The Almanack of Naval Ravikant
On the never-ending pursuit of figuring out life.
Finding specific knowledge
Life is about finding out your specific knowledge, the 1% in life that matters.
99% of exams you’ve taken, books you’ve read, things you learned, they don’t apply.
Specific knowledge is a sum of all your life experiences: how were you raised, where do you reside, your social experiences, your innate likes and dislikes.
Seek out this specific knowledge of yours, and devote 99% of your professional time to it: where to start, what to build, how to scale it.
Compounding specific knowledge is an unstoppable life leverage that no one could ever compete with. All returns in life, whether in wealth, relationships, or knowledge, come from compound interest.
Addendum
No one in the world is going to beat you at being you.
Follow your genuine intellectual curiosity, and it will lead you to your specific knowledge. When you do things for their own sake, you create your best work.
Knowledge only you know or only a small set of people knows is going to come out of your passions and your hobbies. If it entertains you now but will bore you someday, it is a distraction, which means you should keep looking.
Three big decisions
Spend more time making the big decisions: where you live, who you’re with, and what you do.
Choosing what city to live in can almost completely determine the trajectory of your life, your spouse makes up the majority of your time spent in social relationships, and you spend the majority of your waking hours on working.
Be extremely deliberate with these decisions.
Addendum
Advice to a young tech professional considering moving to San Francisco: “Do you want to leave your family & friends behind, or be the one who’s left behind?”
Building your network
Conventional business networking is bullshit.
Develop your specific knowledge, put yourself out there, and let people find you. Build a purposeful network — don’t network just for the sake of it.
Having a quality network increases the chances of you “making your own luck”.
For example: if you’re known to be within the top five of the world's best deep-sea divers, someone who discovers a deep-sea treasure but doesn’t have the means to dive and extract it, is going to find you and share their “luck”.
Addendum
There are different types of luck:
Blind luck (winning a lottery)
Luck through persistence (cold emailing tons of people and finally getting a reply back)
Lucky breaks (a VC just closed a new fund; you capitalize on it and reach out to their GPs for potential analyst openings)
Luck coming to find you (deep-sea diver example).
While you can’t control blind luck, you can do something about the rest to skew them in your favor:
Hone specific knowledge
Be persistent, aware, and patient.
On critical thinking
Be deliberate on what kind of information to absorb as the basis of your worldview. Garbage in, garbage out.
Just like that song that gets stuck in your head, what you read will get internalized within your psyche.
Develop a strong mental model (the result of years of conscious self-reflection), then rely on it to objectively filter out any incoming new information by breaking it down from first principles.
“Does this makes sense?"
"How do you make sense of it?"
"Why does it make sense in the first place?”
Addendum
People get stuck on ridiculous conspiracy theories because they have a weak mental model.
They seldom self-reflect. Hence, they lack first-principles thinking skills.
Mental models are hard to ascribe into words – they’re within your subconscious.
When you read Warren Buffett, you get a glimpse of his mental model, and how he used it to come up with his investing strategies.
Dive into the mental models of great thinkers (by reading them), and you’ll find yourself strengthening your own mental model as a byproduct.
We all have biases – the most important thing is to be aware of it. This will prevent us from being blindly dictated by whatever ideas thrown at us.
Develop the ability to recognize what is “right”, and what is “wrong”.
Achieving happiness
Desire is a chosen unhappiness, a contract that you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.
Build on top of one desire at a time. More desires mean more unhappiness, which dilutes your capacity to think clearly, causing you to make bad choices that will only lead you to compound more unhappiness.
A state of total happiness is when you stop desiring for new things – something that even rich people struggle with.
Play the game of life, but define what’s enough, and then to actually stop playing once this “peak desire” of yours has been reached.
Addendum
Whenever you’re overwhelmed with desires, embrace death – this will help you narrow your desires down to what’s actually important.
There’s no legacy. There’s nothing to leave. We’re all going to be gone. Our children will be gone. Our works will be dust. Our civilizations will be dust. Our planet will be dust. Our solar system will be dust. In the grand scheme of things, the Universe has been around for ten billion years. And it’ll be around for another ten billion years.