Naval’s advice how to become Happy

From Naval Ravikant’s “Almanack of Naval Ravikant”

Naval Ravikant’s advice how to become Happy:

• “The three big ones in life are wealth, health, and happiness. We pursue them in that order, but their importance is reverse.” (p. 126)
  
  
• “Don’t take yourself so seriously, . You’re just a monkey with a plan.” (p. 127)
  
  
• “I think the most common mistake for humanity is believing you’re going to be made happy because of some external circumstance.” (p. 137)
  
  
• “I think the most common mistake if I look at how they’re on planet earth, for humanity, is the idea or the belief that you’re going to be made happy because of some external circumstance. We just bought a new car. We have a baby. We needed a safer car. We were driving a little mini cooper before. Not enough room in there.  We bought a new car. Now I’m waiting for the new car to arrive. Of course, every night, I’m on the forums reading about the car. Why am I doing that? It’s a silly object. It’s a silly car. It’s not going to change my life that much or at all. I know that the instant the car arrives I won’t care about it anymore. What it is is, I’m addicted to the desiring. I’m addicted to the idea that this external thing is going to bring me some kind of happiness and joy and this is completely delusional.”
  
  
• “This led me to the conclusion, which seems trite, that 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.” (p. 140)
  
  
• “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.” (p. 145)
  
  
• “Happiness is a choice you make and a skill you develop.” (p. 134)
  
  
• “There’s the “five chimps theory” where you can predict a chimp’s behavior by the five chimps it hangs out with the most. I think that applies to humans as well. Maybe it’s politically incorrect to say you should choose your friends very wisely. But you shouldn’t choose them haphazardly based on who you live next to or who you happen to work with. The people who are the most happy and optimistic choose the right five chimps.” (p. 147)
  
  
• “At any given time, when you’re walking down the streets, a very small percentage of your brain is focused on the present. The rest is planning the future or regretting the past. This keeps you from having an incredible experience. It’s keeping you from seeing the beauty in everything and for being grateful for where you are. You can literally destroy your happiness if you spend all of your time living in delusions of the future.” (p. 134)
  
  
• “I just don’t believe in anything from my past. Anything. No memories. No regrets. No people. No trips. Nothing. A lot of our unhappiness comes from comparing things from the past to the present.” (p. 134)
  
  
• “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.” (p. 129)
  
  
• “A rational person can find peace by cultivating indifference to things outside of their control. I have lowered my identity. I have lowered the chattering of my mind. I don’t care about things that don’t really matter. I don’t get involved in politics. I don’t hang around unhappy people. I really value my time on this earth. I read philosophy. I meditate. I hang around with happy people. And it works. You can very slowly but steadily and methodically improve your happiness baseline, just like you can improve your fitness.” (p. 133)
  
  
• “The idea you’re going to change something in the outside world, and that is going to bring you the peace, everlasting joy, and happiness you deserve, is a fundamental delusion we all suffer from, including me. The mistake over and over and over is to say, “Oh, I’ll be happy when I get that thing,” whatever it is. That is the fundamental mistake we all make, 24/7, all day long.” (p. 138)
  
  
• “Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want. I don’t think most of us realize that’s what it is. I think we go about desiring things all day long and then wonder why we’re unhappy. I like to stay aware of it, because then I can choose my desires very carefully. I try not to have more than one big desire in my life at any given time, and I also recognize it as the axis of my suffering. I realize the area where I’ve chosen to be unhappy.” (p. 138)
  
  
• “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.” (p. 139)
  
  
• “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.” (p. 141)
  
  
• “There are a couple of these characters I know in my life. Jerzy Gregorek—I would consider him successful because he doesn’t need anything from anybody. He’s at peace, he’s healthy, and whether he makes more money or less money compared to the next person has no effect on his mental state.” (p. 141)
  
  
• “If you ask Behzad what’s his secret? He’ll just look up and say, “Stop asking why and start saying wow.” The world is such an amazing place. As humans, we’re used to taking everything for granted. Like what you and I are doing right now. We’re sitting indoors, wearing clothes, well-fed, and communicating with each other through space and time. We should be two monkeys sitting in the jungle right now watching the sun going down, asking ourselves where we are going to sleep.” (p. 148)
  
  
• “There’s a line from Blaise Pascal I read. Basically, it says: “All of man’s troubles arise because he cannot sit in a room quietly by himself.” If you could just sit for thirty minutes and be happy, you are successful. That is a very powerful place to be, but very few of us get there.” (p. 141)
  
