Vinamra V's Key Ideas from The Almanack of Naval Ravikant
by Eric Jorgenson

“If you secretly despise wealth, it will elude you.”

“Money is not the root of all evil; there’s nothing evil about it. But the lust for money is bad.”

“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.”

“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.”

“You don’t get rich by spending your time to save money. You get rich by saving your time to make money.“

“Everybody who really makes money at some point owns a piece of a product, a business, or some IP.”

“Usually, the real wealth is created by starting your own companies or even by investing.”

“Without ownership, your inputs are very closely tied to your outputs.”

“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.”

“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.”

“My motivation has shifted from being goal-oriented to being artistic.”

“Creating businesses and making money are now more of an ‘art.’“

“Whether in commerce, science, or politics—history remembers the artists.”

“I’m just playing, for sixteen hours a day. If others want to compete with me, they’re going to work, they’re going to lose because they’re not going to do it for sixteen hours a day, seven days a week.”

“I got to combine my vocation and my avocation.”

“All the returns in life, whether in wealth, relationships, or knowledge, come from compound interest.”

“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.“

“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.”

“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.”

“Retirement is when you stop sacrificing today for an imaginary tomorrow. When today is complete, in and of itself, you’re retired.”

“Once you can solve your money problems, either by lowering your lifestyle or by making enough money, you want to retire.”

There are multiple ways to retire:

• “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.”

“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.”

“My old definition was ‘freedom to.’ 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 to.’“

“All the real scorecards are internal.”

“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.”

“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 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.”

“‘I don’t have time’ is just another way of saying ‘It’s not a priority.'”

“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 ten or fifteen different priorities, you’re going to end up getting none of them.”

“The three big ones in life are wealth, health, and happiness. We pursue them in that order, but their importance is reverse.”

“Health, love, and your mission, in that order. Nothing else matters.”

“There are three really big decisions you make in your early life: where you live, who you’re with, and what you do.”

“If you cannot decide, the answer is no. And the reason is, modern society is full of options.“

“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.”

“Intentions don’t matter. Actions do. That’s why being ethical is hard.”

“Impatience with actions, patience with results.”

“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.“

“There is no endpoint 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.”

“The hardest thing is not doing what you want—it’s knowing what you want.”

“You can only achieve mastery in one or two things. It’s usually things you’re obsessed about.”

“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.”

“To make an original contribution, you have to be irrationally obsessed with something.”

“Figure out what you’re good at, and start helping other people with it. Give it away. Pay it forward."

“I think every human should aspire to being knowledgeable about certain things and being paid for our unique knowledge.”

“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.”

Specific knowledge is found much more by pursuing your innate talents, your genuine curiosity, and your passion.”

“‘Productize’ and ‘yourself.’ ‘Yourself’ has uniqueness. ‘Productize’ has leverage. ‘Yourself ‘ has accountability. ‘Productize’ has specific knowledge. ‘Yourself ‘ also has specific knowledge in there. So all of these pieces, you can combine them into these two words.“

Be a maker who makes something interesting people want. Show your craft, practice your craft, and the right people will eventually find you.”

“The really smart thinkers are clear thinkers. They understand the basics at a very, very fundamental level.”

“The best mental models I have found came through evolution, game theory, and Charlie Munger.”

“Mental models are really just compact ways for you to recall your own knowledge.”

“Evolution, thermodynamics, information theory, and complexity have explanatory and predictive power in many aspects of life.”

“The means of learning are abundant—it’s the desire to learn that is scarce.”

“Real knowledge is intrinsic, and it’s built from the ground up.”

“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.”

“If you want to make the maximum amount of money possible, if you want to get rich over your life in a predictable way, stay on the bleeding edge of trends and study technology, design, and art—become really good at something.”

“Reading (learning) is the ultimate meta-skill and can be traded for anything else.”

“Read originals and read classics.”

“Reading science, math, and philosophy one hour per day will likely put you at the upper echelon of human success within seven years.”

“Read the greats in math, science, and philosophy. Ignore your contemporaries and news. Avoid tribal identification. Put truth above social approval.”

“Read what you love until you love to read.”

“Read enough, and you become a connoisseur. Then you naturally gravitate more toward theory, concepts, nonfiction.”