My notes: The Almanack of Naval Ravikant
The Almanack of Naval Ravikant resonates with well me. I connect with some of the inherent characteristics and interests mentioned that have given me an edge throughout my life and others that have room for improvement. Regarding career path and focus, I’ve done a strong retrospective of my past entrepreneurial ventures and identified what my next path is. The Almanack perfectly highlights the vector( direction and magnitude) of the things I’ve determined to be important. I encourage everyone to read it or listen. Thanks to Naval Ravikant and Eric Jorgenson for making this available and free and to my great friend Ibra for his unwavering persistence in promoting it(haha).
Some of my notes on the first part:
LEVERAGE
Learn to sell. Learn to build.
Arm yourself with specific knowledge, accountability, and leverage.
Pursuing your genuine curiosity and passion
Specific knowledge is often highly technical or creative
Embrace accountability
To raise money, apply your specific knowledge with accountability and show resulting good judgment.
Capital and labor are permissioned leverage.
Code and media are permissionless leverage.
Study microeconomics, game theory, psychology, persuasion, ethics, mathematics, and computers.
Apply specific knowledge, with leverage, and eventually you will get what you deserve.
Summary: Productize 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.
Sales skills are a form of specific knowledge.
Specific knowledge, I mean figure out what you were doing as a kid or teenager almost effortlessly
Tinkering with technology, Explaining things
Ability to absorb data, obsess about it, and break it down
Tinkering with technology. And all of this stuff feels like play to me
Innate talents, your genuine curiosity, and your passion
Escape competition through authenticity
A perpetual learner
You really care about having studies the foundations, so your not scared of any book
Knowing how to be persuasive when speaking is far more important than being an expert digital marketer
You do need to be deep in something because otherwise you’ll be a mile wide and an inch deep and you won’t get what you want out of life. You can only achieve mastery in one or two things. It’s usually things you’re obsessed about. [74]
Intentions don’t matter. Actions do. That’s why being ethical is hard.
TAKE ON ACCOUNTABILITY
Embrace accountability and take business risks under your own name. Society will reward you with responsibility, equity, and leverage.
generally, people will forgive failures as long as you were honest and made a high-integrity effort
We live in an age of infinite leverage, and the economic rewards for genuine intellectual curiosity have never been higher.
Think about what product or service society wants but does not yet know how to get. You want to become the person who delivers it and delivers it at scale. That is really the challenge of how to make money.
If you have specific knowledge, you have accountability and you have leverage; they have to pay you what you’re worth.
Learn to sell, learn to build. If you can do both, you will be Unstoppable.
Judgment—especially demonstrated judgment, with high accountability and a clear track record—is critical. [78]
FIND WORK THAT FEELS LIKE PLAY
luck through persistence, hard work, hustle, and motion.
It starts becoming so deterministic, it stops being luck. The definition starts fading from luck to destiny.
Be a maker who makes something interesting
Apply specific knowledge with leverage and eventually, you will get what you deserve.
Judgment. Judgment is underrated.
My definition of wisdom is knowing the long-term consequences of your actions. Wisdom applied to external problems is judgment.
“Clear thinker” is a better compliment than “smart.”
Real knowledge is intrinsic, and it’s built from the ground up.
the smartest people can explain things to a child. If you can’t explain it to a child, then you don’t know it. It’s a common saying and it’s very true.
I would rather understand the basics really well than memorize all kinds of complicated concepts I can’t stitch together and can’t rederive from the basics. If you can’t rederive concepts from the basics as you need them, you’re lost. You’re just memorizing
Part of making effective decisions boils down to dealing with reality.
Cynicism is easy. Mimicry is easy.
Optimistic contrarians are the rarest breed.
I don’t believe I have the ability to say what is going to work. Rather, I try to eliminate what’s not going to work. I think being successful is just about not making mistakes. It’s not about having correct judgment. It’s about avoiding incorrect judgments.
To think clearly, understand the basics. If you’re memorizing advanced concepts without being able to re-derive them as needed, you’re lost.
Image from https://www.navalmanack.com/
