The Almanack of Naval Ravikant
This article is a part of my Best Reads of the Month section on my website www.mikegorlon.com. Each month I pick one or two articles or blog posts that I find on the internet which I thought were really insightful, interesting or moving. Then I share them with you. You can view the previous month’s articles by going to: https://www.mikegorlon.com/best-reads-of-the-month
October 2021: The Almanack of Naval Ravikant
Naval is the founder of AngelList, a company that connects startups, angel investors and job-seekers looking to work at startups.
He is also an early investor in successful companies like Uber, FourSquare, Twitter, Postmates, Opendoor, Clubhouse and many others.
He has distributed a lot of his great knowledge through podcasts, essays and Twitter threads.
Erik Jorgenson combined all of his knowledge and turned it into a great book which I highly recommend reading.
The book is available at https://www.navalmanack.com/ for a donation or it can be downloaded for free.
Erik organized his book into two parts, wealth and happiness. These parts are then further divided in order to help the reader learn how to achieve happiness and wealth.
Some of the nuggets of wisdom that you will learn by reading this book are below.
“Ways to get lucky:
· Hope luck finds you.
· Hustle until you stumble into it.
· Prepare the mind and be sensitive to chances others miss.
· Become the best at what you do. Refine what you do until this is true. Opportunity will seek you out. Luck becomes your destiny.”
The three broad classes of leverage are: labor, money and products with no marginal cost of replication (books, media, movies and code).
“Interview question to Naval: How have your values changed?
Naval’s answer: When I was younger, I really, really valued freedom. Freedom was one of my core values. Ironically, it still is. It’s probably one of my top three values, but it’s now a different definition of freedom.
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.’”
Naval’s three different meanings of life. 1. It’s personal. Everyone has to find their own meaning. 2. There is no meaning to life. We’ve been dead for 10 billion years or more and after we die we will be dead for around another 70 billion years until the heat death of the universe. 3. Is more scientific and complicated. It has to do with us contributing to the heat death of the universe. As we create more and more complex things like art, math, computers and family, we accelerate entropy and we accelerate the heat death of the universe.
“[Wisdom is] understanding the long-term consequences of your actions.”
