits at any given time I'm either trying to pick up a good habit or discard a previous bad habit it takes time if someone says I want to be fit I want to be healthy right now I'm out of shape and I'm fat well nothing sustainable is going to work for you in three months it's going to be at least a 10-year Journey every six months depending on how fast you can do it you're going to break bad habits and pick up good habits one of the things krishnamurthy talks about is being in an internal state of revolution you should always be internally ready for a complete change whenever we say we're going to try to do something or try to form a habit we're wimping out we're just saying to ourselves I'm going to buy myself some more time the reality is when our emotions want us to do something we just do it if you want to go approach a pretty girl if you want to have a drink if you really desire something you just go do it when you say I'm going to do this and I'm going to be that you're really putting it off you're giving yourself an out at least if you're self-aware you can think I say I want to do this but I don't really because if I really wanted to do it I would just do it commit externally to enough people for example if you want to quit smoking all you have to do is go to everybody you know and say I quit smoking I did it I give you my word that's all you need to do go ahead right but most of us say we're not quite ready we know we don't want to commit ourselves externally it's important to be honest with yourself and say okay I'm not ready to give up smoking I like it too much it is going to be too hard for me to give up say instead I'll set a more reasonable goal for myself I'll cut down to the following amount I can commit to that externally I'm going to work on that for three or six months when I get there I'll take the next step as opposed to beating myself up over it when you really want to change you just change but most of us don't really want to change we don't want to go through the pain just yet at least recognize it be aware of it and give yourself a smaller change you can actually carry out impatience with actions patience with results anything you have to do just get it done why wait you're not getting any younger your life is slipping away you don't want to spend it waiting in line you don't want to spend it traveling back and forth you don't want to spend it doing things you know ultimately aren't part of your mission when you do them you want to do them as quickly as you can while doing them well with your full attention but then you just have to be patient with the results because you're dealing with complex systems and many people it takes a long time for markets to adopt products it takes time for people to get comfortable working with each other it takes time for great products to emerge as you polish away polish away polish away impatience with actions patience with results as nivi said inspiration is perishable when you have inspiration act on it right then and there choosing to grow yourself I don't believe in specific goals Scott Adams famously said set up systems not goals use your judgment to figure out what kinds of environments you can thrive in and then create an environment around you so you're statistically likely to succeed the current environment programs the brain but the clever brain can choose its upcoming environment I'm not going to be the most successful person on the planet nor do I want to be I just want to be the most successful version of myself while working the least hard possible I want to live in a way that if my life played out one thousand times Naval is successful 999 times he's not a billionaire but he does pretty well each time he may not have nailed life in every regard but he sets up systems so he's failed in very few places remember I started as a poor kid in India right if I can make it anybody can in that sense obviously I had all my limbs my mental faculties and I did have an education there are some prerequisites you can't get past but if you're listening to this book you probably have the requisite means at your disposal which is a functioning body and a functioning mind if there's something you want to do later do it now there is no later how do you personally learn about new subjects mostly I just stay on the basics even when I learn physics or science I stick to the basics I read concepts for fun I'm more likely to do something that has arithmetic in it than calculus I won't be a great physicist at this point maybe in the next lifetime or my kid will do it but it's too late for me I have to stick to what I enjoy science is to me the study of Truth it is the only true discipline because it makes falsifiable predictions it actually changes the world applied science becomes technology and technology is what separates us from the animals and allows us to have things like cell phones houses cars heat and electricity science to me is the study of Truth and Mathematics is the language of Science and nature I'm not religious but I'm spiritual to me that is the most devotional thing that I could do to study the laws of the universe the same kick that someone might get out of being in Mecca or medina and bowing to the prophet I get the same feeling of awe and small sense of self when I study science for me it's unparalleled and I'd rather stay at the basics this is the beauty of reading do you agree with the idea if you read what everybody else is reading you're going to think