Naval Ravikant is an Indian-American serial entrepreneur, investor, and former CEO of AngelList. AngelList is a website designed to pair investors with startups. He has also invested early in companies like Uber, Twitter, and Postmates. As a result, Naval has gained a wealth of experience. He frequently advises on wealth, happiness, and life. This advice has been shared across a range of tweets, interviews, and essays. You don’t have to read the book from beginning to end. Instead, you can flip to specific chapters to examine that particular topic.

Introduction

According to Naval, wealth is not money. Money is the tool used to transfer wealth.Instead, wealth is things that can earn for you and be productive, even while you sleep. Wealth is inventions, business ideas, computer programs, or products. People will buy and pay for these, even if you’re not there to hand them over directly.The crux of his argument is this: you have to work hard to gain wealth, but you have to work hard the right way. You can work really hard at the wrong thing, and you’ll never have a chance of getting rich.

#1: The Creation of Wealth

Everyone has talents, knowledge, and skills. To truly build wealth, you need to figure out which talents and skills you can use to your advantage. In particular, you want specific skills that not everyone has and that you can sell in some way or another. You need to pursue your talents, hobbies, and passions. Learn how to turn them into actionable skills that people will pay for, and you’ll go far. If you turn your skills into a platform, you’re on the fast track towards building wealth!

#2: Specific Knowledge and Talent

You won’t be successful overnight. You have to build that success with compound interest in many ways. Compound interest in money is how most people think about it, and it can be important. Growing your money through the magic of compound interest on investments is wonderful. Still, it’s not the only thing you should focus on growing over the long term. You want to grow your character, connections, and reputation over the long term. It compounds over time when you build a connection with someone and treat them right.

#3: Wealth is a Long-Term Game

They’re more likely to help you or work with you because they know you’re someone they can count on.

You need to gain leverage to help you apply your knowledge and talent in a way that helps you build wealth. The book itself is a form of leverage! With it, the author can teach principles to far more people than he would ever manage in a lecture hall. Media and code are the top ways to use leverage to build wealth in today’s day and age. If you can create code that people want, you can leverage that software program to your advantage. If you create compelling media, you’re building yourself a platform.

#4: Leverage and Judgment

The key to leverage is to treat it as a force multiplier. You have to use your mind to create products, systems, and ideas worth more than your simple hours of labor. Find something that you can lever to be worth ten people’s labor, or even a hundred or a thousand! It’s essential to have good judgment. When you make wise, long, and short-term decisions, your efforts create better results. You need to combine good judgment with well-placed leverage.

Leverage is a tool to multiply your force. But, you have to work hard at wisdom and judgment. If you apply a lot of force in the wrong direction, you’ll do poorly. In the same way, if you pick the right direction but barely apply any force, you won’t see good results.

Money is a necessity at a certain level, but you have the freedom to do what you want once you get past that point. You can retire, work, invest, invent or do anything else. But how do you get there? There are three main ways to enjoy your life and your wealth creation. First, you can get by on passive income. This means you make enough money to cover your expenses, all without having to work anymore. Although fun, this isn’t realistic for many people.

#5: Enjoy Wealth Creation!

Second, you can “become a monk” and reduce your spending to as little as possible. For most people, this will not be an enjoyable option at all. You might have some investments, but they won’t pay off for a while. So, the best option is to find a job that you enjoy doing. As the saying goes, once you find that, you’ll never have to work another day in your life! Be authentic to yourself and enjoy the journey. Be smart, but don’t obsess over money!

Happiness is a matter of perspective and experience. What works for you may not work for someone else. But there are still some principles that remain the same across the board. Naval believes that happiness is an absence of desire. It’s an absence of longing for things we don’t or can’t have. When we long for an external thing that we lack, we become unhappy because we don’t have it.

#6: Happiness, the Learned Choice

But, we can learn to be happy and focus on the present and more important things. This can be tough, but learning to be happy is a skill you can develop. If you stop longing for what you don’t have, you start building up your skills at contentment. Then, you can genuinely start being happy.

Like many other things, happiness is a skill. You can’t just be happy: you have to work at it and find something that works for you. Everyone is different, and what makes one person happy may not work for another. Try things out and see what healthy habits make you happy. Once you find those things, start prioritizing them!

