The Almanack of Naval Ravikant

Inner Peace & Mental Clarity

• There’s a line from Blaise Pascal I read. Basically, it says: “All of man’s troubles arise because he cannot sit in a room quietly by himself.” If you could just sit for thirty minutes and be happy, you are successful. That is a very powerful place to be, but very few of us get there.
• In any situation in life, you always have three choices: you can change it, you can accept it, or you can leave it. If you want to change it, then it is a desire. It will cause you suffering until you successfully change it. So don’t pick too many of those. Pick one big desire in your life at any given time to give yourself purpose and motivation. Why not two? You’ll be distracted. Even one is hard enough. Being peaceful comes from having your mind clear of thoughts. And a lot of clarity comes from being in the present moment. It’s very hard to be in the present moment if you’re thinking, “I need to do this. I want that. This has got to change.” You always have three options: you can change it, you can accept it, or you can leave it. What is not a good option is to sit around wishing you would change it but not changing it, wishing you could leave it but not leaving it and not accepting it. That struggle or aversion is responsible for most of our misery. The phrase I probably use the most to myself in my head is just one word: “accept.”
• You could also do transcendental meditation, which is where you’re using repetitive chanting to create a white noise in your head to bury your thoughts. Or, you can just very keenly and very alertly be aware of your thoughts as they happen. As you watch your thoughts, you realize how many of them are fear-based. The moment you recognize a fear, without even trying it goes away. After a while, your mind quiets. When your mind quiets, you stop taking everything around you for granted. You start to notice the details. You think, “Wow, I live in such a beautiful place. It’s so great that I have clothes, and I can go to Starbucks and get a coffee anytime. Look at these people—each one has a perfectly valid and complete life going on in their own heads.”
• Another method I’ve learned is to just sit there and you close your eyes for at least one hour a day. You surrender to whatever happens—don’t make any effort whatsoever. You make no effort for something, and you make no effort against anything. If there are thoughts running through your mind, you let the thoughts run. For your entire life, things have been happening to you. Some good, some bad, most of which you have processed and dissolved, but a few stuck with you. Over time, more and more stuck with you, and they almost became like these barnacles stuck to you.
• How do you get those barnacles off you? What happens in meditation is you’re sitting there and not resisting your mind. These things will start bubbling up. It’s like a giant inbox of unanswered emails, going back to your childhood. They will come out one by one, and you will be forced to deal with them. You will be forced to resolve them. Resolving them doesn’t take any work—you just observe them. Now you’re an adult with some distance, time, and space from previous events, and you can just resolve them. You can be much more objective about how you view them. Over time, you will resolve a lot of these deep-seated unresolved things you have in your mind. Once they’re resolved, there will come a day when you sit down to meditate, and you’ll hit a mental “inbox zero.” When you open your mental “email” and there are none, that is a pretty amazing feeling. It’s a state of joy and bliss and peace. Once you have it, you don’t want to give it up. If you can get a free hour of bliss every morning just by sitting and closing your eyes, that is worth its weight in gold. It will change your life.
• “If thoughts come, thoughts come. I’m not going to fight them. I’m not going to embrace them. I’m not going to think harder about them. I’m not going to reject them. I’m just going to sit here for an hour with my eyes closed, and I’m going to do nothing.” How hard is that? Why can you not do anything for an hour? What’s so hard about giving yourself an hour-long break?
• Ninety-five percent of what my brain runs off and tries to do, I don’t need to tackle in that exact moment. If the brain is like a muscle, I’ll be better off resting it, being at peace. When a particular problem arises, I’ll immerse myself in it. Right now as we’re talking, I’d rather dedicate myself to being completely lost in the conversation and to being 100 percent focused on this as opposed to thinking about “Oh, when I brushed my teeth, did I do it the right way?” The ability to singularly focus is related to the ability to lose yourself and be present, happy, and (ironically) more effective.
• If you walk down the street and there are a thousand people in the street, all thousand are talking to themselves in their head at any given point. They’re constantly judging everything they see. They’re playing back movies of things that happened to them yesterday. They’re living in fantasy worlds of what’s going to happen tomorrow. They’re just pulled out of base reality. That can be good when you do long-range planning. It can be good when you solve problems. It’s good for us as survival-and-replication machines. I think it’s actually very bad for your happiness. To me, the mind should be a servant and a tool, not a master. My monkey mind should not control and drive me 24/7.
• Another: I don’t believe in anger anymore. Anger was good when I was young and full of testosterone, but now I like the Buddhist saying, “Anger is a hot coal you hold in your hand while waiting to throw it at somebody.” I don’t want to be angry, and I don’t want to be around angry people. I just cut them out of my life. I’m not judging them. I went through a lot of anger too. They have to work through it on their own. Go be angry at someone else, somewhere else.

