#1309 - Naval Ravikant

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

Pick your one overwhelming desire - it's okay to suffer over that one. But on all the other desires, let them go so you can be calm, peaceful, and relaxed.

We live in an age of infinite leverage... and because of that, the impacts of good decision-making are much higher than they used to be

A clear mind leads to better judgment and better outcomes. A happy, calm, and peaceful person will make better decisions... So if you want to operate at peak performance, you have to learn how to tame your mind.

What you do, who you do it with, and how you do it are way more important than how hard you work.

I don't care how rich you are. I don't care whether you're a top Wall Street banker, if somebody has to tell you when to be at work, what to wear, and how to behave, you're not a free person. You're not actually rich.

The future of work - "The information revolution, by making it easier to communicate, connect, and cooperate, is allowing us to go back to working for ourselves"

The question is not whether automation going to eliminate jobs. There is no finite number of jobs that we've been sitting around dividing up since the Stone Age. New jobs are being created and they're usually better and more creative jobs. So the question is - how quickly is this transition going to happen, what kinds of jobs will be eliminated, and what kinds of jobs will be created?

Nassim Taleb's framework for socialism among small groups and capitalism among larger collections of people

The most powerful people in the world today are the people who are writing the algorithms for Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram because they're controlling the spread of information. They're programming the culture.

If all of your beliefs line up into one political party, you're not a clear thinker. If all your beliefs are the same as your neighbors and your friends, you're not a clear thinker - you're beliefs are socialized, they're taken from other people. If you want to be a clear thinker, you cannot pay attention to politics - it will destroy your ability to think.

We are overexposed to everything. The way to survive in modern society is to be an ascetic, it is to retreat from society. There's too much society everywhere you go. You have society in your phone, society in your pocket, society in your ears... It's socializing you and programming everyone. The only solution is turn it off.

All of man's problems arise because he can't sit by himself in a room for 30 minutes alone

Naval's "Art of Doing Nothing" Mediation

To me, peace is happiness at rest and happiness is peace in motion. You can convert peace to happiness anytime you want.

In today's day and age, many people think you get peace by resolving all your external problems, but there are unlimited external problems. The only way to actually get peace on the inside is by giving up the idea of having problems.

When you're memorizing something, it's an indication that you don't understand it. You should be able to re-derive anything on the spot and if you can't, you don't know it.

A thought exercise - with the right education, everybody can be rich

If you look at all the crazy activities you do to be happy, whether it's trying to get laid and have an orgasm or extreme sports or looking at something beautiful or taking a psychedelic, you're just trying to get out of your own mind. You're trying to get your monkey mind to stop chattering. You're trying to get peace from the mind, but there are other better ways to do that... Whereas if you understand things, if you see things properly, you will naturally slowly develop piece from mind.

Today in society you get rewarded for creative work, for creating something brand new that society didn't even know that it wanted that it doesn't yet know how to get, other than through you.

The way to retire is actually to find the thing that you know how to do better than anybody. And you know how to do it better than anybody because you love to do it. No one can compete with you if you love to do it. Be authentic and 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 then just crank it out.

Reality is neutral. Reality has no judgments. To a tree, there's no concept of right or wrong or good or bad. You're born, you have a whole set of sensory experiences... and then you die. How you choose to interpret that is up to you. And you do have that choice.

Every man has two lives and the second starts when he realizes he has just one.

"I'm always working. It looks like work to others, but feels like play to me. That's how I know no one can compete with me on it. I'm just playing 16 hours a day and if they want to compete with me and they're going to work, they're going to lose because they're not going to do it 16 hours a day 7 days a week.

Just like fitness can be a choice, health can be a choice, nutrition can be a choice, and working hard and making money can be a choice, happiness can also be a choice as well

You're not going to get rich renting out your time

The human brain is not designed to absorb all of the world's breaking news and 24/7 emergencies, injected straight into the skull with clickbait headlines. If you pay attention to that stuff, even if you have a sound mind and body, it will eventually drive you insane.

It's a superpower to learn to enjoy being alone without constant stimulation

It's much better to know the basics from the ground up and have a solid foundation of understanding than it is to have a scaffolding where you're just memorizing advanced concepts.

The peace that we seek is not peace of mind, it's peace from mind

Retirement is when you stop sacrificing today for some imaginary tomorrow

The more you judge people and things, the more you're going to separate yourself. You'll feel good for an instant... but then you're gonna feel lonely and then you're just going to see negativity everywhere. The world just reflects your own feelings back at you.

Desire is suffering... every desire you have is an axis where you will suffer. So just don't focus on more than one desire to time. The universe is rigged in such a way that if you just want one thing, and you focus on that, you'll get it, but everything else you gotta let go.

Everyone should just be able to do everything. I don't believe in this model anymore of trying to focus your life down on one thing. You've got one life. Just do everything you're going to do.

It's kind of a disease - social media is making celebrities of all of us and celebrities are the most miserable people in the world

You want to be rich and anonymous not poor and famous

I do believe that automation, over a long enough period of time, will replace every non-creative job

You have social statisticians, scientists, and researchers in lab coats, literally the best minds of our generation, figuring out how to addict you to the news. And if you fall for it, if you get addicted. your brain will get destroyed.