#7: How to Build Happiness

Many activities reward you in the short term but sap your happiness over the long term. Screens, caffeine, sugar, and alcohol are some of the ways we please ourselves in the short term. But over time, our brains depend on these things, and we become unhappy as soon as we can’t get them. Try to find activities that make you happy, and adopt a mindset of building them into habits. Don’t make “happiness” the goal to the point where you’re even more unhappy when you don’t achieve it. Instead, find healthy activities that make you happy and at peace.

You need to take care of your health. This isn’t just your body; but your spirit, mind, and family’s health. But how do you do that?Our modern world encourages so many distractions and unhealthy habits: from how we dress and move, to our activities, and how we eat. You need to make a conscious choice to take care of yourself and follow specific steps to start!The best place to start is to do something active every day. It doesn’t matter what it is, and it doesn’t matter when you do it. Yes, it will be challenging, but you’ll go a long way if you make it a priority.

#8: Caring For Yourself

Succeeding in life by taking care of yourself involves many hard choices. But if you make the hard choices now in the short term, you’ll find your long-term results will be well worth it. It may not seem like it at the moment, but eventually, you’ll be glad you pushed through. You’ll thank yourself for eating healthy, exercising, and taking the time to meditate! Remember, it’s all about the long-term game! This isn’t just about finances or connections. It’s also about things as simple as your health and well-being.

To truly build and grow yourself, you have to commit to it. You can’t just give yourself a soft “I’ll do it someday” attitude; you have to commit to yourself and others. If you tell people that you’re going to do something to grow, they can help hold you to it. Building yourself requires habits, which are tough when you can’t see immediate results. You have to be impatient with your actions but patient with your results. You have to build your actions and habits right away but may have to wait for a while for them to come to fruition.

#9: Growing and Building Yourself

Not only that, but you must do things differently to set yourself above the crowd. For example, many people read books on macroeconomics, but how many read Adam Smith? To grow yourself, you need to read, but you don’t have to follow society’s rules. Study science, but don’t just read the same books that everyone else does. To truly grow into a unique person who can succeed, forge your own path, and keep working at it your way.

According to Naval, there are a few ways to look at the meaning of life. One is to view it through the purposelessness of everything. At the end of time, the universe will decay, and nobody will remember who you were or what you did. That can be tough to accept, though. The other way to look at it is that the meaning of life is personal. You have to find what matters to you, which becomes the meaning of your life.

#10: The Meaning of Life

Once you find other people to care about, the meaning of life changes. You no longer just care about yourself and what you can do. You care about your friends and family, and you want to ensure that they continue to succeed after you’re gone. Whatever way you view things, you should live your life according to your values. Build things up over the long term, including your character and investments. And do it all without compromising what makes you a good person.

Naval personally believes that rational Buddhism is an excellent guiding philosophy. That means we should meditate on the moment and live by our values while continuing to grow and improve.

You must take care of yourself to be happy. This includes eating healthy, meditating, and regular exercise. Do these things, and the path to building wealth will be much more pleasant! Wealth is important, but it isn’t the only key to happiness. You have to focus on building your skills, habits, and everything else beneficial to you. Meditate regularly to improve your mindset, and you’ll eventually succeed.

Final Summary

Building these things takes time, so plan on the long-term game. Treat people well, learn valuable skills, and make sound investments and judgments. You may not see great results in the short term, but your long-term results will be worth it. Finally, find valuable and worthwhile things for you, and hold on to them. Enjoy the happiness that comes with investing in activities, pursuits, and family. From there, everything else will eventually follow.

Life gets busy. Has The Almanack of Naval Ravikant been gathering dust on your bookshelf? Instead, pick up the key ideas now.