Personal Growth & Self-Awareness

• The problem with getting good at a game, especially one with big rewards, is you continue playing it long after you should have outgrown it.
• To me, the real winners are the ones who step out of the game entirely, who don’t even play the game, who rise above it. Those are the people who have such internal mental and self-control and self-awareness, they need nothing from anybody else
• Socially, we’re told, “Go work out. Go look good.” That’s a multi-player competitive game. Other people can see if I’m doing a good job or not. We’re told, “Go make money. Go buy a big house.” Again, external multiplayer competitive game. Training yourself to be happy is completely internal. There is no external progress, no external validation. You’re competing against yourself—it is a single-player game.
• The reality is life is a single-player game. You’re born alone. You’re going to die alone. All of your interpretations are alone. All your memories are alone. You’re gone in three generations, and nobody cares. Before you showed up, nobody cared. It’s all single player.
• Buffett has a great example when he asks if you want to be the world’s best lover and known as the worst, or the world’s worst lover and known as the best? [paraphrased] in reference to an inner or external scorecard.
• My most surprising discovery in the last five years is that peace and happiness are skills.
• For example, I was reading The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, which is a fantastic introduction to being present, for people who are not religious. He shows you the single-most important thing is to be present and hammers it home over and over again until you get it.
• Essentially, you have to go through your life replacing your thoughtless bad habits with good ones, making a commitment to be a happier person. At the end of the day, you are a combination of your habits and the people who you spend the most time with.
• Every time you catch yourself desiring something, say, “Is it so important to me I’ll be unhappy unless this goes my way?” You’re going to find with the vast majority of things it’s just not true.
• The more you judge, the more you separate yourself. You’ll feel good for an instant, because you feel good about yourself, thinking you’re better than someone. Later, you’re going to feel lonely. Then, you see negativity everywhere. The world just reflects your own feelings back at you.
• Any moment where you’re not having a great time, when you’re not really happy, you’re not doing anyone any favors. It’s not like your unhappiness makes them better off somehow. All you’re doing is wasting this incredibly small and precious time you have on this Earth. Keeping death on the forefront and not denying it is very important.
• 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.
• Like everything in life, if you are willing to make the short-term sacrifice, you’ll have the long-term benefit.
• An emotion is our evolved biology predicting the future impact of a current event. In modern settings, it’s usually exaggerated or wrong.
• I learned a very important lesson from this: most of our suffering comes from avoidance. Most of the suffering from a cold shower is the tip-toeing your way in. Once you’re in, you’re in. It’s not suffering. It’s just cold. Your body saying it’s cold is different than your mind saying it’s cold. Acknowledge your body saying it’s cold. Look at it. Deal with it. Accept it, but don’t mentally suffer over it. Taking a cold shower for two minutes isn’t going to kill you.
• The one I found works best for me is called Choiceless Awareness, or Nonjudgmental Awareness. As you’re going about your daily business (hopefully, there’s some nature) and you’re not talking to anybody else, you practice learning to accept the moment you’re in without making judgments. You don’t think, “Oh, there’s a homeless guy over there, better cross the street” or look at someone running by and say, “He’s out of shape, and I’m in better shape than him.” If I saw a guy with a bad hair day, I would at first think “Haha, he has a bad hair day.” Well, why am I laughing at him to make me feel better about myself? And why am I trying to make me feel better about my own hair? Because I’m losing my hair, and I’m afraid it’s going to go away. What I find is 90 percent of thoughts I have are fear-based. The other 10 percent may be desire-based.
• I think everyone knows it’s possible. There’s a great Osho lecture, titled “The Attraction for Drugs Is Spiritual.” He talks about why do people do drugs (everything from alcohol to psychedelics to cannabis). They’re doing it to control their mental state. They’re doing it to control how they react. Some people drink because it helps them not care as much, or they’re potheads because they can zone out, or they do psychedelics to feel very present or connected to nature. The attraction of drugs is spiritual. All of society does this to some extent. People chasing thrills in action sports or flow states or orgasms—any of these states people strive for are people trying to get out of their own heads. They’re trying to get away from the voice in their heads—the overdeveloped sense of self. At the very least, I do not want my sense of self to continue to develop and strengthen as I get older. I want it to be weaker and more muted so I can be more in present everyday reality, accept nature and the world for what it is, and appreciate it very much as a child would.
• You have to see this mad creature in operation before you feel a certain distaste toward it and start separating yourself from it. In that separation is liberation. You realize, “Oh, I don’t want to be that person. Why am I so out of control?” Awareness alone calms you down.
• I try to keep an eye on my internal monologue. It doesn’t always work. In the computer programming sense, I try to run my brain in “debugging mode” as much as possible. When I’m talking to someone, or when I’m engaged in a group activity, it’s almost impossible because your brain has too many things to handle. If I’m by myself, like just this morning, I’m brushing my teeth and I start thinking forward to a podcast. I started going through this little fantasy where I imagined Shane asking me a bunch of questions and I was fantasy- answering them. Then, I caught myself. I put my brain in debug mode and just watched every little instruction go by.
