Naval Ravikant Quotes

Indian American entrepreneur and investor

Naval Ravikant (born November 5, 1974) is an Indian-born American entrepreneur and investor. He is the co-founder and chairman of AngelList, a platform for startups, investors, and job seekers. He is an angel investor who has made early-stage investments in companies including Uber, Twitter, Postmates, and Yammer.
Ravikant is a recipient of the Edmund Hillary Fellowship. He also co-hosts a podcast with Brett Hall.

As you get older, the sum of preferences you’ve accumulated is very, very large. These habitual reactions end up as runaway freight trains controlling your mood. We should control our own moods.

I think just being aware you’re a rat in a race is about as far as most of us are going to get.

It’s more about consistently creating wealth by creating businesses, creating opportunities, and creating investments. It hasn’t been a giant one-off thing. My personal wealth has not been generated by one big year. It just stacks up a little bit, a few chips at a time: more options, more businesses, more investments, more things I can do.

Run Uphill Simple heuristic: If you’re evenly split on a difficult decision, take the path more painful in the short term. If you have two choices to make, and they’re relatively equal choices, take the path more difficult and more painful in the short term.

Now, when someone mentions a book to me, I buy it. At any given time, I’m reading somewhere between ten and twenty books. I’m flipping through them.

We spend very little time deciding which relationship to get into. We spend so much time in a job, but we spend so little time deciding which job to get into. Choosing what city to live in can almost completely determine the trajectory of your life, but we spend so little time trying to figure out what city to live in. Advice to a young engineer considering moving to San Francisco: “Do you want to leave your friends behind? Or be the one left behind?” If you’re going to live in a city for ten years, if you’re going to be in a job for five years, if you’re in a relationship for a decade, you should be spending one to two years deciding these things. These are highly dominating decisions. Those three decisions really matter.

who you work with and what you work on are more important than how hard you work.

Essentially, you have to go through your life replacing your thoughtless bad habits with good ones, making a commitment to be a happier person.

To me, happiness is not about positive thoughts. It’s not about negative thoughts. It’s about the absence of desire, especially the absence of desire for external things. The fewer desires I can have, the more I can accept the current state of things, the less my mind is moving, because the mind really exists in motion toward the future or the past. The more present I am, the happier and more content I will be. If I latch onto a feeling, if I say, “Oh, I’m happy now,” and I want to stay happy, then I’m going to drop out of that happiness. Now, suddenly, the mind is moving. It’s trying to attach to something. It’s trying to create a permanent situation out of a temporary situation.

When we get something, we assume the world owes it to us. If you’re present, you’ll realize how many gifts and how much abundance there is around us at all times. That’s all you really need to do. I’m here now, and I have all these incredible things at my disposal.

Nature follows unbroken mathematical laws and a chain of cause and effect from the Big Bang to now. Everything is perfect exactly the way it is. It is only in our particular minds we are unhappy or not happy, and things are perfect or imperfect because of what we desire.

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

I think a lot of us have this low-level pervasive feeling of anxiety. If you pay attention to your mind, sometimes you’re just running around doing your thing and you’re not feeling great, and you notice your mind is chattering and chattering about something. Maybe you can’t sit still…There’s this “nexting” thing where you’re sitting in one spot thinking about where you should be next.

Art is creativity. Art is anything done for its own sake. What are the things that are done for their own sake, and there’s nothing behind them? Loving somebody, creating something, playing. To me, creating businesses is play. I create businesses because it’s fun, because I’m into the product. [77]

When someone spends too much time talking about their own values or they’re talking themselves up, they’re covering for something.