The Almanack of Naval Ravikant

"“Clear thinker” is a better compliment than “smart.”"

— Eric Jorgenson, The Almanack of Naval Ravikant (2020)

Introduction

The Almanack of Naval Ravikant
Full title	The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness
Author	Eric Jorgenson
Language	English
Subject	Wealth; Happiness; Personal development
Genre	Nonfiction; Self-help
Publisher	Magrathea Publishing
Publication date	15 September 2020
Publication place	United States
Media type	Print (hardcover, paperback); e-book; audiobook
Pages	242
ISBN	978-1-5445-1421-5
Goodreads rating	4.4/5  (as of 10 November 2025)
Website	navalmanack.com

The Almanack of Naval Ravikant is a 2020 compilation by Eric Jorgenson that curates Naval Ravikant’s tweets, podcasts, and essays into one volume. It features a foreword by Tim Ferriss, illustrations by Jack Butcher, and a freely available PDF edition. Across short, aphoristic passages, it lays out frameworks such as “specific knowledge,” leverage, long-term games, accountability, judgment, and clear thinking to build wealth and cultivate happiness. The book is organized into two main parts—Wealth and Happiness—followed by a bonus section of reading and links. Jorgenson frames it as a guide to consult rather than a step-by-step manual. By 2024–2025, the publisher and author reported over one million copies sold worldwide and more than four million free digital copies distributed; the project also spawned 30-plus translations hosted on the official site.

Part I – Wealth

Chapter 1 – Understand How Wealth Is Created

💡 Starting from zero on a random street in any English-speaking country, wealth can be rebuilt within five or ten years if treated as a learnable skill rather than luck. Wealth means owning assets that earn while you sleep, money merely moves time and value, and status measures social position. The principles were distilled into a “How to Get Rich (Without Getting Lucky)” tweetstorm, a checklist that contrasts wealth games with zero-sum status games and urges industries with long horizons and trusted partners. Technology, following Danny Hillis, is “the set of things that don’t quite work yet,” so opportunity lies in building what society will want before it can make it. The job is not one prototype but scale—thousands, millions, or billions—so everyone can have one. Steve Jobs and his team saw the demand for smartphones—a computer in the pocket with a hundred-fold usability jump—then built and scaled them to the mass market. Renting out hours cannot produce freedom; owning part of the value you create can. The internet widened the career space, so learning to sell and to build—and ideally to do both—makes you hard to replace. Wealth comes from creating and scaling new value, not from status contests or trading hours; leverage—capital, code, and media—compounds assets in long-term games with reliable people. You will get rich by giving society what it wants but does not yet know how to get. At scale.

Chapter 2 – Find and Build Specific Knowledge

🔬 On a startup sales floor, a natural closes deals without a script; that knack—honed in childhood negotiations, schoolyard trades, or early hustles—is specific knowledge. It often feels like play to the person who has it, whether picking up any instrument quickly, obsessively mapping systems, or grokking game theory after hours of gaming. You can sharpen it with brutal, fast training—door-to-door sales, live reps, or studying persuasion researchers like Robert Cialdini—yet it rarely emerges from a classroom. Examples range from sci-fi binge-readers who absorb ideas fast to inveterate gossip-mappers who could channel curiosity into journalism. This kind of knowledge tends to be technical or creative and resists outsourcing and automation; when taught at all, it is through apprenticeships. Underneath sits a blend of DNA, upbringing, and curiosity that you refine until you redefine the niche and become the best at it. “No one can compete with you on being you,” so the work is to find where your edge is native and valuable. Markets reward rare, non-fungible know-how that cannot be standardized. Follow genuine curiosity, iterate toward a unique competence, and pair it with accountability and leverage so the market scales what feels like play. Specific knowledge cannot be taught, but it can be learned.

Chapter 3 – Play Long-Term Games with Long-Term People

♟️ In Silicon Valley, repeating deals with Elad Gil turns negotiations into trust-based rounding—he bends over backward to add value, and the favor is returned. That ease shows compounding in relationships: fewer contingencies, faster decisions, and less friction each time you collaborate. Compounding is not only finance; reputations and knowledge also grow multiplicatively when you stick with them for years. A sterling reputation built over decades becomes far more valuable than raw talent without consistency. The partners worth compounding with are high-integrity, high-energy, and smart—people with whom iterated games create positive-sum outcomes. Intentions matter less than visible behavior, which is why ethics are hard and consistent delivery earns trust. With trust, haggling fades and the flywheel spins faster. Patience matters because most gains arrive late and accelerate thereafter, just as interest accrues to principal. Time horizons transform repeated interactions into exponential advantages in money, relationships, and learning; choose principled partners and stay the course so trust lowers transaction costs and lets time do the work. All the returns in life, whether in wealth, relationships, or knowledge, come from compound interest.

Chapter 4 – Take on Accountability

🛡️ Around 2014–2015, speaking publicly about philosophy and psychology under my own name drew back-channel warnings—“you’re ending your career”—but I took the risk anyway. Accountability is a double-edged sword: it lets you take credit when things go well and forces you to bear failures in public. Building credibility requires operating under your own name so labor, capital, code, or media leverage can accrue to you. There is real downside—the captain goes down with the ship—but in modern systems even bankruptcy can reset the board, and high-integrity effort is often forgiven. Practically, you may be last to get paid and last to pull capital out; your time and cash are on the line. Yet those willing to fail in public gain power because skin in the game signals seriousness and aligns incentives. Clear accountability creates incentives and trust; without it, credibility and ownership never arrive. Public ownership of outcomes concentrates credibility, which attracts responsibility, equity, and leverage. Put your name on the line so others can allocate resources to you for bigger, better bets. Embrace accountability and take business risks under your own name.