  
• “I don’t think life is that hard. I think we make it hard.” (p. 143)
  
  
• “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. Then you just get tired of games. 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.” (p. 77)
  
  
• “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.” (p. 143)
  
  
• “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. You’re gone in three generations, and nobody cares. Before you showed up, nobody cared. It’s all single player.” (p. 143)
  
  
• “One day, I realized with all these people I was jealous of, I couldn’t just choose little aspects of their life. I couldn’t say I want his body, I want her money, I want his personality. You have to be that person. Do you want to actually be that person with all of their reactions, their desires, their family, their happiness level, their outlook on life, their self-image? If you’re not willing to do a wholesale, 24/7, 100 percent swap with who that person is, then there is no point in being jealous.” (p.144)
  
  
• “Essentially, you have to go through your life replacing your thoughtless bad habits with good ones, making a commitment to be a happier person. At the end of the day, you are a combination of your habits and the people who you spend the most time with.” (p. 147)
  
  
• “Many distinctions between people who get happier as they get older and people who don’t can be explained by what habits they have developed. Are they habits that will increase your long-term happiness rather than your short-term happiness? Are you surrounding yourself with people who are generally positive and upbeat people? Are those relationships low-maintenance? Do you admire and respect but not envy them?” (p. 147)
  
  
• “Just being very aware in every moment. If I catch myself judging somebody, I can stop myself and say, “What’s the positive interpretation of this?” I used to get annoyed about things. Now I always look for the positive side of it. It used to take a rational effort. It used to take a few seconds for me to come up with a positive. Now I can do it sub-second.” (p. 149)
  
  
• “A personal metric: how much of the day is spent doing things out of obligation rather than out of interest?” (p. 150)
  
  
• “In any situation in life, you always have three choices: you can change it, you can accept it, or you can leave it. If you want to change it, then it is a desire. It will cause you suffering until you successfully change it. So don’t pick too many of those. Pick one big desire in your life at any given time to give yourself purpose and motivation.” (p. 151)
  
  
• “Even if you can’t come up with something positive, you can say, “Well, the Universe is going to teach me something now. Now I get to listen and learn.” (p. 153)
  
  
• “You’re going to die one day, and none of this is going to matter. So enjoy yourself. Do something positive. Project some love. Make someone happy. Laugh a little bit. Appreciate the moment. And do your work.” (p. 156)
  
  
• “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.” (p. 161)
  
  
• “I don’t have time” is just another way of saying “It’s not a priority.” What you really have to do is say whether it is a priority or not. 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.” (p. 165)
  
  
• “To me, happiness is not about positive thoughts. It’s not about negative thoughts. It’s about the absence of desire, especially the absence of desire for external things. 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. If I latch onto a feeling, if I say, “Oh, I’m happy now,” and I want to stay happy, then I’m going to drop out of that happiness. Now, suddenly, the mind is moving. It’s trying to attach to something. It’s trying to create a permanent situation out of a temporary situation.” (p. 129)
  
  
• “Our lives are a blink of a firefly in the night. You’re just barely here. You have to make the most of every minute, which doesn’t mean you chase some stupid desire for your entire life. What it means is every second you have on this planet is very precious, and it’s your responsibility to make sure you’re happy and interpreting everything in the best possible way.” (p. 132)
  
  
• “When your mind quiets, you stop taking everything around you for granted. You start to notice the details. You think, “Wow, I live in such a beautiful place. It’s so great that I have clothes, and I can go to Starbucks and get a coffee anytime. Look at these people—each one has a perfectly valid and complete life going on in their own heads.” (p. 171)
  
  
• “At the very least, I do not want my sense of self to continue to develop and strengthen as I get older. I want it to be weaker and more muted so I can be more in present everyday reality, accept nature and the world for what it is, and appreciate it very much as a child would.” (p. 174)
  
  
• “I’m actually going back to my awareness level of OS, which is always calm, always peaceful, and generally happy and content. I’m trying to stay in awareness mode and not activate the monkey mind, which is always worried, frightened, and anxious. It serves incredible purpose, but I try not to activate the monkey mind until I need it. When I need it, I want to just focus on that. If I run it 24/7, I waste energy and the monkey mind becomes me. I am more than my monkey mind.” (p. 176)
  
  
• “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.” (p. 178)
  
