The Almanac of Naval Ravikant,

A Guide to Wealth and Happiness Written by Eric Jorgensen,

Forward by Tim Ferriss, Narrated by the Coss Adam I built the Naval Manak entirely out of transcripts, tweets, and talks Naval has shared.

Every attempt is made to present Naval in his own words.

However, there are a few important points.

The transcripts have been edited for clarity and brevity, multiple times.

Not all sources are primary, some excerpts are from writers quoting Naval.

I can't be 100% certain of every source's authenticity.

Please verify phrasing with a primary source before citing Naval from this text.

Please interpret generously.

Everything in this book is taken out of context.

Interpretations change over time.

Understand the original intent may be different than your interpretation in a different time, medium, format, and context.

In the process of creating this book, I may have mistakenly recontextualized, misinterpreted, or misunderstood things.

As content passed through time, space, and medium, some phrasing may have shifted in flight.

Tweets are used throughout the book to summarize and punctuate ideas.

This is what those Tweets will sound like when you hear them.

There are also questions from great interviewers like Shane Parrish, Sarah Lacey, Joe Rogan, and Tim Ferriss.

Those questions will all sound alike.

The book was created as a public service.

Naval is not earning any money from this book.

It is available for free download in PDF format and digital versions on navalmanac.com, including bonus material that was cut from this public service.

The audio is available for free in a podcast format as well.

Naval essays, podcasts, and more at nav.al, and is on Twitter at Naval.

On to the book.

Forward.

Dear listener, it feels strange for me to write these words as I committed many years ago to never write forwards.

I'm making a rare exception in this case.

First, a free version of this book is being offered to the world in a digital Kindle ebook format with no strings attached.

Second, I've known Naval for more than a decade and have long wanted someone to compile this book.

Third, I'm increasing the likelihood of Naval's next child being named Tim.

I'll settle for Timbo if he prefers.

Naval is one of the smartest people I've ever met,

and he's also one of the Not in the run into the fire without thinking twice sense,

but in the think twice and then tell everyone they're focusing on the wrong fire sense.

He is rarely part of any consensus,

and the uniqueness of his life, lifestyle, family dynamics, and startup successes is a reflection of conscious choices he's made to do things differently.

He can be as blunt as a foot to the face, but that's part of what I love and respect about him.

You never have to guess what Naval is thinking.

I've never had to guess how he's feeling about me, someone else, or a situation.

This is a huge relief in a world of double talk and ambiguity.

We've shared a of meals, shared a lot of deals, and hopped around the world together.

That's all to say that, while I consider myself a good people watcher, I consider myself an excellent naval watcher.

He is one of the people I call most for advice,

and I've watched him in many habitats through Easy times, hard times, recessions, booms, you name it.

Sure, he's the CEO and a co-founder of AngelList.

Sure, he previously co-founded Vast.com and Epinions, which went public as part of Shopping.com.

Sure, he's an angel investor and has invested in many mega successes, including Twitter, Uber, Yammer, and OpenDNS, to name it a few.

That's all great, of course, and it shows Naval is a world-class operator instead of an armchair philosopher.

But I don't take his perspectives, maxims, and thoughts seriously because There are lots of miserable, successful people out there.

Be careful about modeling those, as you will get all the bathwater with the baby.

I take Naval seriously because he,

questions nearly everything,

can think from first principles,

tests things well,

is good at not fooling himself, changes laughs a lot, thinks holistically, thinks long-term, and doesn't take himself to God damn seriously.

That last one is important.

This book will give you a good taste of what that cocktail of bullets looks like in Naval's head.

So, pay to But don't simply parrot his words.

Follow his advice.

But only if it holds up after scrutiny and stress testing in your own life.

Consider everything.

But take nothing as gospel.

Naval want you to challenge him as long as you bring your A-game.

Naval has changed my life for the better,

and if you approach the following like a friendly, but highly competent sparring partner, he might just change yours.

Keep your hands up, and your mind open.

Purovida, Tim Ferriss, Austin, Texas.

about this book.

Throughout his career, Naval has generously shared his wisdom and millions of people around the world follow his advice on building wealth and living happily.

Naval Ravikand is an icon in Silicon Valley and startup culture around the world.

He founded multiple successful companies, opinions during the 2000.com crash, Angelist in 2010.

Naval also an angel investor, betting early on companies like Uber, Twitter, Postmates, and hundreds more.

More than a financial success, Naval has been sharing his own philosophy of life and happiness, attracting readers and listeners throughout the world.

Naval is broadly followed because he is a rare combination of successful and happy.

After a lifetime of study and application of philosophy, economics and wealth creation, he has proven the impact of his principles.

Today, Naval continues to build and invest in companies almost casually in his own artistic way, while maintaining a healthy, peaceful and balanced

This book collects and organizes the pieces of wisdom he has shared and shows you how to achieve the same for yourself.

Navel's life story is instructive.

An introspective founder, self-taught investor, capitalist, and engineer certainly has something to teach us all.

As a first principal's thinker with no fear of speaking his truth, truth, Naval's thoughts are often unique and thought-provoking.

His instinct for seeing through life's veneer has changed how I see the world.

I've learned an enormous amount from Naval.

Reading, listening, and applying his principles of wealth and happiness has given me calm confidence on my path and taught me to enjoy every

moment of the world.

Closely studying his career has shown me how great things are accomplished through small persistent steps and how large an impact one individual can have.

I refer to his work often and recommend it to friends.

Those conversations inspired me to create this book,

so people can learn from his perspective whether they're new to Naval's ideas or have followed him the past ten years.

This book collects the wisdom shared by Naval over the past decade in his own words through Twitter, blog posts and podcasts.

With this book, you can get the benefits of a lifetime in a few hours.

I created this book as a public service.

Tweets, podcasts, and interviews quickly get buried and lost.

Knowledge valuable deserves a more permanent, accessible format.

That is my mission with this book.

I hope this acts as an introduction to Naval's ideas.

I've collected his most powerful and useful ideas in his own words, woven into a readable thread, and organized those into sections for easy reference.

I often find myself reviewing sections of this book before making an investment or opening to the happiness chapter if I'm feeling off.

Creating this book has changed.

I feel more clarity, confidence, and peace through all aspects of life.

I hope listening to it will do the same for you.

The Almanac is intended as a guide to be read, and listened to, and consulted for specific topics.

If Naval doesn't answer your emails, I hope this book gives you the next best advice.

This book is an introduction to Naval and dives deeply into his two most explored topics, wealth and happiness.

If you want to continue exploring Naval and his other ideas,

I encourage you to check out the Next on Naval section at the end of this book.

I've shared chapters that were edited out of the final book, as well as other popular resources.

Be well, Eric.

1974.

Born in Delhi, India.

1985.

Age Move from New Delhi to Queens, New York.

1989.

Age Attended Stuyvesant High School.

1995.

Age 1.

Graduated Dartmouth studied computer science and economics.

1999, age 25.

Founder, CEO of Opinions.

2001, age 27.

Venture Partner at August Capital.

2003, age founderofvast.com, a classified ad marketplace.

2005, age 31, is called radioactive mud in Silicon Valley.

2007, age 33, founded Hitforge, a small VC fund originally conceived as an incubator.

2007, age 32, launched Venture Hacks Blog 2010, age 36, launched AngelList 2010, age 36,

invested in Uber 2012, age 32, lobbied Congress to get the Jobs Act passed.

2018, age 44, is named Angel Investor of the Year.

Now, here is Naval in his own words.

I grew up in a single-parent household with my mom working, going to school, and raising my brother and me as latchkey kids.

We were very self-sufficient from a very early age.

There was a lot of hardship, but everyone goes through heart.

It did help me in a number of ways.

We were poor immigrants.

My dad came to the U.S.

He was a pharmacist in India.

But his degree wasn't accepted here, so he worked in a hardware store.

Not a great upbringing, you know.

My family split up.

My mother uniquely provided, against the background of hardship, unconditional and unfailing love.

If you have nothing in your life, but you have at least one person that loves you unconditionally, it'll do wonders for your self-esteem.

We run a part of New York City that isn't very safe.

Basically, the library was my afterschool.

After I came back from school, I would just go straight to the library and hang out there until they closed.

Then, I would come home.

That was my daily routine.

We moved to the U.S.

when we were very young.

I didn't have many friends, so I wasn't very confident.

I spent a lot of time reading.

My only real friends were books.

Books make for great friends because the best thinkers of the last few thousand years tell you their nuggets of wisdom.

My first job was with an illegal catering company in the back of a van delivering Indian food when I was born.

Even when I was younger, I had a paper out, and I washed dishes in the cafeteria.

I was a totally unknown kid in New York City from a nothing-family, and immigrants trying to survive situation.

Then, I passed the test to get into Stuyvesant High School.

That saved my life, because once I had the Stuyvesant brand, I got into an Ivy League college which led me into tech.

Stuyvesant is one of those intelligence lottery situations where you can break in with instant validation.

You go from being blue collar to white collar in one move.

At Dartmouth, I studied economics and computer science.

There was a time when I thought I was going to be a PhD in economics.

Today I'm an investor, personally, in about 200 companies, advisor to a bunch.

I'm on a bunch of boards.

I'm also a small partner in a cryptocurrency fund because I'm really into the potential of cryptocurrencies.

I'm always cooking up something new.

I always have a bunch of side projects.

All that, of course, in addition to being the founder and chairman of AngelList.

I was born poor and miserable.

I'm now pretty well off, and I'm very happy.

I work I've learned a few things and some principles.

I try to lay them out in a timeless manner where you can figure it out for yourself.

Because at the end of the day, I can't quite teach anything.

I can only inspire you and maybe give you a few hooks so you can remember.

on Twitter.

It's Naval.

Applause ensues on May 18th, 2007.

How to get rich without getting lucky?

1.

Building Making money is not a thing you do.

It's a skill you learn.

Understand wealth is created.

I like to think that if I lost all my money and you dropped me on a random street in any English speaking country,

within five or ten years I'd be wealthy again because it's just a skill set I've developed that anyone can develop.

It's not really about hard work.

You can work in a restaurant 80 hours a week and you're not going to get rich.

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

It is much more about understanding than purely hard work.

Yes, hard work matters and you can't skimp on it.

But it has to be directed in the right way.

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.

I came up with the principles in my tweet storm for myself when I was really young, around 13 or 14.

I've been carrying them in my head for 30 years, and I've been living them.

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.

This is exactly what I did my famous tweetstorm about.

Of course, every one of these tweets can be extrapolated into an hour's worth of conversation.

The tweet storm below is a good starting point.

The tweet storm tries to be information dense, very concise, high impact, and timeless.

It has all the information and principles, so if you absorb these and you work hard over ten years, you'll get what you want.

How to get rich without getting lucky.

Seek not money or status.

Wealth having assets that earn while you sleep.

Money how we transfer time and wealth.

Status is your place in the social hierarchy.

Understand, ethical wealth creation is possible.

If you secretly despise wealth, it will elude you.

Ignore playing status games.

They gain status by attacking people playing wealth creation games.

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.

Pick an industry where you can play long-term games with long-term people.

The Internet has massively broadened the possible space of careers.

Most people haven't figured this out yet.

Play iterated games.

All the returns in life, whether in wealth, relationships, or knowledge, come from compound interest.

Pick business partners with high intelligence, energy, and above all, integrity.

Don't partner with cynics and pessimists.

Their beliefs are self-fulfilling.

Learn to sell.

Learn to build.

If you can do both, you will be unstoppable.

Arm yourself with specific knowledge, accountability, and leverage.

Specific knowledge is knowledge you cannot be trained for.

If society can train you,

it can train someone else and Specific knowledge is found by pursuing your genuine curiosity and passion rather than whatever is hot right now.

Building specific knowledge will feel like play to you but will look like work to others.

When specific knowledge is taught, it's through apprenticeships, not Specific knowledge is often highly technical or creative.