what everyone else is thinking I think almost everything that people read these days is designed for social approval I know people who have read 100 regurgitated books on Evolution and they've never read Darwin think of the number of macro economists out there I think most of them have read tons of treatises in economics but haven't read any Adam Smith at some level you're doing it for social approval you're doing it to fit in with the other monkeys you're fitting in to get along with the herd that's not where the returns are in life the returns in life are being out of the herd social approval is inside the herd if you want social approval definitely go read what the herd is reading it takes a level of contrarianism to say nope I'm just going to do my own thing regardless of the social outcome I will learn anything I think is interesting do you think there's some loss aversion there because once you diverge you're not sure if you're diverging toward a positive outcome or a negative outcome absolutely I think that's why the smartest and the most successful people I know started out as losers if you view yourself as a loser as someone who is cast out by society and has no role in normal society then you will do your own thing and you're much more likely to find a winning path it helps to start out by saying I'm never going to be popular I'm never going to be accepted I'm already a loser I'm not going to get what all the other kids have just got to be happy being me for self-improvement without self-discipline update your self-image everyone's motivated at something it just depends on the thing even the people that we say are unmotivated are suddenly really motivated when they're playing video games I think motivation is relative so you just have to find the thing you're into grind and sweat toil and bleed face the abyss it's all part of becoming an overnight success if you had to pass down to your kids one or two principles what would they be number one read everything you can and not just the stuff the society tells you is good or even books that I tell you to read just read for its own sake develop a love for it even if you have to read romance novels or paperbacks or comic books there's no such thing as junk just read it all eventually you'll guide yourself to the things that you should and want to be reading related to the skill of reading are the skills of mathematics and persuasion both skills help you to navigate through the real world having the skill of persuasion is important because if you can influence your fellow human beings you can get a lot done I think persuasion is an actual skill so you can learn it and it's not that hard to do so mathematics helps with all the complex and difficult things in life if you want to make money if you want to do science if you want to understand Game Theory or politics or economics or Investments or computers all of these things have mathematics at the core it's a foundational language of nature nature speaks in mathematics mathematics is US reverse engineering the language of Nature and we have only scratched the surface the good news is you don't have to know a lot of math you just have to know basic statistics arithmetic Etc you should know statistics and probability forwards and backwards and inside out choosing to Free Yourself the hardest thing is not doing what you want it's knowing what you want be aware there are no adults everyone makes it up as they go along you have to find your own path picking choosing and discarding as you see fit figure it out yourself and do it how have your values changed when I was younger I really really valued freedom Freedom was one of my core values ironically it still is it's probably one of my top three values but it's now a different definition of freedom my old definition was freedom 2. freedom to do anything I want freedom to do whatever I feel like whenever I feel like now the freedom I'm looking for is internal freedom it's freedom from freedom from reaction freedom from feeling angry freedom from being sad freedom from being forced to do things I'm Looking For Freedom from internally and externally whereas before I was looking for Freedom too advice to my younger self be exactly who you are holding back means staying in bad relationships and bad jobs for years instead of minutes freedom from expectations I don't measure my effectiveness at all I don't believe in self-measurement I feel like this is a form of self-discipline self-punishment and self-conflict 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 but if they have an expectation of you that's completely their problem it has nothing to do with you they're going to have lots of expectations out of life the sooner you can Dash their expectations the better courage isn't charging into a Machine Gun Nest courage is not caring what other people think anyone who has known me for a long time knows my defining characteristic is a combination of being very impatient and willful I don't like to wait I hate wasting time I'm very famous for being rude at parties events dinners where the moment I figure out it's a waste of my time I leave immediately value your time it is all you have it's more important than your money it's more important than your friends it is more important than anything your time is all you have do not waste your time this doesn't mean you can't relax as long as you're doing what you want it's not a waste of your time but if you're not spending your time doing