Book: The Almanack of Naval Ravikant

Naval Ravikant 是一位印度裔美国企业家和投资者。他是AngelList的联合创始人、主席和前首席执行官。他已经对200多家公司进行了早期投资，包括Uber、FourSquare、Twitter、Wish.com、Poshmark、Postmates、Thumbtack、Notion、SnapLogic、Opendoor、Clubhouse、Stack Overflow、OpenDNS、Yammer和Clearview AI，总共70多家，包括10多家独角兽公司。他本人也经常在社交媒体上分享一些他对于财富和生活的经验和感悟。

这本书是Eric Jorgenson所总结的Naval Ravikant的twitter， pocast，和文章中的一些观点。

内容分为两部分：

• Part 1 – Wealth
• Part 2 – Happiness

书中最后的两段内容是对Naval思想很好的概括：

• Happiness = Health + Wealth + Good Relationships
• Health = Exercise + Diet + Sleep
• Exercise = High Intensity Resistance Training + Sports + Rest
• Diet = Natural Foods + Intermittent Fasting + Plants
• Sleep = No alarms + 8-9 hours + Circadian rhythms
• Wealth = Income + Wealth * (Return on Investment)
• Income = Accountability + Leverage + Specific Knowledge
• Accountability = Personal Branding + Personal Platform + Taking Risk?
• Leverage = Capital + People + Intellectual Property
• Specific Knowledge = Knowing how to do something society cannot yet easily train other people to do
• Return on Investment = “Buy-and-Hold? + Valuation + Margin of Safety

• Be present above all else.
• Desire is suffering. (Buddha)
• Anger is a hot coal you hold in your hand while waiting to throw it at someone else. (Buddha)
• If you can’t see yourself working with someone for life, don’t work with them for a day.
• Reading (learning) is the ultimate meta-skill and can be traded for anything else.
• All the real benefits in life come from compound interest.
• Earn with your mind, not your time.
• 99 percent of all effort is wasted.
• Total honesty at all times. It’s almost always possible to be honest and positive.
• Praise specifically, criticize generally. (Warren Buffett)
• Truth is that which has predictive power.
• Watch every thought. (Ask “Why am I having this thought?)
• All greatness comes from suffering.
• Love is given, not received.
• Enlightenment is the space between your thoughts. (Eckhart Tolle)
• Mathematics is the language of nature.
• Every moment has to be complete in and of itself.

相比于Happiness，Wealth部分显然更吸引我。也许是应为我目前觉得已经足够幸福，并且每个人的幸福哲学并不相同，所以我没有在Happiness部分找到很多的共鸣。

但是对于Wealth部分，Naval的很多观点对我很有启发，也和Tim Ferriss的一些观点十分契合。他很强调“杠杆(leverage)”的重要性，鼓励人们对其善加利用，达到增长自己财富的目的。

以下是我对本书的 highlights。

原文摘录

Building Wealth

标注(橙色) – Understand How Wealth Is Created > 位置 285

Wealth is the thing you want. Wealth is assets that earn while you sleep. Wealth is the factory, the robots, cranking out things. Wealth is the computer program that’s running at night, serving other customers. Wealth is even money in the bank that is being reinvested into other assets, and into other businesses.

标注(橙色) – Understand How Wealth Is Created > 位置 302

笔记 – Understand How Wealth Is Created > 位置 302

标注(橙色) – Find and Build Specific Knowledge > 位置 317

The specific knowledge is sort of this weird combination of unique traits from your DNA, your unique upbringing, and your response to it. It’s almost baked into your personality and your identity. Then you can hone it.

标注(橙色) – Find and Build Specific Knowledge > 位置 319

No one can compete with you on being you.

标注(橙色) – Find and Build Specific Knowledge > 位置 326

Not to take away anything from art or politics or engineering or business, but without science, we’d still be scrambling in the dirt fighting with sticks and trying to start fires. Society, business, & money are downstream of technology, which is itself downstream of science. Science applied is the engine of humanity. Corollary: Applied Scientists are the most powerful people in the world. This will be more obvious in the coming years.

标注(橙色) – Find and Build Specific Knowledge > 位置 344

specific knowledge is at the edge of knowledge. It’s also stuff that’s only now being figured out or is really hard to figure out. If

标注(橙色) – Play Long-Term Games with Long-Term People > 位置 379

Compound interest also happens in your reputation. If you have a sterling reputation and you keep building it for decades upon decades, people will notice.