  
• “This taught me the power of habits. I started realizing it’s all about habits. At any given time, I’m either trying to pick up a good habit or discard a previous bad habit. It takes time.” (p. 180)
  
  
• “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. Your time is all you have. Do not waste your time. This doesn’t mean you can’t relax. As long as you’re doing what you want, it’s not a waste of your time. But if you’re not spending your time doing what you want, and you’re not earning, and you’re not learning—what the heck are you doing?” (p. 189)
  
  
• “Don’t spend your time making other people happy. Other people being happy is their problem. It’s not your problem. If you are happy, it makes other people happy. If you’re happy, other people will ask you how you became happy and they might learn from it, but you are not responsible for making other people happy.” (p. 189)
  
  
• “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.” (p. 190)
  
  
• “A lot of our unhappiness also comes from comparing things from the past to the present.  First time you saw a sunset, it was amazing. It was jaw-dropping. You forgot yourself. The second time you saw it, it was cool. The hundredth time you see it, it’s nothing. The thousandth time you’re seeing it, and someone shows you a sunset, you’re like, “Well, actually, I saw this one sunset in Mexico at this time that was really cool.” You’re not even there.”
  
  
• “We are constantly walking around thinking I need this, I need that, trapped in the web of desires. Happiness is that state when nothing is missing. When nothing is missing, your mind shuts down and your mind stops running into the future or running into the past to regret something or to plan something.”
  
  
• “I just have this saying inside my head, the closer you want to get to me, the better your values have to be. I like that a lot. When I met my wife, it was a great test because I really wanted to be with her and she wasn’t so sure at the beginning. In the end, we ended up together because she saw my values. I am lucky I had developed them by that point. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have gotten her. Not that I own her or anything, there’s no attachment like that. I wouldn’t have deserved her. It’s like, as Charlie Munger says, “To find a worthy mate, be worthy of a worthy mate.”
  
  
• “I think all the benefits in life come from compound interest, whether in money or in relationships or love or health or activities or habits. I only want to be around people that I know I’m going to be around with for the rest of my life. I only want to work on things that I know have long-term payout.”
  
  
• “We also unconsciously pick up habits in the background and we keep them for decades. We may not realize that they’re bad for us until we’re ready to move on them. To some extent, our attitude in life, our mood, our happiness levels, depression levels, these are also habits. Do we judge people? How often do we eat? What kind of food do we eat? Do we walk or do we sit? Do we move? Do we exercise? Do we read? These are habits as well.”
  
  
• “A big habit the I’m working on, which is going to be really hard to explain in any way that any normal human being will understand this, but I’m trying to turn off my monkey mind. I think, when we’re born as children, we’re pretty blank slates. We’re living very much in the moment. We’re essentially just reacting to our environment through our instincts. We’re living in, what I would call the “real world.” When puberty comes along, that’s the onset of desire, it’s the first time you really, really want something and you start long-range planning for it. Because of that, you start thinking a lot and start building an identity and an ego to go and get what you want.
  
  
• “I’m not in this to make money. Money is just a piece of paper. Every time I see one of these billionaire founders giving away to a hospital or whatever, you know they overshot. They don’t need that much money. There’s huge diminishing returns to money after a certain point, especially now that I’m more into freedom from rather than freedom to.”
  
  
• “I think the hard thing here is seeing the truth. To see the truth, you have to get your ego out of the way because your ego doesn’t want to face the truth. The smaller you can make your ego, the less conditioned you can make your reactions, the less desires you can have about the outcome you want, the easier it to see the reality.”
  
  
• “the Buddhist saying that anger is a hot coal that you hold in your hand while waiting to throw it at somebody. I don’t want to be angry and I don’t want to be around angry people. I just cut them out of my life. I’m not judging them. I went through a lot of anger, too, and they have to work through it on their own. Go be angry at someone else somewhere else.”
  
  
• “I think everybody has values and a lot of finding great relationships, great coworkers, great lovers, wives, husbands, is finding other people where your values line up and then the little things don’t matter.”
  
  
• “I would combine radical honesty with an old rule that Warren Buffet has, which is praise specifically, criticize generally. I try to follow this. I don’t always follow it, but I think I follow it enough that it made a difference in my life. If you have a criticism of someone, then don’t criticize the person, criticize the general approach or criticize that class of activities.”
  
