Carlos Rodrigo / The Almanack of Naval Ravikant

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The Almanack of Naval Ravikant

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Making money is not a thing you do—it’s a skill you learn.
It’s not really about hard work. You can work in a restaurant eighty hours a week, and you’re not going to get rich. Getting rich is about knowing what to do, who to do it with, and when to do it.
Seek wealth, not money or status. Wealth is having assets that earn while you sleep. Money is how we transfer time and wealth. Status is your place in the social hierarchy.
You’re not going to get rich renting out your time. You must own equity—a piece of a business—to gain your financial freedom.
You will get rich by giving society what it wants but does not yet know how to get. At scale.
The internet has massively broadened the possible space of careers. Most people haven’t figured this out yet.
All the returns in life, whether in wealth, relationships, or knowledge, come from compound interest.
Learn to sell. Learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable.
Arm yourself with specific knowledge, accountability, and leverage.
Specific knowledge is knowledge you cannot be trained for. If society can train you, it can train someone else and replace you.
Specific knowledge is found by pursuing your genuine curiosity and passion rather than whatever is hot right now.
Building specific knowledge will feel like play to you but will look like work to others.
If you can’t code, write books and blogs, record videos and podcasts.
Study microeconomics, game theory, psychology, persuasion, ethics, mathematics, and computers.
Set and enforce an aspirational personal hourly rate. If fixing a problem will save less than your hourly rate, ignore it. If outsourcing a task will cost less than your hourly rate, outsource it.
if you want to be wealthy, you want to figure out which one of those things you can provide for society that it does not yet know how to get but it will want and providing it is natural to you, within your skill set, and within your capabilities.
Then, you have to figure out how to scale it because if you only build one, that’s not enough.
No one can compete with you on being you.
The group of scientists who have made real breakthroughs and contributions probably added more to human society, I think, than any single other class of human beings.
Applied Scientists are the most powerful people in the world. This will be more obvious in the coming years.
The internet enables any niche interest, as long as you’re the best person at it to scale out. And the great news is because every human is different, everyone is the best at something—being themselves.
“Escape competition through authenticity.”
The best jobs are neither decreed nor degreed. They are creative expressions of continuous learners in free markets.
The most important skill for getting rich is becoming a perpetual learner.
Foundations are super important. [74]
Basic arithmetic and numeracy are way more important in life than doing calculus. Similarly, being able to convey yourself simply using ordinary English words is far more important than being able to write poetry, having an extensive vocabulary, or speaking seven different foreign languages.
Compound interest is a very powerful concept. Compound interest applies to more than just compounding capital. Compounding capital is just the beginning.
Intentions don’t matter. Actions do. That’s why being ethical is hard.
when you find the 1 percent of your discipline which will not be wasted, which you’ll be able to invest in for the rest of your life and has meaning to you—go all-in and forget about the rest. [10]
Without ownership, when you’re sleeping, you’re not earning. When you’re retired, you’re not earning. When you’re on vacation, you’re not earning. And you can’t earn nonlinearly.
You have to work up to the point where you can own equity in a business. You could own equity as a small shareholder where you bought stock. You could also own it as an owner where you started the company. Ownership is really important. [10]
Everybody who really makes money at some point owns a piece of a product, a business, or some IP. That can be through stock options if you work at a tech company. That’s a fine way to start.
You get rewarded by society for giving it what it wants and doesn’t know how to get elsewhere.
Forget rich versus poor, white-collar versus blue. It’s now leveraged versus un-leveraged.
The most interesting and the most important form of leverage is the idea of products that have no marginal cost of replication. This is the new form of leverage.
You’re never going to get rich renting out your time.
If you’re looking at professions where your inputs and your outputs are highly connected, it’s going to be very hard to create wealth and make wealth for yourself in that process. [78]
If you want to be part of a great tech company, then you need to be able to SELL or BUILD. If you don’t do either, learn.
Earn with your mind, not your time.
I think every human should aspire to being knowledgeable about certain things and being paid for our unique knowledge.
Judgment—especially demonstrated judgment, with high accountability and a clear track record—is critical. [78]
Value your time at an hourly rate, and ruthlessly spend to save time at that rate. You will never be worth more than you think you’re worth.
No one is going to value you more than you value yourself.
Optimists actually do better in the long run. [10]
The business world has many people playing zero sum games and a few playing positive sum games searching for each other in the crowd.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
Spend more time making the big decisions. There are basically three really big decisions you make in your early life: where you live, who you’re with, and what you do.
The way to get out of the competition trap is to be authentic, to find the thing you know how to do better than anybody.
One of the things I think is important to make money is having a reputation that makes people do deals through you.
Everybody wants to get rich immediately, but the world is an efficient place; immediate doesn’t work.
The only way to truly learn something is by doing it.