Chapter 5 – Build or Buy Equity in a Business

📈 A highly paid professional who rents out hours stops earning when the clock stops; an owner keeps earning on vacation because the asset works without more hours. The decisive line is ownership versus wage work: without equity, inputs and outputs stay tightly coupled and non-scalable. Even doctors who become truly rich do so by opening private practices that build brands or by creating a device, procedure, or process protected by IP. Equity holders own the upside; debt holders get guaranteed streams but absorb the downside. Stock options are a fine on-ramp to ownership, but the biggest fortunes come from founding or buying meaningful stakes. Without ownership, sleep, retirement, and travel all mean zero income—and no nonlinear growth. Real wealth comes from starting companies or investing—routes that buy equity so returns compound beyond your hours. Equity turns effort into an asset that earns while you sleep and decouples income from time; trade some certainty for upside so gains can scale and compound into freedom. If you don’t own a piece of a business, you don’t have a path towards financial freedom.

Chapter 6 – Find a Position of Leverage

🏗️ A real-estate ladder shows why leverage matters: a laborer paid $10–$20 an hour repairs a house on command, a general contractor bids about $50,000 for the project, a developer who buys, rebuilds, and sells might net $500,000 to $1 million, and a fund manager deploys large pools of capital across many properties. Each rung adds accountability, specific knowledge, and leverage, until a tech-enabled team could build a Trulia-, Redfin-, or Zillow-style company and chase upside in the hundreds of millions or billions. Leverage has three broad classes—labor, capital, and products with no marginal cost of replication. The last category includes code and media and is permissionless: a single laptop ships software, books, or videos to an unlimited audience without asking for headcount or budget. That is why new fortunes flow to code and media and why a developer can sleep while an “army of robots” runs the code. Once inputs and outputs decouple, a leveraged worker can out-produce others by 1,000× or 10,000×, making judgment—not effort—the binding constraint. Aim for roles where you control your time and are measured on outputs—building or selling—rather than support jobs where hours and results stay coupled. Put yourself where each unit of effort is multiplied by labor, capital, or software, then climb toward equity so the upside accrues to you. You’re never going to get rich renting out your time.

Chapter 7 – Get Paid for Your Judgment

⚖️ Tiny accuracy gaps steer enormous ships: if someone is right 85% of the time instead of 75%, firms will pay $50, $100, or even $200 million because ten points of better calls on a $100-billion business is priceless. The ideal structure is to be compensated purely for decisions while robots, capital, or computers do the work. Credibility around those decisions is the moat, earned by long, public accountability—Warren Buffett is trusted with near-infinite leverage because he has been visibly right for decades. Leverage magnifies small differences at the extreme; with capital and code behind you, being marginally better becomes orders of magnitude more valuable. Once you are tracked on outputs, time management fades because the machine amplifies each correct call and ignores the hours behind it. Senior roles concentrate on picking markets, people, and priorities, and compensation flows to those whose judgment compounds. Make judgment the product so you are paid for thinking rather than effort; pair accountable track records with leverage—capital, code, or media—so each decision scales across assets and time. I would love to be paid purely for my judgment, not for any work.

Chapter 8 – Prioritize and Focus

🎯 Focus starts with scarcity and losses: the first small fortune vanishes in the stock market, a second is lost to bad partners, and only the third attempt sticks. Wealth then accumulates as many small chips—new options, businesses, and investments—rather than one big jackpot. Online, the problem becomes too many viable projects and not enough hours, so attention—what to do, where to live, and whom to be with—drives results. Set an aspirational personal hourly rate and defend it; even before being rich, a $5,000-per-hour yardstick forces saying no to low-leverage demands. Solve by iteration, then get paid by repetition, and reinvest the reclaimed time into the few problems that matter most. Stop chasing zero-sum status games and commit to the long, compounding choices that shape a life. Because leverage exaggerates small edges, being at the extreme of your craft matters, and doing less, better, is often the only path there. Concentration converts scattered opportunity into compounding results; price your time, prune commitments, and route energy to the narrow set of decisions and skills that scale. You will never be worth more than you think you’re worth.

Chapter 9 – Find Work That Feels Like Play

🎮 In 1996 at @Home Network in Silicon Valley, telling coworkers “I’m going to start a company” drew months of “I thought you were leaving” until embarrassment forced the first launch. That shove fits a broader point: humans once worked for themselves, agriculture and the Industrial Revolution imposed hierarchy, and the internet now lets many return to self-directed work. Even failed founders are better positioned than lifetime employees because the skills—raising money, recruiting, shipping—transfer to the next try. Once money is no longer necessary, building becomes play: assemble a team, launch in months, and let profit be a side effect. Retirement is reframed as no longer sacrificing today for an imaginary tomorrow, reached by passive income, a radically low burn, or work you love so much that money stops being the point. Escaping the competition trap requires authenticity: find work you can do better because you love it, map it to what society wants, and put your name on it. When work feels like play, you will outlast rivals who are “working,” because intrinsic motivation sustains sixteen-hour days. Align talent, curiosity, and demand so effort becomes sustainable play; choose self-directed, authentic work, apply leverage, and attach your name to the outcome so equity and reputation compound. I want to be off the hedonic treadmill.

Chapter 10 – How to Get Lucky

🍀 In a Twitter exchange with co-founder Babak Nivi, four kinds of luck are sorted out: blind fortune, luck from hustle and motion, luck you notice by becoming skilled, and the rarest kind you attract by building a unique character and brand. Aim not to be one of the few universes where a break fell your way, but to be wealthy in 999 out of 1,000 by reducing reliance on chance. Hustle luck looks like stirring a petri dish—creating energy and collisions—so opportunities have more chances to find you. Skill-driven sensitivity lets you spot breaks others miss and be first to act. Character-driven luck runs deeper: a distinctive reputation makes opportunity seek you out. The vivid example is the world-class deep-sea diver; when a sunken wreck is found off a coast, treasure hunters track you down to extract it and share the payoff. As you move from chance to agency, “luck” fades into inevitability because positioning does most of the work. Engineer luck by shaping identity, motion, and skill so opportunity can attach to you; cultivate a reputation and body of work that make you the obvious partner when chance appears. Luck becomes your destiny.