Every psychedelic state that people encounter using so-called plant medicines can be arrived at just through pure meditation

Everyone can be rich

If you're smart, you should be able to figure out how to be happy. Otherwise, you're not that smart.

That's the fundamental delusion - that there is something out there that will make me happy forever

Meetings should really be phone calls, phone calls should be emails, and emails should just be texts.

Set an aspirational hourly rate and stick to it

Specialization is for insects

When you look at the greatest artists and creators, they have this ability to start over that nobody else does

Everybody wants to be healthy, happy, and fit. The good news? They all can be taught.

If you want to be effective in business, you need a clear, calm, cool, and collected mind

Naval explains Coase theorem and the "atomization of the firm"

I believe everybody can be wealthy. It's not a zero-sum game. It is a positive-sum game.

We're running one of the greatest mental health experiments in history doping everybody up and SSRIs. Maybe if you give 30 million people SSRIs, 29.9 million are a lot happier, but then you have a fraction that commit suicide or detonate. You're basically trading the mean for the variance. You have blow up risk.

The best way to change the world is to change yourself first

There are no get-rich-quick schemes. That's just somebody else trying to get rich off of you.

The way to get out of the competition trap is actually to be authentic

There are two great addictions: heroin and a monthly salary

In every moment, in everything that happens, you can look on the bright side of something... There are two ways of seeing almost everything.

You can meditate 24/7. Meditation is not a sit down and close your eyes activity. Meditation is just basically watching your own thoughts like you would watch anything else in the outside world and saying, 'Why am I having that thought?Does that serve me anymore? Is this just conditioning from when I was 10 years?'

The cost of meetings is so high especially given all the people who are in there... you're literally just dying an hour at a time. So you have to just drop non-urgent meetings or forget them all together if you want to do anything great.

One of the secrets to happiness - only do things that are complete in and of themselves

I would rather read the best hundred books over and over again until I absorb them rather than read every single book out there

What if, instead of universal basic income, society instituted a retraining program for adults to re-educate themselves?

All our diseases are diseases of abundance, not diseases of scarcity

If you're a peaceful person, anything you do will be a happy activity

The modern environmental movement identifies the correct problem, but doesn't come up with the right set of solutions that are appealing to people

I believe the solution to making everybody happy is to give them what they want. Let's get them all rich, let's get them all fit and healthy, and then let's get them all happy.

If you look back at your life on your deathbed at all the interesting things you've done, they're all going to be centered around the sacrifices you've made and the hard things that you did.

Why Naval never travels for business meetings

The number of books you read is just a vanity metric

I don't read anymore to complete books. I read to satisfy my genuine intellectual curiosity.

Humans are always signaling. Rather than really looking at yourself, you're looking at how other people look at you.

The smaller the company you work for, the happier you'll be

Society will always create new jobs, but it's impossible to predict what those jobs will be.

The day is coming when the politicians realize that these social media platforms are picking the next president... they will eventually be controlled by the government

You'll find that with all the great questions of life, the answers are all paradoxes. This is why, at some level, it's sort of pointless to pursue them in order to find a trite answer. But the act of pursuing them is actually really useful because it gives you a certain intrinsic understanding within your life that brings a level of peace.

You have to do hard things to create your own meaning in life

Everything you're a winner at now in your life, you were a once a loser at

Anything you wanted in your life, whether it was a car or whether it was a girl or whether it was money, when you got it, a year later you were back to zero. Your brain had hedonically adapted to it and you were looking for the next thing.

Art is just creativity, it’s just anything done for its own sake

I read for understanding. So with a really good book, I'll flip through it. I won't actually read it in consecutive order. I might not even finish it. I'm looking for ideas and things that I don't understand. When I find something really interesting, I'll reflect on it, research it, and then when I'm bored of it, I'll drop it or I'll flip to another book.

If you think you're so smart, what haven't you figure out how to be happy?

Machines should be working nine to five. Humans are not meant to work nine to five.

One of the myths that we have today is that adults can't be re-educated. We view education as this thing where you go to school, you go to college, you come out, and you're done... no more education. Well that's wrong.

You can't have a reasonable conversation about climate science anymore. It's all politicized. Everyone's got their mind already made up.

Most smart people, over time, realize that possessions don't make them happy

When you combine things you're not supposed to combine, people get interested

A lot of intelligence these days is just the external brain pack of civilization

I'm a hero among young male geeks

You don't want to be the guy who succeeds in life while being high-strung, high-stress, and unhappy while leaving a trail of emotional wreckage for you and your loved ones

Universal basic income doesn't solve the meaning problem

Naval's alternative to universal basic income

We're nowhere near close to General AI... not in our lifetimes. You don't have to worry about it.

I think the bankers have really raped society and the rest of us are suffering from it

If you want to see who rules over you, see who you're not allowed to criticize

Everyone's a journalist. That's the world that we're headed towards.

Generally technology leans the world left

Because we took scientists to be the high priests of our new world, science itself has gotten corrupted

Meditation is one of those things that everybody says they, do but nobody actually does

I can sit around and think my thoughts all day long, but a lot of it's going to be nonsense. There are gaps in thinking where you make leaps, because you're kind to yourself, that you don't realize you're making. But when you're forced to write things down or when your have to talk to somebody, you have to complete those gaps and make it a proper logical chain.