Book of Naval: Concise Authentic Wisdom

Studying the shared expertise from one of the world’s foremost thought leaders

The Almanack of Naval Ravikant should be prerequisite reading for any leader, MBA student, or self-development course. It shares so much valuable perspective, theory, and experience in a concise and easy to read format. Tweet storms refined into a wonderful collection of wisdom and written intelligence. Eric Jorgenson took the content from Naval’s blogs, tweets, and interviews, creating a centralized format for the wisdom Naval freely shares.

I will attempt to boil down what I felt were the most impactful aspects and share any additional perspective that comes to mind.

Broaden your perspective, challenge your mindset

Jorgenson does a masterful job bucketing all of this wisdom to organize it in a useful manner for you to consume Naval’s experience and philosophy. If you have ever organized material like this, it’s often harder to start with all this content, and organize it, compared to actually creating it - it’s so time consuming and tedious work. Naval’s perspective spans broadly across philosophy, wealth, work, life, and relationships.

When I look at this entire body of work, I think of five core areas to change my approach or focus more based on these concepts, integrating them into my life.

Transformation Inspired by Naval

1. Live with intention, doing everything for a reason, and with the most freedom possible

2. Be you, be different - embrace your unique ability and zone of genius, and strive to be the best in the world, finding your life’s work

3. Live to live, work to live, embrace living, and wealth and joy will come

4. Learning is the fountain of youth, creativity, and life

5. Only give energy where it’s deserved - don’t focus on negativity, anger, or people who drain your bucket

Top 10 Nuggets from Naval

1. “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.”

2. “Become the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until this is true.”

3. “The last kind of luck is the weirdest, hardest kind, where you build a unique character, a unique brand, a unique mindset, which causes luck to find you.”

4. “Be a maker who makes something interesting people want. Show your craft, practice your craft, and the right people will eventually find you.”  “great people have great outcomes. You just have to be patient.”

5. “Another thing that helps: 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. For me, freedom is my number one value.”

6. “You do have to put in the time. You do have to put in the hours, and so I think you have to put yourself in the position with the specific knowledge, with accountability, with leverage, with the authentic skill set you have, to be the best in the world at what you do. You have to enjoy it and keep doing it, keep doing it, and keep doing it.”

7. “Your real résumé is just a catalog of all your suffering. If I ask you to describe your real life to yourself, and you look back from your deathbed at the interesting things you’ve done, it’s all going to be around the sacrifices you made, the hard things you did.”

8. “You can work really hard, do great things for society, and society will give you money for things it wants but doesn’t know how to get.”

9. “If you cannot decide, the answer is no. And the reason is, modern society is full of options.”

10. “Whenever the word “should” creeps up in your Whenever the word “should” creeps up in your mind, it’s guilt or social programming. Doing something because you “should” basically means you don’t actually want to do it. It’s just making you miserable, so I’m trying to eliminate as many “shoulds” from my life as possible.” 

_{Jorgenson, Eric. The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness. Magrathea Publishing. Kindle Edition.}

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