what you want and you're not earning and you're not learning what the heck are you doing don't spend your time making other people happy other people being happy is their problem it's not your problem if you are happy it makes other people happy if you're happy other people will ask you how you became happy and they might learn from it but you are not responsible for making other people happy freedom from anger what is anger anger is a way to Signal as strongly as you can to the other party you're capable of violence anger is a precursor to violence observe when you're angry anger is a loss of control over the situation anger is a contract you make with yourself to be in physical and mental and emotional turmoil until reality changes anger is its own punishment an angry person trying to push your head below water is drowning at the same time freedom from employment people who live far below their means enjoy a freedom that people busy upgrading their Lifestyles can't fathom once you've truly controlled your own fate For Better or For Worse you'll never let anyone else tell you what to do a taste of Freedom can make you unemployable 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 a thousand people in the street all thousand are talking to themselves in their head at any given point they're constantly judging everything they see they're playing back movies of things that happened to them yesterday they're living in fantasy worlds of what's going to happen tomorrow they're just pulled out of Base reality that can be good when you do long-range planning it can be good when you solve problems it's good for us as survival and replication machines 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 a busy mind accelerates the passage of subjective time there is no end point to self-awareness and self-discovery it's a lifelong process you hopefully keep getting better and better at there is no one meaningful answer and no one is going to fully solve it unless you're one of these enlightened characters maybe some of us will get there but I'm not likely to given how involved I am in the rat race the best case is I'm a rat who might be able to look up at the clouds once in a while I think just being aware you're a rat in a race is about as far as most of us are going to get the modern struggle lone individuals summoning inhuman willpower fasting meditating and exercising up against armies of scientists and statisticians weaponizing abundant food screens and Medicine into junk food clickbait news Infinite porn endless games and addictive drugs philosophy the real truths are heresies they cannot be spoken only discovered whispered and perhaps read the meanings of life a really unbounded big question what is the meaning and purpose of life that's a big question because it's a big question I'll give you three answers answer one it's personal you have to find your own meaning any piece of wisdom anybody else gives you whether it's Buddha or me is going to sound like nonsense fundamentally you have to find it for yourself so the important part is not the answer it's the question you just have to sit there and dig with the question it might take you years or decades when you find an answer you're happy with it will be fundamental to your life answer two there is no meaning to life there is no purpose to life Osho said it's like riding on water or building houses of sand the reality is you've been dead for the history of the universe 10 billion years or more you will be dead for the next 70 billion years or so until the heat death of the universe anything you do will fade it will disappear just like the human race will disappear and the planet will disappear even the group who colonized as Mars will disappear no one is going to remember you past a certain number of generations whether you're an artist a poet a conqueror a pauper or anyone else there's no meaning you have to create your own meaning which is what it boils down to you have to decide is this a play I'm just watching is there a self-actualization dance I'm doing is there a specific thing I desire just for the heck of it these are all meanings you make up there is no fundamental intrinsic purposeful meaning to the universe if there was then you would just ask the next question you'd say why is that the meaning it would be as physicist Richard Feynman said it would be Turtles all the way down the wise would keep accumulating there is no answer you could give that wouldn't have another why I don't buy the Everlasting afterlife answers because it's insane to me with absolutely no evidence to believe because of how you live 70 years here on this planet you're going to spend eternity which is a very long time in some afterlife what kind of silly God judges you for eternity based on some small period of time here I think after this life it's very much like before you were born remember that it's going to be just like that before you were born you didn't care about anything or anyone including your loved ones including yourself including humans including whether we go to Mars or whether we stay on planet Earth whether there's an AI or not after death you just don't care either answer three the last answer I'll give you is a little more complicated from what I've read in science friends of mine have written books on this I've stitched together some theories maybe there is a meaning to life but it's not a very satisfying purpose basically in physics the arrow of time comes from