Naval Ravikant Quotes That Could Change Your Life • Podcast Notes

• The first step to being happier is to believe you can be happier.
• What you do, and how you do it, is so much more important than how hard you do it.
• Productize Yourself – Create a product out of whatever it is that you naturally and uniquely do really well.
• Find a career/job where you’re tracked on the outputs, rather than the inputs – this will allow you to control your time much better.
• Discipline is just you fighting with yourself to do something you don’t want to do.

• When faced with a difficult choice, if you can’t decide, the answer is no.
• If you have two choices to make, and they’re relatively equal (it’s 50/50), take the path that’s more difficult and more painful in the short term.
• In times of interpersonal conflict, make the choice that will leave you more equanimous (internally calm).

• Guilt is just society’s voice speaking in your head.
• You don’t have to deal with anyone you don’t want to – just walk away.
• We’re afraid of death because we fear we haven’t spent our time here on earth wisely.
• If you’re smart, you should be able to figure out how to be happy. Otherwise, you’re not that smart.

You have social statisticians, scientists, and researchers in lab coats, literally the best minds of our generation figuring out how to addict you to the news. And if you fall for it, if you get addicted. your brain will get destroyed.

We are overexposed to everything. The way to survive in modern society is to be an ascetic, it is to retreat from society. There’s too much society everywhere you go. You have society in your phone, society in your pocket, society in your ears… It’s socializing you and programming everyone. The only solution is to turn it off.

Peace is happiness at rest and happiness is peace in motion. You can convert peace to happiness anytime you want.

In today’s day and age, many people think you get peace 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 the idea of having problems.

The peace that we seek is not peace of mind, it’s peace from mind.

The way to retire is actually to find the thing that you know how to do better than anybody. And you know how to do it better than anybody because you love to do it. 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, put your name on it so you take the risks but you gain the rewards, have ownership and equity in what you do, and then just crank it out.

• Stop thinking in terms of “careers”
• Instead, focus on developing skills, and doing what you want to do at a particular time to get paid.
• The idea of having a lifelong career is going away.
• If you want money – “Give the world something it wants that it does not yet know how to get”.
• You have to like what you’re doing though – if you don’t like it, someone who does will outcompete you.
• Know that your physical health, mental health, and your relationships will bring you more peace and happiness than any amount of money ever will.

The number one thing you can have is general intelligence, because general intelligence allows you to get good at everything else”.

If you’re smart, and question everything, you’ll eventually figure everything else out at a good enough level – this can apply to nutrition, fitness, your sales skills, really anything.

Intelligence and open-mindedness are everything.

• Package yourself in a product.
• Create a product out of whatever it is that you naturally and uniquely do really well.
• If you compete at being someone else, you won’t be the best in the world at it, and in turn, you won’t get rewarded properly for it.
• If you’re getting paid for renting out your time, you can make good money, but you won’t make the kind of money that can really give you freedom – the passive income that can make you money while you’re on vacation.

You’re not going to get rich renting out your time. Aim to have a job, career, or profession where your inputs don’t match your output.

Being tracked on the outputs, rather than the inputs, will allow you to control your time much better.

2000 years ago, the inputs and outputs were connected – effort=result.

Specific Knowledge – A combination of unique traits from your DNA, combined with your unique upbringing and your response to it

Figure out what it was you were doing as a kid, almost effortlessly, that you didn’t even really consider a skill, but people around you would notice.

Everybody can be wealthy. It’s not a zero-sum game; it’s a positive-sum game.

The reason you want wealth is because it buys you freedom, so you don’t have to wear a tie like a collar around your neck, so you don’t have to wake up at 7 AM and rush to work in traffic, so you don’t have to waste away your entire life grinding all your productive hours away to a soulless job that doesn’t fulfil you.

All the benefits in life come from compound interest, whether in relationships, life, your career, health, or learning.

The 5 most important skills are reading, writing, arithmetic, persuasion, and computer programming.

If you’re good with computers, if you’re good at basic math, if you’re good at writing, if you’re good at speaking, and if you like reading, you’re set for life.

• Get comfortable with frequent, small failures. If you’re willing to bleed a little bit every day, but in exchange, you win big later, you’ll be better off.
• Become the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until this is true.
• Reject most advice (but remember you have to listen to/read enough of it to know what to reject and what to accept).
• Results take TIME. In entrepreneurship, you just have to be right ONCE. The good news is you can take as many shots on goal as you want (usually every 3-5 years, 10 at the slowest).

• Happiness is a bad word, it’s like love, it’s overloaded, it means too many different things.
• You have to work to achieve happiness, but you don’t need to overwork yourself to get it.
• It’s very easy for self-improvement to degenerate into self-conflict and self-conflict into self-misery.
• You don’t want to spend 90% of your life trying to figure out how to be happy and 10% being happy, you want to be happy right now.

• Desire is suffering… every desire you have is an axis where you will suffer. So just don’t focus on more than one desire at a time.
• The universe is rigged in such a way that if you just want one thing, and you focus on that, you’ll get it, but everything else you gotta let go.
• Pick your one overwhelming desire – it’s okay to suffer over that one. But on all the other desires, let them go so you can be calm and peaceful and relaxed.

Meetings should really be phone calls, phone calls should be emails, and emails should just be texts.

The cost of meetings is so high, especially given all the people who are in there. You’re literally just dying an hour at a time. You have to drop non-urgent meetings or forget them altogether if you want to do anything great.

• Set an aspirational hourly rate for yourself and stick to it.
• Then, never do anything with your time for less than that amount – whether it’s attending a meeting or returning a package from Amazon (besides things for fun and leisure, of course).
• If I have to return something, and it costs less than my personal hourly rate, I’ll throw or give it away.
• If you need to do a task, but can hire someone for less than your hourly rate – hire them.

• Be RUTHLESS about not scheduling things. You will HAVE to disappoint people, but when they want your time, that’s their problem, not yours.
• Busy is the death of productivity.
• You have to get bored before you can get creative… You can’t be creative on schedule.
• You need 4-5 hours of time by yourself every day doing NOTHING. Because if you don’t have that time, you won’t be able to do ANYTHING.

• The most important form of leverage is the idea of products that have no marginal cost of replication (aka product leverage).
• You can replicate your efforts without having to involve other humans.
• Long ago, to get a similar reach, you would have had to give a public lecture.
• 30-40 years ago – you would have had to get on TV.
• But today, thanks to the internet, anyone can launch a podcast.

• Product leverage is how fortunes will be made in the digital age – using things like code or media
• People who utilized code-based product leverage – Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin.
• Kings of media-based product leverage – Joe Rogan, Gary Vee.
• Combining labour leverage, capital leverage, and product leverage is a magic combination for tech startups.
• You use the minimum, highest output labour – engineers and product developers.
• You add capital which you can use for marketing, advertising, and scaling.
• You then add lots of code, media, and content to get everything out there.

The robot revolution has already arrived – we just keep them in data centres/servers.

Every great software developer has an army of software robots working for him/her at night, while they sleep, after they’ve written the code and they’re just cranking away:

• Robots do web searching.
• Robots handle customer service inquiries.
• Over time, this will progress to autonomous vehicles/planes/trucks.

Coding is a superpower because it allows you to speak the language of the robots and tell them what to do.