标注(橙色) – Play Long-Term Games with Long-Term People > 位置 389

Intentions don’t matter. Actions do. That’s why being ethical is hard.

标注(橙色) – Play Long-Term Games with Long-Term People > 位置 407

when you find the 1 percent of your discipline which will not be wasted, which you’ll be able to invest in for the rest of your life and has meaning to you—go all-in and forget about the rest. [10]

标注(橙色) – Take on Accountability > 位置 410

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

标注(橙色) – Build or Buy Equity in a Business > 位置 449

If you don’t own equity in a business, your odds of making money are very slim.

标注(橙色) – Build or Buy Equity in a Business > 位置 454

the real wealth is created by starting your own companies or even by investing. In an investment firm, they’re buying equity. These are the routes to wealth. It doesn’t come through the hours. [78]

标注(橙色) – Find a Position of Leverage > 位置 467

The less you want something, the less you’re thinking about it, the less you’re obsessing over it, the more you’re going to do it in a natural way.

标注(橙色) – Find a Position of Leverage > 位置 472

If someone can train other people how to do something, then they can replace you. If they can replace you, then they don’t have to pay you a lot. You want to know how to do something other people don’t know how to do at the time period when those skills are in demand. [1]

标注(橙色) – Find a Position of Leverage > 位置 477

Think about what product or service society wants but does not yet know how to get. You want to become the person who delivers it and delivers it at scale. That is really the challenge of how to make money.

标注(橙色) – Find a Position of Leverage > 位置 484

One form of leverage is labor—other humans working for you.

标注(橙色) – Find a Position of Leverage > 位置 487

Money is good as a form of leverage.

标注(橙色) – Find a Position of Leverage > 位置 494

The final form of leverage is brand new—the most democratic form. It is: “products with no marginal cost of replication.

标注(橙色) – Find a Position of Leverage > 位置 529

If you have specific knowledge, you have accountability and you have leverage; they have to pay you what you’re worth.

标注(橙色) – Find a Position of Leverage > 位置 547

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

标注(橙色) – Get Paid for Your Judgment > 位置 611

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

标注(橙色) – Prioritize and Focus > 位置 626

No one is going to value you more than you value yourself. You just have to set a very high personal hourly rate and you have to stick to it. Even when I was young, I just decided I was worth a lot more than the market thought I was worth, and I started treating myself that way.

标注(橙色) – Prioritize and Focus > 位置 657

Because money is not going to solve all of your problems, but it’s going to solve all of your money problems. People realize that, so they want to make money.

标注(橙色) – Prioritize and Focus > 位置 662

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.

标注(橙色) – Prioritize and Focus > 位置 669

The problem is, to win at a status game, you have to put somebody else down.

标注(橙色) – Prioritize and Focus > 位置 676

There are basically three really big decisions you make in your early life: where you live, who you’re with, and what you do.

标注(橙色) – Find Work That Feels Like Play > 位置 753

I value freedom above everything else. All kinds of freedom: freedom to do what I want, freedom from things I don’t want to do, freedom from my own emotions or things that may disturb my peace.

标注(橙色) – How to Get Lucky > 位置 795

build your character in a certain way, then your character becomes your destiny.

标注(橙色) – How to Get Lucky > 位置 804

My co-founder Nivi said, “In a long-term game, it seems that everybody is making each other rich. And in a short-term game, it seems like everybody is making themselves rich.

标注(橙色) – How to Get Lucky > 位置 812

I have a much more comfortable philosophy: “Be a maker who makes something interesting people want. Show your craft, practice your craft, and the right people will eventually find you.” [14]

标注(橙色) – How to Get Lucky > 位置 826

“The closer you want to get to me, the better your values have to be.” [4]

Building Judgment

标注(橙色) – How to Think Clearly > 位置 893

The advanced concepts in a field are less proven. We use them to signal insider knowledge, but we’d be better off nailing the basics. [11]

标注(橙色) – How to Think Clearly > 位置 914

The more desire I have for something to work out a certain way, the less likely I am to see the truth.

标注(橙色) – How to Think Clearly > 位置 917

What you feel tells you nothing about the facts—it merely tells you something about your estimate of the facts.

标注(橙色) – Shed Your Identity to See Reality > 位置 953

Facebook redesigns. Twitter redesigns. Personalities, careers, and teams also need redesigns. There are no permanent solutions in a dynamic system.

