Almanack of Naval Ravikant by Eric Jorgensen

Summary: Naval Ravikant is the most brilliant thinker I’ve stumbled upon. Any time he is a guest on a podcast, writes a tweet, or puts out any thoughts, I pay attention. This book is a compilation of his most brilliant thoughts, packaged together. Naval’s thoughts on building wealth and developing happiness are must-read.

Rating: 10/10

1. Seek leverage

If you want to become wealthy, you should seek to increase leverage. That means that you should increase your ability to deploy capital via labor, money, code, or media. Your inputs will have a disproportionate effect and you will be rewarded accordingly.

2. Play positive sum games

Zero sum games are games where there is a winner and a loser. In positive games, we can both win. If multiple people are working collaboratively at a company, they each have equity, and they increase that company’s value, the size of the pie increases and everyone wins.

3. Happiness is reality minus expectations

Seek to control your expectations. You have limited control over your reality. As you can learn to have a less fixed view of how things “should be,” you find that you are happier due to the fact that there isn’t a reality-expectation mismatch issue.

4. Become a super-learner

Historically, the model for learning in your careers was that you should go to college for 4 years, then use that knowledge for a 40 year career. Now, things move fast. You need to be able to get up to speed rapidly on a new subject and then use that knowledge effectively to learn. For instance, you should be able to master a new field in 9 months and then use that knowledge for 3-4 years.

Read whatever interests you. It is more important that you are reading something that you’ll actually read than that you finish every book that you read cover-to-cover. Have no qualms about dropping a book or just reading a chapter. Build up a tree of knowledge and don’t let any book in the library scare you.

5. Happiness is a skill

Happiness is not a fixed trait. People assume that you are either a happy person or you aren’t. There are tons of ways that you can increase your happiness. Meditation, journaling, healthy habits, watching your thoughts, etc. are all forms of becoming a happier version of yourself.

Kindle Highlights:

Getting rich is about knowing what to do, who to do it with, and when to do it.

If you don’t know yet what you should work on, the most important thing is to figure it out. You should not grind at a lot of hard work until you figure out what you should be working on.

Over time (sadly or fortunately), the thing I got really good at was looking at businesses and figuring out the point of maximum leverage to actually create wealth and capture some of that created wealth.

You’re not going to get rich renting out your time. You must own equity—a piece of a business—to gain your financial freedom.

You will get rich by giving society what it wants but does not yet know how to get. At scale.

Learn to sell. Learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable.

The most important skill for getting rich is becoming a perpetual learner. You have to know how to learn anything you want to learn. The old model of making money is going to school for four years, getting your degree, and working as a professional for thirty years. But things change fast now. Now, you have to come up to speed on a new profession within nine months, and it’s obsolete four years later. But within those three productive years, you can get very wealthy. It’s much more important today to be able to become an expert in a brand-new field in nine to twelve months than to have studied the “right” thing a long time ago. You really care about having studied the foundations, so you’re not scared of any book. If you go to the library and there’s a book you cannot understand, you have to dig down and say, “What is the foundation required for me to learn this?” Foundations are super important.

Knowing how to be persuasive when speaking is far more important than being an expert digital marketer or click optimizer. Foundations are key. It’s much better to be at 9/10 or 10/10 on foundations than to try and get super deep into things.

Intentions don’t matter. Actions do. That’s why being ethical is hard.

99% of effort is wasted.

I’m not saying don’t do the 99 percent, because it’s very hard to identify what the 1 percent is. What I’m saying is: when you find the 1 percent of your discipline which will not be wasted, which you’ll be able to invest in for the rest of your life and has meaning to you—go all-in and forget about the rest.

To get rich, you need leverage. Leverage comes in labor, comes in capital, or it can come through code or media. But most of these, like labor and capital, people have to give to you. For labor, somebody has to follow you. For capital, somebody has to give you money, assets to manage, or machines. So to get these things, you have to build credibility, and you have to do it under your own name as much as possible, which is risky. So, accountability is a double-edged thing. It allows you to take credit when things go well and to bear the brunt of the failure when things go badly. Clear accountability is important. Without accountability, you don’t have incentives. Without accountability, you can’t build credibility. But you take risks. You risk failure. You risk humiliation. You risk failure under your own name. Luckily, in modern society, there’s no more debtors’ prison and people aren’t imprisoned or executed for losing other people’s money, but we’re still socially hardwired to not fail in public under our own names. The people who have the ability to fail in public under their own names actually gain a lot of power.