Chapter 11 – Be Patient

⏳ In Silicon Valley, meeting gifted engineers and founders early and watching them succeed over twenty years shows how outcomes arrive on their own clock, not yours. Even after you assemble specific knowledge, accountability, and leverage, there is an indeterminate amount of time you must put in. Counting days breeds frustration; enjoyment and repetition keep the effort going long enough for compounding to work. Most people want immediate riches, but the world is efficient, so you still have to put in the hours. “You’re too young” is bad advice; history often credits youth after the fact, and the only way to learn is by doing. Patience also applies to relationships and reputation—pay it forward without keeping score and avoid tracking favors or time. Money can buy material freedom but not happiness; it removes external problems so you can pursue peace on your terms. The rhythm is simple work done for years, with taste and judgment steering and boredom-proof rituals sustaining the pace. Long horizons let leverage magnify small advantages; impatience wastes them before they accrue. In this frame, patience is not waiting but persisting without tallying. Apply specific knowledge with leverage and eventually, you will get what you deserve.

Chapter 12 – Judgment

🧑‍⚖️ A short catechism sets priorities—hard work is overrated, judgment is underrated—then defines judgment as wisdom applied to external problems: seeing long-term consequences and choosing accordingly. Live at the edge of technology, design, and art until you become truly good at something worth scaling. Two paired maxims clarify the trade: don’t spend your time to save money; save your time to make money. In a leveraged world, direction beats force because a few correct calls outperform frantic effort. Judgment compounds through visible decisions and feedback loops; with enough leverage behind you, a single bet can dominate years of labor. Work still matters, but the capacity to choose well matters more. As correct calls accumulate, the market hands you larger levers, which make the next call even more consequential. Discernment that holds under pressure and time becomes the durable edge. Wealth follows those whose choices repeatedly align with reality. In an age of leverage, one correct decision can win everything.

Chapter 13 – How to Think Clearly

🧠 Richard Feynman provides the model: in “Six Easy Pieces,” he walks from the number line and counting up to precalculus in a few pages, building each step without jargon or borrowed authority. Clear thinking starts from first principles—understand arithmetic and geometry before trigonometry, and re-derive ideas as needed rather than memorizing them. Advanced concepts often signal status more than truth; mastering the basics is the reliable path. Trust your own reasoning, not the crowd’s; test beliefs against reality instead of parroting definitions. Emotional desire clouds perception, so quiet the “monkey mind,” notice when you want a particular outcome, and leave empty space on the calendar to think. Boredom is not the enemy; it is the precursor to original ideas. The practical habit is to keep reducing, simplifying, and explaining until a child could follow the logic. Clarity is a trainable skill built from the ground up and by separating facts from feelings. The payoff is decisions that reflect the world as it is, not as you hope it to be. “Clear thinker” is a better compliment than “smart.”

Chapter 14 – Shed Your Identity to See Reality

🪞 An example uses Bruce Lee: when a serious injury ends an athletic identity, the only way forward is to accept change and reinvent, perhaps as a philosopher. Ego forms in the first two decades and then spends decades trying to make the world conform, so the remedy is to deconstruct habits and labels bundled into “who I am.” Packaged beliefs—political, religious, or tribal—are suspect; they lock you into defending positions you have not examined from base principles. Honesty improves when you speak without identity, because the ego no longer needs to protect a brand. Suffering is reframed as the moment when desire can no longer deny reality; that pain becomes the opening for truth. Personalities and careers, like Facebook or Twitter interfaces, need redesigns; there are no permanent solutions in a dynamic system. Practice unconditioning: spot toddler-era patterns, test whether they still serve you, and retire the ones that do not. Without the armor of labels, it becomes easier to change your mind and see things as they are. This is not self-erasure; it is loosening your grip so evidence can get in. To be honest, speak without identity.

Chapter 15 – Learn the Skills of Decision-Making

🧮 Treat the classical virtues—temperance, prudence, courage, justice—as long-term decision heuristics, then borrow Richard Feynman’s safeguard: you are the easiest person to fool. Self-serving conclusions should face a higher bar because most biases are time-saving shortcuts that fail on consequential choices. Aim for unconditioning—pause learned responses so you can decide cleanly in the moment without leaning on identity or memory. Two practical tools help: seek calm, empty time to think, and compress lessons into maxims you can recall under stress. As decisions gain leverage through technology, teams, and capital, small improvements in accuracy produce nonlinear returns, so deliberate practice matters. For training material, see Farnam Street’s catalog of mental models, then apply an investing rule of thumb. Good decisions come from clarity, honesty, and probabilistic thinking; better ones come from doing it for years. Over time, knowing more reduces the need to insure against ignorance. The more you know, the less you diversify.

Chapter 16 – Collect Mental Models

🧩 Farnam Street becomes a practical touchstone, singled out for helping people make more accurate decisions and for curating the mental models that matter. Frame the brain as a memory-prediction machine and avoid forecasting by anecdote—“X happened before, so X will happen again.” Favor durable principles drawn from evolution and game theory, and look to Charlie Munger, Nassim Taleb, and Benjamin Franklin as rich sources. Tweets and maxims function as compressed pointers—mnemonics that retrieve hard-won, underlying experience when stakes are high. Without firsthand experience, a list of models degenerates into posters and fades from memory. Load a toolkit you can reach for, not jargon to recite. Models raise the base rate of good calls by giving simple, falsifiable frames for causality and risk. In a world of leverage—capital, code, and media—small accuracy gains compound into outsized results. Clear, generalizable abstractions beat situation-specific stories when decisions must scale; disciplined collection and repeated application tie each model to lived evidence. Mental models are really just compact ways for you to recall your own knowledge.