Getting rich is not just about luck; happiness is not just a trait we are born with. These aspirations may seem out of reach, but building wealth and being happy are skills we can learn. So what are these skills, and how do we learn them? What are the principles that should guide our efforts? What does progress really look like? Naval Ravikant is an entrepreneur, philosopher, and investor who has captivated the world with his principles for building wealth and creating long-term happiness. The Almanack of Naval Ravikant is a collection of Naval's wisdom and experience from the last ten years, shared as a curation of his most insightful interviews and poignant reflections. This isn't a how-to book, or a step-by-step gimmick. Instead, through Naval's own words, you will learn how to walk your own unique path toward a happier, wealthier life.

productivity

Productivity

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

books

Books

Getting rich is not just about luck; happiness is not just a trait we are born with. These aspirations may seem out of reach, but building wealth and being happy are skills we can learn. So what are these skills, and how do we learn them? What are the principles that should guide our efforts? What does progress really look like? Naval Ravikant is an entrepreneur, philosopher, and investor who has captivated the world with his principles for building wealth and creating long-term happiness. The Almanack of Naval Ravikant is a collection of Naval's wisdom and experience from the last ten years, shared as a curation of his most insightful interviews and poignant reflections. This isn't a how-to book, or a step-by-step gimmick. Instead, through Naval's own words, you will learn how to walk your own unique path toward a happier, wealthier life.

Eric Jorgenson is an entrepreneur, writer, and investor. He is on the founding team of Zaarly, and has been publishing online since 2014. His blog has educated and entertained over a million readers.Eric is on a quest to create (and eat) the perfect sandwich. He tweets at @ericjorgenson and publishes new pieces and projects on ejorgenson.com/blog

Eric Jorgenson

The Almanack of Naval Ravikant

At a Glance:Full TitleAnimal Farm: A Fairy Story AuthorGeorge Orwell (pseudonym of Eric Arthur Blair) Type Of WorkNovella GenreDystopian animal fable; satire; allegory; political roman à clef (French for “novel with a key”—a thinly veiled exposé of factual persons or events) LanguageEnglish Time And Place Written1943–1944, in London Date Of First Publication1946 PublisherHarcourt Brace & Company

Summary & Key Facts

NarratorAnimal Farm is the only work by Orwell in which the author does not appear conspicuously as a narrator or major character; it is the least overtly personal of all of his writings. The anonymous narrator of the story is almost a nonentity, notable for no individual idiosyncrasies or biases.Point Of ViewThe story is told from the point of view of the common animals of Animal Farm, though it refers to them in the third person plural as “they.”

ToneFor the most part, the tone of the novel is objective, stating external facts and rarely digressing into philosophical meditations. The mixture of this tone with the outrageous trajectory of the plot, however, steeps the story in an ever-mounting irony.

Setting (Time) As is the case with most fables, Animal Farm is set in an unspecified time period and is largely free from historical references that would allow the reader to date the action precisely. It is fair to assume, however, that Orwell means the fable to be contemporaneous with the object of its satire, the Russian Revolution (1917–1945). It is important to remember that this period represented the recent past and present at the time of writing and that Orwell understands the significance of the story’s action to be immediate and ongoing rather than historical.

Setting (Place)An imaginary farm in England ProtagonistThere is no clear central character in the novel, but Napoleon, the dictatorial pig, is the figure who drives and ties together most of the action. Major ConflictThere are a number of conflicts in Animal Farm—the animals versus Mr. Jones, Snowball versus Napoleon, the common animals versus the pigs, Animal Farm versus the neighboring humans—but all of them are expressions of the underlying tension between the exploited and exploiting classes and between the lofty ideals and harsh realities of socialism.

Rising ActionThe animals throw off their human oppressors and establish a socialist state called Animal Farm; the pigs, being the most intelligent animals in the group, take control of the planning and government of the farm; Snowball and Napoleon engage in ideological disputes and compete for power.ClimaxIn Chapter V, Napoleon runs Snowball off the farm with his trained pack of dogs and declares that the power to make decisions for the farm will be exercised solely by the pigs.

Falling ActionSquealer emerges to justify Napoleon’s actions with skillful but duplicitous reinterpretations of Animalist principles; Napoleon continues to consolidate his power, eliminating his enemies and reinforcing his status as supreme leader; the common animals continue to obey the pigs, hoping for a better future. ThemesThe corruption of socialist ideals in the Soviet Union; the societal tendency toward class stratification; the danger of a naïve working class; the abuse of language as instrumental to the abuse of power SymbolsAnimal Farm; the barn; the windmill

ForeshadowingThe pigs’ eventual abuse of power is foreshadowed at several points in the novel. At the end of Chapter II, immediately after the establishment of the supposedly egalitarian Animal Farm, the extra milk taken from the cows disappears, and the text implies that Napoleon has drunk it himself. Similarly, the dogs’ attack on Boxer during Napoleon’s purges, in Chapter VII, foreshadows the pigs’ eventual betrayal of the loyal cart-horse.