It cannot be outsourced or automated.

Embrace accountability and take business risks under your own name.

Society will reward you with responsibility.

and leverage.

Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand, and I will move the earth.

Archimedes.

Fortunes require leverage.

Business leverage comes from capital, people, and products with no marginal cost of replication.

code and media.

Capital money.

To raise money, apply your specific knowledge with accountability and show resulting good judgment.

Labor means people working for you.

It's the oldest and most fought over form of leverage.

Labor leverage will impress your parents, but don't waste your life chasing it.

Capital and labor are permissioned leverage.

Everyone chasing capital, but someone has to give it to you.

Everyone is trying to lead, but someone has to follow you.

Code and media are permissionless leverage.

They're the leverage behind the newly rich.

You can create software and media that works for you while you sleep.

An army of robots is freely available.

It's just packed in data centers for heat and space efficiency.

use it.

If can't code, write books and blogs, record videos and podcasts.

Leverage is a force multiplier for your judgment.

Judgment requires experience but can be built faster by learning foundational skills.

There is no skill called business.

Avoid business magazines and business classes.

Study microeconomics, game theory, psychology, persuasion, ethics, mathematics, and computers.

Reading is faster than listening.

Doing is faster than watching.

You should be too busy to do coffee while still keeping an uncluttered calendar.

Set and enforce an aspirational personal hourly rate.

If fixing a problem will save less than your hourly rate, ignore it.

If outsourcing a task will cost less than your hourly rate, outsource it.

Work as hard as you can, even though who you work with and what you work on are more important than how hard you work.

Become the best in the world at work.

Keep redefining what you do until this is true.

There are no get-rich-quick schemes, those are just someone else getting rich off you.

Apply specific knowledge with leverage and eventually you will get what you deserve.

When you're finally wealthy, you'll realize it wasn't what you were seeking in the first place, but that is for another day.

Summary?

Productize yourself.

Your summary says, productize yourself.

What does that mean?

Productize and yourself.

Your self has uniqueness.

Productize has leverage.

Your self has accountability.

Productize has specific knowledge.

Your self also has specific knowledge in it.

So all of these pieces, you can combine them into these two words.

If you're looking toward the long-term goal of getting wealthy, you should ask yourself, is this authentic to me?

Is it myself that I am projecting?

And then am I productizing it?

Am I scaling it?

Am I scaling with labor or with capital or with code or with media?

So, it's a very handy, simple mnemonic.

This is hard.

This is why I say it takes decades.

I'm not saying it takes decades to execute, but the better part of a decade may be figuring out what you can uniquely provide.

What's the difference between wealth and wealth?

Money is how we transfer wealth.

Money social credits.

It is the ability to have credits and debits of other people's time.

If I do my job right, if I create value for society, society says, oh, thank you.

We owe you something in the future for the work Here's a little IOU.

Let's call that money.

Wealth the thing you want.

Wealth is assets that earn while you sleep.

Wealth is the factory, the robots, cranking out things.

Wealth is the computer program that's running at night,

serving other Wealth is even money in the bank that is being reinvested into other assets and into other businesses.

Even a house can be a form of wealth,

because you can rent it out, although that's probably a lower productivity use of land than some commercial enterprise.

So my definition of wealth is much more businesses and assets that can earn while you sleep.

Technology democratizes consumption but consolidates production.

The best person in the world at anything gets to do it for everyone.

Society will pay you for creating things at once.

But society doesn't yet know how to create those things because if it did, they wouldn't need you.

They would already be stamped out.

Almost everything in your house, in your workplace and on the street, used to be technology at one point in time.

There was a time when oil was a technology that made JD Rockefeller rich.

There was a time when cars were technology that made Henry Ford rich.

So, technology is the set of things, as Alan Kay said, that don't quite work yet.

Correction, Danny Hillis.

Once something works, it's no longer technology.

Society always wants new things.

And if you want to be wealthy,

you want to figure out which one of those things you can provide for society that it does not yet know how to get,

but it will want, and providing it as natural to you within your skill set and within your capabilities.

Then, you have to figure out how to scale it, because if you only build one, that's not enough.

You've got to build thousands, or hundreds of thousands, or millions, or billions of them so everybody can have one.

Steve Jobs, and his team of course, figured out society would want smartphone.

a computer in their pocket that had all the phone capability times 100 and was easy to use.

So, they figured out how to build it, and then they figured out how to scale it.

Find and build specific knowledge.

Sales skills are a form of specific knowledge.

There's such a thing as a natural in sales.

You run into them all the time in startups and venture capital.

When you meet someone who is a natural at sales, you just know they're amazing.

They're really good at what they do.

That is a form of specific knowledge.

Obviously they learned somewhere, but they didn't learn it in a classroom setting.

They learned probably in their childhood in the schoolyard, or they learned negotiating with their parents.

Maybe some as a genetic component in the DNA.

But you can improve sales skills.

You can read Robert Chaldini.

You can go to a sales training seminar.

You can do door-to-door sales.

It is brutal, but will train you very quickly.

You definitely improve your sales skills.

Specific knowledge cannot be taught, but it can be learned.

When I talk about specific knowledge, I mean, figure out what you were doing as a kid or teenager almost effortlessly.

Something you didn't even consider a skill, but people around you noticed.

Your mother or your best friend growing up would know.

Examples what your specific knowledge could be.

Sales Musical with the ability to pick up any instrument.

An obsessive personality.

You dive into things and remember them quickly.

Love for science fiction.

You were into reading sci-fi, which means you absorb a of knowledge very quickly.

Playing a lot of games, you understand game theory pretty well.

Gossipping, digging into your friend name.

that might make you into a very interesting journalist.

The specific knowledge is sort of this weird combination of unique traits from your DNA, your upbringing, and your response to it.

It's almost baked into your personality and your identity.

Then you can hone it.

No one can compete with you on being you.

Most of life is a search for who and what needs you the most.

For example, I love to read and I love technology.

I learn very quickly and I get bored fast.

If I had gone into a profession where I was required to tunnel down for 20 years into the same topic, it wouldn't have worked.

I'm in venture investing,

which requires me to come up to speed very, very quickly on new technologies, and I'm rewarded for getting bored because new technologies come up.

It matches up pretty well with my specific knowledge and skill sets.

I want it to be a scientist.

That is where a lot of my moral hierarchy comes from.

I view scientists as being at the top of the production chain for humanity.

The group of scientists who have made real breakthroughs and contributions probably added more to human society,

I think, than any single other class of human beings.

Not to take away anything from art,

or politics, or engineering, or business, but without science, we'd still be scrambling in the dirt fighting with sticks and trying to start fires.

Society, business, and money are downstream of technology, which is itself downstream of science.

Science is the engine of humanity.

Corollary, applied are the most powerful people in the world.

This will be more obvious in the coming years.

My whole value system was built around scientists, and I wanted to be a great scientist.

But when I actually looked back at what I was uniquely good at and what I ended up spending my time doing,

it was more around making money, tinkering with technology and selling people on things.

explaining things and talking to people.

I have some sales skills, which is a form of specific knowledge.

I have some analytical skills on how to make money.

And I have this ability to absorb data, obsess about it, and break it down.

That is a specific skill that I have.

I also love tinkering with technology, and all of this stuff feels like play to me, but it looks like work to others.

There are other people to whom these things would be hard,

and they say, well, how do I get good at being pithy and selling ideas?

Well, if you're not already good at it, or if you're not really into it, maybe it's not your thing.

Focus on the thing that you are really into.

The first person to actually point out my real specific knowledge was my mother.

She did it as an aside, talking from the kitchen, and she said it when I was 15 or 16 years old.

I was telling a friend of mine that I want to be an astrophysicist and she said, No, you're going to go into business.

I was like, What, my mom's telling me I'm going to be in business?

I'm going to be an astrophysicist.

Mom doesn't know what she's talking about.

But mom knew exactly what she was talking about.

Specific knowledge is found much more by pursuing your innate talents, your curiosity and your passion.

It's not by going to school for whatever is the hottest job.

It's not by going into whatever field investors say is the hottest.

Very often, specific knowledge is at the edge of knowledge.

It's also stuff that's only now being figured out or is really hard to figure out.

If you're not 100% into it, somebody else who is 100% into it will outperform you.

And they won't just outperform you by a little bit.

it.

They'll outperform you by a lot, because now we're operating the domain of ideas.

Compound interest really applies, and leverage really applies.

The Internet has massively broadened the possible space of careers.

Most people haven't figured this out yet.

You can go on the internet, and you can find your audience.

And you can build a business, and create a product, and build wealth, and make people happy just uniquely expressing yourself through the internet.

The internet enables any niche interest, as long as you're the best person at it to scale out.

And the great news is, because every human is different.

Everyone the best at something.

Being Another tweet I had that is worth weaving in, but didn't go into the how to get rich tweet storm was very simple.

Escape through authenticity.

Basically, when you're competing with people, it's because you're copying them.

It's because you're trying to do the same thing.

But every human is different.

Don't copy.

If you're fundamentally building and marketing something that is an extension of who you are, no one can compete with you on that.

Who's going to compete with Joe Rogan or Scott Adams?

it's impossible.

Is somebody else going to come along and write a better Dilbert?

No.

Is someone going to compete with Bill Waterson and create a better Calvin and Hobbes?

No.

They're being authentic.

The best jobs are neither decreed nor decreed.

They are creative expressions of continuous learners in free markets.

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 30 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, 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 9 to 12 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.

Basic arithmetic and numeracy are way more important in life than doing kiddo.

Similarly, being able to convey yourself simply using ordinary English words is far more important

than being able to write poetry, having an extensive vocabulary, or speaking seven different foreign languages.

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 out of 10 or 10 out of 10 on foundations

than to try and get super deep into things.

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.

Play long-term games with long-term people.

All the returns in life, whether in wealth, relationships, or knowledge, come from compound interest.

How does one know if they're earning compound interest?

Compound interest is a very powerful concept.

Compound interest applies to more than just compounding capital.

Compounding capital is just the beginning.

Compounding in business relationships is very important.

Look at some of the top roles in society, like why someone is a CEO of a public company or managing billions of dollars.

It's because people trust them.

They are trusted because the relationships they've built and the work they've done has

They've stuck with the business and shown themselves in a visible and accountable way to be high-integrity people.

Compound interest also happens in your reputation.

If you have a sterling reputation and you keep building it for decades upon decades, people will notice.

Your reputation will literally end up being thousands or tens of thousands of times more valuable than somebody else who was very talented but is not keeping the compound interest in reputation going.

This is also true when you're working with individual people.

If you've worked with somebody for 5 or 10 years,

and you still enjoy working with them, obviously you trust them, and the little foibles are gone.

All the normal negotiations and business relationships can work very simply because you trust each other.

You know it will work out.

For example, there's another angel in Silicon Valley named Illad Gil who I like to do deals with.

I love working with Illad because I know when the deal is being done, he will bend over backward to give me extra.

He will always round off in my favor if there's an extra dollar being delivered here or there.

If there's some cost to pay, he will pay it out of his own pocket and he won't even mention it to me.

me.

Because he goes so far out of his way to treat me so well, I send him every deal I have.

I try to include him in everything.

Then, I go out of my way to try and pay for him.

Compounding in those relationships is very valuable.

Intentions don't matter, actions do.

That's why being ethical is hard.

When you find the right thing to do, when you find the right people to work with, invest deeply.

Sticking with it for decades is really how you make the big returns in your relationships and in your money.

So compound interest is very important.

99% of effort is wasted.

Obviously, nothing is ever completely wasted because it's all a learning moment.

You can learn from anything.

But for example,

when you go back to school,

99% of the term papers you did, books you read, exercises you did, things you learned, they don't really apply.

You might have read geography and history you never reuse.

You might have studied a language you don't speak.

You might have studied a branch of mathematics you completely forgot.

