Prince Rahul's Key Ideas from The Almanack Of Naval Ravikant
by Eric Jorgenson

• 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.
• Total honesty at all times. It’s almost always possible to be honest and positive.
• Praise specifically, criticize generally. (Warren Buffett)

• Wealth is assets that can earn while you sleep and that is being reinvested into other assets.
• Intentions don’t matter. Action do.
• “Learn to sell , learn to build. If you can do both , you will be unstoppable.”
• “Making money is not a thing you do- it’s a skill you learn”
• “Getting rich is about knowing what to do, who to do with and when to do it.
• “If you don’t own a piece of business, you don’t have a path towards financial freedom”

1. Labor(worst form of leverage): Other humans working for you. Managing other people is incredibly messy, it requires tremendous leadership skills.
2. Money(good form): 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.
3. Product with no marginal cost of replication: includes books ,media, movies and code. You can multiply your efforts without involving other humans and without Needing money from other humans.(permissionless).

Retirement is when you stop sacrificing today for an imaginary tomorrow.

How do you get there?

1. Have so much money that your passive income covers your burn rate.
2. Drive your burn rate to zero—You become a monk.
3. Doing something you love—You know how to do it better because you love it and no one can compete with you.(Figure out how to map that to what society actually wants)

1. Hope luck finds you.
2. Hustle until you stumble into it.
3. Prepare the mind and be sensitive to chances other miss.
4. Become the best at what you do.

• The really smart thinkers are clear thinkers. They understand the basics at a very, very fundamental level.
• 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.
• If you can't explain it to a child, then you don't know.
• 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
• The more you know, the less you diversify.

• Lean into things with short-term pain, but long-term gain.
• Read what you love until you love to read.
• It’s not about “educated” vs. “uneducated.” It’s about “likes to read” and “doesn’t like to read.”
• A calm mind, a fit body, and a house full of love. These things cannot be bought. They must be earned.
• The three big ones in life are wealth, health, and happiness. We pursue them in that order, but their importance is reverse.

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.

How do you learn to accept things you can’t change?

Fundamentally, it boils down to one big hack: embracing death.

• People mistakenly believe happiness is just about positive thoughts and positive actions.

The Tao Te Ching says it’s all duality and polarity.

• If I say I’m happy, that means I was sad at some point.
• 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.

• 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.

• Happiness is what’s there when you remove the sense that something is missing in your life.
• 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.
• Happiness, love, and passion…aren’t things you find—they’re choices you make.
• A lot of our unhappiness comes from comparing things from the past to the present.
• The anxiety is just a series of running thoughts.

• 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.
• I think the most common mistake for humanity is believing you’re going to be made happy because of some external circumstance.
• Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.

• The enemy of peace of mind is expectations drilled into you by society and other people.
• Jealousy, It’s such a poisonous emotion because, at the end of the day, you’re no better off with jealous. You’re unhappier, and the person you’re jealous of is still successful or good-looking or whatever they are.
• When working, surround yourself with people more successful than you. When playing, surround yourself with people happier than you.

• If you’re present, you’ll realize how many gifts and how much abundance there is around us at all times.
• First, you know it. Then, you understand it. Then, you can explain it. Then, you can feel it. Finally, you are it.
• At the end of the day, you are a combination of your habits and the people who you spend the most time with.
• World’s simplest diet: The more processed the food, the less one should consume.
• Too much sugar leads to a heavy body, and too many distractions lead to a heavy mind.

• 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.
• It is much more about understanding than purely hard work. Yes, hard work matters. But it has to be directed in the right way.

• Brain works better
• Exercise & sunlight
• Shorter, less pleasantries
• More dialogue, less monologue
• No slides
• End easily by walking back

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

• 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 reroute those resources to the rest of your body.
• If you stop talking to yourself for even ten 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.

• 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.
• 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.
• Wisdom- Understanding the long-term consequences of your actions.

...when you’re thirty, what advice would you give your twenty-year-old self? And when you’re forty, what advice would you give your thirty-year-old self? (Maybe if you’re younger, you can do it by every five years.)

1. Read everything you can. And not just the stuff that society tells you is good. Just read for its own sake. Develop a love for it.
2. Having the skill of persuasion is important because if you can influence your fellow human beings, you can get a lot done. Persuasion is an actual skill. So you can learn it.
3. Value your time. It is all you have. It’s more important than your money, friends or anything. Your time is all you have. Do not waste your time.

In the grand scheme of things, the Universe has been around for ten 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 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?