  
• “If you’re angry about something, or if you get an unhappy email and you want to respond, don’t respond for 24 hours.” What does that do? You calm down. The emotions subside, the hormones go down, and you’re in a better mental state 24 hours later. I think people already know this, but we just don’t act on it because, socially, we’re not conditioned to act on it.”
  
  
• “I don’t believe in macro-environmentalism, I believe in microenvironmentalism. I don’t believe in macro-charity. I believe in micro-charity. I don’t believe in macro improving the world. There’s a lot of people out there who get really fired up about I’m going to change the world, I’m going to change this person, I’m going to change the way people think. Nobody reaches enlightenment or internal happiness or does serious internal work in group settings. I think it’s all micro. It’s like change yourself, then maybe change your family and your neighbor before you get into abstract concepts about I’m going to change the world.”
  
  
• “At any given time, when you’re walking down the streets, a very small percentage of your brain is focused on the present. The rest is future planning or regretting the past. That’s keeping you from an incredible experience. It’s keeping you from seeing the beauty in everything and for being grateful for where you are.”
  
  
• “I have mental models around how do I determine if I can trust somebody, around what are the actual odds that this is going to work, how much margin of safety do I have, if it works out? Angel bets and venture bets are great because they have nonlinear outcomes in the positive, but on the downside you can only use one X. On the upside, you can make 10,000 X. I’ve tried to rig the game
  
  
• “That’s the hardest one. Integrity is the hardest one. Integrity usually comes out in two ways. One is long-term, which is you’ve known somebody for a while and you kind of know how they think about things. The more interesting one, there’s a short-term one, which is you just kind of see how they treat other people. There are lots and lots of people who will not screw over, screw over is a strong word, but they will do something that is self-dealing or slightly unethical relative to another business partner. The whole time they’ll say to you, nudge nudge, wink, wink, “I’m taking advantage of that person because they deserve it. You’re my friend and I would never do that to you.” Of course they would. Exactly. It’s very easy to change your definition of who friends are. I find that the people who really do things out of integrity, they have an internal moral compass. They don’t do unfair, unethical, or bad deals with other people because it would soil their own view of themselves and they wouldn’t be able to sleep themselves at night. Some of the highest integrity people I know, the worst thing you can do is you can say to them is, “I think you’re self-dealing on that one.” They will get so unhappy because they’ll be like, “No, no, no. That’s not who I am. I can’t be that person.” They’ll bend over backwards. Usually, I find that people that I negotiate with who are high integrity, they’re very easy to negotiate with. They’ll give you things that they don’t need to give you because they think it’s fair and vice versa.”
  
  
• “I think it’s the daily morning workout. That has been a complete gamechanger. It’s made me feel healthier, younger. It’s made me not go out late. It came from one simple thing, which is everybody says, “I don’t have time.”
  
  
• “Basically, if someone is using a lot of fancy words and a lot of big concepts, they probably don’t know what they’re talking about. I think the smartest people can explain things to a child. If you can’t explain it to a child, then you don’t know it.”
  
  
• “Again, this goes back to, I think, the really smart thinkers are clear thinkers and they understand the basics at a very, very fundamental level. I would rather understand the basics really well than have memorized all kinds of complicated concepts that I can’t stitch together and I can’t rederive them from the basics. If you can’t rederive them from the basics as you need it, you’re lost. You’re just memorizing.
  
  
• “The idea that you’re going to change something in the outside world and that is going to bring you the peace and everlasting joy and the happiness that you deserve, that is a fundamental delusion that we all suffer from, including me. The mistake over and over and over is to say, “Oh, I’ll be happy when I get that thing, whatever that is.” That’s the fundamental mistake that we all make, including me, 24/7, all day long.”
  
  
• “A lot of the oldest wisdom is actually in books. With books, you’re now talking about the combined works of all of humanity as opposed to just who happens to be blogging right now. I realized I missed that
  
  
• “I probably read one to two hours a day. That puts me in the top .00001%. I think that alone accounts for any material success that I’ve had in my life and any intelligence that I might have. Making it an actual habit is the most important thing.”
  
  
• “I think it’s the mark of a charlatan to try and explain simple things in complicated ways. It’s the mark of a genius to explain complicated things in simple ways. Really they should be able to do it very, very, very simply.”
  
  
• “I think the hard thing here is seeing the truth. To see the truth, you have to get your ego out of the way because your ego doesn’t want to face the truth. The smaller you can make your ego, the less conditioned you can make your reactions, the less desires you can have about the outcome you want, the easier it to see the reality”