Of course, these are learning experiences.

You did learn.

You learned the value of hard work.

You might have learned something that went deep into your psyche and became a piece of what you're doing now.

But at least when it comes to the goal-oriented life, only about 1% of the efforts you made paid off.

Another example is all the people you dated until you met your husband or wife.

It was wasted time in the goal sense.

Not wasted in the exponential sense, not wasted in the learning sense, but definitely wasted in the goal sense.

The reason I say this is not to make some glib comment about how 99%

of your life is wasted and only 1% is useful.

I say this because you should be very thoughtful and realize in most things,

relationships, work, even in the learning What you're trying to do is find the thing you can go all in on to earn compound interest.

When you're dating, the instant you know this relationship is not going to be the one that leads to marriage, you should probably move on.

When you're studying something, like a geography or history class, and you realize you are never going to use the information, drop the class.

It's a waste of time.

It's a waste of your brain energy.

I'm not saying don't do the 99% because it's very hard to identify what the 1% is.

What I'm saying is,

when you find the 1%

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.

Intensions don't matter.

Actions Take accountability.

Embrace accountability and take business risks under your own name.

Society will reward you with responsibility, equity, and leverage.

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 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 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-

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.

I'll give a personal anecdote.

Up until about 2013-2014, my public persona was entirely around startups and investing.

Only around 2014-2015 did I start talking about philosophy and psychological things and broader things.

It made me a little nervous because I was doing it under my own name.

There were definitely people in the industry who sent me messages through the back channel like, what are you doing?

You're ending your career.

This is stupid.

I kind of just went with it.

I took a risk.

Same with crypto.

Early I took a risk.

But when you put your name out there, you take a risk with certain things.

You also get to reap the rewards.

You get the benefits.

In the old days, the captain was expected to go down with the ship.

If the ship was sinking, then literally the last person to get off was the captain.

Accountability come with real risks, but we're talking about a business context.

The risk here would be you would probably be the last one to get your capital back out.

You'd be the last one to get paid for your time.

The time that you put in, the capital you put into the company, these are at risk.

Realize that in modern society, the downside risk is not that large.

Even bankruptcy can wipe the debts clean in good ecosystems.

I'm most familiar with Silicon Valley, but generally, people will forgive failures as long as you were honest and made a high-integrity effort.

There's not really that much to fear in terms of failure, and so people should take on a lot more accountability than they do.

Build or buy equity in a business.

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

Why is owning equity in a business important to becoming rich?

It's ownership versus wage work.

If you are paid for renting out your time,

even lawyers and doctors, you can make some money, but you're not going to make the money that gives you financial freedom.

You're not going to have passive income where a business is earning for you while you are on vacation.

This is probably one of the most important points.

People seem to think you can create wealth, make money through work.

It's probably not going to work.

There are many reasons for that.

Without your inputs are very closely tied to your outputs.

In almost any salaried job,

even one paying a lot per hour like a lawyer or a doctor, you're still putting in the hours, and every hour you get paid.

Without ownership, when you're sleeping, you're not earning.

When you're retired, you're not earning.

When you're on vacation, you're not earning.

And you can't earn non-linearly.

If you look at even doctors who get rich, like really rich, it's because they open a business.

They open a private practice.

The private practice builds a brand, and the brand attracts people.

Or they build some kind of a medical device,

a procedure,

or a process with an intellectual Essentially,

you're working for somebody else, and that person is taking on the risk and has the accountability, the intellectual property, and the brand.

They're not going to pay you enough.

They're going to pay you the bare minimum they have to to get you to do their job.

That can be a high better job.

but it's still not going to be true wealth where you're retired, but still earning.

Owning equity in a company basically means you own the upside.

When you own debt, you own guaranteed revenue streams and you own the downside.

You want to own equity.

If you don't own equity in a business, your odds of making money are very slim.

You have to work up to the point where you can own equity in a business.

You could own equity as a small shareholder where you bought stock.

You could also own it as an owner where you started the company.

Ownership is really important.

Everybody who really makes money at some point owns a of a product, a business, or some IP.

That can be through stock options if you work at a tech company.

That's a fine way to start.

But usually, the real wealth is created by starting your own companies, or even by investing.

In an investment firm, they're buying equity.

These are the routes to wealth.

It doesn't come through the hours.

Find position of leverage.

We live in an age of infinite leverage, and the economic rewards for genuine intellectual curiosity have never been higher.

Following genuine intellectual curiosity is a better foundation for a career than following whatever is making money right now.

Knowledge only you know or only a small set of people knows is going to come out of your passions and your hobbies, oddly enough.

If you have hobbies around your intellectual curiosity, you're more likely to develop these passions.

If it entertains you now, but will bore you some day, it's a distraction.

Keep I only really want to do things for their own sake.

That is one definition of art.

Whether it's business, exercise, romance, friendship, whatever.

I think the meaning of life is to do things for their own sake.

Ironically, when you do things for their own sake, you create your best work.

Even if you're just trying to make money, you will actually be the most successful.

The year I generated the most wealth for myself was actually the year I worked the least hard and cared the least about the future.

I was mostly doing things for the sheer fun of it.

I was basically telling people, I'm retired, I'm not working.

Then I had the time for whatever was my highest valued project.

By doing things for their own sake, I did them at their best.

The less you want something,

the less you're thinking about it,

the less you're obsessing over it,

the more you're going to do it in a natural way, the more you're going to do it for yourself.

You're going to do it in a way you're good at, and you're going to stick with it.

The people around you will see the quality of your work is higher.

Follow intellectual curiosity more than whatever is hot right now.

If your curiosity ever leads you to a place where society eventually wants to go, you'll get paid extremely well.

You're more likely to have skills, society does not yet know how to train other people to do.

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 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.

You get rewarded by society, forgiving it what it wants, and doesn't know how to get elsewhere.

A lot of people think you can go to school and study for how to make money,

but the reality is there's no skill called business.

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.

Now, the problem is becoming good at whatever it is.

It moves around from generation to generation, but a lot of it happens to be in technology.

You are waiting for your moment when something emerges.

They need a skill set, and you're uniquely qualified.

You build your brand in the meantime on Twitter, on YouTube, and by giving away free work.

You make a name for yourself, and you take some risk in the process.

When it is time to move on the opportunity, you can do so with leverage.

The maximum leverage possible.

There are three broad classes of leverage.

One form of leverage is labor.

Other humans working for you.

It is the oldest form of leverage and actually not a great one in the modern world.

I would argue this is the worst form of leverage that you could possibly use.

Managing other people is incredibly messy.

money.

It requires tremendous leadership skills.

You're one short hop from a mutiny or getting eaten or torn apart by the mob.

Money is good as a form of leverage.

It means every time you make a decision, you multiply it with money.

Capital a trickier form of leverage to you.

It's more modern.

It's the one that people have used to get fabulously wealthy in the last century.

It's probably been the dominant form of leverage in the last century.

You can see this by looking for the richest people.

It's bankers, politicians corrupt countries who print money, essentially people who move large amounts of money around.

If you look at the top of very large companies,

outside of technology companies, in many, many large old companies, the CEO job is really a financial job.

It scales very, very well.

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.

The final form of leverage is brand new, the most democratic form.

It is, product with no marginal cost of replication.

This includes books, media, movies and codes.

code is probably the most powerful form of permissionless leverage all you need is a computer you don't need anyone's permission forget rich versus poor white

collar It's now leveraged versus un-leveraged.

The most interesting and the most important form of leverage is the idea of products that have no marginal cost of replication.

This is the new form of leverage.

This was only invented in the last few hundred years.

It started with a printing prep.

It accelerated with broadcast media, and now it's really blown up with the internet and with coding.

Now, you can multiply your efforts without involving other humans and without needing money from other humans.

This book is a form of leverage.

Long ago,

I would have had to sit in a lecture hall and lecture each of you I would have maybe reached a few hundred people,

and that would have been that.

This newest form of leverage is where all the new fortunes are made, all the new billionaires.

For the last generation, fortunes were made by capital.

The people who made fortunes were the war and buffets of the world.

But the new generation's fortunes are all made through code or media.

Joe Rogan making $50 million to $100 million a year from his podcast.

You're going to have PewDiePie.

I don't know how much money he's rolling in, but he's bigger than the news.

And of course, there's Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.

Their wealth is all code-based leverage.

Probably the most interesting thing to keep in mind about new forms of leverage is they are permissionless.

They don't require somebody else's permission for you to use them or succeed.

For labor leverage, somebody has to decide For capital leverage, somebody has to give you money to invest or to turn into a product.

Coding, writing books, recording podcasts, tweeting, YouTubing, these kinds of things are permissionless.

You don't need anyone's permission to do them, and that's why they are very egalitarian.

they're great equalizers of leverage.

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.

you're never going to get rich renting out your time.

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.

Humans in societies where there was no leverage.

If I was chopping wood or carrying water for you, you knew eight hours put in would be equal to about eight hours of output.

Now we've invented leverage, through capital, cooperation, technology, productivity, all these means.

We live in an age of leverage.

As a worker, you want to be as leveraged as possible so you have a huge impact without as much time or physical effort.

A leveraged worker can out-produce a non-leveraged worker by a factor of 1,000 or With a leveraged worker,

judgment is far more important than how much time they put in or how hard they work.

Forget programmers.

1000x programmers really exist, we just don't fully acknowledge it.

See, at ID underscore AA underscore car Mac, at notch, Satoshi Nakamoto, etc.

For example,

a good software engineer just by writing the right little piece of code and creating the right little application can literally create half a billion dollars worth of value for a company.

But 10 engineers working 10 times as hard just because they choose the wrong model,

the wrong product, wrote it the wrong way, or put in the wrong viral loop, have basically wasted their time.

Inputs don't match outputs, especially for leveraged workers.

What you want in life is to be in control of your time.

You want to get into a leveraged job where you control your own time and you're tracked on the output.

If you do something incredible to move the needle on the business, they have to pay you.

Especially if they don't know how you did it because it's innate to your obsession or your skill or your innate abilities,

they're going to have to keep paying you to do it.

If you have specific knowledge, you have accountability, and you have leverage, they have to pay you what you're worth.

If they pay you what you're worth, then you can get your time back.

You can be hyper-efficient.

You're not doing meetings for meetings' sake.

You're not trying to impress other people.

You're not writing things down to make it look like you did work.

All you care about is the actual work itself.

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 function like athletes, train and sprint, then rest and reassess.

Sales is an example, especially very high-end sales.

If you're a real estate agent out there selling houses, it's not a great job, necessarily.

It's very crowded.

But if you're a top tier real estate agent,

you know how to market yourself and you know how to sell houses,

it's possible you could sell 5 million dollar mansions in one-tenth of the time while somebody else is struggling to sell 100,000 dollar apartments or condos.

Real estate agent is a job with input and output disconnect.

Building any product and selling any product fits this description, and fundamentally, what else is there?

Where you don't necessarily want to be is a support role, like customer service.

In customer service, unfortunately, inputs and outputs relate relatively close to each other, and the hours you put in matter.

Tools and leverage create this disconnection between inputs and outputs.

The higher the creativity component of a profession, the more likely it is to have disconnected inputs and outputs.

If you're looking at professions where your inputs and your outputs are highly connected,

it's going to be very hard to create wealth and make wealth for yourself in that process.

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.

Learn to sell.

Learn build.

If you can do both, you will be unstoppable.

These are two very broad categories.

One building the product.

This is hard and it's multivariate.

It can include design, it can include development, it can include manufacturing, logistics, etc.

And it can even be designing and operating a service.

It has many, many definitions.

But in every industry, there is a definition of the builder.

In our tech industry, it's the CTO.

It's the programmer.

It's the software engineer or hardware engineer.

But even in the laundry business,

it could be the person who's building the laundry service,

who is making the trains run on time,

who's making sure all the clothes end up in the right place at the right time, and so on.

