The Almanack of Naval Ravikant
A Guide to Wealth and Happiness
Wealth and happiness run on the same engine: judgment, leverage, and playing long games with long-term people. Free to read, took a lifetime to compress.
Eric Jorgenson compiled this book in 2020 from a decade of Naval Ravikant’s tweets, podcast appearances, and essays — Naval never wrote it himself, and it’s free to read online. Naval co-founded AngelList and made his name as an early-stage investor; the book collects his thinking on building wealth without luck and building happiness without chasing it.
A few lines worth keeping:
Karma is just you, repeating your patterns, virtues, and flaws until you finally get what you deserve.
Value your time at an hourly rate, and ruthlessly spend to save time at that rate.
Always pay it forward. And don’t keep count.
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.
Specific knowledge is knowledge that you cannot be trained for. If society can train you, it can train someone else, and replace you.
Play iterated games. All the returns in life, whether in wealth, relationships, or knowledge, come from compound interest.
If you can’t explain it to a child, then you don’t know it.
A calm mind, a fit body, and a house full of love. These things cannot be bought. They must be earned.
Happiness is the state when nothing is missing.
Meditation is turning off society and listening to yourself.
The hardest thing is not doing what you want — it’s knowing what you want.
Appears in think → forward