Chapter 17 – Learn to Love to Read

📚 A concrete rule opens the case: an hour a day of science, math, and philosophy can put you in the upper echelon within seven years, and even one to two hours daily already places you in vanishingly rare company. Reading is a superpower in an “age of Alexandria,” with every book a fingertip away and rereading the greats a legitimate strategy. Reject performative literacy—start in the middle, skip, quit—and follow curiosity until reading becomes a self-reinforcing habit. The mind weaves passages into a “tapestry” over time, so precision recall matters less than cumulative absorption. A tweet from @illacertus—read the 100 great books over and over—illustrates depth over breadth. Most people read a minute a day; making it a daily practice is the dividing line. This is not hobbyism; it is an operating-system upgrade that improves judgment, vocabulary for thinking, and opportunity recognition. Loving the act itself is the only reliable way to sustain volume over years. Remove guilt and follow interest until momentum makes reading effortless. Read what you love until you love to read.

Part II – Happiness

Chapter 18 – Happiness Is Learned

🏫 A personal baseline sets the terms: ten years earlier, self-rated happiness hovered at 2/10 or 3/10—maybe 4/10 on better days—whereas today it sits near 9/10, with money a small contributor. Happiness is described as a “default state” that appears when the mind stops insisting something is missing. Definitions differ—flow, satisfaction, contentment—and your own will evolve. Polarity matters: every positive thought implies its negative, so chasing “positive thinking” alone keeps you in duality. The useful move is subtraction—quieting mental time travel into past regret or future planning long enough to touch internal silence. From that neutral state, presence improves and contentment surfaces. Test the claims directly; the argument rests on felt experience rather than slogans. At stake is a learnable skill akin to fitness, trained by attention and perspective. Well-being grows from removing mental friction, not stacking pleasures, and presence practiced over time makes peace the baseline. Happiness is there when you remove the sense of something missing in your life.

Chapter 19 – Happiness Is a Choice

✅ External events arrive, but meaning is assigned internally, which keeps emotion within your circle of control. Accepting this reframes happiness from a treasure hunt to a practice—reading philosophy, meditating, spending time with happy people—and allows the baseline to rise slowly, like fitness. We spend enormous effort changing the world while leaving the mind’s programming intact, even though identity and memory are malleable. Believing choice is possible is itself the door to training it. Emphasize steady, methodical gains rather than epiphanies and habits that lighten the “voice in your head.” Over time, better interpretations yield calmer reactions, which in turn make better interpretations easier. Choosing well does not deny pain; it reduces suffering added by rumination. This mirrors wealth’s compounding—small, repeated improvements that accumulate. The reliable lever is daily commitment to how you perceive, not episodic control of what happens. Happiness is a choice you make and a skill you develop.

Chapter 20 – Happiness Requires Presence

🌅 A walk down the street is ordinary, yet most of the brain is elsewhere—planning the future or regretting the past—and blind to available beauty. Call the common trap “nexting,” then test it: try doing nothing and notice how anxiety pulls you away. Subtract vices to reduce anticipatory loops and notice thoughts rather than wrestling them. Meditation helps, but under stress acceptance and attention do most of the work. Presence is practical, not mystical: it is how you stop squandering the minutes of a blink-long life. A line about enlightenment as the “space between thoughts” demystifies it as moment-to-moment rather than mountaintop-earned. Here “happiness” means peace—interpreting events so innate calm remains intact—and chasing peak experiences can ruin presence. Presence enables other practices to stick; cut future-seeking urges, return to sensations, and let attention settle until quiet becomes the default. We crave experiences that will make us be present, but the cravings themselves take us from the present moment.

Chapter 21 – Happiness Requires Peace

☮️ Sitting quietly without music, books, or a phone for a few minutes exposes “nexting,” the reflex to plan the next thing and rehearse worries—the engine of low-level anxiety. Distinguish peace from joy and see how most unhappiness comes from mental chatter rather than events, making attention the primary lever. Rather than wrestle anxiety, notice it and ask whether a thought is worth trading for peace, then let it go. Purpose reframed helps: externally imposed missions rarely yield peace, while an internal vocation can. When thoughts subside, the baseline steadies; treat peace as the practical definition of happiness in daily life. What feels like restlessness is often a cascade of interpretations layered on neutral moments, solvable by awareness rather than conquest. A practical test: can you do nothing without agitation? If not, the work is subtractive. Peace multiplies the value of ordinary moments and keeps life livable through calm interpretation rather than perfect circumstances. It’s someone who effortlessly interprets events in such a way that they don’t lose their innate peace.

Chapter 22 – Every Desire Is a Chosen Unhappiness

🎭 After buying a new car, nights sink into forum threads and spec sheets while waiting for delivery, even though the car will feel ordinary the day it arrives. The object is trivial, but the pattern is not—attaching happiness to a future event manufactures lack in the present. This is the delusion behind “I’ll be happy when…,” a loop that restarts with each new want. Striving is fine, but narrow it: choose as few big desires as possible and recognize where you elected to suffer. Borrow a Buddhist insight—craving spawns its own pain—even when the purchase is rational. Treat attention as the scarce resource desire hijacks, and awareness as the solvent that loosens its grip. Choosing desires carefully reduces ambient misery without banning ambition. In this framework, wealth pursuits do not become permanent postponement of joy. Fewer open “contracts” free more present-tense peace. Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.

Chapter 23 – Success Does Not Earn Happiness

🏆 An interviewer cites the saying attributed to Confucius—“you have two lives, and the second begins when you realize you only have one”—to probe what counts as winning. We call “successful” whoever wins our preferred game: an athlete on the field, a founder in business, a creator of breakthrough technology such as Netscape or Bitcoin, or a culture-shifting builder like Elon Musk. Contrast that with people who step out of the game entirely—friends like Jerzy Gregorek or exemplars such as the Buddha or Jiddu Krishnamurti—whose peace is independent of scoreboards. Success is dissatisfaction-driven and happiness is sufficiency-driven; chasing both simultaneously usually sacrifices peace. Recognition, money, and status can be fine, but they do not cash out into well-being unless interpreted through contentment. The question is not whether achievement is bad; it is whether you can be at ease without it. Redefine “win” as inner stability rather than external rank so wealth-building does not colonize the rest of life. Happiness is being satisfied with what you have.