Animal Farm is a novel about a group of animals who take control of the farm they live on. The animals get fed up of their master, Farmer Jones, so they kick him out. ... The novel ends with the pigs behaving and even dressing like the humans the animals tried to get rid of in the first place.

The animals of Manor Farm have revolted and taken over. Upon the death of Old Major, pigs Snowball and Napoleon lead a revolt against Mr. Jones, driving him from the farm. The animals embrace the Seven Commandments of Animalism and life carries on, but they learn that a farm ruled by animals looks more human than ever. Intended as a critique of Stalinist-era Russia, Orwell’s satirical novella Animal Farm is one of his greatest literary achievements. Animal Farm was chosen as one of Time magazine’s 100 best English-language novels, and won a Retrospective Hugo Award in 1996. HarperPerennialClassics brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperPerennial Classics collection to build your digital library.

The animals of Manor Farm have revolted and taken over. Upon the death of Old Major, pigs Snowball and Napoleon lead a revolt against Mr. Jones, driving him from the farm. The animals embrace the Seven Commandments of Animalism and life carries on, but they learn that a farm ruled by animals looks more human than ever.Intended as a critique of Stalinist-era Russia, Orwell’s satirical novella Animal Farm is one of his greatest literary achievements. Animal Farm was chosen as one of Time magazine’s 100 best English-language novels, and won a Retrospective Hugo Award in 1996.HarperPerennialClassics brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperPerennial Classics collection to build your digital library.

Eric Arthur Blair, better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist, essayist, journalist, and critic. His work is characterised by lucid prose, social criticism, opposition to totalitarianism, and support of democratic socialism.

George Orwell

Animal Farm

- Theory isn’t reality“The challenge for us is that no amount of studying or open-mindedness can genuinely recreate the power of fear and uncertainty.”We are not spreadsheets. As much as reading can inform us about what has happened in the past, like stock market crashes or how stocks have trended up and to the right over time, learning about something in a book is very different from actually experiencing the event. So be careful. You may think that you can hold your stocks during a 30% market downturn because you know that only suckers sell at the bottom, but it’s only when you experience it

🔰 Key Takeaways

It’s easy to convince yourself that your financial outcomes are determined entirely by the quality of your decisions and actions, but that’s not always the case. You can make good decisions that lead to poor financial outcomes. And you can make bad decisions that lead to good financial outcomes. You have to account for the role of luck and risk.“But more important is that as much as we recognize the role of luck in success, the role of risk means we should forgive ourselves and leave room for understanding when judging failures.”

- Luck and risk

To mitigate the risk of overweighting the role of individual effort in determining outcomes:<ol><li>Be cautious about the people who you admire and look down upon. Those at the top may have been the benefactors of luck while those at the bottom may have been the victims of risk.</li><li>Focus less on individuals, and turn your mind to broader patterns. It’s difficult to replicate the outcomes of successful individuals, but you may be able to participate in broader patterns.</li></ol>Be kind to yourself when you make a mistake or end up on the wrong side of risk. The world is uncertain, and it may not be your fault.

“There is no reason to risk what you have and need for what you don’t have and don’t need. – Warren BuffetIt’s easy to have a goalpost that keeps moving. Once you achieve your goals, you look toward the next goal. And the cycle never ends. This is often driven by comparing yourself to others, and you’re often comparing yourself to someone who is above you in the ladder that you benchmark yourself against.When it comes to money, someone will always have more of it than you. That’s okay. It’s fine to pursue more money, but don’t start making risky bets for that.

- Lessons from Buffet

“Getting money requires taking risks, being optimistic, and putting yourself out there. But keeping money requires the opposite of taking risk. It requires humility, and fear that what you’ve made can be taken away from you just as fast. It requires frugality and an acceptance that at least some of what you’ve made is attributable to luck, so past success can’t be relied upon to repeat indefinitely.”Getting money and keeping money are two distinct skills. While getting money necessitates risk taking, hard word, and an optimistic disposition.