If you don’t own a piece of a business, you don’t have a path towards financial freedom.

We live in an age of infinite leverage, and the economic rewards for genuine intellectual curiosity have never been higher. Following your genuine intellectual curiosity is a better foundation for a career than following whatever is making money right now.

If it entertains you now but will bore you someday, it’s a distraction. Keep looking.

If someone can train other people how to do something, then they can replace you. If they can replace you, then they don’t have to pay you a lot. You want to know how to do something other people don’t know how to do at the time period when those skills are in demand.

If they can train you to do it, then eventually they will train a computer to do it.

If you get good at managing capital, you can manage more and more capital much more easily than you can manage more and more people.

“products with no marginal cost of replication.”

Forget rich versus poor, white-collar versus blue. It’s now leveraged versus un-leveraged.

Every great software developer, for example, now has an army of robots working for him at nighttime while he or she sleeps, after they’ve written the code, and it’s cranking away.

Whenever you can in life, optimize for independence rather than pay. If you have independence and you’re accountable on your output, as opposed to your input—that’s the dream.

With a leveraged worker, judgment is far more important than how much time they put in or how hard they work.

When you do just the actual work itself, you’ll be far more productive, far more efficient. You’ll work when you feel like it—when you’re high-energy—and you won’t be trying to struggle through when you’re low energy. You’ll gain your time back.

Forty hour work weeks are a relic of the Industrial Age. Knowledge workers function like athletes—train and sprint, then rest and reassess.

If you want to be part of a great tech company, then you need to be able to SELL or BUILD. If you don’t do either, learn.

we know it’s better because this person has some accountability. They’re responsible for the outcome, they have to sweat at night if things aren’t working. Contractors have leverage through laborers working for them.

The developer takes on more risk, more accountability, has more leverage, and needs to have more specific knowledge.

You start as a salaried employee. But you want to work your way up to try and get higher leverage, more accountability, and specific knowledge. The combination of those over a long period of time with the magic of compound interest will make you wealthy. The one thing you have to avoid is the risk of ruin.

Judgment—especially demonstrated judgment, with high accountability and a clear track record—is critical.

We waste our time with short-term thinking and busywork. Warren Buffett spends a year deciding and a day acting. That act lasts decades.

The business world has many people playing zero sum games and a few playing positive sum games searching for each other in the crowd.

Wealth creation is an evolutionarily recent positive-sum game. Status is an old zero-sum game. Those attacking wealth creation are often just seeking status.

What is the most important thing to do for younger people starting out? Spend more time making the big decisions. There are basically three really big decisions you make in your early life: where you live, who you’re with, and what you do.

What are one or two steps you’d take to surround yourself with successful people? Figure out what you’re good at, and start helping other people with it. Give it away. Pay it forward. Karma works because people are consistent. On a long enough timescale, you will attract what you project. But don’t measure—your patience will run out if you count. An old boss once warned: “You’ll never be rich since you’re obviously smart, and someone will always offer you a job that’s just good enough.”

There are almost 7 billion people on this planet. Someday, I hope, there will be almost 7 billion companies.

I learned how to make money because it was a necessity. After it stopped being a necessity, I stopped caring about it. At least for me, work was a means to an end. Making money was a means to an end. I’m much more interested in solving problems than I am in making money.

Retirement is when you stop sacrificing today for an imaginary tomorrow. When today is complete, in and of itself, you’re retired.

Every person I met at the beginning of my career twenty years ago, where I looked at them and said, “Wow, that guy or gal is super capable—so smart and dedicated”…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.

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 success actually arrives.

People are oddly consistent. Karma is just you, repeating your patterns, virtues, and flaws until you finally get what you deserve. Always pay it forward. And don’t keep count.

Your real résumé is just a catalog of all your suffering. 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.