Chapter 24 – Envy Is the Enemy of Happiness

😒 “Should” is a tell for social programming—do this workout, buy that house, keep up with peers—and a reliable path to misery. Reframe life as a single-player game: progress is internal and unverifiable, so comparing dashboards with others guarantees discontent. Expectations drilled by society crowd out intrinsic aims, turning peace into a hostage of other people’s metrics. Envy fades when the goal is to be fully yourself rather than an edited version of someone else; relief comes from no longer wanting to be anybody else. Envy links to multiplayer status contests that never end and to the judgment loop that fuels them. Stepping out requires subtracting “shoulds,” not winning more rounds. This protects happiness from wealth’s zero-sum optics. Judge less, choose deliberately, and accept the solitary nature of experience. The enemy of peace of mind is expectations drilled into you by society and other people.

Chapter 25 – Happiness Is Built by Habits

🧱 Treat peace as trainable: in the last five years it became clear that happiness, like fitness, is a skill you can practice and improve. Use trial and error—try seated meditation (Vipassana or otherwise), yoga, kitesurfing, cooking—then keep what actually quiets the mind. An exercise from Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now—lying down, feeling energy move through the body—worked once skepticism was suspended long enough to test it. Favor placebo-friendly beliefs for inner life; with the mind, a bias toward positivity helps. Concrete levers follow: avoid alcohol and sugar to stabilize mood; limit social media and video games whose short-term dopamine can erode long-term well-being; consider caffeine’s trade-offs. Habits compound, and relationships matter—the “five chimps theory” suggests choosing people around you with care because their moods and norms become yours. Swapping thoughtless routines for constructive ones makes peace more probable. Habits are happiness’s scaffolding just as leverage is wealth’s; consistent practice plus a supportive environment makes well-being the default. You can increase your happiness over time, and it starts with believing you can do it.

Chapter 26 – Find Happiness in Acceptance

🤲 In ordinary annoyances—traffic, a late meeting, an overflowing inbox—the choice set stays the same: change it, accept it, or leave it; anything else is rumination. Keep one big desire at a time so attention can settle; a busy mind that cycles through “I need to do this” and “that must change” cannot rest in the present. When change is not feasible, repeat “accept” internally while scanning for the smallest positive reframe. A simple loop helps: notice a negative reaction, search for one specific upside, and make that hunt automatic over weeks until it happens in under a second. For perspective, zoom out: every civilization—from the Sumerians onward—disappears; legacies, planets, and even solar systems turn to dust, and remembering this loosens the grip of ego battles. Write down old hardships—breakups, business failures, health scares—and trace long-run benefits to make current pain more bearable. For minor frictions, treat them as lessons; for major immovables, remember mortality to stop postponing peace. Acceptance is not surrender but lucid nonresistance: let reality be real so you can act cleanly or walk away. Reduce mental struggle until calm interpretation returns, then choose change or exit from a quiet mind; acceptance amplifies ordinary moments the way leverage amplifies wealth. In any situation in life, you always have three choices: you can change it, you can accept it, or you can leave it.

Chapter 27 – Choosing to Be Yourself

🧍 A common spiral—pages of “I need to do” notes—meets a stop sign: you do not need to do anything except what you genuinely want. Listen for the small, insistent voice that prefers one path; following it stops life by other people’s checklists and starts building your own. A mentor’s invisible gift—“be yourself, with passionate intensity”—shifts the frame from emulation to expression. Uniqueness is combinatorial: DNA, upbringing, obsessions, and experience mix into a profile no one else has, which is why imitation stalls and originality compounds. The practical task is to find the people, project, or field that needs your exact mix most; everything else is noise. Markets reward non-substitutable work, so irrational obsession with a fitting problem is the fastest route to contribution. That focus later aligns with responsibility and leverage, but it starts with permission to ignore imported goals. The result is not selfishness; it is the only sustainable source of excellence. Authenticity powers specific knowledge, accountability, and leverage; replace compliance with curiosity and let taste narrow the arena until you can be the best at it. No one in the world is going to beat you at being you.

Chapter 28 – Choosing to Care for Yourself

🫶 Priority order is explicit: health first—physical, then mental, then spiritual—before family and work, because everything else rests on that foundation. Modern life fights this: phones spike mood with likes and outrage, abundance overwhelms genes tuned for scarcity, and the sugar-and-fat combo hacks appetite. Keep diet simple—avoid highly processed foods; beware sugar-fat pairings—and use the environment: more play than treadmills, some cold exposure, fewer sterile buffers, and tribes that keep you human. Exercise is the daily anchor; a morning workout eliminates the “no time” excuse and cascades into earlier nights and better days. Consistency beats modality: the best workout is the one you will do every day. Jerzy Gregorek’s maxim—easy choices, hard life; hard choices, easy life—shows why discipline now creates ease later. The same lens applies to media and stimulants: less social feed, less alcohol, moderated caffeine equals a steadier mind. Caring for yourself is not indulgence; it is capacity building. You cannot compound judgment and peace without a stable platform; environmental design plus daily, non-negotiable routines makes well-being the default. My number one priority in life, above my happiness, above my family, above my work, is my own health.