- Getting money vs. keeping money

“A plan is only useful if it can survive reality. And a future filled with unknowns is everyone’s reality”If you’re relatively young and earn more than you spend, the best way to optimize your long-term investment returns is to invest the majority of your money into a diversified portfolio of low-cost index funds. Holding more than a few percentage points of your net worth in cash is silly because the value of cash erodes with inflation, and that cash can otherwise be put into assets like stocks that historically have compounded at a rate of 6-7%.

- Cash is not the enemy

"Long tails – the farthest ends of a distribution of outcomes – have tremendous influence in finance, where a small number of events can account for the majority of outcomes.”The investment decisions you make on 99% of days don’t matter. It’s the decisions you make on a small number of days when something big is happening – a massive downturn, a frothy market, a speculative bubble, etc. – that make all the difference. Warren Buffet has owned 400 to 500 stocks during his life. He’s made the majority of his money on 10 of them.

- Long tails

“The ability to do what you want, when you want, with who you want, for as long as you want, is priceless. It is the highest dividend money pays.”Having more flexibility and control over your time is far more valuable than getting another 2% on your returns by working all-nighters or making speculative bets that impact your sleep.

- Highest form of wealth

People buy mansions and fancy cars because they want respect and admiration from others. What they don’t realize is that people don’t admire the person with the fancy house or car; they admire the object and think of themselves having that object. So buying impressive items to gain admiration and respect from others is a fool’s pursuit – these things can not be bought.

- Ferraris don’t generate respect

If you’re rich, you have a high current income. But being wealthy is something different – wealth is not visible. It’s the money that you have that’s not spent. It’s the optionality to buy or do something at a future time.Being rich offers you opportunities in the short-term, but being wealthy provides you the flexibility of having more of the items you want – freedom, time, possessions – in the future.

- Being rich vs. wealthy

The optimal portfolio is one that allows you to sleep at night. It allows you to generate reasonable returns, while also maximizing your quality of life and control over your life. It will stand the test of tough recessions and other blips in the road. Most academic understandings of the ideal portfolio ignore the very real human factors that come into play and that may cause you to deviate from the strategy.

- What’s the optimal portfolio?

If you want to be in the game for the long run, you need to leave room for error. “Room for error lets you endure a range of potential outcomes, and endurance lets you stick around long enough to let the odds of benefiting from a low-probability outcome fall in your favor.”A big gap in most people’s understanding of room for error is accepting that there is a difference between what you can technically endure vs. what you can emotionally endure.

-Leave room for error

As humans, we tend to underestimate how much our personality and goals will change with time. This makes long-term financial planning hard. We may think we’ll never have kids or a big house when we’re young, so we plan as if that’s the case, but then we find ourselves with a house and kids that the plan didn’t account for. So when thinking about your investment strategy, try to account for the unknown.

- The difficulty of long-term financial planning

“Like everything else worthwhile, successful investing demands a price. But its currency is not dollars and cents. It’s volatility, fear, doubt, uncertainty, and regret – all of which are easy to overlook until you’re dealing with them in real time.”If you choose to invest and try to compound your wealth, there is a price. And that price is often hidden – it’s the ups and downs of Mr. Market that take you on a ride. It’s the uncertainty and fear that pop into your mind from time to time, as market conditions and your personal conditions change. You have to be willing to pay that price .

- The price of investing

“Few things matter more with money than understanding your own time horizon and not being persuaded by the actions and behaviors of people playing different games than you are.”If you have a buddy who’s making lots of money trading short-term options and you start getting FOMO and want to play that game, you really need to consider if that aligns with your goals. If you have a 20-year time horizon and like the simple nature of passive investing, it would be stupid for you to start playing your buddy’s game. You may be able to profit, but at what cost? Know the game you’re playing.

- What game are you playing?

Pessimism often sounds smarter and more persuasive than optimism. If something is not going well, it’s easy to think that it will continue not going well. And that sounds very plausible. But what this line of thinking misses is that problems often create demand for change and solutions. And this leads to ingenuity that creates changes that only the optimist might believe in.

