Why should I know Naval Ravikant?

“A busy mind accelerates the perceived passage of time. Buy more time by cultivating peace of mind.”

“A fit body, a calm mind, a house full of love. These things cannot be bought — they must be earned.”

“A great goal in life would be to not have to be in a given place at a given time.”

“A rational person can find peace by cultivating indifference to things outside of their control.”

“All greatness comes from suffering.”

“All the real benefits in life come from compound interest.”

“An army of robots is freely available - it's just packed in data centers for heat and space efficiency. Use it.”

“Apply specific knowledge, with leverage, and eventually you will get what you deserve.”

“Arm yourself with specific knowledge, accountability, and leverage. Specific knowledge is knowledge that you cannot be trained for. If society can train you, it can train someone else, and replace you.”

“At heart I'm an entrepreneur and any day in which I solve the same problem twice in a row, I'm pretty unhappy. So by definition, I like to do something different every day. I think all humans are sort of meant to do that kind of thing.”

“Become the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until this is true.”

“Bitcoin is a tool for freeing humanity from oligarchs and tyrants, dressed up as a get-rich-quick scheme.”

“Code and media are permissionless leverage. They're the leverage behind the newly rich. You can create software and media that works for you while you sleep.”

“Desire is a contract that you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.”

“Don't partner with cynics and pessimists. Their beliefs are self-fulfilling.”

“Don’t do things that you know are morally wrong. Not because someone is watching, but because you are. Self-esteem is just the reputation that you have with yourself.”

“Embrace accountability, and take business risks under your own name. Society will reward you with responsibility, equity, and leverage.”

“Fortunes require leverage. Business leverage comes from capital, people, and products with no marginal cost of replication (code and media).”

“Forty hour workweeks are a relic of the Industrial Age. Knowledge workers function like athletes — train and sprint, then rest and reassess.”

“Humans are basically habit machines… I think learning how to break habits is actually a very important meta skill and can serve you in life almost better than anything else.”

“I don’t like to self-identify in almost any level anymore. That keeps me from having too many of these so-called stable beliefs.”

“I like to think that if I lost all my money and if you drop me on a random street in any English-speaking country, within 5, 10 years I’d be wealthy again, because it’s just a skill set that I’ve developed and I think anyone can develop. In 1,000 parallel universes, you want to be wealthy in 999 of them. You don’t want to be wealthy in the 50 of them where you got lucky. So, we want to factor luck out of it.”

“I think a lot of us learn as we get older that happiness is internal. Happiness is a choice that you make and a skill that you develop.”

“I would define values, first of all, as a set of things that you will not compromise on. Foundational values to me are things that I’ve looked at very, very carefully about myself and I’ve deliberately chosen and said, “You know what, this is a habit. This is a way of life. I’m not going to compromise on it. I’m going to stay this way forever. I don’t want to live life any other way.”

“If you can't code, write books and blogs, record videos and podcasts.”

“Ignore people playing status games. They gain status by attacking people playing wealth creation games.”

“In almost any salaried job, even at one that’s paying a lot per hour like a lawyer, or a doctor, you’re still putting in the hours, and every hour you get paid. So, what that means is when you’re sleeping, you’re not earning. When you’re retired, you’re not earning. When you’re on vacation, you’re not earning. And you can’t earn non-linearly.”

“It’s a contradiction that we all deal with. That we all want to be successful people, but we also want to be happy people. The two of those run in almost diametric opposites to each other.”

“Labor means people working for you. It's the oldest and most fought-over form of leverage. Labor leverage will impress your parents, but don’t waste your life chasing it.”

“Learn to sell. Learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable.”

“Leverage is a force multiplier for your judgement. Judgement requires experience, but can be built faster by learning foundational skills.”

“More drugs are taken to quiet the mind than to heal the body.”

“Pick an industry where you can play long term games with long term people.”

“Pick business partners with high intelligence, energy, and, above all, integrity.”

“Play iterated games. All the returns in life, whether in wealth, relationships, or knowledge, come from compound interest.”

“Reading (learning) is a meta-skill and can be traded for anything else.”

“Reading is faster than listening. Doing is faster than watching.”

