A Guide to Wealth and Happiness
Life gets busy. Has The Almanack of Naval Ravikant been gathering dust on your bookshelf? Instead, pick up the key ideas now.
We’re scratching the surface here. If you don’t already have the book, order it here or get the audiobook for free on Amazon to learn the juicy details.
Eric Jorgenson’s Perspective
Eric Jorgenson is a writer, podcaster, investor, and product strategist. He’s blogged and created online courses for several years. He writes and podcasts about personal leverage, building wealth, and good living on ejorgenson.com these days.
Eric felt inspired to write The Almanack of Naval Ravikant because of the insights he gained from Naval. He decided to collect Naval’s ideas and pass them on to others in a more accessible and organized way.
Introduction
Naval Ravikant is an Indian-American serial entrepreneur, investor, and former CEO of AngelList. AngelList is a website designed to pair investors with startups. He has also invested early in companies like Uber, Twitter, and Postmates.
As a result, Naval has gained a wealth of experience. He frequently advises on wealth, happiness, and life. This advice has been shared across a range of tweets, interviews, and essays.
Author Eric Jorgenson curated this advice into The Almanack of Naval Ravikant.
Eric broke the book into two main sections: wealth and happiness. Each section’s chapters contain various tweets, comments, and statements from Naval. Eric edited the words to flow well, but he has tried to share the ideas as unchanged as possible.
You don’t have to read the book from beginning to end. Instead, you can flip to specific chapters to examine that particular topic.
StoryShot #1: The Creation of Wealth
According to Naval, wealth is not money. Money is the tool used to transfer wealth.
Instead, wealth is things that can earn for you and be productive, even while you sleep. Wealth is inventions, business ideas, computer programs, or products. People will buy and pay for these, even if you’re not there to hand them over directly.
The crux of his argument is this: you have to work hard to gain wealth, but you have to work hard the right way. You can work really hard at the wrong thing, and you’ll never have a chance of getting rich. That’s where specific knowledge and working in the right direction come into play.
StoryShot #2: Specific Knowledge and Talent
Everyone has talents, knowledge, and skills. To truly build wealth, you need to figure out which talents and skills you can use to your advantage. In particular, you want specific skills that not everyone has and that you can sell in some way or another.
You need to pursue your talents, hobbies, and passions. Learn how to turn them into actionable skills that people will pay for, and you’ll go far. If you turn your skills into a platform, you’re on the fast track towards building wealth!
StoryShot #3: Wealth is a Long-Term Game
You won’t be successful overnight. You have to build that success with compound interest in many ways.
Compound interest in money is how most people think about it, and it can be important. Growing your money through the magic of compound interest on investments is wonderful. Still, it’s not the only thing you should focus on growing over the long term.
You want to grow your character, connections, and reputation over the long term. It compounds over time when you build a connection with someone and treat them right. They’re more likely to help you or work with you because they know you’re someone they can count on.
You need to keep working at whatever you’re doing and understand that the timescales are different. You’re trying to succeed over years and decades, not just in days or weeks.
StoryShot #4: Leverage and Judgment
You need to gain leverage to help you apply your knowledge and talent in a way that helps you build wealth. The book itself is a form of leverage! With it, the author can teach principles to far more people than he would ever manage in a lecture hall.
Media and code are the top ways to use leverage to build wealth in today’s day and age. If you can create code that people want, you can leverage that software program to your advantage. If you create compelling media, you’re building yourself a platform.
The key to leverage is to treat it as a force multiplier. You have to use your mind to create products, systems, and ideas worth more than your simple hours of labor. Find something that you can lever to be worth ten people’s labor, or even a hundred or a thousand!
It’s essential to have good judgment. When you make wise, long, and short-term decisions, your efforts create better results. You need to combine good judgment with well-placed leverage.
Leverage is a tool to multiply your force. But, you have to work hard at wisdom and judgment.
If you apply a lot of force in the wrong direction, you’ll do poorly. In the same way, if you pick the right direction but barely apply any force, you won’t see good results.
StoryShot #5: Enjoy Wealth Creation!
Money is a necessity at a certain level, but you have the freedom to do what you want once you get past that point. You can retire, work, invest, invent or do anything else.
But how do you get there? There are three main ways to enjoy your life and your wealth creation.
First, you can get by on passive income. This means you make enough money to cover your expenses, all without having to work anymore. Although fun, this isn’t realistic for many people.
Second, you can “become a monk” and reduce your spending to as little as possible. For most people, this will not be an enjoyable option at all. You might have some investments, but they won’t pay off for a while.
So, the best option is to find a job that you enjoy doing. As the saying goes, once you find that, you’ll never have to work another day in your life!
Be authentic to yourself and enjoy the journey. Be smart, but don’t obsess over money!
This was the tip of the iceberg. To dive into the details and support the author, order it here or get the audiobook for free on Amazon.
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