The other side of it is sales.

Again, selling has a very broad definition.

Selling doesn't necessarily just mean selling to individual customers,

but it can mean marketing,

it can mean communicating, it can mean recruiting, it can mean raising money, it can mean inspiring people, it could mean doing PR.

It's broad umbrella category.

Earn with your mind, not your time.

Let's talk more about the real estate business.

The worst kind of job is someone who's doing labor to repair a Maybe you get paid ten dollars or twenty dollars an hour.

You go to people's houses, your boss demands, you're there at eight a.m., and you repair your piece of the house.

Here, you You have some accountability, but not really, because your accountability is to your boss, not to the client.

You don't have any real specific knowledge, since what you're doing is labor lots of people can do.

You're not going to get paid a lot.

You're getting paid minimum wage plus a little bit for your skill and your time.

The next level up might be the general contractor working on the house for the owner.

They may be getting paid $50,000 to do the whole project.

Then they're paying the labor $15 an hour and they're keeping the difference.

A general contractor is obviously a better place to be.

But how do we measure it?

How do we know it's better?

Well, 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.

They also have a little bit more specific.

How to organize a team, make them show up on time, and how to deal with city regulations.

The level up might be a real estate developer.

A developer is someone who's going to buy a property, hire a bunch of contractors, and transform it into something higher value.

They probably have to take out a loan to buy a house or go to investors to raise money.

They buy the old house, tear it down, rebuild it, and sell it.

Instead of $50,000,

like the general contractor,

or $15 an hour like the laborer,

the developer might be able to make a million dollars or half a million dollars in profit when they

sell the house for more than they bought it for, including the expenses of But now, notice what is required from the developer.

A very high level of accountability.

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

They need to understand fundraising, city regulations, where the real estate market is headed and whether they should take the risk or not.

It is more difficult.

The next level up might be someone who's managing money in a real estate fund.

They have an enormous amount of capital leverage.

They're dealing with lots and lots of developers and they're buying huge amounts of housing inventory.

One level beyond that might be somebody who says,

actually, I want to bring the maximum leverage to bear in this market and the maximum specific knowledge.

That person would say,

Well, I understand real estate, and I understand everything from basic housing construction

to building properties and selling them to how real estate markets move and thrive, and I also understand the technology business.

I understand how to recruit developers,

how to write code,

and how to build a good product,

and I understand how to raise money from venture capitalists, how to return it, and how all of that works.

Obviously, not a single person may know that.

You may pull a team together to do it where each have different skill sets,

but that combined entity would have specific knowledge in technology and in real estate.

It would have massive accountability because that company's name would be a very high risk,

high reward effort attached to the whole thing and people would devote their lives to it and take on significant risk.

It would have leverage in code with lots of developers.

It would have capital with investors putting money in and the founders own capital.

It would have some of the highest quality labor you can find,

which is high-quality engineers, designers, and marketers who are working on the company.

Then, you may end up with a Trulia, Redfin, or Zillow company, and then the upside could potentially be in the billions of dollars or the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Each level has increasing leverage, increasing accountability, increasingly specific knowledge.

You're adding in money-based leverage on top of labor-based leverage.

Adding in code-based leverage on top of money and labor allows you to actually create something bigger and

bigger and get closer and closer to owning all the upside, not just being paid a salary.

You start as a salary and 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.

Avoiding ruin means stay out of jail, so don't do anything illegal.

It's never worth it to wear an orange jumpsuit.

Stay out of total catastrophic loss.

Avoiding ruin could also mean you stay out of things that could be physically dangerous or hurt your body.

You have to watch your health.

Stay out of things that could cause you to lose all of your capital, all of your savings.

Don't gamble everything on one go.

Instead, take rationally optimistic bets with big upsides.

Earn with your mind, not your time.

Get paid for your judgment.

Choosing what kinds of jobs,

careers, or fields you get into and what sort of deals you're willing to take from your employer will give you much more free time.

Then, you don't have to worry as much about time management.

I would love to be paid purely for my judgment, not for any work.

I want a robot, capital, or computer to do the work, but I want to be paid for my judgment.

I think every human should aspire to being knowledgeable about certain things and being paid for our unique knowledge.

We have as much leverage as is possible in our business, whether it's through robots or computers or what have you.

Then, we can be masters of our own time, because we are just being tracked on outputs and not inputs.

Imagine someone comes along, who demonstrably has slightly better judgment.

They're right, 85% of the time, instead of 75%.

You will pay them $50 million,

$100 million, $200 million whatever it takes, because 10% better judgment steering a $100 billion ship is very valuable.

CEOs highly paid because of their leverage.

Small differences in judgment and capability really get amplified.

Demonstrated judgment, credibility the judgment, is so critical.

Warren Buffett wins here because he has massive credibility.

He's been highly accountable.

He's been right over and over in the public domain.

He's built a reputation for very high integrity so you People will throw infinite leverage behind him because of his judgment.

Nobody asks him how hard he works.

Nobody asks him when he wakes up or when he goes to sleep.

They're like, Warren, just do your thing.

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

We our time with short-term thinking and busy work.

Warren Buffett spends a year deciding and a day acting.

That act lasts decades.

Just from being marginally better, like running a quarter mile of fraction of a second faster, some people get paid a lot more.

Orders magnitude more.

Leverage magnifies those differences even more.

Being the extreme in your art is very important in the age of leverage.

Solve via iteration.

then get paid via repetition.

Prioritize and focus.

I've encountered plenty of bad luck along the way.

The first little fortune I made I instantly lost in the The second little fortune I made,

or should have made, I basically got cheated out of it by my business partners.

It's only the third time around that has been a charm.

Even then, it has been a slow and steady struggle.

I haven't made money in my life in one giant payout.

It has always been a whole bunch of small things piling up.

It's more about consistently creating wealth by creating businesses, creating opportunities, and creating investments.

It hasn't been a giant one-off thing.

My personal wealth has not been generated by one big year.

It just stacks up a little bit, a few chips at a time.

more options, more businesses, more investments, more things I can do.

Thanks to the internet, opportunities are massively abundant.

In fact, I have too many ways to make money.

I don't have enough time.

I literally have opportunities pouring out of my ears and I keep running out of time.

There are so many ways to create wealth, to create products, to create businesses, and to get paid by society as a by-product.

I just can't handle them all.

Value your time at an hourly rate, and ruthlessly spend to save time at that rate.

You will never be worth more than you think you're worth.

No one is going to value you more than you value yourself.

You just have to set a very high personal hourly rate and you have to stick to it.

Even when I was young I just decided I was worth a lot more than the market thought I was worth and I started treating myself that way.

Always factor your time into every decision.

How much time does it take?

It's going to take you an hour to get across town to get something.

If you value yourself at $100 an hour, that's basically throwing $100 out of money.

Are you going to do that?

Fast forward to your wealthy self and pick some intermediate hourly rate.

For me, believe it or not, back when you could have Which now obviously you can't, but back when you could have hired me.

This was true a decade ago or even two decades ago before I had any real money.

My hourly rate, I used to say to myself over and over, is $5,000 an hour.

Today when I look back, really it was about $1,000 an hour.

Of course, I still ended up doing stupid things like arguing with the electrician or returning the broken speaker, but I shouldn't have.

And I did a lot less than any of my friends would.

I would make a theatrical show out of throwing something in the trash pile or giving it to

Salvation Army rather than trying to return it or handing something to people rather than trying to fix it.

I would argue with my girlfriend, and even today it's my wife.

I don't do that, that's not a problem that I solve.

I still argue that with my mother when she hands me little to-dos.

I just don't do that.

I would rather hire you an assistant.

This was true even when I didn't have- Another way of thinking about something is,

if you can outsource something, or not do something for less than your hourly rate, outsource it, or don't do it.

If you can hire someone to do it for less than your hourly rate, hire them.

That even includes things like cooking.

You may want to eat your healthy home-cooked meals, but if you can outsource it, do that instead.

Set a very high hourly aspirational rate for yourself and stick to it.

It should seem and feel absurdly high.

If it doesn't, it's not high enough.

Whatever you picked,

my advice to you would be to raise Like I said,

for myself, even before I had money, for the longest time, I used $5,000 an hour.

And if you extrapolate that out into what it looks like as an annual salary, it's multiple millions of dollars per year.

Ironically, I actually think I've beaten it.

I'm not the hardest-working person.

I'm actually a lazy person.

I work through bursts of energy where I'm really motivated with something.

If I actually look at how much I've earned per actual hour that I've put in, it's probably quite a bit higher than that.

Can you expand on your statement if you secretly despise wealth, it will allude you?

If you get into a relative mindset,

you're always going to hate people who do better than you, you're always going to be jealous or envious of them.

They'll sense those feelings when you try and do business with them.

When you try and do business with somebody, if you have any bad thoughts or any judgments about them, they will feel it.

Humans are wired to feel what the other person deep down inside feels.

You have to get out of a relative mindset.

Literally, being anti-wealth will prevent you from becoming wealthy because you will not have the right mindset for it.

You won't have the right spirit and you won't be dealing with people on the right level.

Be optimistic.

Be positive.

It's important.

Optimists actually do better in the long run.

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

There are fundamentally two huge games in life that people play.

One is the money game.

Because is not going to solve all of your problems, but it's going to solve all of your money problems.

People realize that, so they want to make But at the same time, many of them, deep down, believe they can't make money.

They don't want any wealth creation to happen.

So they attack the whole enterprise by saying, well, making money is evil, you shouldn't do it.

But they're actually playing the other game, which is the status game.

They're trying to be high status in the eyes of other people watching by saying, well, I don't need money.

We don't want money.

Status is your ranking in the social hierarchy.

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 status is

a zero-sum game it's a very old game we've been playing it since monkey tribes it's

hierarchical who's number one who's number two who's number And for number three to move to number two,

number two has to move out of that slot.

So status is a zero-sum game.

Politics is an example of a status game.

Even are an example of a status game.

To be the winner, there must be a loser.

I don't fundamentally love status games.

They play an important role in our society so we can figure out who's in charge.

But fundamentally you play them because they're a necessary evil.

The problem is, to win at a status game, you have to put somebody else down.

That's why you should avoid status games in your life.

They make you into an angry, combative person.

You're always fighting to put other people down, to put yourself and the people you like up.

Status games are always going to exist.

There's no way around it, but realize most of the time when you're trying to create wealth and you're getting a time.

else, they're trying to increase their own status at your expense.

They're playing a different game, and it's a worse game.

It's a zero-sum game instead of a positive-sum game.

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.

We spend very little time deciding which relationship to get into.

We spend so much time in a job, but we spend so little time deciding which job to get into.

Choosing what city to live in can almost completely determine the trajectory of your life,

but we spend so little time trying to figure out what city to live in.

Advice to a young engineer considering moving to San Francisco.

Do you want to leave your friends behind?

Or be the one left behind?

If you're going to live in a city for ten years,

if you're going to be in a job for five years,

if you're in a relationship you should be spending one to two years deciding these things.

These are highly dominating decisions.

Those three decisions really matter.

You have to say note everything and free up your time so you can solve the important problems.

Those three are probably the three biggest ones.

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 time scale you will attract what you 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.

How did you decide to start your first company?

I was working at this tech company called At Home Network,

and I told everybody around me, my boss, co-workers, my friends, in Silicon Valley, all of these other people are starting companies.

It looks like they can do it.

I'm going to start a company.

I'm just here temporarily.

I'm an entrepreneur.

I didn't actually mean to trick myself into it.

It wasn't a deliberate, calculated thing.

I was just venting, talking out loud, being overly honest.

But I didn't actually start a company.

This was in 1999.

It was a much scarier, more difficult proposition to start a company then.

Sure enough, everyone saying, what are you still doing here?

I thought you were leaving to start a company and wow, you're still here.

I was literally embarrassed into starting my own company.