entropy the second law of thermodynamics states entropy only goes up which means disorder in the universe only goes up which means concentrated free energy only goes down if you look at living things humans plants civilizations what have you these systems are locally reversing entropy humans locally reverse entropy because we have action in the process we globally accelerate entropy until the heat death of the universe you could come up with some fanciful Theory which I like that were headed towards the heat death of the universe in that death there's no concentrated energy and everything is at the same energy level therefore we're all one thing we're essentially indistinguishable what we do as living systems accelerates getting to that state the more complex system you create whether it's through computers civilization art mathematics or creating a family you actually accelerate the heat death of the universe you're pushing us towards this point where we end up as one thing live by your values what are your core values I've never fully enumerated them but a few examples honesty is a core core core value by honesty I mean I want to be able to just be me I never want to be in an environment or around people where I have to watch what I say if I disconnect what I'm thinking from what I'm saying it creates multiple threads in my mind I'm no longer in the moment now I have to be future planning or past regretting every time I talk to somebody anyone around whom I can't be fully honest I don't want to be around before you can lie to another you must first lie to yourself another example of a foundational value I don't believe in any short-term thinking or dealing if I'm doing business with somebody and they think in a short-term manner with somebody else then I don't want to do business with them anymore all benefits in life come from compound interest whether in money relationships love Health activities or habits I only want to be around people I know I'm going to be around for the rest of my life I only want to work on things I know have long-term payout another one is I only believe in peer relationships I don't believe in hierarchical relationships I don't want to be above anybody and I don't want to be below anybody if I can treat someone like a peer and if they can't treat me like a peer I just don't want to interact with them another I don't believe in Anger anymore anger was good when I was young and full of testosterone but now I like the Buddhist saying anger is a hot coal you hold in your hand while waiting to throw it at somebody I don't want to be angry and I don't want to be around angry people I just cut them out of my life I'm not judging them I went through a lot of anger too they have to work through it on their own go be angry at someone else somewhere else I don't know if these necessarily fall into the classical definition of values but it's a set of things I won't compromise on and I live my entire life by I think everybody has values much of finding great relationships great co-workers great lovers wives husbands is finding other people where your values line up if your values line up the little things don't matter generally I find if people are fighting or quarreling about something it's because their values don't line up if their values lined up the little things wouldn't matter meeting my wife was a great test because I really wanted to be with her and she wasn't so sure at the beginning in the end we ended up together because she saw my values I am lucky I had developed them by that point if I hadn't I wouldn't have gotten her I wouldn't have deserved her as investor Charlie Munger says to find a worthy mate be worthy of a worthy mate my wife is an incredibly lovely family-oriented person and so am I that was one of the foundational values that brought us together the moment you have a child it's this really weird thing but it answers the meaning of life purpose of life question all of a sudden the most important thing in the universe moves from being in your body into the child's body that changes you your values inherently become a lot less selfish rational Buddhism the older the question the older the answers you've called your philosophy rational Buddhism how does it differ from traditional Buddhism what type of exploration did you go through the rational part means I have to reconcile with science and evolution I have to reject all the pieces I can't verify for myself for example is meditation good for you yes is clearing your mind a good thing yes is there a base layer of awareness below your monkey mind yes all these things are verified for myself some beliefs from Buddhism I believe and follow because again I verified or reasoned with thought experiments myself what I will not accept is things like there's a past life you're paying off the karma for I haven't seen it I don't remember any past lives I don't have any memory I just have to not believe that when people say your third chakra is opening Etc I don't know that's just fancy nomenclature I have not been able to verify or confirm any of that on my own if I can't verify it on my own or if I cannot get there through science then it may be true it may be false but it's not falsifiable so I cannot view it as a fundamental truth on the other side I do know evolution is true I do know we are evolved as survival and replication machines I do know we have an ego so we get up off the ground and worms don't eat us and we actually take action rational