Naval Ravikant Quotes

However, if you view yourself as a bacteria or an amoeba — or if you view all of your works as writing on water or building castles in the sand, then you have no expectation for how life should “actually” be. Life is just the way it is. When you accept that, you have no cause to be happy or unhappy. Those things almost don’t apply.

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

I once asked a monk how he found peace. “I say ‘yes,’” he’d said. “To all that happens, I say ‘yes.’” [7]

Saving Yourself Doctors won’t make you healthy.
Nutritionists won’t make you slim.
Teachers won’t make you smart.
Gurus won’t make you calm.
Mentors won’t make you rich.
Trainers won’t make you fit. Ultimately, you have to take responsibility. Save yourself.

There’s the “five chimps theory” where you can predict a chimp’s behavior by the five chimps it hangs out with the most. I think that applies to humans as well.

Happiness is a very evolving thing, I think, like all the great questions. When you’re a little kid, you go to your mom and ask, “What happens when we die? Is there a Santa Claus? Is there a God? Should I be happy? Who should I marry?” Those kinds of things. There are no glib answers because no answers apply to everybody. These kinds of questions ultimately do have answers, but they have personal answers. The answer that works for me is going to be nonsense to you, and vice versa. Whatever happiness means to me, it means something different to you. I think it’s very important to explore what these definitions are.

I think the meaning of life is to do things for their own sake.

If you have nothing in your life, but you have at least one person that loves you unconditionally, it’ll do wonders for your self-esteem. [8]

Read a lot — just read.

Capital means money. To raise money, apply your specific knowledge with accountability and show resulting good judgment.

If I say I’m happy, that means I was sad at some point. If I say he’s attractive, then somebody else is unattractive. Every positive thought even has a seed of a negative thought within it and vice versa, which is why a lot of greatness in life comes out of suffering. You have to view the negative before you can aspire to and appreciate the positive.

It’s better to be really great at arithmetic and geometry than to be deep into advanced mathematics. I would read microeconomics all day long — Microeconomics 101.

It’s very, very important we only say yes when we are pretty certain. You’re never going to be absolutely certain, but you’re going to be very certain.

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. (Eck-hart Tolle) → Mathematics is the language of nature. → Every moment has to be complete in and of itself. [5] Health, love, and your mission, in that order. Nothing else matters.

Most of the time, the person you have to become to make money is a high-anxiety, high-stress, hard-working, competitive person. When you have done that for twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years, and you suddenly make money, you can’t turn it off. You’ve trained yourself to be a high-anxiety person. Then, you have to learn how to be happy.