#145 Not-a-book-review: The Almanack of Naval Ravikant
the first book for 2024, time to take stock
Dearest,
This week, I finished my first book for 2024: The Almanack of Naval Ravikant.
First up, I had to google what almanack means. If you are like me, this is for you:
a book published every year that contains facts and information, esp. tables showing the days, weeks, and months, important holidays, and times when the sun and moon rise, or a book containing facts and information about a particular subject.
Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s delve into the nuggets I picked from the book. Shall we?
Three major learnings from the Almanack:
1. Building wealth
The best way to stay away from this constant love of money is to not upgrade your lifestyle as you make money.
To build wealth, the first thing is to understand the difference between accumulating money, being wealthy, and playing the status game.
Money, according to Naval, is a medium of exchange and a unit of account. It's a tool that allows you to transact and acquire goods and services. Money is finite and can be a means to an end, essential to basic needs and providing access to experiences and opportunities.
Wealth, on the other hand, is a broader concept that includes financial assets but extends beyond them. These are assets that earn while you sleep. Wealth is the freedom to do what you want, when you want, and with whom you want. Wealth includes time, health, relationships, and a sense of fulfillment. It encompasses all aspects of a rich and meaningful life.
“The distinction between money and wealth involves a mindset shift. It's not just about accumulating money for its own sake but using it as a tool to enhance overall well-being.”
Status is essentially one's position within the social hierarchy, and in this dynamic, it often operates as a ladder where ascending to a higher rung may involve someone else descending a step.
While money and status are zero-sum games, wealth is a positive sum game. The pursuit of wealth doesn't necessarily involve taking resources away from others; instead, it involves creating new opportunities and value for everyone involved.
So essentially, we are talking about escaping/transcending competition. And how do you do that? By building specific knowledge.
“Specific knowledge is knowledge you cannot be trained for. If society can train you, it can train someone else and replace you. Specific knowledge is found by pursuing your genuine curiosity and passion rather than what is hot right now. Building specific knowledge will feel like play to you but will look like work to others. When specific knowledge is taught, it is through apprenticeships, not schools. Specific knowledge is often highly technical or creative. It cannot be outsourced or automated.”
Building specific knowledge and being measured on output, gives you freedom to do as you like.
2. Learning happiness
Naval puts it beautifully when he calls happiness a side effect of peace.
I agree cent per cent that happiness is what you feel when you are devoid of desires or the sense that something is amiss in your life.
“Every desire is a chosen unhappiness”. The delusion that something (I currently don’t possess) or somewhere (where I am not currently) will make me happy is a pervasive human experience. And that is basically why we suffer.
Now understanding all of this at an intellectual level is easy (the way I am agreeing!). However, accepting this and working on it like we work on a skill is the difficult part.
We know that the best way to master the skill is to be able to do nothing and train the mind to get comfortable with that. Yet why is that so difficult?
The concept of single vs multiplayer games from the book makes this dilemma easier to comprehend:
Socially, we’re told, “Go work out. Go look good.” That’s a multi-player competitive game. Other people can see if I’m doing a good job or not. We’re told, “Go make money. Go buy a big house.” Again, external multiplayer competitive game. 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’re like bees or ants. 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.
The reality is life is a single-player game. You’re born alone. You’re going to die alone.
3. Saving yourself
In this section, there are three things that stood out for me:
a. I don't have time = It's not a priority
If something is a priority, you WILL do it. So every time you skip a habit/practice that you know is good and blame it on the lack of time, be honest with yourself realize that it’s not a priority for you.
Cannot workout, no time = My health is not a priority for me.
Cannot read, no time = Knowledge is not a priority for me.
Cannot create/do things that make me happy = My joy is not a priority for me.
As soon as you say that out loud, there will be a shift in the way you see that ritual, and you won’t be able to ignore it anymore.
b. Meditation is not about controlling the mind, it's about observing how wild the mind is. In observing, you can transcend it.
If you are new to meditating, or don’t have time for it (go to point ‘a’), then a cool hack by Naval might help you: Meditate every night when you go to bed. You will either have a good meditation or will fall asleep. In both cases, you will have formed the habit of meditating before bed.
c. On needs to be in an internal state of revolution (ability to constantly change yourself)
The only way to grow and build yourself, to be an explorer, to find your new favorites, is to be willing to change. And that begins with curiosity and the ability to not get too attached to who you think you are.
Quite neat, no?
Well, this was a great book to begin the year with, and I can see myself going through the bookmarked pages every now and then.
Next up, I have picked Farnam Street’s, The Great Mental Models.
If I get bored or don’t like this new read, I will not hesitate to skim through it, or better put it down for something else. That is the one lesson from The Almanack I am definitely going to carry with me for the rest of my life!
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See you next Sunday,
Love, Riya
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