Ian Nathaniel Puang's Key Ideas from ALMANACK OF NAVAL RAVIKANT
by Eric Jorgenson

• the challenge to make money is to figure out what product or service society wants but does not yet know how to deliver it at scale
• without ownership, you are being paid renting out your time
• when sleeping, on vacation, or retired, you’re not earning
• work up to a point where you can own equity in a business

1. labor
2. money
3. product with no marginal cost of replication

• other human working for you
• require leadership skills

• dominant form of leverage for the last century
• capital is trickier form of leverage
• banker, politician

• media, movies, and code
• code is permissionless leverage, which means they don’t require somebody else’s permission for you to use them or succeed

• 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
• what you want in life is to be in control of your time

more accountability has more leverage, and more risk, and needs more specific knowledge

• labor to repair house: low accountability, low risk, low payment, least leverage
• contractor: mid accountability, average risk, average payment
• real estate developer: high accountability, high risk, high leverage

1. spend more time making big decisions:

• where you live
• who you’re with
• what you do

1. figure out what you’re good at
2. start helping other people with it
3. give it away. pay it forward
4. long enough time scale. you will attract what you project

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

1. have so much money saved that your passive income covers your burn rate
2. drive your burn rate down to zero → become a monk
3. do something you love and enjoy it so much that it’s not about the money

1) blind luck

• something completely out of their control happened, which include fortune, fate, etc.

2) luck through persistence, hard work, hustle, and motion

• you running around creating opportunities
• you generate enough force, hustle and energy for luck to find you

3) you become very good at spotting luck

• if you’re very good in a field, you will notice when a lucky break happens in your field

4) weirdest, hardest kind of luck

• you build a unique character, unique brand, unique mindset, which causes luck to find you

• making effective decisions boils down to dealing with reality
• the number one thing clouding us from being able to see reality is we have preconceived notions of the way it should be
• when you’re in pain, it is the moment of truth, where you are forced to embrace reality the way it actually is
• to see the truth, you have to get your ego out of the way because your ego doesn’t want to face the truth