Buddhism to me means understanding the internal work Buddhism espouses to make yourself happier better off more present and in control of your emotions being a better human being I don't subscribe to anything fanciful because it was written down in a book I don't think I can levitate I don't think meditation will give me superpowers and those kinds of things try everything test it for yourself be skeptical keep what's useful and discard what's not I would say My Philosophy falls down to this on one poll is evolution as a binding principle because it explains so much about humans on the other is Buddhism which is the oldest most time tested spiritual philosophy regarding the internal state of each of us I think those are absolutely reconcilable I actually want to write a blog post at some point about how you can map the tenets of Buddhism especially the non-fanciful ones directly into a virtual reality simulation everyone starts out innocent everyone is corrupted wisdom is the discarding of vices and the return to Virtue by way of knowledge how do you define wisdom understanding the long-term consequences of your actions if wisdom could be imparted through words alone we'd all be done here the present is all we have there is actually nothing but this moment no one has ever gone back in time and no one has ever been able to successfully predict the future in any way that matters literally the only thing that exists is this exact point where you are in space at the exact time you happen to be here like all great profound truths it's all paradoxes any two points are infinitely different any moment is perfectly unique each moment itself slips by so quickly you can't grab it you're dying and being reborn at every moment it's up to you whether to forget or remember that everything is more beautiful because we're doomed you will never be Lovelier than you are now and we will never be here again Homer The Iliad I don't even remember what I said two minutes ago at pest the past is some fictional little memory tape in my head as far as I'm concerned my past is dead it's gone all death really means is that there are no more future moments inspiration is perishable act on it immediately inspiration is perishable act on it immediately bonus the democratization of Technology allows anyone to be a Creator entrepreneur scientist the future is brighter it's statistically likely there are more advanced alien civilizations out there hopefully they're good environmentalists and find us cute naval's recommended reading the truth is I don't read for self-improvement I read out of curiosity and interest the best book is the one you'll devour books since there are so many in this section you may prefer a digital copy go to navalmanac.com to get a digital version of this chapter for your convenience read enough and you become a connoisseur then you naturally gravitate more toward Theory Concepts non-fiction non-fiction the beginning of infinity explanations that transform the world by David Deutsch not the easiest read but it made me smarter sapiens a brief history of humankind by Yuval Noah Harari a history of the human species the observations Frameworks and mental models will have you looking at history and your fellow humans differently sapiens is the best book of the last decade I have read he had decades to write sapiens there are lots of great ideas in there and it's just full of them chock full per page the rational Optimist how Prosperity evolves by Matt Ridley the most brilliant and enlightening book I've read in years he has written four of my top 20 books everything else written by Matt Ridley Matt is a scientist Optimist and forward thinker one of my favorite authors I've read everything of his and re-read everything of his genome the autobiography of a species in 23 chapters the Red Queen sex and the evolution of human nature the origins of virtue human instincts and the evolution of cooperation the evolution of everything how new ideas emerge skin in the game by Nasim taleb the best book I read in 2018 I highly recommend it lots of great ideas in there lots of good mental models and constructs he has a bit of an attitude but he has that because he's brilliant and it's okay so just look past the attitude and read the book learn the concepts it's one of the best business books I've ever read and luckily it doesn't masquerade as a business book the bed of procrusties philosophical and practical aphorisms by Nasim taleb this is his collection of ancient wisdom he is also famous for the Black Swan the impact of the highly improbable anti-fragile things that gain from disorder and Fooled by Randomness the hidden role of chance in life and in the markets all of which are worth reading six Easy Pieces Essentials of physics explained by its most brilliant teacher by Richard Feynman I would give my kids a copy of Richard feynman's six easy pieces and six not so easy pieces Einstein's relativity Symmetry and space time Richard Feynman is a famous physicist I love both his demeanor as well as his understanding of physics I've also been reading perfectly reasonable deviations from the Beaten Track by Feynman and re-reading genius The Life and Science of Richard Feynman a biography about him thing explainer complicated stuff in simple words by Randall Monroe a great book by Randall Monroe creator of XKCD a very science-oriented webcomic in this book he explains very complicated Concepts all the way from climate change to physical systems to submarines