-  Pessimism is persuasive

When we look back at the past, we create stories about why certain things happened. And those stories make us think that the world is understandable and makes sense in some way.The problem is that these stories may be complete nonsense. What happened may have been completely random, yet our stories delude us into thinking that there is some lesson we can learn to better predict the future.Avoid the illusion that you have full control in the uncertain world in which we live.

- The problem with hindsight

<ul><li>If you evaluate how well you’ve done by focusing on your individual investments, versus your entire portfolio, you’ll overestimate the brilliance of your winners and feel too much regret about your losers.</li><li>Good decisions are not always rational. Sometimes, you have to consider that you’re an emotional creature that may have different needs than an ROI-optimizing model may suggest.</li><li>If you can do everything you want without trying to outperform the market, then why try to outperform the market and endure the price tag that this pursuit requires?</li></ul>

- Investment results

In the Psychology of Money, Morgan Housel teaches you how to have a better relationship with money and to make smarter financial decisions. Instead of pretending that humans are ROI-optimizing machines, he shows you how your psychology can work for and against you.

Doing well with money isn’t necessarily about what you know. It’s about how you behave. And behavior is hard to teach, even to really smart people. Money—investing, personal finance, and business decisions—is typically taught as a math-based field, where data and formulas tell us exactly what to do. But in the real world people don’t make financial decisions on a spreadsheet. They make them at the dinner table, or in a meeting room, where personal history, your own unique view of the world, ego, pride, marketing, and odd incentives are scrambled together. In The Psychology of Money, award-winning author Morgan Housel shares 19 short stories exploring the strange ways people think about money and teaches you how to make better sense of one of life’s most important topics.

moneyandinvestments

Money & Investments

Doing well with money isn’t necessarily about what you know. It’s about how you behave. And behavior is hard to teach, even to really smart people. Money—investing, personal finance, and business decisions—is typically taught as a math-based field, where data and formulas tell us exactly what to do. But in the real world people don’t make financial decisions on a spreadsheet. They make them at the dinner table, or in a meeting room, where personal history, your own unique view of the world, ego, pride, marketing, and odd incentives are scrambled together. In The Psychology of Money, award-winning author Morgan Housel shares 19 short stories exploring the strange ways people think about money and teaches you how to make better sense of one of life’s most important topics.

Morgan Housel is a partner at The Collaborative Fund. He is a two-time winner of the Best in Business Award from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers, winner of the New York Times Sidney Award, and a two-time finalist for the Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism. He lives in Seattle with his wife and two kids.

Morgan Housel

The Psychology of Money

<ul><li class="ql-align-justify">.Life isn’t fair – but it’s not an excuse to have a victim mindset – instead we must equip ourselves with knowledge of the potential obstacles and shortcuts</li><li class="ql-align-justify">An unfair advantage is a condition, asset or circumstance that puts you in a favourable business position (e.g. being tall in basketball, )</li><li class="ql-align-justify">There are five categories of unfair advantages – Money, Intelligence and insight, Location and luck, Education and expertise, Status</li><li class="ql-align-justify">The key to success is working hard and smart (on things you are lucky/have unfair advantages in) – it is not just about hard work or getting lucky</li></ul>

🚀 The book in 4 bullet points

<ul><li>There are two leading, opposing narratives on how success/wealth is attained: </li></ul><ol><li>Luck – rich people got rich due to factors outside their control (luck, timing, natural talent and fate) – their success wasn’t earned (fatalism)</li><li>Hard work – rich people deserve their riches because they earned it through hard work (meritocracy)</li></ol>

📑 Key Takeaways

• The reality is in the middle of these two:- You can be unlucky and still successful (e.g. Oprah Winfrey was raised in a poor, traumatising, unstable household but still became wildly successful)- But hard work can’t undo luck in all cases (e.g. if Warren Buffett was born black or a woman or in war-torn Iraq, no matter how much he worked, he wouldn’t have the same opportunities/success he did)

The key to success is working hard and smart (on things you are lucky/have unfair advantages in)An unfair advantage is a condition, asset or circumstance that puts you in a favourable business position

Examples of unfair advantages – being tall in basketball, being rich before starting a business, knowing someone at a company when applying for a job etc.