Yes, I know some people aren't necessarily ready to be entrepreneurs, but long term, where

did we come up with this idea, the correct logical thing to do is for everybody to work for somebody else?

It is a very hierarchical model.

Find work that feels like play.

Humans evolved as hunters and gatherers, where we all worked for ourselves.

It's only at the beginning of agriculture we became more hierarchical.

The industrial revolution and factories made us extremely hierarchical, because one individual couldn't necessarily own or build a factory, but now, thanks to the Internet.

we're going back to an age where more and more people can work for themselves.

I would rather be a failed entrepreneur than someone who never tried.

Because even a failed entrepreneur has the skill set to make it on their own.

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.

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...

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.

I want to be off the hedonic treadmill.

What you really want is freedom.

You want freedom from your money problems, right?

I think that's okay.

Once you can solve your money problems, either by lowering your lifestyle or by making enough money, you want to retire.

Not retirement at 65 years old, sitting in a nursing home collecting a check retirement.

It's a different definition.

What is your definition of retirement?

Retirement is when you stop sacrificing today for an imaginary tomorrow.

When today is complete, in and of itself, you're retired.

How do you get there?

Well, one way is to have so much money saved that your passive income without you lifting a finger covers your burn rate.

A second is you just drive your burn rate down to zero.

You a monk.

A third is you're doing something you love.

You enjoy it so much, it's not about the money.

So there are multiple ways to retirement.

The way to get out of the competition trap is to be authentic, to find the thing you know how to do better than anybody.

You know how to do it better because you love it and no one can compete with you.

If you love to do it, be authentic and then figure out how to map that to what society actually wants.

Apply some leverage and put your You take the risks,

but you gain the rewards, have ownership and equity in what you're doing, and just crank it up.

Did your motivation to earn money drop after you became financially independent?

Yes and no.

It did in the sense the desperation was gone.

But if anything, creating businesses and making money are now more of an art.

Whether in commerce, science, or politics, history remembers the artists.

Art is creativity.

Art is anything done for its own sake.

What are the things that are done for their own sake and there's nothing behind them?

Loving somebody, creating something, playing.

To me, creating businesses I create businesses because it's fun, because I'm into the product.

I can create a new business within three months.

Raise the money, assemble a team, and launch it.

It's fun for me.

It's really cool to see what can I put together.

It makes money almost as a side effect.

Creating businesses is the game I became good at.

It's just my motivation has shifted from being goal-oriented to being artistic.

Ironically, I think I'm much better at it now.

Even when I invest, it's because I like the people involved.

I like hanging out with them.

I learn from them.

I think the product is really good.

These days, I will pass on great investments because I don't find the products interesting.

These are not 100% or nothing things.

You can start moving more and more toward that goal in your life.

It's a goal.

When I was younger, I used to be so desperate to make money that I would have done anything.

If you'd shown up and said, Hey, I've got a sewage trucking business.

Want to go into that?

I would have said, Great, I want to make money.

Thank God no one gave me that opportunity.

I'm glad I went down the road of technology and science, which I genuinely enjoy.

I got to combine my vocation and my avocation.

I'm always working.

It looks like work to others, but it feels like play to me.

And that's how I know no one can compete with me on it.

Because I'm just playing for 16 hours a day.

If others want to compete with me?

They're going to work, and they're going to lose because they're not going to do it for 16 hours a day, seven days a week.

What was your figure where you thought you were financially safe?

Money is not the root of all evil.

There's nothing evil about it.

But the lust for money is bad.

The lust for money is not bad in a social sense.

It's not bad in the sense of you're a bad person for lusting for money.

It's bad for you.

Lusting for money is bad for us because it is a bottomless pit.

It will always occupy your mind.

If you love money and you make it, there's never enough.

There is never enough because the desire is turned on and doesn't turn off at some number.

It's a fallacy to think it turns off at some number.

The punishment for the love of money is delivered at the same time as the money.

As you make money, you just want even more and you become paranoid and fearful of losing what you do have.

There is no free lunch.

You make money to solve your money and material problems.

I think the best way to stay away from this constant love of money is to not upgrade your lifestyle as you make money.

It's very easy to keep upgrading your lifestyle as you make money,

but if you can hold your lifestyle fixed and hopefully make your money in giant lump sums as opposed to a trickle at a time,

you won't have time to upgrade your lifestyle.

You may get so far ahead you actually become financially free.

Another thing that helps, I value freedom above everything else.

All kinds of freedom.

Freedom to do what I want.

Freedom things I don't want to do.

Freedom my own emotions or things that may disturb my peace.

For me, freedom is my number one value.

To the extent money buys freedom,

it's my but to the extent it makes me less free, which it definitely does at some level as well.

I don't like it.

Do I 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 controlled but 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 them scale.

Then, they go into the latest Dropbox or the latest Airbnb.

The people who were at Google then joined Facebook when it was 100 people and then joined Stripe when it was 100 people?

When Zuckerberg was just starting to scale his company and panicked, he was like, I don't know how to do this.

And he called Jim Breyer, venture capitalist and founder of Axl Partners.

And Jim Breyer said, well, I have this really great head of product at this other company and you need this purpose.

Those people tend to do the best, risk adjusted over a long period of time, other than the venture investors themselves.

Some of the most successful people I've seen in Silicon Valley had breakouts very early in their careers.

They got promoted to VP, Director, or CEO, or started a company that did well fairly early.

If you're not getting promoted through the ranks, it gets a lot harder to catch up later in life.

It's good to be in a smaller company early because there's less of an infrastructure to prevent early promotion.

For someone who is early in their career,

and maybe even later, the single most important thing about a company is the alumni network you're going to build.

Think about who you will work with and what those people are going on to do.

How to get lucky.

Why you say get rich without getting lucky?

In 1000 parallel universes,

you want to be wealthy in 990 You don't want to be wealthy in the 50 of them where you got lucky,

so we want to factor luck out of it.

But getting lucky would help, right?

Just recently,

Babak Nivi,

my co-founder,

and I were talking on Twitter about how one gets lucky, and there are really four kinds of luck we were talking about.

The first kind of luck is blind luck, where one just gets lucky because something completely out of their control happened.

This includes fortune, fate, etc.

Then there's luck through persistence, hard work, hustle, and motion.

This is when you're running around creating opportunities.

You're generating a lot of energy, you're doing a lot to stir things up.

It's almost like mixing a petri dish or mixing a bunch of reagents and seeing what combines.

You're just generating enough force, hustle, and energy for luck to find you.

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.

The kind of luck is the weirdest,

hardest kind, where you build a unique character, a unique brand, a unique mindset which causes luck to find you.

For example, let's say you're the best person in the world at deep sea diving.

You're known to take on deep sea dives nobody else believe in dare to attempt.

By sheer luck,

somebody finds a sunken treasure ship off the coast they can't Well,

their luck just became your luck because they're going to come to you to get to the treasure and you're going to get paid for it.

This is an extreme example, but it shows how one person had blind luck finding the treasure.

Them coming to you to extract it and give you half is not blind luck.

You created your own luck.

You put yourself in a position to capitalize on luck or to attract luck when nobody else created the opportunity for themselves.

To get rich without getting lucky, we want to be deterministic.

We don't want to leave it to chance.

Ways to get lucky.

Hope finds you.

Hustle until you stumble into it.

Prepare the mind and be sensitive to chances others miss.

Become best at what you do.

Refine what you do until this is true.

Opportunity seek you out.

Luck your destiny.

It starts becoming so deterministic, it stops being luck.

The starts fading from luck to destiny.

To summarize the fourth type, build your character in a certain way, then your character becomes your death.

One of the things I think is important to make money is having a reputation that makes people do deals through you.

Remember the example of being a great diver where treasure hunters will come and give you a piece of the treasure for your diving skills.

If you are a 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 warrants, bail out banks, and do things other people can't do because of his work.

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.

My co-founder, Nia.

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.

How important is networking?

I think business networking is a complete waste of time.

And I know there are people and companies popularizing this concept because it serves them and their business model well,

but the reality is, if you're building something interesting, you will always have more people who will want to know you.

Trying to build business relationships well in advance of doing business is a complete waste of time.

I have a much more comfortable philosophy.

Be a maker who makes something interesting people like Show your craft, practice your craft, and the right people will eventually find you.

And once you've met someone, how do you determine if you can trust someone?

What signals do you pay attention to?

If someone is talking a lot about how honest they are, they're probably dishonest.

That is just a little telltale indicator I've learned.

When someone spends too much time talking about their own values, or talking themselves up, they're covering for something.

Sharks eat well, but live a life surrounded by sharks.

I have great people in my life who are extremely successful, very desirable, like everybody wants to be their friend, very smart.

Yet, I've seen them do one or two things slightly not great to other people.

The first time I'll say, hey, I don't think you should do this to that other person.

again, not because you won't get away with it, you will get away with it, but because it will hurt you in the end.

Not in some cosmic karma kind of way, but I believe deep down we all know who we are.

You cannot hide anything from yourself.

Your own failures are written within your psyche, and they are obvious to you.

If you have too many of these moral shortcomings, you will not respect yourself.

The worst outcome in this world is not having self-esteem.

If you don't love yourself, who will?

I think you just have to be very careful about doing things you are fundamentally not going to be proud of

because they will damage you.

The first time someone acts this way, I will warn them.

By the way, nobody changes.

Then just distance myself from them.

I them out of my life.

I just have this thing inside my head.

The closer you want to get to me, the better your values have to be.

Give me a lever long enough.

end, and I will move the Earth.

Every person I met at the beginning of my career 20 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 time scale.

It never happens in the time scale you want, or they want, but it does happen.

Apply specific knowledge with leverage, and eventually, you will get what you deserve.

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.

Everybody wants to get rich immediately, but the world is an efficient place.

Immediate doesn't work.

You do have to pull.

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 skillset 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.

The most common bad advice I hear is, you're too young.

Most history was built by young people.

They just got credit when they were older.

The only way to truly learn something is by doing it.

Yes, listen to guidance.

But don't wait.

People are oddly consistent.

Garma 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.

This is not to say it's easy.

It's not easy.

It's actually really freaking hard.

It is the hardest thing you will do.

But it's also rewarding.

Look at the kids who are born rich.

They have no meaning to their lives.

Your real resume 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.

However, anything you're given doesn't matter.

You have your forelimbs, your brain, your head, your skin.

That's all for granted.

You have to do hard things anyway to create your own meaning in life.

Making money is a fine thing to choose.

Go struggle.

It is hard.

I'm not going to say it's easy.

It's really hard, but the tools are all available.

It's all out there.

Money buys you freedom in the material world.

It's not going to make you happy.

It's not going to solve your health problems.

It's not going to make your family great.

It's not going to make you fit.

It's not going to make you calm.

But it will solve a lot of external problems.

It's a reasonable step to go ahead and make money.

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 20, 30, 40, 50 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.

In the old days, if you wanted to be peaceful inside, you would become a monk.

You would give up everything, renounce sex, children, money, politics, science, technology, everything.

and you would go out in the woods by yourself.

You had to give everything up to be free inside.

Today, with this wonderful invention called money, you can store it in a bank account.

You can work really hard,

do great things for society, and society will give you money for things it wants but doesn't know how to get.

You can save money, you live a little below your means, and you can find a certain freedom.

That will give you the time and the energy to pursue your own internal peace.

I believe the solution to making everybody happy is to give them what they want.

Let's get them all rich.

Let's get them all fit and healthy.

Then, let's get them all happy.

Amazing how many people confuse wealth and wisdom.

Building Judgment There's no shortcut to smart.

Judgment If you want to make the maximum amount of money possible,

if you want to get rich over your life in a deterministically predictable way,

stay 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.

Hard work is really overrated.

How hard you work matters a lot less in the modern economy.

What is underrated?

Judgment.

Judgment is underrated.

