The Almanack Of Naval Ravikanth Flashcards
Cynicism is easy. Mimicry is easy. Optimistic contrarians are the rarest breed.
A contrarian isn’t one who always objects - that’s a conformist of a different sort. A contrarian reasons independently from the ground up and resists pressure to conform.
It’s only after you are bored you have the great ideas. It’s never going to be when you are stressed, or busy, running around or rushed. Make the time.
It’s actually really important to have empty space.
The number one thing clouding us from being able to see reality is we have preconceived notions of the way it should be.
When, on one day, truth hits your face, you suffer. You suffer because you’ve been putting off reality. You’ve been hiding it from yourself.
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 will be to see the reality.
You have to get your ego out of the way.
You can’t understand trigonometry without understanding arithmetic and geometry.
Richard Feynman very famously does this in “Six Easy Pieces”, one of his early physics lectures. He basically explains mathematics in 3 pages - starts from number-line - counting - ans then he goes all the way up to precalculus. He just builds it up through an unbroken chain of logic.
If you can’t explain it to a child, then you don’t know it.
If you want to get rich over your life in a deterministically predictable way, start on the bleeding edge of trends and study technology, design, and art - become really good at something.
You don’t get rich by spending your time to save money. You get rich by saving your time to make money.
Wisdom applied to external problems is judgement. They’re highly linked: knowing the long term consequences of your actions and then making the right decision to capitalise on that.
Wisdom is knowing the long term consequences of your actions
How to get rich?
Society will give you money for the things it wants but direct know here you get.
If I ask you to describe your real life to yourself, and you look back from your deathbed at the interesting things you’ve done, it’s all going to be around the sacrifices you made, the hard things you did.
Your real resume is just a catalog of all your suffering.
It takes time even once you have all of these pieces in place, there is an indeterminate amount of time you have to put in.
If you’re counting, you’ll run out of patience before succes actually arrives.
Everybody wants to get rich immediately, but the world is an efficient place; immediate doesn’t work. You do have to put in the time. You do have to put in the hours, and so I think you have to put yourself in the position with the specific knowledge, with accountability, with leverage, with the authentic skill set you have, to be the best in the world at what you do.
You have to enjoy it and keep doing it, keep doing it, and keep doing it. Don’t keep track, and don’t keep count because if you do, you will run out of time.
Youare trusted, reliable, high-integrity long-term-thinking dealmaker, when other people want to do deals but don’t know how to do them in a trustworthy manner with strangers, they will literally approach you and give you a cut of the deal just because of the integrity and reputation you’ve built up.
Warren Buffett gets offered deals to buy companies, buy war-rants, bail out banks, and do things other people can’t do because of his reputation. Of course, he has accountability on the line, and he has a strong brand on the line.
Your character and your reputation are things you can build, which will let you take advantage of opportunities other people may characterize as lucky, but you know it wasn’t luck.
Your character and your reputation are things you can build, which will let you take advantage of opportunities.
My co-founder Nivi said, “In a long-term game, it seems that everybody is making each other rich. And in a short-term game, it seems like everybody is making themselves rich.
I think that is a brilliant formulation. In a long-term game, it’s positive sum. We’re all baking the pie together. We’re trying to make it as big as possible. And in a short-term game, we’re cutting up the pie.
In a long-term game, it’s positive sum.
A third way is you become very good at spotting luck. If you are very skilled in a field, you will notice when a lucky break happens in your field, and other people who aren’t attuned to it won’t notice. So, you become sensitive to luck.
Become the best in your field, so much that you become very good at spotting luck.
Do l have to start a company to be successful?
The most successful class of people in Silicon Valley on a consistent basis are either the venture capitalists (because they are diversified and control what used to be a scarce resource) or people who are very good at identifying companies that have just hit product/market fit.
Those people have the background, expertise, and references those companies really want to help.
What is your definition of retirement and how you get there
Retirement is when you stop sacrificing today for an imaginary tomorrow. One is to save so much money that your passive income (without lifting a finger) covers your burn rate.