• I’m actually going back to my awareness level of OS, which is always calm, always peaceful, and generally happy and content. I’m trying to stay in awareness mode and not activate the monkey mind, which is always worried, frightened, and anxious. It serves incredible purpose, but I try not to activate the monkey mind until I need it. When I need it, I want to just focus on that. If I run it 24/7, I waste energy and the monkey mind becomes me. I am more than my monkey mind.
• Another thing: spirituality, religion, Buddhism, or anything you follow will teach you over time you are more than just your mind. You are more than just your habits. You are more than just your preferences. You’re a level of awareness. You’re a body. Modern humans, we don’t live enough in our bodies. We don’t live enough in our awareness. We live too much in this internal monologue in our heads. All of which is just programmed into you by society and by the environment when you were younger. You are basically a bunch of DNA that reacted to environmental effects when you were younger. You recorded the good and bad experiences, and you use them to prejudge everything thrown against you. Then you’re using those experiences, constantly trying and predict and change the future.
• As you get older, the sum of preferences you’ve accumulated is very, very large. These habitual reactions end up as runaway freight trains controlling your mood. We should control our own moods. Why don’t we study how to control our moods? What a masterful thing it would be if you could say, “Right now I would like to be in the curious state,” and then you can genuinely get yourself into the curious state. Or say, “I want to be in a mourning state. I’m mourning a loved one, and I want to grieve for them. I really want to feel that. I don’t want to be distracted by a computer programming problem due tomorrow.”
• The greatest superpower is the ability to change yourself.
• Life is going to play out the way it’s going to play out. There will be some good and some bad. Most of it is actually just up to your interpretation. You’re born, you have a set of sensory experiences, and then you die. How you choose to interpret those experiences is up to you, and different people interpret them in different ways.
• Really, I wish I had done all of the same things, but with less emotion and less anger. The most celebrated example would be when I was younger, I started a company. This company did well, but I didn’t do well, so I sued some of the people involved. It was a good outcome for me in the end, and everything worked out okay, but there was a lot of angst and a lot of anger.
• I would have realized the anger and emotions are a huge, completely unnecessary consequence. Now, I’m trying to learn from that and do the same things I think are the right things to do but without anger and with a very long-term point of view. If you take a very long-term point of view and take the emotion out of it, I wouldn’t consider those things mistakes anymore.
• When you say, “I’m going to do this,” and “I’m going to be that,” you’re really putting it off. You’re giving yourself an out. At least if you’re self-aware, you can think, “‘I say I want to do this, but I don’t really because if I really wanted to do it, I would just do it.”
• Impatience with actions, patience with results.
• I’m not going to be the most successful person on the planet, nor do I want to be. I just want to be the most successful version of myself while working the least hard possible. I want to live in a way that if my life played out 1,000 times, Naval is successful 999 times. He’s not a billionaire, but he does pretty well each time. He may not have nailed life in every regard, but he sets up systems so he’s failed in very few places
• Absolutely. I think that’s why the smartest and the most successful people I know started out as losers. If you view yourself as a loser, as someone who was cast out by society and has no role in normal society, then you will do your own thing and you’re much more likely to find a winning path. It helps to start out by saying, “I’m never going to be popular. I’m never going to be accepted. I’m already a loser. I’m not going to get what all the other kids have. I’ve just got to be happy being me.”
• When I was younger, I really, really valued freedom. Freedom was one of my core values. Ironically, it still is. It’s probably one of my top three values, but it’s now a different definition of freedom. My old definition was “freedom to.” Freedom to do anything I want. Freedom to do whatever I feel like, whenever I feel like. Now, the freedom I’m looking for is internal freedom. It’s “freedom from.” Freedom from reaction. Freedom from feeling angry. Freedom from being sad. Freedom from being forced to do things. I’m looking for “freedom from,” internally and externally, whereas before I was looking for “freedom to.”
• Observe when you’re angry—anger is a loss of control over the situation. Anger is a contract you make with yourself to be in physical and mental and emotional turmoil until reality changes
• When we’re children, we’re pretty blank slates. We live very much in the moment. We essentially just react to our environment through our instincts. We live in what I would call the “real world.” Puberty is the onset of desire—the first time you really, really want something and you start long-range planning. You start thinking a lot, building an identity and an ego to get what you want.
• There is no endpoint to self-awareness and self-discovery. It’s a lifelong process you hopefully keep getting better and better at. There is no one meaningful answer, and no one is going to fully solve it unless you’re one of these enlightened characters. Maybe some of us will get there, but I’m not likely to, given how involved I am in the rat race. The best case is I’m a rat who might be able to look up at the clouds once in a while. I think just being aware you’re a rat in a race is about as far as most of us are going to get.
• Before you can lie to another, you must first lie to yourself.
• Understanding the long-term consequences of your actions
• Inspiration is perishable—act on it immediately.

