- What is this book?
- Who is Naval and why it is worth listening to him?
- Idea 1: How to build Wealth
- Idea 2: How to build judgment
- Idea 3: How to be happy
- Conclusion
What is this book?
The Almanack of Naval Ravikant is a free e-book by Eric Jorgenson that captures the writings, tweets of Naval Ravikant – an entrepreneur, philosopher and investor based in Silicon Valley.
This book is free as it was created as a public service and everyone can download the PDF and e-reader versions here.
Who is Naval and why it is worth listening to him?
Naval is a successful angel investor, having been through the entrepreneur route, creating Angel List and a few others and leading an enlightened life and sharing his thoughts freely via Twitter which are always well received by the start-up and investor community. Some of his thoughts on the 2 basic wants of humans on Wealth and Happiness are captured by Eric Jorgensen in the book.
One example of his most popular tweets: (source: Twitter)
Idea 1: How to build Wealth
To Naval – building wealth is a skill – combining factors such as personal expertise, sales skills, domain knowledge, right network, creating your own luck, developing good judgment.
He goes in-depth to each of the main points as he breaks down the wealth building process. Essentially one has to be unique in a specific domain, go all-in, and build something of value to society through a business. Leverage business structures, other people’s time, money, code (he terms them as robots) to own equity instead of trading time for money.
Idea 2: How to build judgment
To make sure one can make high quality decisions to make a good calls in life and business, having good judgment is very important. We make many decisions daily, so honing this skill is important and people actually pay top executives well because of their decision making skills. If one can make better decisions 10% of the time more than others, one can command more compensation especially if the decisions cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
A right decision can make a difference between surviving and death of a company. Naval also emphasises that ‘clear’ thinking is better than ‘smart’ thinking.
He lists 12 mental models that one can use to quickly use to evaluate situations to come to a decision. Some of the best ones that helped me a lot was: “If you can’t decide, the answer is NO”. A lot of people are stuck with hard questions such, ‘should I take this job?’, ‘should I marry this person?’, but we forget that there are other better options out there which we do not usually think about when we are stuck in that rut.
Idea 3: How to be happy
Besides wealth and health, happiness is next in the holy trinity that all human beings strive for. And Naval shares that happiness is something that we all can have with a few basic mindset shifts such as acknowledging that it is a choice, not being envious, and building right habits such as meditation and caring for yourself.
Naval sees meditation as intermittent fasting for the mind to make it sharper and fitter- just like fasting helps our body. Personally I have tried it at a meditation retreat and can attest to the benefits of it.
Conclusion
There are many more gems in the book – highly recommend all to check it out and get smarter to focus on the right things in life – happiness, health and wealth.
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