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Everything from Money to The Meaning of Life: Wisdom from “The Almanack of Naval Ravikant” (Book Summary)

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This is a detailed book summary of The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness by Eric Jorgenson.

You can find various free and paid versions of the book on Navalmanack.com and Amazon.

Note: Premium Members have access to my ultimate synthesis of all of Naval’s wisdom:

🔒 Naval Ravikant Synthesis: How to Build Wealth by Being Yourself (+ Infographics)

Naval is broadly followed because he is a rare combination of successful and happy. After a lifetime of study and application of philosophy, economics, and wealth creation, he has proven the impact of his principles.

— Eric Jorgenson

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Quick Housekeeping:

Notes from the editor:

  • The transcripts have been edited for clarity and brevity (multiple times).
  • Not all sources are primary (some excerpts are from other writers quoting Naval).
  • Please verify phrasing with a primary source before citing Naval from this text.

Notes from me:

  • I’ve rearranged my favorite quotes from the book into my own themes below.
  • Bold text has been added for emphasis and skimmability.

Summary Contents: Click a link here to jump to a section below

The Almanack of Naval Ravikant
Source: navalmanack.com

Everything from Money to The Meaning of Life: Wisdom from “The Almanack of Naval Ravikant” (Book Summary)

I’ve learned a few things, and some principles. I try to lay them out in a timeless manner, where you can figure it out for yourself. Because at the end of the day, I can’t quite teach anything. I can only inspire you and maybe give you a few hooks so you can remember.

— Naval Ravikant

“Money is not going to solve all of your problems, but it’s going to solve all of your money problems.”

  • “Money is how we transfer wealth. Money is social credits. It is the ability to have credits and debits of other people’s time.”
  • “My definition of wealth is much more businesses and assets that can earn while you sleep.”
  • “Money buys you freedom in the material world. It’s not going to make you happy, it’s not going to solve your health problems, it’s not going to make your family great, it’s not going to make you fit, it’s not going to make you calm. But it will solve a lot of external problems.”
  • “Making money is not a thing you do—it’s a skill you learn.”

“If you secretly despise wealth, it will elude you.”

  • “Being anti-wealth will prevent you from becoming wealthy, because you will not have the right mindset for it, you won’t have the right spirit, and you won’t be dealing with people on the right level.”
  • “Money is not the root of all evil; there’s nothing evil about it. But the lust for money is bad.”
  • “Lusting for money is bad for us because it is a bottomless pit. It will always occupy your mind. If you love money, and you make it, there’s never enough. There is never enough because the desire is turned on and doesn’t turn off at some number.”
  • “You make money to solve your money and material problems. I think the best way to stay away from this constant love of money is to not upgrade your lifestyle as you make money.”

“You don’t get rich by spending your time to save money. You get rich by saving your time to make money.“

  • “The (how to get rich without getting lucky) tweetstorm tries to be information-dense, very concise, high-impact, and timeless. It has all the information and principles, so if you absorb these and you work hard over ten years, you’ll get what you want.”
  • “Everybody who really makes money at some point owns a piece of a product, a business, or some IP.”
  • “Usually, the real wealth is created by starting your own companies or even by investing.”
  • “Without ownership, your inputs are very closely tied to your outputs.”
  • “Getting rich is about knowing what to do, who to do it with, and when to do it. It is much more about understanding than purely hard work. Yes, hard work matters, and you can’t skimp on it. But it has to be directed in the right way.”

“I’m always ‘working.’ It looks like work to others, but it feels like play to me. And that’s how I know no one can compete with me on it.”

  • “Making money was a means to an end. I’m much more interested in solving problems than I am in making money.”
  • “My motivation has shifted from being goal-oriented to being artistic.”
  • “Creating businesses and making money are now more of an ‘art.’“
  • “Whether in commerce, science, or politics—history remembers the artists.”
  • “Art is creativity. Art is anything done for its own sake. What are the things that are done for their own sake, and there’s nothing behind them? Loving somebody, creating something, playing. To me, creating businesses is play.“
  • “I’m just playing, for sixteen hours a day. If others want to compete with me, they’re going to work, and they’re going to lose because they’re not going to do it for sixteen hours a day, seven days a week.”
  • “I got to combine my vocation and my avocation.”

