I’m serious.
This book will land you in a pickle and then will pull you out of it only if you’d be willing to.
Ladies and Gents, I introduce you to the best non-fiction book I ever read…(cue applause)
The Almanack of Naval Ravikant.
This one book will make you question everything in life, I’m serious, every single thing. Your health choices, your wealth sources, your relationships, your financial decision, your happiness decisions and everything, if there’s anything major, else. And all in a good way, in a really productive, healthy, self-aware way.
That’s not a bad thing. The fact that this book will make you doubt how you’ve been spending your one and only life.
It makes you think. And that’s what book are supposed to do, right?
Table of Contents
The Almanack of Naval Ravikant
The book is made up of two parts.
The first deals with wealth; tells us how to get rich. How to create generational wealth? Plainly and without any sugar-coating and downplaying, I loved how Naval ravikant didn’t say anything about wanting to be wealthy as being too money-minded or materialistic. He knows people want to be rich and he’s providing simple lessons on it.
That’s the basic motto of the first part, to create ethical wealth.
You’ll learn how we can employ the world around us and our society and our own mind to succeed in whatever venture we try out. Business, corporate, art.
By wealth, he means, equity in a business.
More onto this below.
The second half of the book deals with, you guessed it right, happiness, and how we all are losing ourselves indefinitely to the shackles of a fast-paced world where no one has any time for stopping once and taking a breath and looking around themselves to appreciate it all.
It makes you question if you’re running too fast? Or maybe you’re running towards stuff that isn’t your destination at all? Are you? That’s the question no. 1.
Naval Ravikant is a very amazing role model to have. If maybe you wanna know more about his stuff, check out his website and his podcast and you’ll learn so many more things to sort out your life. In addition to that, he’s got this whole list of books and blog and online stuff to reading in his recommended reading list.
The Almanack of Naval Ravikant Summary
How to Create Generational Wealth?
- Making money is a skill you learn. It’s not something that happens overnight, but is the result of years worth of perseverance and implementation of knowledge and experience.
- The ultimate way to wealth-generation is owning equity, not doing a job or something. To have the financial freedom you need, you must own a piece of a business.
- Have a unique skillset. If you’re just doing whatever everyone else is, trying to mimic the successful people in history in hopes you should be able to recreate their situation, you’re in for a disappointment. To learn how to create generational wealth, you’ll have to find out what your Blue Ocean is, the market or industry where competition is minimal and where you can make some big, visionary change through your own unique perspective.
- Be careful while choosing your business partners. They’re the people who’ll have a major say in what the future of your company would be.
In the words of Naval Ravikant himself—
“Pick business partners with high intelligence, energy, and above all, integrity.”
- Some recommendations from Naval to study: microeconomics, game theory, psychology, persuasion, ethics, mathematics, and computers. Fun reads, guys, makes you educated above what society expects from someone who doesn’t primarily belong to one of these industries.
“Summary: Productize yourself. Become the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until this is true.”
Questions to ponder on: Naval ends this section of the book saying, “When you’re finally wealthy, you’ll realise it wasn’t what you were seeking in the first place. But that is for another day.”
I mean, this is such a teasing question, you know, Naval knows something I don’t yet. (Because for right now, some of us just need wealth). But it shows how those people who’ve already been here—at the top—have realised that being here wasn’t the ultimate destination at all.
The destination was something else. What is it for you?
Expanding more on the unique function of a person and the Blue Ocean strategy they could use:
The Blue Ocean strategy is not something that was talked about in Naval’s book but it has got another book for it. Check it out here.
Once you completely understand the concept of the blue ocean that you can conquer, you will also be able to correctly determine what’s that one purpose you want to spend your life working on.
“The best person in the world at anything gets to do it for everyone.”
Naval tells us to find what that one (or more) thing is that we’re good at. And then become the best at it. That’s just how it’s supposed to happen. You won’t become good overnight, either, but when you will, it’ll be worth it all. He calls this “specific knowledge”: the stuff only we can do this well.
Here’s what specific knowledge really is, according to The Almanack of Naval Ravikant:
“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.”
And then again: “No one can compete with you on being you.”
The Importance of Being a Perpetual Learner according to Naval
“You can only achieve mastery in one or two things. It’s usually things you’re obsessed about.”
So much of the stuff we learn, experience, do, never really comes to use. That’s the truth. It’s like the exaggerated version of the 80/20 Pareto Principle. But it talks about 99% of the effort being wasted in finding that one area where our true passions lie.
That’s why he goes on to say, “When you find the right thing to do, when you find the right people to work with, invest deeply.”
You have to do stuff for its own sake, that’s how you create the best work you can. Your magnum opus, you know.
But when you’re just finding out your area of focus for your perpetual learning strategy, don’t forget to keep this one thing in mind: “If they can train you to do it, eventually they will train a computer to do it (quoted).”
You have to have an authentic need for wealth in your life. If you secretly dislike it, it’s going to elude you.
Value yourself
“You will never be worth more than you think you’re worth.”
On Playing Games, Retirement and Getting Lucky
Naval Ravikant says how we always play games in life. From the social game, to the money game, to the status game in the society.
Retirement, as he phrases it, “is when you stop sacrificing today for some imaginary tomorrow. When today is completed in and of itself, you’re retired.”
And how to reach retirement?
- Have so much money that what you earn passively is more than what you spend.