What making money will do is solve your money problems. It will remove a set of things that could get in the way of being happy, but it is not going to make you happy. I know many very wealthy people who are unhappy. Most of the time, the person you have to become to make money is a high-anxiety, high-stress, hard-working, competitive person. When you have done that for twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years, and you suddenly make money, you can’t turn it off. You’ve trained yourself to be a high-anxiety person. Then, you have to learn how to be happy. Let’s get you rich first. I’m very practical about it because, you know, Buddha was a prince. He started off really rich, then he got to go off in the woods.

You don’t get rich by spending your time to save money. You get rich by saving your time to make money.

Hard work is really overrated. How hard you work matters a lot less in the modern economy.

My definition of wisdom is knowing the long-term consequences of your actions.

The direction you’re heading in matters more than how fast you move, especially with leverage.

“Clear thinker” is a better compliment than “smart.”

Real knowledge is intrinsic, and it’s built from the ground up.

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.

The advanced concepts in a field are less proven. We use them to signal insider knowledge, but we’d be better off nailing the basics.

The “monkey mind” will always respond with this regurgitated emotional response to what it thinks the world should be. Those desires will cloud your reality. This happens a lot of times when people are mixing politics and business.

One definition of a moment of suffering is “the moment when you see things exactly the way they are.” This whole time, you’ve been convinced your business is doing great, and really, you’ve ignored the signs it’s not doing well. Then, your business fails, and you suffer because you’ve been putting off reality. You’ve been hiding it from yourself.

What we wish to be true clouds our perception of what is true. Suffering is the moment when we can no longer deny reality. Imagine we’re going through something difficult like a breakup, a job loss, a business failure, or a health problem, and our friends are advising us. When we’re advising them, the answer is obvious. It comes to us in a minute, and we tell them exactly, “Oh that girl, get over her, she wasn’t good for you anyway. You’ll be happier. Trust me. You’ll find someone.” You know the correct answer, but your friend can’t see it, because they’re in the moment of suffering and pain. They’re still wishing reality was different. The problem isn’t reality. The problem is their desire is colliding with reality and preventing them from seeing the truth, no matter how much you say it. The same thing happens when I make decisions. The more desire I have for something to work out a certain way, the less likely I am to see the truth. Especially in business, if something isn’t going well, I try to acknowledge it publicly and I try to acknowledge it publicly in front of my co-founders and friends and co-workers. Then, I’m not hiding it from anybody else. If I’m not hiding it from anybody, I’m not going to delude myself from what’s actually going on. What you feel tells you nothing about the facts—it merely tells you something about your estimate of the facts. It’s actually really important to have empty space.

It’s only after you’re bored you have the great ideas.

Very smart people tend to be weird since they insist on thinking everything through for themselves.

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. Cynicism is easy. Mimicry is easy. Optimistic contrarians are the rarest breed.

“How do I change the external world to make it more how I would like it to be?”

“Tension is who you think you should be. Relaxation is who you are.”

It’s really important to be able to uncondition yourself, to be able to take your habits apart and say, “Okay, this is a habit I probably picked up when I was a toddler trying to get my parent’s attention. Now I’ve reinforced it and reinforced it, and I call it a part of my identity. Does it still serve me? Does it make me happier? Does it make me healthier? Does it make me accomplish whatever I set out to accomplish?” I’m less habitual than most people. I don’t like to structure my day. To the extent I have habits, I try to make them more deliberate rather than accidents of history.

Any belief you took in a package (ex. Democrat, Catholic, American) is suspect and should be re-evaluated from base principles.

To be honest, speak without identity.

I used to identify as libertarian, but then I would find myself defending positions I hadn’t really thought through because they’re a part of the libertarian canon. If all your beliefs line up into neat little bundles, you should be highly suspicious.

Facebook redesigns. Twitter redesigns. Personalities, careers, and teams also need redesigns. There are no permanent solutions in a dynamic system.

Almost all biases are time-saving heuristics. For important decisions, discard memory and identity, and focus on the problem.

Radical honesty just means I want to be free. Part of being free means I can say what I think and think what I say. They’re highly congruent and integrated.

I never ask if “I like it” or “I don’t like it.” I think “this is what it is” or “this is what it isn’t.”

It’s really important for me to be honest. I don’t go out of my way volunteering negative or nasty things. I would combine radical honesty with an old rule Warren Buffett 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 to have 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 the class of activities. If you have to praise somebody, then always try and find the person who is the best example of what you’re praising and praise the person, specifically. Then people’s egos and identities, which we all have, don’t work against you. They work for you.