Chapter 29 – Meditation + Mental Strength

🧘 Tim Ferriss’s interview with Wim Hof, the “Ice Man,” illustrates the point: Hof set world records for time in an ice bath and cold-water swims and teaches breathing and cold exposure to reconnect body and mind. Breath sits where the autonomic and voluntary nervous systems meet, so calm breathing signals safety and frees resources for recovery instead of vigilance. Cold showers become a daily drill in non-avoidance—step in, feel the sensation, and watch the mind’s fear separate from the body’s fact. Different practices fit different temperaments: Choiceless Awareness during a quiet walk, transcendental chanting to bury thoughts, or an hour of doing nothing each morning until the mind hits “inbox zero.” Journaling and solitude belong here too; undistracted time lets old experiences surface and dissolve without effort. Try sixty days of one hour at dawn before the world starts, when attention is clean. As the mind quiets, gratitude rises and details become vivid, and work proceeds from a calmer baseline. Emotional predictions—ancient biology guessing at the future—lose their grip under observation. This is mental leverage: a small daily practice that scales clarity across every decision. Time spent undistracted and alone, in self-examination, journaling, meditation, resolves the unresolved and takes us from mentally fat to fit.

Chapter 30 – Choosing to Build Yourself

🛠️ A hard lesson: after a startup dispute years ago, lawsuits and anger produced a decent outcome but needless suffering, and a later, calmer self would have handled the same facts without the turmoil. A backward-looking exercise—ask each decade-older self what advice they would give the decade-younger one, year by year—exposes patterns that need rewriting. Habits become the unit of change: a trainer’s simple daily routine transforms body and mood, proving identity shifts are built, not declared. When change is real, it happens now; if you cannot do it now, scale back the promise, commit publicly, and step in smaller increments you can keep. Krishnamurti’s “internal revolution” reframes growth as readiness to change completely, not half-measures protected by “I’ll try.” One mantra guides tempo: impatience with actions, patience with results—act immediately when inspired, then wait while complex systems respond. Agency is sober: moods are trainable, attention is allocatable, and the mind is a program you can recode with awareness. Over time, you become your habits, so swapping one routine at a time is the reliable way to become someone else. Compounding helps only once you are building the right self to apply it; deliberate reconfiguration—less emotion, longer horizon, and routines that make the new identity inevitable—does the work. The greatest superpower is the ability to change yourself.

Chapter 31 – Choosing to Grow Yourself

🌱 A light daily workout showed what consistent habits can do: done every single day, the physical and mental change was obvious. The sustainable path takes years, not weeks; it is a ten-year journey in which every six months one bad habit is broken and one good habit added. Krishnamurti’s “internal revolution” makes the point plain: when change is truly wanted, you change, not try. If not ready, shrink the promise—commit publicly to a smaller step, keep it for three to six months, then move to the next step. Systems beat goals, so choose environments where success is statistically likely and let the environment program the brain you will live inside. Design a life that would succeed in 999 of 1,000 runs—not by aiming at billionaire outcomes, but by failing in very few places and repeating what works. To keep learning, stick to basics—science as the study of truth, mathematics as its language—and read for curiosity rather than approval. Returns live outside the herd, so prefer contrarian study to performative reading. Growth here means building the right systems now and iterating until they become identity; act when inspired, adjust the environment, and let compounding do the rest. There is no “later.”

Chapter 32 – Choosing to Free Yourself

🕊️ Freedom used to mean “freedom to”—to do whatever whenever—until the deeper kind appeared: “freedom from” anger, compulsion, and being forced. Stop looking for “adults” and take responsibility for picking, choosing, and discarding your own path. Advice to a younger self is blunt: be exactly who you are, and leave bad jobs and relationships in minutes, not years. Expectations become a trap you do not owe; only agreements bind, so drop other people’s hopes and refuse self-measurement as self-punishment. Value time above money or status and walk out of conversations or events the moment they waste your life. Treat happiness as your responsibility, not someone else’s, and stop managing other people’s moods. Watch anger as a self-inflicted contract to suffer until reality changes and release it before it escalates into violence. Living far below your means buys optionality, and once you truly control your fate a taste of freedom makes you unemployable. True freedom is inward: fewer reactions, fewer borrowed expectations, and sovereignty over your minutes; clarity about what you want and firm boundaries around time, attention, and emotion make it real. The hardest thing is not doing what you want—it’s knowing what you want.

Chapter 33 – The Meanings of Life

❓ When asked about life’s meaning, three answers follow. First, personal: find your own meaning or any sage—from Buddha to me—will sound like nonsense. Second, cosmic: you were dead for 10 billion years and will be dead for tens of billions after heat death, so even a colony on Mars will be forgotten. Richard Feynman’s “turtles all the way down” shows that asking “why” never bottoms out, so no external purpose can be final. Third, physics: living systems locally reverse entropy and, by building families, civilizations, and computers, globally accelerate it toward equilibrium. Taken together, the meanings you live with are ones you choose—a play you watch, a self-actualization dance you perform, or a desire you pursue for its own sake. Meaning is enacted, not revealed. Attention and choice decide which story to inhabit in light of impermanence and thermodynamics. You have to create your own meaning, which is what it boils down to.

Chapter 34 – Live by Your Values

🧭 Values show by example rather than list: honesty means saying exactly what you are thinking so the mind does not split into planning and regret while you speak. Avoid short-term dealings and choose partners who think in decades because compounding governs money, relationships, health, and habits. Insist on peer relationships—neither above nor below—and exit hierarchies that demand posturing. Anger no longer belongs; the Buddhist image of holding a hot coal is reminder enough to cut angry people from your orbit while withholding judgment. When a child was born, the center of the universe moved from self to them, and values became less selfish overnight. Finding coworkers and partners whose values align makes the “little things” vanish and the work feel easy. In practice, values are lines you do not cross and filters for people and projects. They reduce internal conflict and let compounding trust carry the long run. Before you can lie to another, you must first lie to yourself.

Chapter 35 – Rational Buddhism

🪷 Call the approach Rational Buddhism: reconcile any claim with science and evolution and reject what you cannot verify firsthand. Meditation, the quiet below “monkey mind,” and a base layer of awareness pass the test; talk of past lives and energy centers does not. Evolution is non-negotiable, and ego exists for action; what matters is internal work that makes you calmer, more present, and in control of emotions. Old scriptures are not proof and sitting still does not grant superpowers. Experiment, keep what improves life, and discard what does not. The thread is empiricism in the service of peace and sanity. Self-experimentation—test, falsify, and build a practice that holds under your own observation—drives the results. Try everything, test it for yourself, be skeptical, keep what’s useful, and discard what’s not.