- Don’t spend anything at all; live a monk lifestyle.
- Do something you love. When you do something you love, it’s not about money at all. You just do it for the sake of it. Like art, which is “anything done for its own sake.”
How to Get Lucky?
- Hope luck finds you by itself
- Keep working hard until you stumble into it.
- Prepare your mind and be sensitive to chances and opportunities that others don’t see.
- And this is the best: become the best at what you do. Redefine what you do until this is true. Opportunity will seek you out. Luck becomes your destiny.
And to sum it all up, don’t count. Don’t wait, don’t long. Success will find you itself. Just keep working hard. Keep doing stuff that feels like play to you.
That’s the method how to find happiness.
How to Find Happiness?
“Don’t take yourself so seriously. You’re just a monkey with a plan.”
Happiness means something different to everyone. What happiness is to me is probably something else to you. That’s how it is, and that what makes our individual life paths so interesting and so unique.
I didn’t know the true meaning of happiness until I read this book (when I was sixteen or something) And until then I only just had this vague idea regarding what happiness was; smiling, laughing, being calm, forgiving everyone, not holding grudges, feeling peace within yourself. Unnecessary to say, I wasn’t really busy. Because I was always striving.
Naval Ravikant goes on to explain how happiness “is really a default state. It is when you remove the sense of something missing in your life.” It’s when you’re content, perfectly satisfied with where you are in life and for a second nothing else matter and nothing can touch you.
This is such a beautiful thought:
Our lives are a blink of a firefly in the night. You’re just barely here. You have to make the most of every minute, which doesn’t mean you chase some stupid desire for your entire lifte. What it means is every second you have on this planet is very precious, and it’s your responsibility to make sure you’re happy and interpreting everything in the best possible way.
What you should do is have some basic values, some principles in life which form the core belief systems of yours. They are the values on which you function, on the basis of which you interpret your circumstances and live your life. It’s not such a bad thing to have a routine, a structure in life.
In addition, you have to be present in the moment. You have to be where your feet are, do what you’re doing right now, look around yourself and feel the air on your skin and speak your thoughts ahd hear everything clearly and live life like this moment is all that’s ever existed or will ever exist. In a way it’s true, that’s why.
Another amazing piece of wisdom shared by Naval Ravikant was, whenever you’re overthinking, ask yourself, “Would I rather be having this thought right now, or would I rather have my peace?”
You’ve got your answer there.
At the same time, it’s not healthy, and it’s even counter-intuitive to ignore your thoughts and feelings like they don’t exist. To ignore your sadness or anxiety or fear like it’s not rational is to set yourself up for emotional pain.
Every thought you’ve got is rational. It’s stemming from somewhere at least. It doesn’t help to just unvalidate its existence. That’s just you being cruel to yourself.
What helps is to try to figure out the roots of these emotions, try to find out why you’re feeling so. And then, making a contract with yourself to not waste your one and only precious life on anything that won’t matter in, say, five years. You decide, really.
But sometimes, we ourselves end up becoming our own enemies regarding this thing. Sometimes, we, maybe consciously or maybe without realising, end up choosing unhappiness ourselves. This happens when we desperately choose:
- To be unhappy until we get something or do something
- To be envious of other people and their lives.
- To choose habits that harm us and make us feel guilty the more and more we do it.
Unhappiness—just like happiness—can mean different things to different poeple. Everyone chooses their own suffering, I guess?
The thing is, you get to have desires or things you aspire to. But to be unhappy until your desires get fulfilled, that’s another matter entirely. You gonna regret that, seriously.
The Almanack of Naval Ravikant outlines how happiness is built on habits and the things you choose to do every day, day in and day out, are the very things that will ultimately decide the way your life goes.
To wrap this section up, I’ll once again quote Naval Ravikant here:
“You’re going to die one day and none of this is going to matter. So enjoy yourself. Do something positive. Project some love. Make someone happy. Laugh a little bit. Appreciate the moment. And do your work.”
That’s all from Naval Ravikant.
This book has been a life-changer for me. Learn how to create generational wealth and how to be happy, both needed at the same time, and I was again reminded of how important it is to love myself, love my family, love everything that I’ve got in life. What else do you even need in life, huh?
Of course, there’s so much more insight in the book that can’t be replicated in a blog, and it means different things to different people. So you might interpret it different that I did, and that’s the complete beauty of all knowledge.
Questions to Ask Yourself:
- Do I actually, really want to learn how to create generational wealth or am I doing it just because I don’t have anything else to do? Do I really want to play this game for the long-term? If yes, proceed.
- What’s one thing I’m good at?
- What’s one thing that the society needs?
- Can I strike a balance, find a new market gap between those two things? Find a product which I’m good at creating and which the society needs?
- Am I working hard enough, or maybe am I just waiting for the results without putting in the effort?
- When will I create my best work, my magnum opus?
- Do I realise that one life is all I get? Am I living it up to the fullest?
- Am I focusing properly on my health?
- Am I happy or am I just living a delusion?
- Is this it? Is this life? What did Naval Ravikant mean when he said that once we gain wealth, we’ll realise that it wasn’t what we wanted in the first place?
If you liked this summary, then you’re gonna love this book. And what better time to add it to your bookshelf than right now?
Yes, right now, you cannot put off greatness any longer at any cost. The Almanack of Naval Ravikant.
