Getting Rich and Finding Happiness with Naval Ravikant
The moment I saw this recent episode of ‘Joe Rogan Experience’ on my podcast list, I knew it was going to be a good one. Many times I have…
The moment I saw this recent episode of ‘Joe Rogan Experience’ on my podcast list, I knew it was going to be a good one. Many times I have been fascinated by the brilliant ideas portrayed by Naval on life and our society, and this podcast was no exception. I enjoyed it so much that I decided to compile a summary of the ideas that I found quite interesting. Hope you enjoy reading!
Life
People don’t want to start over. You have to willing to be a fool and kind of have that beginner’s mind and go back to the beginning to start over. If you’re not doing that you’re just getting older.
Social Media
(In social media), rather than you looking at yourself, you’re looking at how other people look at you.
It’s kind of a disease. Because social media is making celebrities of all of us. And celebrities are the most miserable people in the world. They have this strong self-image that gets built up by compliments, and it doesn’t take many insults to cancel out a lot of compliments. And then you’re carrying around this big weighty image. It is very easy to be attacked.
Success
You want to be rich and anonymous, not poor and famous.
You don’t want to be the guy who succeeds in life while being highly stressed, unhappy and leaving a trail of emotional wreckage with you and your loved ones. You want to get there calmly, quietly and without struggle.
Desire
Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want. Don’t have too many.
Pick your one overwhelming desire. It’s okay to suffer over that one. But on all the others, you want to let them go, so you can be calm, peaceful and relaxed.
Business
If you want to be effective in business, you need a clear, calm, cool and collective mind.
We live in an age of infinite leverage. Your actions can be multiplied by a thousand fold. Because of that, the impacts of good decision making is much higher than it used to be.
A clear mind leads to better judgement, leads to better outcomes. So if you want to operate at peak performance, you have to learn how to tame your mind, just like you have to learn how to tame your body.
Work
We like to view the world as linear. Which is saying, I’m gonna put in 8 hours of work, I’m gonna get back 8 hours of output. It doesn't work that way.
Outputs are non-linear based on the quality of work that you put in. The right way to work is like a lion. You and I are not like cows, we are not meant to graze all day. We are meant to hunt like lions. Machines are meant to work 9–5, not humans.
You are not gonna get rich renting out your time. You need to have equity to gain your financial freedom.
The idea that we are all factory like cogs in a machine, who are specialised and have to do things by memorisation or instruction, is gonna go away and we are gonna go back to being small groups of creative bands of individuals setting out to do missions. And when those missions are done, we are gonna collect our money, we get rated, and then we rest and reassess until we are ready for the next sprint.
Automation
Automation has been happening since the dawn of time. When electricity came along, that put a lot of people out of work. What it does is, it frees people up for new creative work. So the question is not ‘ is automation is gonna eliminate jobs?’ There is no finite number of jobs. Obviously new jobs are being created. They’re usually more creative jobs. So the question is ‘ how quickly is this transition going to happen? And what kind of jobs will be eliminated and what kind of jobs will be created? It’s impossible looking forward to predicting what kinds of jobs will be created.
Capitalise
The correct criticism of capitalism is when it does not provide equal opportunity. But people confuse this with equal outcome. When you have equal outcome, that can only be enforced by violence. Because free people make different choices, and when they make different choices, they have different outcomes.
Socialism comes from the heart. Capitalism comes from the head.
Technology
Technology empowers the individual, the individual means that you have the break down of family structure and religion and it does mean that there is a leftward shift to it. Technology leads the world left.
Politics
If all your believes line up into one political party, if all your believes are the same as your neighbours and friends, you are not a clear thinker. Your beliefs are socialised, they are taken from other people. So if you want to be a clear thinker you cannot pay attention to politics, it will destroy your ability to think.
Modern society
For most of modern life, all of our diseases are diseases of abundance. Not diseases of scarcity.
We are over-exposed to everything. So the way to survive in modern society is to be an ascetic. It is to retreat from society, there is too much society everywhere you go. Everyone is trying to program everybody. The only solution is to turn it off.
All of man’s problems arise because he cannot sit by himself in a room for 30 minutes alone.
Peace and Happiness
Peace is happiness at rest. Happiness is peace in motion. You can convert peace to happiness anytime you want. But peace is what you want most of the time.
The way we think you get peace is by resolving all your external problems. But there are unlimited external problems. So the only way to actually to get peace is on the inside by giving up this idea of problems.
It’s easier to change yourself than to change the world.
Meaning of life
The question (of the meaning of life) is more interesting than the answer.
If there was a single answer we will not be free. We would be trapped. Because then we would all have to live to that answer.
The fundamental delusion is thinking that there is something out there that will make you happy and feel free forever — there is. Its called death.
Retirement
Retirement is when you stop sacrificing today for some imaginary tomorrow.
Way to get out of the competition trap is by being authentic. Way to retire is to actually find the thing that you know how to do better than anybody else. And you know how to do better than anybody else because you love to do it. So nobody can compete with you.
Then figure out how to map that to what society actually wants. Apply some leverage, put your name on it so you take the risks but you gain the rewards, have ownership and equity in what you do and just crank it up.
Reality and life
Your real resume is a catalogue of all your suffering. You have to do hard things anyway to create meaning in life. Making money is a fine one.
Life is really a single player game. It’s all going on your head. Whatever you think you believe would very much shape your reality.
The world just reflects your own feelings back at you. Reality is neutral. Reality has no judgements. It’s your chiose how you see your senses.
Every man has two lives. And the second starts when he realises he has just one. — Confucius
If you have read this post so far, I hope that you find these ideas inspiring as much as I did. And as always, it was a pleasure listening to Naval Ravikant.
Thanks for reading!