while only using the Thousand most common words in the English language he called the Saturn V rocket up goer 5. you can't Define a rocket as a spaceship or a rocket it's self-referential he says up goer it's this thing that goes up kids get it right away thinking physics understandable practical Reality by Lewis Carroll Epstein there's another great book called thinking physics I opened this one all the time I love on the back cover how it has this great little pitch that says the only Book used in both grade school and graduate school it's true all simple physics puzzles that can be explained to a 12 year old child and can be explained to a 25 year old grad student in physics they all have fundamental insights in physics they're all kind of tricky but anyone can get to the answer through purely logical reasoning the lessons of History by Will and Ariel Durand this is a great book I really like that summarizes some of the larger themes of History it's very incisive and unlike most history books it's actually really small and it covers a lot of ground the sovereign individual mastering the transition to the information age by James Dale Davidson and Lord William reese-mogg this is the best book I've read since sapiens far less mainstream though poor Charlie's Almanac the wit and wisdom of Charles D Monger by Charlie Munger edited by Peter Kaufman this masquerades as a business book but it's really just Charlie Munger of Berkshire Hathaways advice on overcoming oneself to live a successful and virtuous life reality Is Not What It Seems the journey to Quantum Gravity by Carlo ravelli this is the best book I've read in the last year physics poetry philosophy and history packaged in a very accessible form seven brief lessons on physics by Carlo ravelli I've read this one at least twice for game theory in addition to playing strategy games you may want to try the complete strategist being a primer on the theory of games of strategy by JD Williams and the evolution of cooperation by Robert Axelrod philosophy and spirituality everything by Jed McKenna Jed spits raw truth his style may be off-putting but the dedication to truth is unparalleled Theory of Everything the enlightened perspective dream state trilogy Jed McKenna's notebook Jed talks number one and number two everything by Kapil Gupta MD Garfield recently became a personal advisor and Coach to me and this comes from a person who doesn't believe in coaches a master's secret Whispers for those who abhor noise and seek the truth about life and living direct truth uncompromising non-prescriptive truths to the enduring questions of life Atma Moon the path to achieving the Bliss of the Himalayan swamis and the freedom of a living God The Book of Life by jidu krishnamurti krishnamurthy is a lesser known guy an Indian philosopher who lived at the turn of the last century and is extremely influential to me he's an uncompromising very direct person who basically tells you to look at your own mind at all times I have been hugely influenced by him probably the best book is The Book of Life which is excerpts from his various speeches and books stitched together I'll give my kids a copy of The Book of Life I'll tell them to save it until they're older because it won't make much sense while they're younger total freedom the Essential krishnamurthy by jidu krishnamurthy I like this for someone who's more advanced a rationalist's guide to The Perils of the human mind the spiritual book I keep returning to Siddhartha by Hermann Hessa I love this as a classic book on philosophy a good introduction for someone starting out I've given out more copies of this book than any other I'm pretty much always rereading something by either krishnamurthy or Osho those are my favorite philosophers update I now add Jed McKenna Kapil Gupta the vashishta yoga and schopenhauer to that list The Book of Secrets 112 meditations to discover the mystery Within by Osho most meditation techniques are concentration methods and there are many many meditation techniques if you want to run through a bunch of them you can pick up a book called The Book of Secrets by Osho I know he's gotten a bad rap recently but he was a pretty smart guy it's actually a translation of an old Sanskrit book with 112 different meditations you can try each one and see which one works for you the great challenge exploring the world within by Osho the way to love the last meditations of Anthony Demello by Anthony Demello the untethered Soul the journey Beyond Yourself by Michael Singer meditations by Marcus Aurelius 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 love yourself like your life depends on it by camel ravikant I've actually been reading my brother's book love yourself like your life depends on it I thought it was very succinctly written obviously a plug for my bro he's the philosopher in the family I'm just the amateur he has a great line in his book I once asked a monk how he found peace I say yes he'd said to all that happens I say yes The Tao of Seneca practical letters from A stoic master my most listened to audiobook the most important audiobook I've ever heard how to change your mind by Michael Pollan there's a good book Michael Paulin wrote recently called how to change your mind and I think it is a brilliant book everybody should read the book discusses psychedelics psychedelics are a bit of a cheat code in self-observation I don't recommend drugs for anybody you can do it all through pure meditation if you