标注(橙色) – Learn the Skills of Decision-Making > 位置 964

I never ask if “I like it or “I don’t like it. I think “this is what it is or “this is what it isn’t.”—Richard Feynman

标注(橙色) – Learn the Skills of Decision-Making > 位置 967

praise specifically, criticize generally.

Saving Yourself

标注(橙色) – Choosing to Be Yourself > 位置 1520

No one in the world is going to beat you at being you.

标注(黄色) – Choosing to Care for Yourself > 位置 1594

Walking meetings:

• Brain works better
• Exercise & sunlight
• Shorter, less pleasantries
• More dialogue, less monologue
• No slides
• End easily by walking back

标注(橙色) – Choosing to Care for Yourself > 位置 1599

“Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life.”

标注(橙色) – Meditation + Mental Strength > 位置 1607

Your breath is one of the few places where your autonomic nervous system meets your voluntary nervous system. It’s involuntary, but you can also control it.

标注(橙色) – Meditation + Mental Strength > 位置 1627

most of our suffering comes from avoidance.

标注(橙色) – Meditation + Mental Strength > 位置 1632

Too much sugar leads to a heavy body, and too many distractions lead to a heavy mind. Time spent undistracted and alone, in self-examination, journaling, meditation, resolves the unresolved and takes us from mentally fat to fit. Do you have

标注(橙色) – Meditation + Mental Strength > 位置 1643

What I find is 90 percent of thoughts I have are fear-based. The other 10 percent may be desire-based.

标注(橙色) – Meditation + Mental Strength > 位置 1733

Meditation is turning off society and listening to yourself. It only “works” when done for its own sake. Hiking is walking meditation. Journaling is writing meditation. Praying is gratitude meditation. Showering is accidental meditation. Sitting quietly is direct meditation.

标注(橙色) – Choosing to Build Yourself > 位置 1766

One of the things Krishnamurti talks about is being in an internal state of revolution. You should always be internally ready for a complete change. Whenever we say we’re going to try to do something or try to form a habit, we’re wimping out.

标注(橙色) – Choosing to Build Yourself > 位置 1782

Impatience with actions, patience with results.

Philosophy

标注(橙色) – The Meanings of Life > 位置 1927

What we do as living systems accelerates getting to that state. The more complex system you create, whether it’s through computers, civilization, art, mathematics, or creating a family—you actually accelerate the heat death of the Universe. You’re pushing us towards this point where we end up as one thing. [4]

标注(橙色) – Rational Buddhism > 位置 1979

How do you define wisdom? Understanding the long-term consequences of your actions. [11]

标注(橙色) – The Present Is All We Have > 位置 1992

Inspiration is perishable—act on it immediately.

Naval’s Writing

标注(橙色) – 位置 2207

Life Formulas I (2008) These are notes to myself. Your frame of reference, and therefore your calculations, may vary. These are not definitions—these are algorithms for success. Contributions are welcome.

• Happiness = Health + Wealth + Good Relationships
• Health = Exercise + Diet + Sleep
• Exercise = High Intensity Resistance Training + Sports + Rest
• Diet = Natural Foods + Intermittent Fasting + Plants
• Sleep = No alarms + 8-9 hours + Circadian rhythms
• Wealth = Income + Wealth * (Return on Investment)
• Income = Accountability + Leverage + Specific Knowledge
• Accountability = Personal Branding + Personal Platform + Taking Risk?
• Leverage = Capital + People + Intellectual Property
• Specific Knowledge = Knowing how to do something society cannot yet easily train other people to do
• Return on Investment = “Buy-and-Hold? + Valuation + Margin of Safety

标注(橙色) – 位置 2217

Naval’s Rules (2016)

• Be present above all else.
• Desire is suffering. (Buddha)
• Anger is a hot coal you hold in your hand while waiting to throw it at someone else. (Buddha)
• If you can’t see yourself working with someone for life, don’t work with them for a day.
• Reading (learning) is the ultimate meta-skill and can be traded for anything else.
• All the real benefits in life come from compound interest.
• Earn with your mind, not your time.
• 99 percent of all effort is wasted.
• Total honesty at all times. It’s almost always possible to be honest and positive.
• Praise specifically, criticize generally. (Warren Buffett)
• Truth is that which has predictive power.
• Watch every thought. (Ask “Why am I having this thought?)
• All greatness comes from suffering.
• Love is given, not received.
• Enlightenment is the space between your thoughts. (Eckhart Tolle)
• Mathematics is the language of nature.
• Every moment has to be complete in and of itself.