Tell everyone. Start now. It doesn’t have to be blunt. Charisma is the ability to project confidence and love at the same time. It’s almost always possible to be honest and positive.

The best mental models I have found came through evolution, game theory, and Charlie Munger.

Author and trader Nassim Taleb has great mental models. Benjamin Franklin had great mental models. I basically load my head full of mental models.

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.

Microeconomics and game theory are fundamental. I don’t think you can be successful in business or even navigate most of our modern capitalist society without an extremely good understanding of supply-and-demand, labor-versus-capital, game theory, and those kinds of things. Ignore the noise. The market will decide.

It’s a very simple concept. Julius Caesar famously said, “If you want it done, then go. And if not, then send.” What he meant was, if you want it done right, then you have to go yourself and do it. When you are the principal, then you are the owner—you care, and you will do a great job. When you are the agent and you are doing it on somebody else’s behalf, you can do a bad job. You just don’t care. You optimize for yourself rather than for the principal’s assets. The smaller the company, the more everyone feels like a principal. The less you feel like an agent, the better the job you’re going to do. The more closely you can tie someone’s compensation to the exact value they’re creating, the more you turn them into a principal, and the less you turn them into an agent.

It’s worth reading a microeconomics textbook from start to finish.

In the intellectual domain, compound interest rules. When you look at a business with one hundred users growing at a compound rate of 20 percent per month, it can very, very quickly stack up to having millions of users. Sometimes, even the founders of these companies are surprised by how large the business scales.

I think macroeconomics, because it doesn’t make falsifiable predictions (which is the hallmark of science), has become corrupted. You never have a counterexample when studying the economy.

If you find yourself creating a spreadsheet for a decision with a list of yes’s and no’s, pros and cons, checks and balances, why this is good or bad…forget it. If you cannot decide, the answer is no.

Simple heuristic: If you’re evenly split on a difficult decision, take the path more painful in the short term.

Reading science, math, and philosophy one hour per day will likely put you at the upper echelon of human success within seven years.

These days, I find myself rereading as much (or more) as I do reading.

Reading a book isn’t a race—the better the book, the more slowly it should be absorbed.

Pointing out obvious exceptions implies either the target isn’t smart or you aren’t.

I don’t believe in delayed gratification when there are an infinite number of books out there to read. There are so many great books.

Once I feel like I’ve gotten the gist, I feel very comfortable putting the book down.

If they wrote it to make money, don’t read it.

Explain what you learned to someone else. Teaching forces learning.

Study logic and math, because once you’ve mastered them, you won’t fear any book.

No book in the library should scare you. Whether it’s a math, physics, electrical engineering, sociology, or economics book. You should be able to take any book down off the shelf and read it. A number of them are going to be too difficult for you. That’s okay—read them anyway. Then go back and reread them and reread them.

Learn how to learn and read the books.

Because most people are intimidated by math and can’t independently critique it, they overvalue opinions backed with math/pseudoscience.

If you’re a perpetual learning machine, you will never be out of options for how to make money. You can always see what’s coming up in society, what the value is, where the demand is, and you can learn to come up to speed. To think clearly, understand the basics. If you’re memorizing advanced concepts without being able to re-derive them as needed, you’re lost.

You know that song you can’t get out of your head? All thoughts work that way. Careful what you read.

The three big ones in life are wealth, health, and happiness. We pursue them in that order, but their importance is reverse.

Don’t take yourself so seriously. You’re just a monkey with a plan.

Maybe happiness is not something you inherit or even choose, but a highly personal skill that can be learned, like fitness or nutrition.

The answer that works for me is going to be nonsense to you, and vice versa. Whatever happiness means to me, it means something different to you. I think it’s very important to explore what these definitions are. For some people I know, it’s a flow state. For some people, it’s satisfaction. For some people, it’s a feeling of contentment. My definition keeps evolving. The answer I would have given you a year ago will be different than what I tell you now.

Today, I believe happiness is really a default state. Happiness is there when you remove the sense of something missing in your life.

