My Favorite Naval Ravikant Quotes:
“I don’t know about you, but I have very poor attention. I skim. I speed read. I jump around. I could not tell you specific passages or quotes from books. At some deep level, you do absorb them and they become part of the threads of the tapestry of your psyche.”
“Now we have the Internet, which is the greatest weapon of knowledge ever created, completely interconnected. It’s very easy to learn. If you actually have the desire to learn, everything is on the Internet. You can go on Khan Academy. You can get MIT and Yale lectures online. You can get all the coursework and get interactivity. You can read blogs by brilliant people. You can read all these great books. The ability to learn, the means of learning, the tools of learning, are abundant and infinite. It’s the desire that’s incredibly scarce.”
“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.”
“I do not want my sense of self to continue to develop and become stronger as I get older. I want it to be weaker and more muted so that I can live much more in present every day reality and accept nature and the world for what it is and appreciate it very much as a child would. Then not have to seek happiness through external circumstances, chasing the fits of preconceived notion that I have.”
“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.”
“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’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.”
“Basically whenever you throw any so-called good habit at somebody, they’ll have an excuse for themselves. Usually the most common is, I don’t have time. I don’t have time is just another way of saying, it’s not a priority. What you really have to do is say is it a priority or not. If something is your number one priority then you will get it. That’s just the way life works. If you’ve got a fuzzy basket of 10 or 15 different priorities, you’re going to end up getting none of them.”
“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.”
“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 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.”
“I don’t have time. I don’t have time is just another way of saying, it’s not a priority. What you really have to do is say is it a priority or not. If something is your number one priority then you will get it. That’s just the way life works. If you’ve got a fuzzy basket of 10 or 15 different priorities, you’re going to end up getting none of them.”
“For example, there’s a famous line that says that, “All of man’s problems arise because he can’t sit by himself in a room for 30 minutes
“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.”
“The one that I discovered that spoke to me was the day I realized that all these people that I was jealous of, I couldn’t just cherry-pick and 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% swap with who that person is, then there is no point in being jealous.”
“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 mma 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.”
“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.”
“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
“A lot of what goes on today is a lot of your listeners are right now, beating themselves up and scribbling notes and saying, “I need to do this and I need to do that and I need to do …” No, you don’t need to do anything. All you should do is what you want to do. If you stop trying to figure out how to do things the way other people want you to do them, then you get to listen to that little voice inside of your head that wants to do things a certain way and then you get to be you.”
“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.
“One thing I figured out kind of late is that generally, at least in the tech business in Silicon Valley, great people have great outcomes. You just have to be patient. Every person that I met at the beginning of my career 20 years ago, where I looked at them and said, “Wow, that guy or that gal is super capable. They’re so smart and dedicated and blah, blah, blah. Now we’ll just be friends or hang out or whatever”, and then I kind of forgot about them, all of them, almost without exception, became extremely successful. You just had to give them a long enough timescale. It never happens in the timescale you want or they want, but it does happen.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.
“We are highly judgmental, survival, and replication machines. 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 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”
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 monkey-player
competitive game. When it comes to learn to be happy, train yourself to be
happy, completely internal, no external progress, no external validation, 100%
you’re competing against yourself, single-player game. We are such social
creatures, we’re more like bees or ants, that we’re externally programmed
and driven, that we just don’t know how to play and win at these single-player
games anymore. We compete purely on multi-player games. The reality is
life is a single-player game.
“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.”