“All the returns in life, whether in wealth, relationships, or knowledge, come from compound interest.”

  • “What you want in life is to be in control of your time. You want to get into a leveraged job where you control your own time and you’re tracked on the outputs.”
  • “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.“
  • “When you find the right thing to do, when you find the right people to work with, invest deeply. Sticking with it for decades is really how you make the big returns in your relationships and in your money.”
  • “What you’re trying to do is find the thing you can go all-in on to earn compound interest.”
  • “When you find the 1 percent of your discipline which will not be wasted, which you’ll be able to invest in for the rest of your life and has meaning to you—go all-in and forget about the rest.”
  • “I haven’t made money in my life in one giant payout. It has always been a whole bunch of small things piling up. It’s more about consistently creating wealth by creating businesses, creating opportunities, and creating investments.”
  • “Everybody wants to get rich immediately, but the world is an efficient place; immediate doesn’t work. You do have to put in the time. You do have to put in the hours, and so I think you have to put yourself in the position with the specific knowledge, with accountability, with leverage, with the authentic skill set you have, to be the best in the world at what you do.”

“Any end goal will just lead to another goal, lead to another goal. We just play games in life.“

  • “When you grow up, you’re playing the school game, or you’re playing the social game. Then you’re playing the money game, and then you’re playing the status game. These games just have longer and longer and longer-lived horizons. At some point, at least I believe, these are all just games. These are games where the outcome really stops mattering once you see through the game.”
  • “I would say I’m at the stage where I’m just tired of games. I don’t think there is any end goal or purpose. I’m just living life as I want to. I’m literally just doing it moment to moment.”
  • “The winners of any game are the people who are so addicted they continue playing even as the marginal utility from winning declines.”
  • “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.”

“Retirement is when you stop sacrificing today for an imaginary tomorrow. When today is complete, in and of itself, you’re retired.”

  • “Once you can solve your money problems, either by lowering your lifestyle or by making enough money, you want to retire.”
  • There are multiple ways to retirement:
    • “One way is to have so much money saved that your passive income (without you lifting a finger) covers your burn rate.”
    • “A second is you just drive your burn rate down to zero—you become a monk.”
    • “A third is you’re doing something you love. You enjoy it so much, it’s not about the money.”

“Whenever you can in life, optimize for independence rather than pay. If you have independence and you’re accountable on your output, as opposed to your input—that’s the dream.”

  • “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.’“
  • “You can save money, you can live a little below your means, and you can find a certain freedom.”
  • “People who live far below their means enjoy a freedom that people busy upgrading their lifestyles can’t fathom.”
  • “Once you’ve truly controlled your own fate, for better or for worse, you’ll never let anyone else tell you what to do.”
  • “A taste of freedom can make you unemployable.”

“All the real scorecards are internal.”

  • “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.”
  • “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.“
  • “We are such social creatures, we’re externally programmed and driven. We don’t know how to play and win these single-player games anymore. We compete purely in multiplayer games.”
  • “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.”
  • “All that matters is you experience your reality as you go through life. Why not interpret it in the most positive possible way?”

“‘I don’t have time’ is just another way of saying ‘It’s not a priority.'”

  • “If something is your number one priority, then you will do it. That’s just the way life works. If you’ve got a fuzzy basket of ten or fifteen different priorities, you’re going to end up getting none of them.”
  • “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.”
  • “The three big ones in life are wealth, health, and happiness. We pursue them in that order, but their importance is reverse.”
  • “Health, love, and your mission, in that order. Nothing else matters.”
  • “When you’re young, you have time. You have health, but you have no money. When you’re middle-aged, you have money and you have health, but you have no time. When you’re old, you have money and you have time, but you have no health. So the trifecta is trying to get all three at once.”
  • “There are basically three really big decisions you make in your early life: where you live, who you’re with, and what you do.”
  • “If you’re going to live in a city for ten years, if you’re going to be in a job for five years, if you’re in a relationship for a decade, you should be spending one to two years deciding these things. These are highly dominating decisions.”