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. In that absence, for a moment, you have internal silence. When you have internal silence, then you are content, and you are happy. Feel free to disagree. Again, it’s different for everybody. People mistakenly believe happiness is just about positive thoughts and positive actions. The more I’ve read, the more I’ve learned, and the more I’ve experienced (because I verify this for myself), every positive thought essentially holds within it a negative thought. It is a contrast to something negative. The Tao Te Ching says this more articulately than I ever could, but it’s all duality and polarity. If I say I’m happy, that means I was sad at some point. If I say he’s attractive, then somebody else is unattractive. Every positive thought even has a seed of a negative thought within it and vice versa, which is why a lot of greatness in life comes out of suffering. You have to view the negative before you can aspire to and appreciate the positive. 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. Happiness to me is mainly not suffering, not desiring, not thinking too much about the future or the past, really embracing the present moment and the reality of what is, and the way it is. If you ever want to have peace in your life, you have to move beyond good and evil.

The world just reflects your own feelings back at you. Reality is neutral. Reality has no judgments. To a tree, there is no concept of right or wrong, good or bad. You’re born, you have a whole set of sensory experiences and stimulations (lights, colors, and sounds), and then you…

There are no external forces affecting your emotions.

However, if you view yourself as a bacteria or an amoeba—or if you view all of your works as writing on water or building castles in the sand, then you have no expectation for how life should “actually” be. Life is just the way it is.

What you’re left with in that neutral state is not neutrality. I think people believe neutrality would be a very bland existence. No, this is the existence little children live. If you look at little children, on balance, they’re generally pretty happy because they are really immersed in the environment and the moment, without any thought of how it should be given their personal preferences and desires.

A rational person can find peace by cultivating indifference to things outside of their control.

Happiness, love, and passion…aren’t things you find—they’re choices you make.

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.

Anticipation for our vices pulls us into the future. Eliminating vices makes it easier to be present.

“Enlightenment is the space between your thoughts.”

How I combat anxiety: I don’t try and fight it, I just notice I’m anxious because of all these thoughts. I try to figure out, “Would I rather be having this thought right now, or would I rather have my peace?” Because as long as I have my thoughts, I can’t have my peace.

A happy person isn’t someone who’s happy all the time.

It’s someone who effortlessly interprets events in such a way that they don’t lose their innate peace.

I think the most common mistake for humanity is believing you’re going to be made happy because of some external circumstance.

Looking outside yourself for anything is the fundamental delusion. Not to say you shouldn’t do things on the outside. You absolutely should. You’re a living creature. There are things you do. You locally reverse entropy. That’s why you’re here. You’re meant to do something. You’re not just meant to lie there in the sand and meditate all day long. You should self-actualize. You should do what you are meant to do. 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.

Happiness is being satisfied with what you have. Success comes from dissatisfaction. Choose.

all real success is internal and has very little to do with external circumstances.

The problem with getting good at a game, especially one with big rewards, is you continue playing it long after you should have outgrown it. Survival and replication drive put us on the work treadmill. Hedonic adaptation keeps us there. The trick is knowing when to jump off and play instead.

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.

“All of man’s troubles arise because he cannot sit in a room quietly by himself.”

The irony is the way most of us try to find peace is through war. When you start a business, in a way, you’re going to war. When you struggle with your roommates as to who should clean the dishes, you’re going to war. You’re struggling so you can have some sense of security and peace later.

You can get almost anything you want out of life, as long as it’s one thing and you want it far more than anything else.

Peace is happiness at rest, and happiness is peace in motion.

Today, the way we think you get peace is by resolving all your external problems. But there are unlimited external problems. The only way to actually get peace on the inside is by giving up this idea of problems.

The enemy of peace of mind is expectations drilled into you by society and other people.

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.

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.

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.

When working, surround yourself with people more successful than you. When playing, surround yourself with people happier than you.

What type of skill is happiness? It’s all trial and error. You just see what works. You can try sitting meditation. Did that work for you? Was it Tantra meditation or was it Vipassana meditation? Was it a ten-day retreat or was twenty minutes enough?

When it comes to medicines for the mind, the placebo effect is 100 percent effective. When it comes to your mind, you want to be positively inclined, not incredulous in belief. If it is fully internal, you should have a positive mindset.

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?

The people who are the most happy and optimistic choose the right five chimps.

“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.