“School, politics, sports, and games train us to compete against others. True rewards — wealth, knowledge, love, fitness, and equanimity — come from ignoring others and improving ourselves.”

“Seek wealth, not money or status. Wealth is having assets that earn while you sleep. Money is how we transfer time and wealth. Status is your place in the social hierarchy.”

“Set and enforce an aspirational personal hourly rate. If fixing a problem will save less than your hourly rate, ignore it. If outsourcing a task will cost less than your hourly rate, outsource it.”

“So you came here through an unbroken chain of your ancestors from tadpoles till now that all replicated, are you literally gonna be the first ones to miss that branch? Yes, of course my ancestors are dead and I will never communicate with them, but I just can’t even imagine the thought that I have great grandfather’s and great-great grandfather’s who suffered all kinds of misery and hell to survive and to replicate… and I’m gonna say oh yeah, I couldn’t be bothered I was having too good of a time it’s actually passed the genes along.”

“Social media has degenerated into a deafening cacophony of groups signaling and repeating their shared myths.”

“Sophisticated foods are bittersweet (wine, beer, coffee, chocolate). Addictive relationships are cooperative and competitive. Work becomes flow at the limits of ability. The flavor of life is on the edge.”

“Specific knowledge is found by pursuing your genuine curiosity and passion rather than whatever is hot right now. Building specific knowledge will feel like play to you but will look like work to others.”

“Study microeconomics, game theory, psychology, persuasion, ethics, mathematics, and computers.”

“The idea that we repeat ourselves, and we specialize and we pigeon
hole ourselves is a modern invention created through specialization
of labor in the Industrial Revolution. And hopefully, as more and
more people move up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, we’re going to
be able to define ourselves much more loosely.”

“The Internet has massively broadened the possible space of careers. Most people haven't figured this out yet.”

“The most important trick to be happy is to realize that happiness is a choice that you make and a skill that you develop. You choose to be happy, and then you work at it. It’s just like building muscles.”

“The people who succeed are irrationally passionate about something.”

“The reason you want wealth is because it buys you your freedom. So, you don’t have to wear a tie like a collar around your neck. So, you don’t have to wake up at 7:00 AM, and rush to work, and sit in commute traffic. So, you don’t have to waste away your entire life grinding all the productive hours away into a soulless job that doesn’t fulfill you.”

“The secret to public speaking is to speak as if you were alone.”

“The three big ones in life are wealth, health, and happiness. We pursue them in that order but their importance is in the reverse.”

“There are no get rich quick schemes. That's just someone else getting rich off you.”

“There is no skill called “business.” Avoid business magazines and business classes.”

“There’s always someone higher up the stack. So the success driven mentality drives you to unhappiness and if you want to be successful, surround yourself with people who are more successful than you are. But if you want to be happy, surround yourself with people who are less successful than you are. So this is the contradiction that we deal with all day long because we’re also told that the American dream will bring you happiness, and it will not. ”

“To the experts, what looks like hard work from the outside, is play from the inside.”

“Total honesty at all times. It’s almost always possible to be honest & positive.”

“Understand that ethical wealth creation is possible. If you secretly despise wealth, it will elude you.”

“We waste our time with short term thinking and busywork. Warren Buffett spends a year deciding and a day acting. That act lasts decades.”

“Wealth creation is an evolutionarily recent positive-sum game. Status is an old zero-sum game. Those attacking wealth creation are often just seeking status.”

“When specific knowledge is taught, it’s through apprenticeships, not schools. Specific knowledge is often highly technical or creative. It cannot be outsourced or automated.”

“When you have children you learn to love something more than you love yourself… and you can talk about that all day long but you’ve never had that feeling until you’ve had a child, and it’s very important for all of us I think to experience that feeling.”

“When you're finally wealthy, you'll realize that it wasn't what you were seeking in the first place.”

“You get paid for being right first, and to be first, you can’t wait for consensus.”

“You should be too busy to “do coffee," while still keeping an uncluttered calendar.”

“You will get rich by giving society what it wants but does not yet know how to get. At scale.”

“You'll do better work if you're bored rather than busy.”

“You’re not going to get rich renting out your time. You must own equity - a piece of a business - to gain your financial freedom.”

“Your real resumé is a painful recounting of all of your struggles.”