Chapter 36 – The Present Is All We Have

🕰️ Right here, at this point in space and time, is all that exists; no one has gone back, and no one can predict forward in a way that truly matters. Any two points are infinitely different, every moment is perfectly unique, and each slips by too quickly to clutch. Treat the past as a faint, fictional tape and let it go; what we call death is the absence of future moments. Borrow Homer for perspective—the fact we are doomed makes everything more beautiful—then return attention to the breath and the room you are in. When inspiration appears, move now because it spoils fast. Presence is practical attention that dissolves rumination and turns ideas into action. In this frame, happiness is ordinary peace and wealth is many small, present-tense choices compounded over years. Attention binds both because reality only ever arrives one instant at a time. There is actually nothing but this moment.

Part III – Bonus

Chapter 37 – Naval’s Recommended Reading

📖 Read from curiosity, not duty, and let appetite choose the next page. Selections sprawl across disciplines so the mind can synthesize—science for truth, history for context, philosophy for clarity, and stories for imagination. Highlights include David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity, Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens (the standout of the past decade here), and a shelf of Matt Ridley’s work. Add Nassim Taleb’s Skin in the Game (a 2018 favorite) and Carlo Rovelli for physics written with lyric precision. Strategy shows up through J.D. Williams’s The Compleat Strategyst and Robert Axelrod’s The Evolution of Cooperation, because games and incentives run beneath daily life. Krishnamurti’s The Book of Life and Total Freedom, Jed McKenna, and Osho ground the spiritual shelf in rigorous self-inquiry. Sampling widely, then rereading what endures, matures taste until signal stands out from noise. This is intellectual compounding: curiosity selects inputs, breadth widens priors, and rereading deepens models you can use. The best book is the one you’ll devour.

Chapter 38 – Books

📘 Because the list is long and link-heavy, grab the digital version on Navalmanack.com and browse by category. Nonfiction anchors the list: The Beginning of Infinity (David Deutsch), Sapiens (Yuval Noah Harari), and The Rational Optimist with more Matt Ridley titles for evolution and progress. Add Nassim Taleb’s The Bed of Procrustes, then sweep in Will and Ariel Durant’s The Lessons of History and Davidson and Rees-Mogg’s The Sovereign Individual. For judgment and temperament, see Poor Charlie’s Almanack (Charlie Munger) and Carlo Rovelli’s Reality Is Not What It Seems and Seven Brief Lessons on Physics. Game-theory primers—The Compleat Strategyst and The Evolution of Cooperation—sit beside philosophy and spirituality: Krishnamurti, Jed McKenna, Osho’s The Book of Secrets, and Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. Science fiction matters too: Jorge Luis Borges’s Ficciones, Ted Chiang’s Stories of Your Life and Others (with Exhalation and The Lifecycle of Software Objects), Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, and Isaac Asimov’s “The Last Question.” The pattern is deliberate eclecticism that privileges clear thinking over genre. Load mental models with varied, testable ideas you can recall under pressure, and circle back to the few that change you. Read enough, and you become a connoisseur.

Chapter 39 – Other Recommendations

🔗 Beyond books, keep a handful of sources on rotation: Kevin Simler’s Melting Asphalt, Farnam Street (fs.blog), Ben Thompson’s Stratechery, and Idle Words. Two posts work like tools—Farnam Street’s “The Munger Operating System: How to Live a Life That Really Works” and Scott Adams’s “The Day You Became a Better Writer,” which still opens during writing. For fast upgrades, read Simler’s “Crony Beliefs,” Elad Gil on “Career Decisions,” Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens lectures on YouTube, and Ben Thompson’s Aggregation Theory; add Eliezer Yudkowsky’s “Think Like Reality,” Andrew Wilkinson’s “Lazy Leadership,” and Ed Latimore’s essays. Favorite Twitter follows include @AmuseChimp, @mmay3r, and @nntaleb, and a short list of graphic novels punches above its weight: Transmetropolitan, The Boys, Planetary, and The Sandman. For television-plus-comics, Rick and Morty remains a tight blend of curiosity and humor, and Zac Gorman’s comic holds its own. When you need a master class in doing great work, revisit Richard Hamming’s “You and Your Research.” Curate an information diet that sharpens judgment instead of hijacking attention; subscribe to signal, ignore spectacle, and your mind will compound accordingly. If you eat, invest, and think according to what the “news” advocates, you’ll end up nutritionally, financially, and morally bankrupt.

Chapter 40 – Naval’s Writing

✍️ Two compendia close the book. Life Formulas I (2008) sketches terse equations as personal algorithms—Happiness = Health + Wealth + Good Relationships; Health = Exercise + Diet + Sleep; Sleep = No alarms + 8–9 hours + circadian rhythms; Income = Accountability + Leverage + Specific Knowledge; and more—offered as notes to self, not scripture. Naval’s Rules (2016) distill habits and guardrails: be present above all else; desire is suffering; anger is a hot coal; if you cannot see yourself working with someone for life, do not work with them for a day; earn with your mind, not your time; truth is what has predictive power; watch every thought; mathematics is the language of nature; every moment must be complete in itself. Together they compress the book’s arcs—wealth and happiness—into portable checklists that steer behavior without drama. They also show a working method: reduce to essentials, test, and keep what works. Read them as prompts for your own formulas and rules, not as creed. Align daily choices so they naturally serve health, love, and mission; a simple operating system—clear values, simple heuristics, and consistent practice—does the rest. Health, love, and your mission, in that order.

