#97: The Evolutionary Angel, Naval Ravikant

I think, long-term, on a long enough time scale—maybe it's 50 years from now, or maybe it's 500 years from now—almost everybody on this planet will work for themselves.

Knowing how little you matter is actually very important for your own mental health and happiness. Usually, when you see someone who's depressed, they're trapped in their own mind and taking themselves far too seriously.

Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.

In any situation in life, you always have three options: you can change it, you can accept it, or you can leave it. Those are your three options. What is not a good option is to sit around wishing you would change it but not changing it, wishing you would leave it but not leaving it, and not accepting it.

If you want to be successful, surround yourself with people who are more successful than you are, but if you want to be happy, surround yourself with people who are less successful than you are.

Love people more ... Everyone wants to be loved, and everyone needs to be loved, but it's not something you can buy. No amount of money will bring you unconditional love. But you can give love—it's free to give ... On a long enough time scale, you get what you deserve, and the universe sends it back your way.

When you invest in somebody, work with somebody, or start a company with somebody, you're signing up to spend the next decade of your life having them in your life. You have to make sure you genuinely like these people, and you don't consider it work to have to answer a phone call, take a meeting, or spend time with them. If it's exhausting, if they're downers, if they're negative, or if they're difficult, no amount of money is worth it.

I feel like there are 10 or 15 great skills that we should have all been taught in school, but instead, we spend too much time memorizing the capital of Rwanda or Alabama. We should be learning: What do we know that works about dieting and nutrition? What do we know that works about happiness and peace? What do we know that works about persuasion? How do you have a healthy relationship with someone? What is the meaning of values?

Real education begins in the library. It begins with books. If you can learn to like to read, you never need to go to school.

The most important way to read is to pick up a lot of books, start reading them all, put down any book instantly that doesn't grab you that you don't have fun reading, and just keep going until you find something that speaks to you.

Be more yourself. Don't try to do what you think society wants or needs. Don't try to live up to other people's expectations. Self-actualize. Say no to more things to protect your time because it's very precious. On your dying day, you will give everything you have for another day.

A lot of happiness is just being present ... To live in the present moment is the highest calling. It's the source of all happiness.

At the end of the day, we're all founders. We're all meant to work for ourselves. We're meant to be individuals. We're not meant to be in hierarchies. We're not meant to go to 9-5 jobs and be told what to do over and over.

Enlightenment is the space between your thoughts. It isn't this thing you achieve after 30 years of sitting in a corner on a mountaintop; it's something you can achieve moment to moment, and you can be a certain percentage enlightened every single day.

90% of thoughts that I have are fear. 90% are fear-based. The other 10% are desire-based. As any Buddhist will tell you, desire is just fear by another name.

We spend most of our waking lives dreaming. We think we're awake, but we're walking around talking to ourselves. If we verbalized those thoughts, we'd be locked up.

Don't feel the need to read anything you don't want to read. Read what's fun to you ... Don't feel an obligation to finish any book.

If you really want to be happy, you have to be present, and one of the core tenets of being present is to be completely honest at all times.

I think reading is so powerful. If you take away one thing from this podcast it should be: Figure out how to read.

Alarm clocks are terrible for you. Anyone who's waking up to an alarm clock on a regular basis—it will bring more peace into your life to break that habit compared to any more difficult habit you might change.

Happiness is internal. Happiness is a choice that you make and a skill that you develop.

To have peace of mind, you must have piece of body first.

The great thing about reading is you can use it to pick up any new skill.

All humans are meant to do something different every day. The idea that we repeat ourselves, and we specialize, and we pigeonhole ourselves is a modern invention created through specialization of labor and the Industrial Revolution.

We all get shaped by adversity ... All the great things that have happened to me in my life that I consider highly positive—they all started with something highly negative.

In the long run, the people who succeed are just the ones who persevere.

You have to work on your internal state until you are free of as many biases and conditioned responses as possible. This will improve every aspect of your life, including investing.

All of man's troubles arise because he cannot sit in a room quietly by himself for half an hour.

Suffering is that moment when you see reality exactly as it is—when you can no longer run away from it and when you can no longer deny it.

You must never fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.

With certain entrepreneurs, you get the feeling that they really care about what they're putting together. With every early move they make, they consider it as if they're putting bricks in the foundation of a skyscraper.

The reality is books are long because that's the size you need to justify cutting up a tree and printing a physical object ... A lot of the wisdom in books can be encapsulated in a few pages, but you can't charge somebody $20 for a couple of pages of info.

As an early stage investor, guard your time more carefully than you guard your money.

The point of meditation is to clear your mind. One way to clear your mind is by sitting in the corner and struggling with it ... Or you can very keely & alertly be aware of your thoughts as they happen, and as you watch them, you realize how many are fear-based.

One of the best ways to solve insomnia or get to sleep is to turn off your problem-solving brain by reading fiction before bed.