Habits & Daily Practices

• It’s pretty much every day. There are a few days where I’ve had to take a break because I’m traveling, or I’m injured or sick or something. I can count on one hand the number of breaks I take every year.
• Meditation is turning off society and listening to yourself. It only “works” when done for its own sake. Hiking is walking meditation. Journaling is writing meditation. Praying is gratitude meditation. Showering is accidental meditation. Sitting quietly is direct meditation.
• Again, habits are everything—everything we are. We are trained in habits from when we are children, including potty training, when to cry and when not to, how to smile and when not to. These things become habits—behaviors we learn and integrate into ourselves. When we’re older, we’re a collection of thousands of habits constantly running subconsciously. We have a little bit of extra brainpower in our neocortex for solving new problems. You become your habits.

Social Dynamics & Relationships

• There’s the “five chimps theory” where you can predict a chimp’s behavior by the five chimps it hangs out with the most. I think that applies to humans as well. Maybe it’s politically incorrect to say you should choose your friends very wisely. But you shouldn’t choose them haphazardly based on who you live next to or who you happen to work with. The people who are the most happy and optimistic choose the right five chimps.
• Another one is I only believe in peer relationships. I don’t believe in hierarchical relationships. I don’t want to be above anybody, and I don’t want to be below anybody. If I can’t treat someone like a peer and if they can’t treat me like peer, I just don’t want to interact with them.

Time & Priority Management

• I’m very famous for being rude at parties, events, dinners, where the moment I figure out it’s a waste of my time, I leave immediately. Value your time. It is all you have. It’s more important than your money. It’s more important than your friends. It is more important than anything. Your time is all you have. Do not waste your time.