“If you cannot decide, the answer is no. And the reason is, modern society is full of options.“

  • “There are tons and tons of options. We live on a planet of seven billion people, and we are connected to everybody on the internet. There are hundreds of thousands of careers available to you. There are so many choices.”
  • “One of the things I’m trying to get rid of is the word ‘should.’ Whenever the word ‘should’ creeps up in your mind, it’s guilt or social programming. Doing something because you ‘should’ basically means you don’t actually want to do it. It’s just making you miserable, so I’m trying to eliminate as many ‘shoulds’ from my life as possible.”
  • “Intentions don’t matter. Actions do. That’s why being ethical is hard.”
  • “Impatience with actions, patience with results.”
  • “Inspiration is perishable—act on it immediately.”

“Everyone makes it up as they go along. You have to find your own path, picking, choosing, and discarding as you see fit. Figure it out yourself, and do it.“

  • “The hardest thing is not doing what you want—it’s knowing what you want.”
  • “The way to get out of the competition trap is to be authentic, to find the thing you know how to do better than anybody. You know how to do it better because you love it, and 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 and put your name on it. You take the risks, but you gain the rewards, have ownership and equity in what you’re doing, and just crank it up.”
  • “No one in the world is going to beat you at being you. You’re never going to be as good at being me as I am. I’m never going to be as good at being you as you are. Certainly, listen and absorb, but don’t try to emulate. It’s a fool’s errand. Instead, each person is uniquely qualified at something. They have some specific knowledge, capability, and desire nobody else in the world does, purely from the combinatorics of human DNA and development.”
  • “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.'”
  • “Advice to my younger self: ‘Be exactly who you are.'”
  • “Honesty is a core, core, core value. By honesty, I mean I want to be able to just be me.“
  • “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.”

“You can only achieve mastery in one or two things. It’s usually things you’re obsessed about.”

  • “Focus on the thing that you are really into.”
  • “All you should do is what you want to do. If you stop trying to figure out how to do things the way other people want you to do them, you get to listen to the little voice inside your head that wants to do things a certain way. Then, you get to be you.”
  • “To make an original contribution, you have to be irrationally obsessed with something.”
  • “I think motivation is relative, so you just have to find the thing you’re into.”
  • “The internet enables any niche interest, as long as you’re the best person at it to scale out. And the great news is because every human is different, everyone is the best at something— being themselves.”
  • “Figure out what you’re good at, and start helping other people with it. Give it away. Pay it forward. Karma works because people are consistent. On a long enough timescale, you will attract what you project.“

“I think every human should aspire to being knowledgeable about certain things and being paid for our unique knowledge.”

  • “Specific knowledge is sort of this weird combination of unique traits from your DNA, your unique upbringing, and your response to it. It’s almost baked into your personality and your identity. Then you can hone it.”
  • “When I talk about specific knowledge, I mean figure out what you were doing as a kid or teenager almost effortlessly. Something you didn’t even consider a skill, but people around you noticed. Your mother or your best friend growing up would know.”
  • “Specific knowledge is found much more by pursuing your innate talents, your genuine curiosity, and your passion.”
  • “Following your genuine intellectual curiosity is a better foundation for a career than following whatever is making money right now.”
  • “Knowledge only you know or only a small set of people knows is going to come out of your passions and your hobbies, oddly enough. If you have hobbies around your intellectual curiosity, you’re more likely to develop these passions.”
  • “Very often, specific knowledge is at the edge of knowledge. It’s also stuff that’s only now being figured out or is really hard to figure out. If you’re not 100 percent into it, somebody else who is 100 percent into it will outperform you.”
  • “Apply specific knowledge with leverage and eventually, you will get what you deserve.”

“If you want to be wealthy, you want to figure out which one of those things you can provide for society that it does not yet know how to get but it will want and providing it is natural to you, within your skill set, and within your capabilities.”