want to accelerate ahead you know psychedelics are good for that striking thoughts Bruce Lee's wisdom for daily living by Bruce Lee oddly enough Bruce Lee wrote some great philosophy and striking thoughts is a good summary of some of his philosophy The Prophet by Khalil Gibran this book reads like a modern day poetic religious tome it's up there with the bhagavad-gita the Tau de ching The Bible and the Quran it is written in the style where it has a feel of religiosity and truth but it was very approachable beautiful non-denominational and non-sectarian I loved this book he has a gift for poetically describing what children are like what lovers are like what marriage should be like how you should treat your enemies and your friends how you should work with money what can you think of every time you have to kill something to eat it I felt it like the great religious books gave a very deep very philosophical but very true answer to how to approach the major problems in life I recommend the profit to anybody whether you're religious or not whether you are Christian Hindu Jewish or atheist I think it's a beautiful book and it's worth reading science fiction I started with comic books and sci-fi then I was into history and news then into psychology popular science technology Jorge Luis Borges I love Jorge Luis Borges an Argentine author his short Story collection fixiones or Labyrinth is amazing Borges is probably still the most powerful author I have read who wasn't just outright writing philosophy there was philosophy in there with the Sci-Fi stories of your life and others by Ted Chiang my current favorite sci-fi short story probably understand by Ted Chang it's in a collection called stories of your life and others story of your life was made into a movie called arrival exhalation stories by Ted Chang this contemplates the Marvel of thermodynamics from the best sci-fi short story writer of our age the life cycle of software objects by Ted Chang another Masterpiece of sci-fi by Ted Chang Snow Crash by Neil Stevenson snow crash is an amazing amazing book there's nothing quite similar to snow crash snow crash is in a league of its own Stevenson also wrote The Diamond age the last question a short story by Isaac Asimov I quote the last question all the time I loved it as a kid what are the books you're rereading now that's a good question I'll pull up my Kindle app as we talk usually I'm always rereading some books in science I'm reading a book on Renee Gerrard's memetic Theory it's more of an overview book because I couldn't make it through his actual writings I'm reading tools of Titans Tim ferriss's book of what he learned from a lot of great performers I'm reading a book Thermo info complexity it's actually by a friend of mine bezad Mohit I just finished reading persuasion a revolutionary way to influence and persuade or I should say I just finished skimming persuasion by Robert cialdini I don't think I needed to read the entire book to get the point but it was still good to read what I did it's a great little history book I'm currently reading the story of philosophy the lives and opinions of the great philosophers also by Will Durant I have a young kid now so I've got a lot of child-rearing books I use more as reference material than anything else I recently read some Emerson and some Chesterfield I have a Leo Tolstoy book here Alan Watts Scott Adams I reread God's debris recently a friend of mine is rereading it so I picked it up again there's tons I mean I could go on and on there's niche's book here there's the undercover Economist Tim Harford the Richard Bach book Illusions The Adventures of a reluctant Messiah there are some Jed McKenna books a little Dale Carnegie in here the three body problem man search for meaning Victory Frankel there's lots sex at dawn Christopher Ryan there's a lot of books out there by the way when I tell people what I'm reading I skip two thirds of my books the reason I skipped two-thirds is because they're embarrassing they don't sound like good books to read they'll sound trivial or silly who cares I don't have to tell everybody everything I read I read all kinds of stuff other people consider junk or even reprehensible I read all kinds of stuff I disagree with because they're mind-bending I always spent money on books I never viewed that as an expense that's an investment to me blogs since there are so many links in this section you may prefer a digital copy go to navalmanac.com to get a digital version of this chapter for your convenience some amazing blogs out there at Kevin simler melting asphalt https meltingasphalt.com at Farnham Street Farnam Street a signal in a world full of noise https fs.blog at Ben Thompson stratchery https stratchery.com at bacon meteor Idle Words https idlewords.com the Monger operating system how to live a life that really works by at Farnham Street rules to live and prosper by the day you became a better writer by Scott Adams even though I'm a very good writer and I've been writing a lot since I was young I still open up that blog post and put it in the background anytime I'm writing anything important it's that good I use it as my basic template for how to write well think about the title the day you became a better writer it's such a powerful title he teaches you in one small blog post the importance of surprise the importance of headlines The Importance of Being brief and directed not using some adjectives and adverbs using active not the passive voice Etc