Freedom & Authenticity

• I think almost everything that people read these days is designed for social approval. I know people who have read one hundred regurgitated books on evolution and they’ve never read Darwin. Think of the number of macroeconomists out there. I think most of them have read tons of treatises in economics but haven’t read any Adam Smith. At some level, you’re doing it for social approval. You’re doing it to fit in with the other monkeys. You’re fitting in to get along with the herd. That’s not where the returns are in life. The returns in life are being out of the herd.
• Social approval is inside the herd. If you want social approval, definitely go read what the herd is reading. It takes a level of contrarianism to say, “Nope. I’m just going to do my own thing. Regardless of the social outcome, I will learn anything I think is interesting.”
• If you hurt other people because they have expectations of you, that’s their problem. If they have an agreement with you, it’s your problem. But, if they have an expectation of you, that’s completely their problem. It has nothing to do with you. They’re going to have lots of expectations out of life. The sooner you can dash their expectations, the better.
• Don’t spend your time making other people happy. Other people being happy is their problem. It’s not your problem. If you are happy, it makes other people happy. If you’re happy, other people will ask you how you became happy and they might learn from it, but you are not responsible for making other people happy

Health & Wellbeing

• Hedonic adaptation is more powerful for man-made things (cars, houses, clothes, money) than for natural things (food, sex, exercise). No exceptions—all screen activities linked to less happiness, all non-screen activities linked to more happiness.
• tryptophan
• My number one priority in life, above my happiness, above my family, above my work, is my own health. It starts with my physical health. Second, it’s my mental health. Third, it’s my spiritual health. Then, it’s my family’s health. Then, it’s my family’s wellbeing. After that, I can go out and do whatever I need to do with the rest of the world.
• In terms of exercise, we’re probably meant to play instead of running on a treadmill. We’re probably evolved to use all of our five senses equally as opposed to favoring the visual cortex. In modern society, almost all of our inputs and communication are visual. We’re not meant to walk in shoes. A lot of back and foot problems come from shoes. We’re not meant to have clothes keep us warm all of the time. We’re meant to have some cold exposure. It kickstarts your immune system.
• We’re not meant to check our phone every five minutes. The constant mood swings of getting a “like” then an angry comment makes us into anxious creatures. We evolved for scarcity but live in abundance. There’s a constant struggle to say no when your genes always want to say yes. Yes to sugar. Yes to staying in this relationship. Yes to alcohol. Yes to drugs. Yes, yes, yes. Our bodies don’t know how to say no.
• When everyone is sick, we no longer consider it a disease.
• Most fit and healthy people focus much more on what they eat than how much. Quality control is easier than (and leads to) quantity control.
• Your breath is one of the few places where your autonomic nervous system meets your voluntary nervous system. It’s involuntary, but you can also control it.
• I think a lot of meditation practices put an emphasis on the breath because it is a gateway into your autonomic nervous system. There are many, many cases in the medical and spiritual literature of people controlling their bodies at levels that should be autonomous.
• I highly recommend listening to the Tim Ferriss’s podcast with Wim Hof.
• To have peace of mind, you have to have peace of body first.
• The modern struggle: Lone individuals summoning inhuman willpower, fasting, meditating, and exercising… Up against armies of scientists and statisticians weaponizing abundant food, screens, and medicine into junk food, clickbait news, infinite porn, endless games, and addictive drugs.

Learning & Wisdom

• I’m not religious, but I’m spiritual. To me, that is the most devotional thing that I could do, to study the laws of the Universe. The same kick that someone might get out of being in Mecca or Medina and bowing to the prophet, I get the same feeling of awe and small sense of self when I study science. For me, it’s unparalleled and I’d rather stay at the basics. This is the beauty of reading.
• Number one: read. Read everything you can. And not just the stuff that society tells you is good or even books that I tell you to read. Just read for its own sake. Develop a love for it. Even if you have to read romance novels or paperbacks or comic books. There’s no such thing as junk. Just read it all. Eventually, you’ll guide yourself to the things that you should and want to be reading.
• Related to the skill of reading are the skills of mathematics and persuasion. Both skills help you to navigate through the real world. Having the skill of persuasion is important because if you can influence your fellow human beings, you can get a lot done. I think persuasion is an actual skill. So you can learn it, and it’s not that hard to do so. Mathematics helps with all the complex and difficult things in life. If you want to make money, if you want to do science, if you want to understand game theory or politics or economics or investments or computers, all of these things have mathematics at the core. It’s a foundational language of nature.