Can you define judgment?

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

Wisdom applied to external problems is judgment.

They're highly linked, knowing the long-term consequences of your actions and then making the right decision to capitalize on that.

In an age of leverage, one correct decision can win everything.

Without hard work, you'll develop neither judgment nor leverage.

You have to put in the time, but the judgment is more important.

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

Picking the direction you're heading in for every decision is far, far more important than how much force you apply.

Just pick the right direction to start walking in and start walking.

How to think clearly.

Clear is a better compliment than smart.

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

To use a math example, you can't understand trigonometry without understanding arithmetic and geometry.

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.

It's a common saying, and it's very true.

Richard Feynman very famously does this in six easy pieces, one of his early physics lectures.

He basically explains mathematics in He starts from the number line, counting, and then he goes all the way up to pre-calculus.

He just builds it up through an unbroken chain of logic.

He doesn't rely on any definitions.

The really smart thinkers are clear thinkers.

They understand the basics at a very, very fundamental level.

I would rather understand the basics really well than memorize all kinds of complicated

concepts I can't stick together and can't re-derive from the basics.

If you can't re-derive concepts from the basics as you need them, you're lost.

You're just memorizing.

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.

Clear appeal to their own authority.

Part of making effective decisions boils down to dealing with reality.

How do you make sure you're dealing with reality when you're making decisions?

By not having a strong sense of self or judgments or mind presence,

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.

The one thing clouding us from being able to see reality is we have preconceived notions of the way it should be.

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.

The good news is the moment of suffering when you're in pain is a moment of suffering.

It is a moment where you're forced to embrace reality the way it actually is.

Then, you can make meaningful change and progress.

You can only make progress when you're starting with the truth.

The hard thing 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 will be to see the reality.

What we wish to be true clouds our perception of what 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.

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.

If you don't have a day or two every week in your calendar where you're not always in meetings and you're not always busy,

then you're not going to be able to think.

You're not going to be able to have good ideas for your business.

You're not going to be able to make good judgements.

I also encourage taking at least one day a week,

preferably two because if you budget two, you'll end up with one, where you just have time to think.

It's only after your board you have the great ideas.

It's never going to be when you're stressed or busy running around or rushed.

Make the time.

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 reasons independently from the ground up and resists pressure to conform.

mimicry is easy.

Optimistic contrarians are the rarest breed.

Shed your identity to see reality.

Our egos are constructed in our formative years.

Our first They get constructed by our environment, our parents, society.

Then, we spend the rest of our life trying to make our ego happy.

We interpret anything new through our ego.

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.

Buddhist You absolutely need habits to function.

You cannot solve every problem in life as if it is the first time it's thrown at you.

We accumulate all these habits.

we put them in the bundle of identity, ego, ourselves, and then we get attached to them.

I'm Naval.

This is the way I am.

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 parents' 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, example, Democrat, Catholic, American, is suspect, and should be re-evaluated from base principles.

I try not to have too much I've pre-decided.

I think creating identities and labels locks you in and keeps you from seeing the truth.

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.

I don't like to self-identify on almost any level anymore, which keeps me from having too many of these so-called stable beliefs.

We each have a contrarian belief society rejects, but the more our own identity and local trust.

The more real it likely is.

There are two attractive lessons about suffering in the long term.

It can make you accept the world the way it is.

The other lesson is it can make your ego change in an extremely hard way.

Maybe you're a competitive athlete and you get injured badly, like Bruce Lee.

You have to accept being an athlete is not your entire identity and maybe you can forge a new identity as a philosopher.

Facebook redesigns.

Twitter redesigns.

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

Tension is who you think you should be.

Relaxation is who you are.

Learn skills of decision-making.

The classical virtues are all decision-making heuristics to make one optimized for the long-term rather than for the short-term.

Self-serving conclusions should have a higher bar.

I do view a lot of my goals over the next few years of unconditioning previous learned

responses or habituated responses so I can make decisions more cleanly in the moment without relying on memory or prepackaged heuristics and judgments.

Almost all biases are time-saving heuristics.

For important decisions, discard memory and identity.

and focus on the problem.

it.

Theoretical physicist Richard Feynman famously said, you never ever fool anybody and you are the easiest person to fool.

The moment you tell somebody something dishonest, you've lied to yourself.

Then you'll start believing your own lie which will disconnect you from reality and take you down the wrong road.

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.

Richard Feynman.

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 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.

Any advice on developing capacity for instinctual blunt honesty?

Tell everyone, start now.

It does Charisma is the ability to project confidence and love at the same time.

It's almost always possible to be honest and positive.

As an investor and CEO of AngelList, you're paid to be right when other people are wrong.

Do you have a process around how you make decisions?

Yes, decision-making.

In fact,

someone who makes decisions right 80%

of the time instead of 70% of the time will be valued and compensated in the market hundreds of times more.

I think people have a hard time understanding a fundamental fact If I manage $1 billion and I'm right 10%

more often than somebody else, my decision-making creates $100 million worth of value on a judgment call.

With modern technology and large workforces and capital, our decisions are leveraged more and more.

If you can be more right and more rational,

you're going to get non-linear returns in I love the blog,

Farnham Street, because it really focuses on helping you be more accurate and overall better decision-maker.

Decision-making is everything.

The more you know, the less you diversify.

Collect mental models.

During decision-making, the brain is a memory prediction machine.

A lousy way to do memory prediction is X happened in the past, therefore X will happen in the future.

It's too based on specific circumstances.

What you want is principles.

You mental models.

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

Charlie Munger is Warren Buffett's partner.

Very investor.

He has tons and tons of great mental models.

Author and trader Naseem Taleb has great mental models.

Benjamin Franklin had great mental models.

I basically load my head full of mental models.

I use my tweets and other people's tweets as maxims that help compress my own learnings and recall them.

The brain space is finite.

You have finite neurons,

so you can almost think of these as pointers,

addresses, or mnemonics to help you remember deep-seated principles where you have the underlying experience to back it up.

If you don't have the underlying experience, then it just reads like a collection of quotes.

It's cool, it's inspirational for a moment, maybe you'll make a nice poster out of it.

But then you forget Mental models are really just compact ways for you to recall your own knowledge.

Evolution.

I think a lot of modern society can be explained through evolution.

One theory is civilization exists to answer the question of who If you look around from a purely sexual selection perspective,

sperm is abundant and eggs are scarce.

It's an allocation problem.

Literally all of the works of mankind and womankind can be traced down to people trying to solve this problem.

Evolution, thermodynamics, information theory, and complexity have explanatory and predictive power in many aspects of life.

Inversion 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 to me.

It has helped me come to a system that operates in the face of ignorance.

I believe we are fundamentally ignorant and very, very bad at predicting the future.

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, gain theory, and those kinds of things.

Ignore noise.

The market will decide.

principal agent problem.

To me, the principal agent problem is the single most fundamental problem in microeconomics.

If you do not understand the principal agent problem, you will not know how to navigate your way through the world.

It is important if you want to build a successful company or be successful in your dealings.

It's a very simple concept.

Julius famously said, If 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 principle and the less you turn them into an agent.

I think at a core fundamental level, we understand this.

We're attracted to principles and we all bond with principles,

but the media and modern society spend a lot of time brainwashing you about needing an agent,

an agent being important, and the agent being knowledgeable.

Most of you should know it in the finance context.

If you don't, crack open a microeconomics textbook.

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

An example of compound interest.

Let's say you're earning 10% a year on your $1.

The first year you make 10% and you end up with $1.10.

The next year, you end up with $1.21 and the next year $1.33.

It keeps adding on to itself.

If you're compounding at 30% per year for 30 years, you don't just end up with 10 or 20 times your money.

You end up with thousands of times your money.

In the intellectual domain, compound interest rules.

When you look at a with 100 users growing at a compound rate of 20%

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 basic mathematics is really underrated.

If you're going to make money, if you're going to invest money, your basic math should be really good.

You don't need to learn geometry, trigonometry, calculus, or any of the complicated stuff if you're just going into business.

But you want arithmetic, probability, and statistics.

Those are extremely important.

Crack open a basic math book and make sure you are really good at multiplying, dividing, compounding, probability, and statistics.

Black Swans There's a new branch of probability statistics, which is really around the tail events.

Black swans are extreme probabilities.

Again, I have to refer back to Naseem Taleb, who I think is one of the greatest philosopher-scientists of our times.

He's really done a lot of pioneering work on this.

Calculus Calculus is useful to know, to understand the rates of change and how nature works.

But it's more important to understand the principles of calculus, where you're measuring the change in small discrete or small continuous events.

It's not important you solve integrals or do derivations on demand because you're not going to need to in the business world.

For you to believe something is true, it should have predictive power, and it must be falsifiable.

I think macroeconomics, because it doesn't make falsifiable predictions, which is the hallmark of science, has become corrupted.

You never have a counter-example when studying the economy.

You can never take the U.S.

economy and run two different experiments at the same time.

If you can't decide, the answer is no.

If I'm faced with a difficult choice,

such as should I marry this person,

should I take this job, should I buy this house, should I move to this city, should I go into business with this person?

If you cannot decide, the answer is no.

And the reason is, modern society is full of options.

There are tons and tons of options.

We live on a planet of 7 billion people and we are connected to everybody on the internet.

There are hundreds of thousands of careers available.

There are so many choices.

You're biologically not built to realize how many choices there are.

Historically, we've all evolved in tribes of 150 people.

When someone comes along, they may be your only option for a partner.

When you choose something, you get locked in for a long time.

Starting a business may take ten years.

You start a relationship that will be five years or maybe more.

You move to a city for ten to twenty years.

These are very, very long-lived decisions.

It's very, very important we only say yes when we are pregnant.

You're never going to be absolutely certain, but you're going to be very certain.

If you find yourself creating a spreadsheet for a decision with a list of yeses and nos,

pros and cons, checks and balances, why this is good or bad, forget it.

If you cannot decide, the answer is no.

Run uphill.

Simple heuristic.

If evenly split on a difficult decision, take the path more painful in the short term.

If you have two choices to make and they're relatively easy, take the path more difficult and more painful in the short term.

What's actually going on is one of these paths requires short-term pain, and the other path leads to pain further out in the future.

And what your brain is doing through conflict avoidance is trying to push off the short-term pain.

By definition, if the two are even and one has short-term pain, that path has long-term gain associated.

With the law of compound interest, long-term gain is what you want to go toward.

Your brain is overvaluing the side with the short-term happiness and trying to avoid the one with short-term pain.

So, you have to cancel the tendency out.

It's a powerful subconscious tendency by leaning into the pain.

As you know, most of the gains in life come from suffering in the short term so you can get paid in the long term.

Working out for me is not fun.

I suffer in the short term.

I feel But then in the long term, I'm better off because I have muscles or I'm healthier.

If I'm reading a book and I'm getting confused,

it is just like working out and the muscle getting sore or tired, except now my brain is being overwhelmed.

In the long run, I'm getting smarter because I'm absorbing new concepts from working at the limit or edge of my capability.

So you generally want to lean into things with short-term pain but long-term gain.

What are the most efficient ways to build new mental models?

Just read.

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

Learn to love to read.

Specific recommendations for books, blogs, and more are in Navalle's recommended reading section.

The genuine love for reading itself, when cultivated, is a superpower.

We live in the age of Alexandria, when every book and every piece of knowledge ever written down is a fingertip away.

The means of learning are abundant.

It's the desire to learn that is scarce.

Reading was my first love.

I remember my grandparents' house in India.

I'd be a little kid on the floor going through all of my grandfather's readers' digests, which is all he had to read.

Now, of course, there's a smorgasbord of information out there.

Anybody can read anything all the time.

Back then, it was much more limited.

I would read comic books, story books, whatever I could get my hands on.

I think I always love to read because I'm actually an antisocial introvert.

I was lost in the world of words and ideas from an early age.