this one blog post right there will change your writing style forever if you put your ego down and absorb it properly want to become smarter in 10 minutes absorb this crony beliefs by Kevin simler best post I've read on Career decisions in Silicon Valley Tech by at elad Gill harare's sapiens in lecture course form on YouTube every business school should have a course on aggregation Theory or learn it from the master himself at Ben Thompson the best analyst in technology great read quantum physics is not weird you are weird think like reality Eliezer yutkowski must read lazy leadership by at a Wilkinson No Holds Barred wisdom from a self-made man everything on at Ed Latimore site is worth reading for overachievers https Ed latimore.com if you eat invest and think according to what the news Advocates you'll end up nutritionally financially and morally bankrupt other recommendations Twitter accounts like at amuse chimp my all-time favorite Twitter account at mmay3r at anantaleb art devaney on Facebook genius is here just unevenly distributed must read Twitter thread on intellectual compounding by at Zhao yang there are actually some really good graphic novels out there if you're open to the cartoony element of it transmetropolitan Warren Ellis the boys Garth anus planetary Warren Ellis and the Sandman Neil Gaiman some of these are I think among the finest works of art of our age I also grew up as a boy reading comics so I may be very biased toward those Rick and Morty TV show plus comic book Rick and Morty is the best show on television IMHO of course just watch the first episode that's all it takes it's Back to the Future meets The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy the Rick and Morty comic by Zach Gorman is just as clever as the show you and your research by Richard Hamming a beautiful essay I highly recommend reading it it's ostensibly written for people who are in scientific research but I think it applies across the board it's just an old-timer essay on how to do great work it reminds me of much of what Richard Feynman used to say although I think Hamming has put it more eloquently than almost anywhere else I've seen naval's writing life formulas one 2008. these are notes to myself your frame of reference and therefore your calculations may vary these are not definitions these are algorithms for success contributions are welcome happiness equals Health Plus wealth plus good relationships Health equals exercise plus diet plus sleep exercise equals high intensity resistance training plus Sports Plus rest diet equals Natural Foods plus intermittent fasting plus plants sleep equals no alarms plus eight to nine hours plus circadian rhythms wealth equals income plus wealth return on investment income equals accountability plus leverage plus specific knowledge accountability equals personal branding plus personal platform plus taking risk leverage equals Capital plus people plus intellectual property specific knowledge equals knowing how to do something Society cannot yet easily train other people to do return on investment equals Buy and Hold plus valuation plus margin of safety naval's rules 2016. be present Above All Else desire is suffering Buddha anger is a hard call you hold in your hand while waiting to throw it at someone else Buddha if you can't see yourself working with someone for life don't work with them for a day reading learning is the ultimate meta skill and can be traded for anything else all the real benefits in life come from compound interest earn with your mind not your time 99 of all effort is wasted total honesty at all times it's almost always possible to be honest and positive praise specifically criticize generally Warren Buffett truth is that which has predictive power watch every thought ask why am I having this thought all greatness comes from suffering love is given not received Enlightenment is the space between your thoughts Eckhart Tolle mathematics is the language of nature every moment has to be complete in and of itself health love and your mission in that order nothing else matters next on Naval if you loved this book there are many ways to dive deeper into Naval I am publishing navalmanac shorts on navalmanac.com these are sections that were edited out of the original enormous manuscript of this book I've published them online for those interested in naval's more specific insights on education the story of angelist investing startups crypto relationships Naval continues to create and share great insights on Twitter twitter.com Naval on his podcast Naval on his website https colon slash slash nav dot a l slash the most popular of naval's material at the time of writing Naval podcast episodes compilation how to get rich interview on the knowledge project interview on Joe Rogan podcast readwise dot IO has generously created a collection of excerpts of this book available through readwise dot IO slash Naval you will receive a weekly email with key excerpts from this book to keep the concepts top of Mind long after you've finished reading you can find illustrations of naval's ideas by Jack Butcher on navalmanac.com and more of his work at visualizevalue.com this has been the almanac of Naval ravikant a guide to wealth and happiness written by Eric Jorgensen forward by Tim Ferriss narrated by vikas Adam this program was produced by Dion audio Services Inc text copyright 2020 by Eric Jorgensen production copyright 2021 by Eric Jorgensen All rights reserved thank you for listening