The Almanack of Naval Ravikant

Written by Eric Jorgenson

This was an interesting read, in part because I disagreed with about a third of the book sort of fundamentally, but as a whole it made me think quite a bit. The book is about Naval Ravikant, an angel investor who now preaches philosophy as well. The first half of the book was on wealth and judgement, in particular about compounding effects, leverage, doing things you're the best at, and so on. A lot of the advice is sensible in this vein, things like "Productize yourself", "own equity", and "Find what looks like work to others and feels like play to you"; these are all things that I largely agree with and relate to in some way.

On the other hand, the second half focuses on happiness and becoming happy, and the arguments in this section, to me, seem to center around the Buddhist ideals of removing desires to appreciate more the less that you have, in a way. "Desires are a contract with yourself to be unhappy until you achieve what you want" is a quote from the book which exemplifies this idea. Similarly, there's this notion of optimizing your time so you can focus on only the "important" things, and as I've already written in this blog post, I don't really jive with this. The mundanity of life should, in some situations, be celebrated, and Naval's seemingly extremal views in this regard are rather opposed to my own. It speaks volumes, however, that he is happy and at peace.

I'll likely read parts of this again just so I can sporadically reintroduce these ideas to myself.