  • “Your goal in life is to find the people, business, project, or art that needs you the most. There is something out there just for you. What you don’t want to do is build checklists and decision frameworks built on what other people are doing. You’re never going to be them. You’ll never be good at being somebody else.”
  • “No one can compete with you on being you. Most of life is a search for who and what needs you the most.“
  • “‘Escape competition through authenticity.’ Basically, when you’re competing with people, it’s because you’re copying them. It’s because you’re trying to do the same thing. But every human is different. Don’t copy.”
  • “If you are fundamentally building and marketing something that is an extension of who you are, no one can compete with you on that.”
  • “Society will give you money for things it wants but doesn’t know how to get.”
  • “There are so many ways to create wealth, to create products, to create businesses, and to get paid by society as a byproduct.”
  • “The best jobs are … creative expressions of continuous learners in free markets.”
  • “If your curiosity ever leads you to a place where society eventually wants to go, you’ll get paid extremely well.”

“‘Productize’ and ‘yourself.’ ‘Yourself’ has uniqueness. ‘Productize’ has leverage. ‘Yourself ‘ has accountability. ‘Productize’ has specific knowledge. ‘Yourself ‘ also has specific knowledge in there. So all of these pieces, you can combine them into these two words.“

  • “If you’re looking toward the long-term goal of getting wealthy, you should ask yourself, ‘Is this authentic to me? Is it myself that I am projecting?’ And then, ‘Am I productizing it? Am I scaling it? Am I scaling with labor or with capital or with code or with media?'”
  • “You can go on the internet, and you can find your audience. And you can build a business, and create a product, and build wealth, and make people happy just uniquely expressing yourself through the internet.”
  • “Be a maker who makes something interesting people want. Show your craft, practice your craft, and the right people will eventually find you.”
  • “If you don’t know yet what you should work on, the most important thing is to figure it out. You should not grind at a lot of hard work until you figure out what you should be working on.”

“The most important skill for getting rich is becoming a perpetual learner. You have to know how to learn anything you want to learn.”

  • “You’re more likely to have skills society does not yet know how to train other people to do. If someone can train other people how to do something, then they can replace you. If they can replace you, then they don’t have to pay you a lot. You want to know how to do something other people don’t know how to do at the time period when those skills are in demand.“
  • “Learn to sell, learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable.”
  • “One is building the product. This is hard, and it’s multivariate. It can include design; it can include development; it can include manufacturing, logistics, procurement; and it can even be designing and operating a service. It has many, many definitions.”
  • “The other side of it is sales. Again, selling has a very broad definition. Selling doesn’t necessarily just mean selling to individual customers, but it can mean marketing, it can mean communicating, it can mean recruiting, it can mean raising money, it can mean inspiring people, it could mean doing PR. It’s a broad umbrella category.”
  • “Related to the skill of reading are the skills of mathematics and persuasion. Both skills help you to navigate through the real world.”
  • “You are waiting for your moment when something emerges in the world, they need a skill set, and you’re uniquely qualified.”

“My definition of wisdom is knowing the long-term consequences of your actions. Wisdom applied to external problems is judgment. They’re highly linked; knowing the long-term consequences of your actions and then making the right decision to capitalize on that.”

  • “I would love to be paid purely for my judgment, not for any work. I want a robot, capital, or computer to do the work, but I want to be paid for my judgment.”
  • “Judgment—especially demonstrated judgment, with high accountability and a clear track record—is critical.”
  • “You have to put in the time, but the judgment is more important. The direction you’re heading in matters more than how fast you move, especially with leverage. Picking the direction you’re heading in for every decision is far, far more important than how much force you apply. Just pick the right direction to start walking in, and start walking.”
  • “Embrace accountability and take business risks under your own name. Society will reward you with responsibility, equity, and leverage.“
  • “I don’t believe in specific goals. Scott Adams famously said, ‘Set up systems, not goals.’ Use your judgment to figure out what kinds of environments you can thrive in, and then create an environment around you so you’re statistically likely to succeed.”

“The really smart thinkers are clear thinkers. They understand the basics at a very, very fundamental level.”

  • “A contrarian reasons independently from the ground up and resists pressure to conform.”
  • “Optimistic contrarians are the rarest breed.”
  • “Any belief you took in a package (ex. Democrat, Catholic, American) is suspect and should be re-evaluated from base principles.”
  • “The best mental models I have found came through evolution, game theory, and Charlie Munger.”
  • “Mental models are really just compact ways for you to recall your own knowledge.”
  • “Evolution, thermodynamics, information theory, and complexity have explanatory and predictive power in many aspects of life.”