I think some of it comes from the happy circumstance that when I was young, nobody forced me to read certain things.

I think there's a tendency among parents and teachers to say, oh, you should read this, but don't read that.

I read a lot which by today's standards would be considered mental junk food.

Read what you love until you love to read.

You almost have to read the stuff you're reading because you're into it.

You don't need any other reason.

There's no mission here to accomplish.

just read because you enjoy it.

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

A tweet from at Illisertus said, I don't want to read everything.

I just want to read the 100 great books over and over again.

I think there's a lot to them.

It's really more about identifying the great books for you because different books speak to different people.

Then you can really absorb those.

Reading a book isn't a race.

The better the book, the more slowly it should be absorbed.

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 absorb them, and they become threads in the tapestry of your psyche.

They kind of weave in I'm sure you've had this feeling where you pick up a book and start reading it and you're like,

this is pretty interesting.

This is pretty good.

You're getting this increasing sense of deja vu.

Then halfway through the book you realize, I've read this book before.

That's perfectly.

It means you were ready to re-read it.

I don't actually read a lot of books.

I pick up a lot of books and only get through a few which form the foundation of my knowledge.

The reality is, I don't actually read much compared to what people say.

I probably read 1-2 hours a day.

That me in the top 0.00001%.

I think that alone accounts for any material success I've had in my life and any intelligence I might have.

Real people don't read an hour a day.

Real people I think read a minute a day or less.

Making it an actual habit is the most important thing.

It almost doesn't matter what you read.

Eventually, you will read enough things and your interests will lead you there that it will dramatically improve your life.

Just like the best workout for you is one you are excited enough to do every day,

I would say for books,

blogs, tweets or whatever, anything with ideas and information and learning, the best ones to read are the ones you are excited about reading all the time.

As long as I have a book in my hand, I don't feel like I am wasting time.

Charlie Munger.

Then I try and put it out there as an aphorism.

Then I get attacked by random people who point out all kinds of obvious exceptions and jump down my throat.

Then I think, why did I do this again?

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

When you first pick up a book, are you skimming for something interesting?

How do you go about reading it?

Do you just flip to a random page and start reading?

What's your process?

I'll start at the beginning, but I'll move forward.

If it's not interesting, I'll just start flipping ahead, skimming or speed reading.

If it doesn't grab my attention within the first chapter in a meaningful positive way, I'll either drop the book or skip ahead a chapters.

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.

The number of books completed is a vanity metric.

As know more, you'll leave more books unfinished.

Focus on new concepts with predictive power.

Generally I'll skim.

I'll fast forward.

I'll try and find a part to catch my attention.

Most books have one point to make.

Obviously, this is non-fiction.

I'm not talking about fiction.

They have one point to make,

they make it, and then they give you example after example after example after example, and they apply it to explain everything in the world.

Once I feel like I've gotten the gist,

I feel very comfortable putting the book There's a lot of these, what I would call pseudoscience bestsellers.

People are like, oh, did you read this book?

I always say yes, but the reality is I read maybe two chapters of it.

I got the gist.

What practices do you follow to internalize, organize information from reading books?

Explain you learned to someone else.

Teaching learning.

It's not about educated versus uneducated.

It's about learning.

and doesn't like to read.

What can I do for the next 60 days to become a clearer, more independent thinker?

Read the greats in math, science and philosophy.

Ignore contemporaries and news.

Avoid identity.

Put truth above social approval.

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 re-read them and re-read them.

When you're reading a book and you're confused, that confusion is similar to the pain you get in the gym when you're working out.

But you're building mental muscles instead of physical muscles.

Learn how to learn and read the books.

The with saying, just read, is there is so much junk out there.

There are as many different kinds of authors as there are Many of them are going to write lots of junk.

I have people in my life I consider to be very well read, who aren't very smart.

The reason is because even though they're very well read, they read the wrong things in the wrong order.

They started out reading a set of false or just weekly true things, and those formed the axioms of the foundation for their worldview.

Then, when new things come, they judge the new idea based on a foundation they already built.

Your foundation is critical.

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

When it comes to reading, make sure your foundation is very, very high quality.

The best way to have a high quality foundation,

you may not love this answer, but the trick is to stick to science and to stick to the basics.

Generally, there are only a few things you can read people don't disagree with.

Very few people disagree 2 plus 2 equals 4, right?

That is serious knowledge.

Mathematics a solid foundation.

Similarly, the hard sciences are a solid foundation.

microeconomics is a solid foundation.

The moment you start wandering outside of these solid foundations you're in trouble because now you don't know what's true and what's false.

I would focus as much as I could on having solid It's better to be really great at arithmetic and geometry than to be deep into advanced

mathematics.

I would read microeconomics all day long, microeconomics 101.

Another way to do this is to read originals and read classics.

If you're interested in evolution, read Charles Darwin.

Don't begin with Richard Dawkins even though I think he's great.

Read him later.

Read Darwin first.

If you want to learn macroeconomics, first read Adam Smith, read von Mises, or read Hayek.

Start with the original philosophy.

If you're into communist or socialist ideas, which I'm personally not, start by reading Karl Marx.

Don't read the current interpretation someone is feeding you about how things should be done and run.

If you start with the originals as your foundations, then you have enough of a worldview and understanding that you won't fear any book.

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 If you're memorizing advanced concepts without being able to re-derive them as needed, you're lost.

We're now in a day and age of Twitter and Facebook.

We're getting bite-sized, pithy wisdom, which is really hard to absorb.

Books are very difficult to read as a modern person because we've been trained.

We have two contradictory pieces of training.

One is our attention span has gone through the floor because we're hit with so much information all the time.

We want to skip, summarize, and cut to the chase.

Twitter has made me a worse reader, but a much better writer.

On the other hand, we're also taught from a young age to finish your books.

Books are sacred.

When you go to school and you're assigned to read a book, you have to finish the book.

Over time, we forget how to read books.

Everyone know is stuck on some book.

I'm sure you're stuck on something right now.

It's page 332.

You go any further, but you know you should finish the book.

So what do you do?

You give up reading books for a while.

For me, giving up reading was a tragedy.

I grew up on books.

Then I switched to blogs.

Then I switched to Twitter and Facebook, and I realized I wasn't actually listening.

I was just taking little dopamine snacks all day long.

I was getting my little 140 character burst of dopamine.

I would tweet, then look to see who retweeted my tweet.

It's a fun and wonderful thing, but it's a game I was playing.

I realized I had to go back to reading books.

I knew it was a very hard problem because my brain had now been trained to spend time on Facebook,

Twitter, and these other bite-sized pieces.

I came up with this hack where I started treating books as throwaway blog posts or bite-sized tweets or posts.

I felt no obligation to finish any book.

Now, when someone mentions a book to me, I buy it.

At any given time, I'm reading somewhere between 10 and 20 books.

I'm flipping through them.

If the book is getting a little boring, I'll skip ahead.

Sometimes I start reading a book in the middle because some paragraph comes.

I'll just continue from there, and I feel no obligation whatsoever to finish the book.

All of a sudden, books are back into my reading library.

That's great, because there is ancient wisdom in books.

When solving problems, the older the problem, the older the solution.

If you're trying to learn how to drive a car or fly a plane,

you should read something written in the modern age because this problem was created in the modern age and the solution

is great in the modern age.

If you're talking about an old problem like how to keep your body healthy,

how to stay calm and peaceful,

what kinds of value systems are good, how you raise a family and those kinds of things, the older solutions are probably better.

Any book that survived for 2,000 years has been filtered through many people.

The general principles are more likely to be correct.

I wanted to get back into reading these sorts of books.

You know that song you can't get out of your head?

All thoughts work that way.

Careful what you read.

A calm mind, a fit body, and a house full of love.

These things cannot be bought.

They must be earned.

Part 2.

Happiness The three big ones in life are wealth, health, and happiness.

We pursue them in that order, but their importance is reverse.

Learning Don't take yourself so seriously.

You're just a monkey with a plan.

Happiness is learned.

Ten years ago, if you would have asked me how happy I was, I would have dismissed the question.

I didn't want to talk about it.

On a scale of 1 to 10, I would have said 2 out of 10 or 3 out of 10.

Maybe 4 out of 10 on my best days.

But I did not value being happy.

Today, I am a 9 out of 10.

And yes, having money helps.

But it's actually a very small piece of it.

Most of it comes from learning over the years,

my own happiness is the most important thing to me, and I've cultivated it with a lot of techniques.

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

Happiness is a very evolving thing, I think, like all the great questions.

When you're a little kid, you go to your mom and ask, what happens when we die?

Is there a Santa Claus?

Is there a God?

Should I be happy?

Who should I marry?

Those kinds of things.

There are no glib answers because no answers apply to everybody.

These kinds of questions ultimately do have answers, but they have personal answers.

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 it.

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 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 De 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.

mind.

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 on to 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.

Nature has no concept of happiness or unhappiness.

Nature follows unbroken mathematical laws and a chain of cause and effect from the Big Bang to now.

Now, everything is perfect exactly the way it is.

It is only in our particular minds we are unhappy, or not happy, and things are perfect or imperfect because of what we desire.

The world just reflects your own feelings back at you.

Reality has no judgments.

But 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 die.

How you choose to interpret them is up to you.

You have that choice.

This is what I mean when I say happiness is a choice.

If you believe it's a choice, you can start working on it.

There are no external forces affecting your emotions, as much as it may feel that way.

I've also come to believe in the complete and utter insignificance of the self, and I think that helps a lot.

For example,

if you thought you were the most important thing in the universe, then you would have to bend the entire universe to your will.

If you're the most important thing in the universe,

then how could it not conform to If it doesn't conform to your desires, something is wrong.

However, if you view yourself as a bacteria or an amoeba,

or if you view all of your works as riding 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.

When you accept that, you have no cause to be happy or unhappy.

Those things almost don't apply.

Happiness what's there when you remove the sense that something is missing in your life.

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.

I think the neutral state is actually a perfection state.

One can be very happy as long as one isn't too caught up in their own head.

Our lives are a blink of a firefly in the 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.

We think of ourselves as fixed and the world as malleable, but it's really we who are malleable and the world is largely fixed.

Can practicing meditation help you accept reality?

But it's amazing how little it helps.

You can be a long time meditator,

but if someone says the wrong thing in the wrong way, you go back to your ego-driven self.

It's almost like you're lifting one pound weights, but then somebody drops a huge barbell with a stack of plates on your head.

It's absolutely better than doing nothing, but when the actual moment of mental or emotional suffering arrives, it's still never easy.

Real only comes as a side effect of peace.

Most of it is going to come from acceptance, not from changing your external environment.

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 worked.

You can very slowly but steadily and methodically improve your happiness baseline just like you can improve your fitness.

Happiness is a choice.

Happiness, love and passion aren't things you find.

They're choices you make.

Happiness is a choice you make and a skill you develop.

The mind is just as malleable as the body.

We spend so much time and effort trying to change the external world,

other people, and our own bodies, all while accepting ourselves the way we were programmed in our history.

We accept the voice in our head as the source of all truth, but all of it is malleable, and every day is new.

Memory identity are burdens from the past, preventing us from living freely in the present.

Happiness presence.

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 can literally destroy your happiness if you spend all of your time living in delusions of the future.

We crave experiences that will make us be present, but the cravings themselves take us from the present moment.

I just don't believe in anything from my past.

No memories, no regrets, no people, no trips, nothing.

A of our unhappiness comes from comparing things from the past to the present.

Anticipation for our vices pulls us into the future.

Eliminating vices makes it easier to be present.

There's a great definition, I read.

Enlightenment the space between your thoughts.

It means enlightenment isn't something you achieve after thirty years sitting on a mountaintop.

It's something you can achieve moment to moment, and you can be enlightened to a certain percent every single day.

What if this life is the paradise we were promised, and we are just squandering it?

Happiness peace.