We ALL have unfair advantages

<ul><li class="ql-align-justify">Can’t be easily copied or bought</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Unique to you﻿</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Build on each other and have a snowballing, multiplicative effect﻿</li><li class="ql-align-justify">For any early-stage startup, the startup’s UA = sum of individual founders’ UAs﻿</li></ul>This is why it’s important to choose founders that complement your UAs﻿

Properties of unfair advantages Can’t be easily copied or bought

<ul><li>Money – the capital you have/can easily raise</li></ul><ol><li>Money gives you a safety net, contingency and the power to scale (you need money to make money). </li></ol> <ul><li>Intelligence and Insight – ‘book smarts’, social + emotional intelligence and creativity</li></ul><ol><li>Business isn’t an exam – all aspects of intelligence are needed (not just ‘book smarts’)</li><li>Insight is required to find a need/problem in the market that can be solved</li></ol>

There are five categories of unfair advantages aka ( MILES )

<ul><li class="ql-align-justify">Location and Luck – being in the right place at the right time</li></ul><ol><li class="ql-align-justify">A good location affects your vibe and makes it easier to make friends, find out business insights, have access to capital and better infrastructure</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Note – location isn’t just physical – it refers to your environment (which can be online)</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Luck/timing is important – you don’t want to be too early (i.e. VR) or too late (i.e. Bing)</li></ol> To be more lucky – maximise your ability to seize chances, trust your intuition, expect to be lucky, turn bad luck into learning opportunities and take more action

<ul><li>Education and Expertise – formal schooling and your self-learning/gained knowledge</li></ul><ol><li>Education can be formal/informal – doesn’t matter</li><li>Three main benefits from formal education – knowledge, network and signalling that comes with a degree.</li></ol> <ul><li>Status – social status (your network and connections) + your ‘personal brand’ (how you’re perceived) + your inner status (confidence and self-esteem)</li></ul>Status is your perceived ability to add valueIt’s comprised of three types of capital – economic (i.e. wealth), cultural (i.e. social class/subculture) and social (i.e. who you know)

<ul><li>Lots of money can make you complacent, wasteful and less hungry to succeed</li><li>A lack of intelligence can mean being more humble and willing to ask questions and less overthinking</li><li>A good location costs money and being frequently lucky means you may not develop the skills needed to develop your startup when luck runs out</li><li>A lack of status (i.e. being an outsider) reveals powerful insights and enables you to stand out/be memorable</li></ul>

All unfair advantages can be double-edged swords

I also had a strong tendency to do things the hard way without anyone’s help. Again, in this way, I threw any unfair advantages I had (like my parents being willing and able to invest in me but me choosing to go it alone) down the drain. I’ve foregone a lot of unfair advantages in my life in pursuit of true meritocratic ideals. The trouble was, as this book showed, our society was never purely meritocratic to begin with. I was driven by naive delusion.

We all have unfair advantages in life, whether we happen to be quick, have a talent for maths, a great feel for people. An unfair advantage is simply the element that gives you an edge over your competition. This innovative book shows how to identify your own unfair advantages and apply them to any project. Drawing on over two decades of hands-on experience, including as the first Marketing Director of Just Eat, the authors offer a unique framework for assessing your external circumstances in addition to your internal strengths. Hard work and grit aren't enough, so this book explores the importance of money, intelligence, location, education, expertise, status and luck in the journey to success. From starting your company, to gaining traction, raising funds and growth hacking, The Unfair Advantage helps you look at yourself and find the ingredients you didn't realise you already had, to succeed in the cut-throat world of business.

The guide that overturns conventions to help you map your route to success.

HASAN KUBBA is a specialist in technology startups, marketing, and fundraising. His TEDx talk titled Startups, Entrepreneurship and Unfair Advantages was voted highest ever on the Official TED subreddit.

Hasan Kubba

ASH ALI is the co-founder of Uhubs, a skills training platform to help entrepreneurs and professionals. He sold his first internet business at age 19. With over 20 years of hands-on experience creating and growing startups, he has consulted, advised, and invested in hundreds of startups.

Ash Ali

The Unfair Advantage

Happy people are just people you aren't acquainted enough with yet to know how miserable they really are.

I just came to this Author which have a YouTube channel with same channel and I kind of getting fond of him. Hoping to share more of his work!