“The means of learning are abundant—it’s the desire to learn that is scarce.”

  • “Real knowledge is intrinsic, and it’s built from the ground up.”
  • “If you’re a perpetual learning machine, you will never be out of options for how to make money. You can always see what’s coming up in society, what the value is, where the demand is, and you can learn to come up to speed.”
  • “If you want to make the maximum amount of money possible, if you want to get rich over your life in a deterministically predictable way, stay on the bleeding edge of trends and study technology, design, and art—become really good at something.”

“Reading (learning) is the ultimate meta-skill and can be traded for anything else.”

  • “When it comes to reading, make sure your foundation is very, very high quality.”
  • “Any book that survived for two thousand years has been filtered through many people. The general principles are more likely to be correct.“
  • “Read originals and read classics.”
  • “Reading science, math, and philosophy one hour per day will likely put you at the upper echelon of human success within seven years.”
  • “Read the greats in math, science, and philosophy. Ignore your contemporaries and news. Avoid tribal identification. Put truth above social approval.”
  • “Read what you love until you love to read.”
  • “I could not tell you specific passages or quotes from books. At some deep level, you absorb them, and they become threads in the tapestry of your psyche. They kind of weave in there.”
  • “Read enough, and you become a connoisseur. Then you naturally gravitate more toward theory, concepts, nonfiction.”
  • “I probably read one to two hours a day. That puts me in the top .00001 percent. I think that alone accounts for any material success I’ve had in my life and any intelligence I might have.”

“Tools and leverage create this disconnection between inputs and outputs.”

  • “We live in an age of infinite leverage, and the economic rewards for genuine intellectual curiosity have never been higher.”
  • “You have to figure out how to scale it because if you only build one, that’s not enough. You’ve got to build thousands, or hundreds of thousands, or millions, or billions of them so everybody can have one.”
  • “To get rich, you need leverage. Leverage comes in labor, comes in capital, or it can come through code or media.“
  • “One form of leverage is labor—other humans working for you. It is the oldest form of leverage, and actually not a great one in the modern world.”
  • “Money is good as a form of leverage. It means every time you make a decision, you multiply it with money.”
  • “The final form of leverage is brand new—the most democratic form. It is: ‘products with no marginal cost of replication.’ This includes books, media, movies, and code. Code is probably the most powerful form of permissionless leverage. All you need is a computer—you don’t need anyone’s permission.”
  • “Now, you can multiply your efforts without involving other humans and without needing money from other humans.”
  • “Probably the most interesting thing to keep in mind about new forms of leverage is they are permissionless. They don’t require somebody else’s permission for you to use them or succeed. For labor leverage, somebody has to decide to follow you. For capital leverage, somebody has to give you money to invest or to turn into a product.”
  • “Coding, writing books, recording podcasts, tweeting, YouTubing—these kinds of things are permissionless.”
  • “The democratization of technology allows anyone to be a creator, entrepreneur, scientist. The future is brighter.”
  • “Technology democratizes consumption but consolidates production. The best person in the world at anything gets to do it for everyone.“

“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.”

  • “Science is, to me, the study of truth. It is the only true discipline because it makes falsifiable predictions. It actually changes the world. Applied science becomes technology, and technology is what separates us from the animals and allows us to have things like cell phones, houses, cars, heat, and electricity.”
  • “Nature speaks in mathematics. Mathematics is us reverse engineering the language of nature, and we have only scratched the surface.”
  • “I wanted to be a scientist. That is where a lot of my moral hierarchy comes from. I view scientists as being at the top of the production chain for humanity. The group of scientists who have made real breakthroughs and contributions probably added more to human society, I think, than any single other class of human beings.”
  • “Society, business, & money are downstream of technology, which is itself downstream of science. Science applied is the engine of humanity.“
  • “Corollary: Applied Scientists are the most powerful people in the world. This will be more obvious in the coming years.”

“I would say my philosophy falls down to this—on one pole is evolution as a binding principle because it explains so much about humans, on the other is Buddhism, which is the oldest, most time-tested spiritual philosophy regarding the internal state of each of us.”