The most important trick to being happy is to realize happiness is a skill you develop and a choice you make. You choose to be happy, and then you work at it. It’s just like building muscles. It’s just like losing weight. It’s just like succeeding at your job. It’s just like learning calculus. You decide it’s important to you. You prioritize it above everything else. You read everything on the topic.

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.

Hedonic adaptation is more powerful for man-made things (cars, houses, clothes, money) than for natural things (food, sex, exercise).

No exceptions—all screen activities linked to less happiness, all non-screen activities linked to more happiness.

A personal metric: how much of the day is spent doing things out of obligation rather than out of interest?

It’s the news’ job to make you anxious and angry. But its underlying scientific, economic, education, and conflict trends are positive. Stay optimistic.

Pick one thing. Cultivate a desire. Visualize it. Plan a sustainable path. Identify needs, triggers, and substitutes. Tell your friends. Track meticulously. Self-discipline is a bridge to a new self-image. Bake in the new self-image. It’s who you are—now.

First, you know it. Then, you understand it. Then, you can explain it. Then, you can feel it. Finally, you are it.

The phrase I probably use the most to myself in my head is just one word: “accept.”

What does acceptance look like to you? It’s to be okay whatever the outcome is. It’s to be balanced and centered. It’s to step back and to see the grander scheme of things.

How do you learn to accept things you can’t change? Fundamentally, it boils down to one big hack: embracing death. Death is the most important thing that is ever going to happen to you. When you look at your death and you acknowledge it, rather than running away from it, it’ll bring great meaning to your life. We spend so much of our life trying to avoid death. So much of what we struggle for can be classified as a quest for immortality.

Here’s a hot tip: There is no legacy. There’s nothing to leave. We’re all going to be gone. Our children will be gone. Our works will be dust. Our civilizations will be dust. Our planet will be dust. Our solar system will be dust. In the grand scheme of things, the Universe has been around for ten billion years. It’ll be around for another ten billion years.

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.

A lot of what goes on today is what many of you are doing right now—beating yourself 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, you get to listen to the little voice inside your head that wants to do things a certain way. Then, you get to be you.

Certainly, listen and absorb, but don’t try to emulate.

The combinatorics of human DNA and experience are staggering. You will never meet any two humans who are substitutable for each other.

Your goal in life is to find the people, business, project, or art that needs you the most. There is something out there just for you. What you don’t want to do is build checklists and decision frameworks built on what other people are doing. You’re never going to be them. You’ll never be good at being somebody else.

To make an original contribution, you have to be irrationally obsessed with something.

There are a number on the physical side. We have diets we are not evolved to eat. A correct diet should probably look closer to a paleo diet, mostly eating vegetables with a small amount of meat and berries.

We evolved for scarcity but live in abundance. There’s a constant struggle to say no when your genes always want to say yes. Yes to sugar. Yes to staying in this relationship. Yes to alcohol. Yes to drugs. Yes, yes, yes. Our bodies don’t know how to say no.

When everyone is sick, we no longer consider it a disease.

The problem is the sugar effect dominates the fat effect. If you eat a fatty meal and you throw some sugar in, the sugar is going to deliver hunger and fat is going to deliver the calories and you’re just going to binge.

I will just say in general, any sensible diet avoids the combination of sugar and fat together. Dietary fat drives satiety. Dietary sugar drives hunger. The sugar effect dominates. Control your appetite accordingly.

Most fit and healthy people focus much more on what they eat than how much. Quality control is easier than (and leads to) quantity control.

Ironically, fasting (from a low-carb/paleo base) is easier than portion control. Once the body detects food, it overrides the brain.

World’s simplest diet: The more processed the food, the less one should consume.

If you’ve got a fuzzy basket of ten or fifteen different priorities, you’re going to end up getting none of them.

An emotion is our evolved biology predicting the future impact of a current event. In modern settings, it’s usually exaggerated or wrong.

I think it’s actually very bad for your happiness. To me, the mind should be a servant and a tool, not a master. My monkey mind should not control and drive me 24/7.

A busy mind accelerates the passage of subjective time.

The modern struggle: Lone individuals summoning inhuman willpower, fasting, meditating, and exercising… Up against armies of scientists and statisticians weaponizing abundant food, screens, and medicine into junk food, clickbait news, infinite porn, endless games, and addictive drugs.