Chapter 41 – Next on Naval

⏭️ After cutting an enormous manuscript down to this book, readers are pointed to “Navalmanack” shorts on Navalmanack.com—spin-off chapters that go deeper on Education, the Story of AngelList, Investing, Startups, Crypto, and Relationships. Ongoing channels include Twitter.com/Naval for aphorisms and threads, the Naval podcast for long-form thinking, and nav.al for essays and transcripts. The page curates an entry point for newcomers by calling out the “How to Get Rich” podcast compilation as the most popular set at the time of writing. These links turn a static book into a living syllabus: move from a printed passage to a tweetstorm, from a tweet to a podcast, and from a podcast back to a long essay. Follow curiosity into the format you will actually consume. In the wealth-and-happiness frame, this section functions like leverage: free distribution through code and media lets ideas scale without permission. An open information funnel—shorts, feeds, and episodes—compounds understanding as you iterate.

Chapter 42 – Appreciation

🙏 A half-assed tweet kicked off the project, and trust from a stranger—Naval—turned it into a book, so thanks go first to him for responsiveness and generosity. Thanks to Babak Nivi for the most succinct, precise writing advice offered here and for time spent making the manuscript better. Thanks to Tim Ferriss for bending his no-forewords rule and contributing one that helps more readers find their way. Thanks to Tucker Max for creating Scribe, assembling a team, and giving the project personal attention—including candor that hurt feelings in pursuit of a great product. Thanks to Bo and the Zaarly team for patience and grace while this work consumed hours. Finally, thanks to friends and strangers online whose DMs and encouragement helped through the thousand hours it took to make this for you. None of this exists without a network of collaborators and readers; gratitude documents the real labor and trust behind the pages. There is so much to be grateful for, and so many people to be grateful to.

Chapter 43 – Sources

📎 The appendix lists dozens of primary and secondary references that anchor the quotes and ideas throughout the book. Early entries include two Periscope streams—“Naval Ravikant Was Live” from 20 January 2018 and 11 February 2018—and Farnam Street’s 2019 profile “Naval Ravikant: The Angel Philosopher.” It cites Tim Ferriss’s Houghton Mifflin Harcourt titles (Tools of Titans, 2016) and his blog posts and interviews (2015–2019), alongside Joe Rogan Experience #1309 (4 June 2019; 2:11:56). Reporting on AngelList’s rise comes from outlets such as Forbes (2012), The Mercury News (2013), The Next Web (2010), and The PEHub Network (2010), with industry commentary from Venture Hacks and company pages at AngelList. Startup essays from StartupBoy.com, product-acquisition coverage from TechCrunch and Vox (both 1 December 2016), and earlier context from The New York Times (26 January 2005) round out the business history. Crypto discussions draw on Unchained (2017), Token Summit (2017), and CoinDesk (2017). The list closes with Naval’s own compilations—“How to Get Rich: Every Episode” (2019)—and notes original material created specifically for this book (2019). In the book’s architecture, this appendix is the provenance ledger: it shows where each idea or quotation came from so readers can verify, explore, and apply with context. Traceability—linking aphorisms back to talk, tweet, or interview—keeps interpretation honest.

Chapter 44 – About the Author

👤 Eric Jorgenson is a product strategist and writer who joined the founding team of Zaarly in 2011, a company that helps homeowners find accountable service providers they can trust. His business blog, Evergreen, has entertained and educated more than one million readers. He lives in Kansas City with Jeannine and shares new projects at ejorgenson.com and on Twitter @ericjorgenson. The short bio mirrors the book’s method: build useful things, teach what you learn, and keep distribution open. It grounds the curation in a working operator’s perspective rather than an armchair summary. Read the credits as an invitation to follow the work beyond this book—to product, essays, and future collaborations. Sustained curiosity plus public work compounds into opportunity and service. Eric is on a quest to create—and eat—the perfect sandwich.

—Note: The above summary follows the Magrathea Publishing paperback edition (2020; ISBN 978-1-5445-1421-5). Publication announcement (September 2020). Catalog record: National Library Board, Singapore (2020).

== Background & reception ==```

🖋️ Author & writing. Jorgenson describes the book as a curated “almanack” assembled from a decade of Naval Ravikant’s public writing and interviews, with a process that emphasized free digital access, modular reading, and community-driven translations. He documented creative choices and constraints while “building the Navalmanack,” reinforcing the collage-like voice and aphoristic register. The finished volume positions itself as a consultable guide rather than a prescriptive program and credits Tim Ferriss (foreword) and Jack Butcher (illustrations).

📈 Commercial reception. The publisher and author state that the book has sold more than 1,000,000 copies worldwide and that over 4,000,000 digital copies have been given away for free (2024–2025). International editions include a German translation from FinanzBuch Verlag (2021) and a Chinese edition from CITIC Publishing (2022), reflecting broad rights uptake. A South Asian trade edition from HarperCollins India further signaled commercial reach.

👍 Praise. Business Insider highlighted the book as a freelancing/entrepreneurship pick, calling it a compilation that “helped me put my ambitions into perspective.” India’s Mint wrote that “merely reading [the book] may leave you in awe,” noting its blend of investing principles and personal philosophy. The Week described it as “full of thoughtful leadership and life insights,” in a reading feature with a business leader.

👎 Criticism. The Power Moves’ review praised the ideas but argued the book mixes “strong insights” with “less impressive takes and pop self-optimization fads.” Another review noted that, as a curated compilation, it can feel repetitive and fragmented relative to a conventional narrative. A physician-reviewer cautioned that readers seeking a step-by-step “recipe” may be disappointed by its aphoristic format.

🌍 Impact & adoption. Beyond trade sales, the team curates an official translations hub with completed versions across dozens of languages, supporting open access and community uptake. Business publications in India have repeatedly referenced the book in profiles and advice columns, reflecting ongoing influence in entrepreneurial culture. Alumni groups and reading lists have also recommended the free edition to their communities, underscoring its broad accessibility.

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