All of time is simultaneous. Matter tends towards perfection. Cats can be dicks sometimes. The Prince of Milk is a leisurely stroll from prehistory to the distant future, stopping for tea in the 21st century English countryside. Before the time machine, before the undead mannequins, before the cat with the universe eye, there were the arbiters. They regulated the world and kept reality from banging into itself. All was well in paradise. But even the gods end up in love triangles from time to time. Several galaxies and a dimension away, Wilthail is a small English village alternating between flower shows and the occasional divorce. Life ambles. Old men and women make peace with their gods. Little do they know three deities walk among them already, biding their time before an ancient grudge rears its head. The world is a garden. The world is a gutter. Which is it? PRAISE FOR THE PRINCE OF MILK: "Please stop contacting me. I'm not going to read your book." - Exurb1a's mother "Sorry, I don't like science fiction." - Woman on the bus "Is that you again? Look, we've talked about this." - Exurb1a's mother

All of time is simultaneous. Matter tends towards perfection. Cats can be dicks sometimes. The Prince of Milk is a leisurely stroll from prehistory to the distant future, stopping for tea in the 21st century English countryside. Before the time machine, before the undead mannequins, before the cat with the universe eye, there were the arbiters. They regulated the world and kept reality from banging into itself. All was well in paradise. But even the gods end up in love triangles from time to time. Several galaxies and a dimension away, Wilthail is a small English village alternating between flower shows and the occasional divorce. Life ambles. Old men and women make peace with their gods. Little do they know three deities walk among them already, biding their time before an ancient grudge rears its head. The world is a garden. The world is a gutter. Which is it? PRAISE FOR THE PRINCE OF MILK: "Please stop contacting me. I'm not going to read your book." - Exurb1a's mother "Sorry, I don't like science fiction." - Woman on the bus "Is that you again? Look, we've talked about this." - Exurb1a's mother

Exurb1a (Science fiction author)

The Prince of Milk

From my experience of being unbearable failure and unlucky, I have learned that no matter how prepare you are life will always surprise you and provide you with new set of challenges. It doesn't always mean to break you down. Sometimes it is tasting you for, How much badly is it that you want that thing ? I guess the lesson here is always to learn and move forward.﻿

Failure

It's important to know why sometimes you fail regardless how favourable the situation is.

If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

I came to know him from the Lectures of Jordan Peterson. After a week I started reading both Volume 1 & 2 of The Gulag Archipelago. It still gives me cold chills to know, What really happens in the concentration camps. A must read book if you ask.

WITH A NEW FOREWORD BY JORDAN B. PETERSON'Solzhenitsyn?s masterpiece...The Gulag Archipelagohelped create the world we live in today' Anne ApplebaumTHE OFFICIALLY APPROVED ABRIDGEMENT OFTHE GULAG ARCHIPELAGOVOLUMES I, II & III A vast canvas of camps, prisons, transit centres and secret police, of informers and spies and interrogators but also of everyday heroism, The Gulag Archipelagois Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's grand masterwork. Based on the testimony of some 200 survivors, and on the recollection of Solzhenitsyn's own eleven years in labour camps and exile, it chronicles the story of those at the heart of the Soviet Union who opposed Stalin, and for whom the key to survival lay not in hope but in despair. A thoroughly researched document and a feat of literary and imaginative power, this edition of The Gulag Archipelagowas abridged into one volume at the author's wish and with his full co-operation.' The Gulag Archipelagohelped to bring down an empire. Its importance can hardly be exaggerated' Doris Lessing, Sunday Telegraph

La 4ème de couv. indique : "A vast canvas of camps, prisons, transit centres and secret police, of informers and spies and interrogators but also of everyday heroism, 'The Gulag Archipelago' is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's grand masterwork. Based on the testimony of some 200 survivors, and on the recollection of Solzhenitsyn's own eleven years in labour camps and exile, it chronicles the story of those at the heart of the Soviet Union who opposed Stalin, and for whom the key to survival lay not in hope but in despair. A thoroughly researched document and a feat of literary and imaginative power, this edition of The Gulag Archipelago was abridged into one volume at the author's wish and with his full co-operation."

The Almanack of Naval Ravikant

Animal Farm

The Psychology of Money

The Unfair Advantage

The Prince of Milk

Aashish