  • “The rational part means I have to reconcile with science and evolution. I have to reject all the pieces I can’t verify for myself.”
  • “If I can’t verify it on my own or if I cannot get there through science, then it may be true, it may be false, but it’s not falsifiable, so I cannot view it as a fundamental truth.”
  • “On the other side, I do know evolution is true. I do know we are evolved as survival and replication machines. I do know we have an ego, so we get up off the ground and worms don’t eat us and we actually take action. Rational Buddhism, to me, means understanding the internal work Buddhism espouses to make yourself happier, better off, more present and in control of your emotions—being a better human being.”
  • “Try everything, test it for yourself, be skeptical, keep what’s useful, and discard what’s not.”
  • “The older the question, the older the answers.”

“The number one thing clouding us from being able to see reality is we have preconceived notions of the way it should be.”

  • “What we wish to be true clouds our perception of what is true. Suffering is the moment when we can no longer deny reality.”
  • “The moment of suffering—when you’re in pain—is a moment of truth. It is a moment where you’re forced to embrace reality the way it actually is. Then, you can make meaningful change and progress. You can only make progress when you’re starting with the truth.“
  • “I try not to have too much I’ve pre-decided. I think creating identities and labels locks you in and keeps you from seeing the truth.”
  • “There are two attractive lessons about suffering in the long term. It can make you accept the world the way it is. The other lesson is it can make your ego change in an extremely hard way.”
  • “The world just reflects your own feelings back at you. Reality is neutral. Reality has no judgments. To a tree, there is no concept of right or wrong, good or bad. You’re born, you have a whole set of sensory experiences and stimulations (lights, colors, and sounds), and then you die. How you choose to interpret them is up to you—you have that choice.”

“Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.”

  • “The problem isn’t reality. The problem is their desire is colliding with reality and preventing them from seeing the truth.”
    “The more desire I have for something to work out a certain way, the less likely I am to see the truth.”
  • “You can get almost anything you want out of life, as long as it’s one thing and you want it far more than anything else.”
  • “Pick one big desire in your life at any given time to give yourself purpose and motivation.”
  • “One thing I’ve learned recently: it’s way more important to perfect your desires than to try to do something you don’t 100 percent desire.”

“The first thing to realize is you can observe your mental state. Meditation doesn’t mean you’re suddenly going to gain the superpower to control your internal state. The advantage of meditation is recognizing just how out of control your mind is.“

  • “The mind itself is a muscle—it can be trained and conditioned. It has been haphazardly conditioned by society to be out of our control. If you look at your mind with awareness and intent (a 24/7 job you’re working at every moment) I think you can unpack your own mind, your emotions, thoughts, and reactions. Then you can start reconfiguring. You can start rewriting this program to what you want.“
  • “The ability to singularly focus is related to the ability to lose yourself and be present, happy, and (ironically) more effective.”
  • “It’s actually really important to have empty space. If you don’t have a day or two every week in your calendar where you’re not always in meetings, and you’re not always busy, then you’re not going to be able to think.”
  • “I also encourage taking at least one day a week (preferably two, because if you budget two, you’ll end up with one) where you just have time to think.”
  • “It’s only after you’re bored you have the great ideas. It’s never going to be when you’re stressed, or busy, running around or rushed. Make the time.”
  • “Meditation is intermittent fasting for the mind.”
  • “Meditation is turning off society and listening to yourself. It only ‘works’ when done for its own sake.”
  • “Insight meditation lets you run your brain in debug mode until you realize you’re just a subroutine in a larger program.”
  • “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 make any decisions. You don’t judge anything. You just accept everything. If I do that for ten or fifteen minutes while walking around, I end up in a very peaceful, grateful state. Choiceless Awareness works well for me.”
  • “It pops us out of the story we’re constantly telling ourselves. If you stop talking to yourself for even ten minutes, if you stop obsessing over your own story, you’ll realize we are really far up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and life is pretty good.”

“I think the most common mistake for humanity is believing you’re going to be made happy because of some external circumstance.”

