Naval’s Choiceless Awareness

Specific knowledge cannot be taught, but it can be learned. It’s about what makes you special. Like the things you were effortlessly doing that made people notice you. No one can compete with you on being you. Specific knowledge is found by pursuing your genuine curiosity and pas...

Buddhists look at your brain, your consciousness, as a multilayered mechanism. There’s a core-base, kernel-level OS running. Then, there are applications running on top.

Always go back to the awareness level of OS, which is always calm, always peaceful, and generally happy...

• 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 capitalise on that.
• Wisdom is the d...

You can only make progress when you’re starting with the truth. The hard thing is seeing the truth. Suffering is the moment when we can no longer deny reality.

Outside of suffering, you have to get your ego out of the way because your ego doesn’t want to face the truth.

Happiness is really a default state. Happiness is there when you remove the sense of something missing in your life. 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.

It is cult...

What is the meaning and purpose of life?

• Answer 1: It’s personal. You have to find your own meaning. 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...

Virtues are trained heuristics that automate decision making. You cannot solve every problem in life as if it is the first time it’s thrown at you.

The classical virtues are all decision-making heuristics to make one optimise for the long term rather than for the short term...

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 ar...

• Hope luck finds you: fortune, fate, etc
• Work for luck to find you: persistence, hard work, running around creating opportunities. Become the best at what you do. Refine what you do until this is true. Opportunity will seek you out.
• You

Leverage is a force multiplier for your judgment. 3 options:

• Labor: making other humans working for you. It is the oldest form of leverage, and actually not a great one in the modern world. Because managing other people is incredibly messy.
• Money

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 probl...

The path to success is to find a way to automate your uniqueness. "Productise" is about leverage and "Yourself" is about accountability.

If you’re looking toward getting wealthy, you should ask yourself:

• “Is this authentic to me? Is it myself that I am projecting?”

The best jobs are neither decreed nor degreed. 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.

It’s mu...

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?

• Have so much money saved that your passive income covers your burn rate.
• Drive your

90 percent of thoughts are fear-based. The other 10 percent are desire-based.

Try to keep an eye on my internal monologue. It would be like running tour brain in “debugging mode”.

If you don’t own a piece of a business, you don’t have a path towards financial freedom.

It’s 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. Y...

Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want. We go about desiring things all day long and then wonder why we’re unhappy. Anticipation for our vices pulls us into the future. Eliminating vices makes it easier to be present.

Eliminati...

Do things for their own sake. Whether it’s business, exercise, romance, friendship the meaning of life is to do things for their own sake.

Anything worth doing comes from trying to overcome boredom. Because you would be doing it for its own sake. Much more ...