  • “The fundamental delusion: There is something out there that will make me happy and fulfilled forever.”
  • “Happiness is internal. That conclusion set me on a path of working more on my internal self and realizing all real success is internal and has very little to do with external circumstances.”
  • “The most important trick to being happy is to realize happiness is a skill you develop and a choice you make. You choose to be happy, and then you work at it.”
  • “You can very slowly but steadily and methodically improve your happiness baseline, just like you can improve your fitness.”
  • “Whatever happiness means to me, it means something different to you. I think it’s very important to explore what these definitions are.”
  • “Today, I believe happiness is really a default state. Happiness is there when you remove the sense of something missing in your life.”
  • “We are highly judgmental survival-and-replication machines. We constantly walk around thinking, ‘I need this,’ or ‘I need that,’ trapped in the web of desires. Happiness is the state when nothing is missing. When nothing is missing, your mind shuts down and stops running into the past or future to regret something or to plan something.”
  • “In that absence, for a moment, you have internal silence. When you have internal silence, then you are content, and you are happy.“
  • “The fewer desires I can have, the more I can accept the current state of things, the less my mind is moving, because the mind really exists in motion toward the future or the past. The more present I am, the happier and more content I will be.“
  • “Happiness to me is mainly not suffering, not desiring, not thinking too much about the future or the past, really embracing the present moment and the reality of what is, and the way it is.”
  • “Everything is perfect exactly the way it is. It is only in our particular minds we are unhappy or not happy, and things are perfect or imperfect because of what we desire.”
  • “Happiness is what’s there when you remove the sense that something is missing in your life.”

“Real happiness only comes as a side-effect of peace. Most of it is going to come from acceptance, not from changing your external environment.”

  • “My most surprising discovery in the last five years is that peace and happiness are skills. These are not things you are born with. Yes, there is a genetic range. And a lot of it is conditioning from your environment, but you can un-condition and recondition yourself.”
  • “The current environment programs the brain, but the clever brain can choose its upcoming environment.”
  • “I think of happiness as an emergent property of peace. If you’re peaceful inside and out, that will eventually result in happiness.”
  • “Peace is happiness at rest, and happiness is peace in motion. You can convert peace into happiness anytime you want. But peace is what you want most of the time. If you’re a peaceful person, anything you do will be a happy activity.“
  • “A rational person can find peace by cultivating indifference to things outside of their control.”
  • “In reality, peace is not a guarantee. It’s always flowing. It’s always changing. You want to learn the core skill set of flowing with life and accepting it in most cases.”
  • “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.’“
  • “It’s to be okay whatever the outcome is. It’s to be balanced and centered. It’s to step back and to see the grander scheme of things.”

“You have to create your own meaning, which is what it boils down to. You have to decide.”

  • “It’s personal. You have to find your own meaning. Any piece of wisdom anybody else gives you, whether it’s Buddha or me, is going to sound like nonsense. Fundamentally, you have to find it for yourself, so the important part is not the answer, it’s the question. You just have to sit there and dig with the question. It might take you years or decades. When you find an answer you’re happy with, it will be fundamental to your life.“
  • “I only really want to do things for their own sake. That is one definition of art. Whether it’s business, exercise, romance, friendship, whatever, I think the meaning of life is to do things for their own sake. Ironically, when you do things for their own sake, you create your best work.”
  • “You’re meant to do something. You’re not just meant to lie there in the sand and meditate all day long. You should self-actualize. You should do what you are meant to do.“
  • “Like all great profound truths, it’s all paradoxes. Any two points are infinitely different. Any moment is perfectly unique.”
  • “There is no fundamental, intrinsic purposeful meaning to the Universe. If there was, then you would just ask the next question. You’d say, ‘Why is that the meaning?’ It would be, as physicist Richard Feynman said, it would be ‘turtles all the way down.’ The ‘why’s’ would keep accumulating. There is no answer you could give that wouldn’t have another ‘why.’“
  • “You’re a living creature. There are things you do. You locally reverse entropy. That’s why you’re here.”
  • “Basically, in physics, the arrow of time comes from entropy. The second law of thermodynamics states entropy only goes up, which means disorder in the Universe only goes up, which means concentrated free energy only goes down. If you look at living things (humans, plants, civilizations, what have you) these systems are locally reversing entropy. Humans locally reverse entropy because we have action.“

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