Our happiness and purpose interconnected.

Happiness is such an overloaded word, I'm not even sure what it means.

For me these days, happiness is more about peace than it is about joy.

I don't think peace and purpose go together.

If it's your internal purpose, the thing you most want to do, then sure, you'll be happy doing it.

But an externally inflicted purpose,

like society wants me to do X,

I am the first son of the first son of this so I should do Y,

or I have this debt or burden I took on, I don't think it will make you happy.

I think a lot of us have this low level pervasive feeling of anxiety.

If you pay attention to your mind,

sometimes you're just running around doing your thing and you're not feeling great, and you notice your mind is chattering and chattering about something.

Maybe you can't sit still.

There's this next thing where you're sitting in one spot thinking about where you should be now.

It's always the next thing, then the next thing, the next thing after that, then the next thing after that, creating this pervasive anxiety.

It's most obvious if you ever just sit down and try and do nothing.

Nothing.

I mean nothing.

I mean not read a book.

I mean not listen to music.

I mean literally just sit down and do nothing.

You can't do it, because there's anxiety always trying to make you get up and go, get up and go, get up and go.

I think it's important just being aware the anxiety is making you unhappy.

The anxiety is just a series of running 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.

You'll notice when I say happiness, I mean peace.

When a lot of people say happiness, they mean joy or bliss, but I'll take 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.

Desire is a contract that you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.

Every desire is a chosen unhappiness.

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

I know that's not original.

That's not new.

It's fundamental Buddhist wisdom.

I'm not taking credit for it.

I think I really just recognize it on a fundamental level, including in myself.

We bought a new car.

Now I'm waiting for the new car to Of course, every night, I'm on the forums reading about the car.

Why?

It's a silly object.

It's a silly car.

It's not going to change my life much or at all.

I know the instant the car arrives, I won't care about it anymore.

The thing is, I'm addicted to the desiring.

I'm addicted to the idea of this external thing bringing me some kind of happiness and joy, and this is completely delusional.

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.

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 ideal 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.

The fundamental delusion.

There is something out there that will make me happy and fulfilled forever.

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.

Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.

One thing I've learned recently.

It's way more important to perfect your desires than to try to do something you don't 100% desire.

When you're young and healthy you can do more.

By doing more you're actually taking on more and more You don't realize this is slowly destroying your happiness.

I find younger people are less happy but more healthy.

Older people are more happy but less healthy.

When you're young, you have time.

You have health, but you have no money.

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.

By the time people realize they have enough money, they've lost their time and their health.

Success does not earn happiness.

Happiness is being satisfied with what you have.

Success comes from dissatisfaction.

Confucius says you have two lives, and the second one begins when you realize you only have one.

When and how did your second life begin?

That's a very deep question.

Most who are past a certain age have had this feeling more phenomenon.

They've gone through life a certain way, and then gotten to a certain stage and had to make some pretty big changes.

I'm definitely also in that vote.

I struggled for a lot of my life to have certain material and social successes.

When I achieved those material and social successes,

or at least was beyond a point where they didn't matter as much,

I realized the people around me who had achieved similar successes and were on their way to achieving more didn't seem all that happy.

In my case, there was definitely hedonic adaptation.

I'd very quickly get used to anything.

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.

One has to do the external thing anyway.

We're biologically hardwired.

It's glibbed to say, you can just turn it off.

Your own life experience will bring you back to the internal path.

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 put us on the work treadmill.

Adonic adaptation keeps us there.

The trick is knowing when to jump off and play instead.

Who do you think of as successful?

Most people think of someone as successful when they win a game, whatever game they play themselves.

If you're an athlete, you're going to think of a athlete.

If you're in business, you might think Elon Musk.

A few years ago,

I would have said Steve Jobs because he was part of the driving force creating something that changed lives for all of humanity.

I think Mark Andreessen is successful,

not because of his recent incarnation as a venture capitalist, but because of the incredible work he did with Netscape.

Satoshi Nakamoto is successful in that he created Bitcoin, which is this incredible technological creation that will have repercussions for decades to come.

Of course, Elon Musk, because he changed everyone's viewpoint on what is possible with modern technology and entrepreneurship, I consider those creators and commercializers successful.

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.

There are a couple of these characters I know in...

Jersey Gregorick, 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.

Historically, I would say the legendary Buddha, or Murthy, who's stuff I like

reading, they are successful in the sense that they step out of the game entirely.

Winning or losing does not matter to them.

There's a line from Blaze 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 30 minutes and be happy.

happy, you are successful.

That is a very powerful place to be, but very few of us get there.

I think of happiness as an emergent property of peace.

If you're peaceful inside and out, that will eventually result in happiness.

But peace is a very hard thing to come 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.

In reality, peace is not a It's always flowing.

It's always changing.

You want to learn the core skill set of flowing with life and accepting it in most cases.

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.

In my own personal experience, the place I end up the most is wanting to be at peace.

Peace happiness at rest and happiness is peace in motion.

You can convert peace into happiness any time you want, but peace is what you want most of the time.

If you're a peaceful person, anything you do will be a happy activity.

Today, the way we think you get peace is by resolving all your external problems.

But there are unlimited external problems.

The way to actually get peace on the inside is by giving up this idea of problems.

Envy is the enemy of happiness.

I don't think life is that hard.

I think we make it hard.

One of the things I'm trying to get rid of is the word should.

Whenever the word should creeps up in your mind, it's guilt or social programming.

Doing something because you should basically means you don't actually want to do it.

It's just making you miserable, so I'm trying to eliminate as many shoulds from my life as possible.

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 multiplayer competitive game.

Other people can see if I'm doing a good 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.

We're like bees or ants.

We are such social creatures, we're externally programmed and driven.

We don't know how to play and win these single player games anymore.

We compete purely in multiplayer games.

The reality is life is a single player game.

name.

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.

Perhaps one reason why yoga and meditation are hard to sustain is they have no extrinsic value.

Purely single-player games.

Buffett has a great example when he asks if you want to be the world's best lover

and known as the worst or the world's worst lover and known as the best, paraphrased, in reference to an inner or external scorecard.

Exactly right.

All the real scorecards are internal.

Jealousy was a very hard emotion for me to overcome.

When I was young, I had a lot of jealousy.

By and by, I learned to get rid of it.

It still crops up every now and then.

It's such a poisonous emotion because, at the end of the day, you're no better off with jealousy.

You're unhappier and the person you're jealous of is still successful or good-looking or whatever they are.

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% swap with who that person is, then there is no point in being jealous.

Once I came to that realization, jealousy away because I don't want to be anybody else.

I'm perfectly happy being me.

me.

By the way, even that is under my control.

To be happy being me.

It's just there are no social rewards for it.

Happiness is built by habits.

My most surprising discovery in the last five years is that peace and happiness are skilled.

cells.

These are not things you're born with.

Yes, there is a genetic range, and a lot of it is conditioning from your environment, but you can uncondition and recondition yourself.

You can increase your happiness over time, and it starts with believing you can do it.

It's a skill.

Just like nutrition is a skill,

dieting is a skill,

working out is a skill,

making money is a skill, meeting girls and guys is a skill, having good relationships is a skill, even love is a skill.

It starts with realizing their skills you can learn.

When you put your intention and focus on it.

The world can become a better place.

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 tantrum meditation or was it vipassana meditation?

Was it a 10-day retreat or was 20 minutes enough?

Okay, none of those worked.

But, what if I tried yoga?

What if I kitesurfed?

What if I go car racing?

What about cooking?

Does that make me zen?

You literally have to try all of these things until you find something that works for you.

When it comes to medicines for the mind, the placebo effect is 100% percent.

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.

For example,

I was reading The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, which a fantastic introduction to being present, for people who are not really present.

He shows you the single most important thing is to be present and hammers at home over and over again until you get it.

He wrote about this body energy exercise.

You lie down and you feel the energy moving around your body.

At that point, the old me would have put the book down and said, well, that's BS.

But the new me said, Well, if I believe it, maybe it'll work.

I went into it with a positive mindset.

I laid down and tried You know what?

It felt really good.

How does someone build the skill of happiness?

You can build good habits.

Not drinking alcohol will keep your mood more stable.

Not eating sugar will keep your mood more stable.

Not going on Facebook, Snapchat, or Twitter will keep your mood more stable.

Playing games will make you happier in the short run,

and I used to be an avid gamer, but in the long run, it could ruin your happiness.

You're being fed dopamine and having dopamine withdrawn from you in these little uncontrollable ways.

Caffeine is another one where you trade long term for the short term.

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.

When we're kids, we have very few habits.

Over time, we learn the things we are not supposed to do.

We become self-conscious.

We start forming habits and routines.

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 unhappy?

Are those relationships low maintenance?

Do you admire and respect, but not envy them?

There's the five chimps theory where you can predict a chimps behavior by the five chimps it hangs out with the most.

I think that applies to humans as well.

Maybe 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.

The first rule of handling conflict is don't hang around people who constantly engage in conflict.

I'm not interested in anything unsustainable or even hard to sustain, including difficult relationships.

If you can't see yourself working with someone for life, don't work with them for a day.

There's a friend of mine, a Persian guy named Bezad.

He just loves life, and he has no time for anybody who is not happy.

If you ask Bezad 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 When we get something thing, we assume the world owes it to us.

If you're present, you will realize how many gifts and how much abundance there is around us at all times.

That's all you really need to do.

I'm here now, and I have all these incredible things at my disposal.

The most important trick to being happy is to realize happiness is the skill you develop and the choice you make.

You 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.

Happiness I have a series of tricks I use to try and be happier At first,

they were silly and difficult and required a lot of attention, but now some of them have become second nature.

By doing them religiously, I've managed to increase my happiness level quite a bit.

The obvious one is meditation, insight working toward a purpose on it, which is to try and understand how my mind works.

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.

I try to get more sunlight on my skin.

I look up and smile.

Every time you catch yourself desiring something, say, is it so important to me I'll be unhappy unless this goes my way?

You're going to find, with the vast majority of things, it's just not true.

I think dropping caffeine made me happier.

It makes me more of a stable person.

I think working out every day made me happier.

If you have peace of body, it's easier to have peace of mind.

The more you judge, the more you separate yourself.

You'll feel good for an instant because you feel good about yourself thinking you're better than someone.

Later you're going to feel lonely.

Then you see negativity everywhere.

The world just reflects your own feelings back at you.

tell your friends you're a happy person then you'll be forced to conform to

it you'll have a consistency bias you have to live up to it your friends will

expect you to be a happy person recover time and happiness by minimizing your use of these three smart phone, calendar, and alarm clock.

The more secrets you have, the less happy you're going to be.

Cotton funk?

Use meditation, music, and exercise to reset your mood.

Then a new path to commit emotional energy for the rest of the day.

Hedonic adaptation is more powerful for man-made things, cars, houses, clothes, money, than for natural things.

Food, sex, exercise.

No 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.

Politics, academia, and social status are all zero-sum games.

Positive-sum games create positive people.

Increase serotonin in the brain without drugs.

Sunlight, exercise, positive thinking, and tryptophan.

Changing Habits Pick one thing, cultivate a desire, visualize it, plan a sustainable path, identify needs, triggers, and substitute.

Tell your friends.

Track Self-discipline is a bridge to a new self-image.

Bake in the new self-image.

It's who you are.

Now.

First know it.

Then you understand it.

Then you can explain it.

then you can feel it.

Finally, you are it.

Find happiness in acceptance.

In 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 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.

Why not two?

You'll be distracted.

Even one is high.

Being peaceful comes from having your mind clear of thoughts, and a lot of clarity comes from being in the present moment.

It's very hard to be in the present moment if you're thinking, I need to do this.

I want that.

This has got to change.

You always have three options.

You can change it, you can accept it, or you can leave it.

What is not a good option is to sit around wishing you would change it,

but not changing it, wishing you could leave it, but not leaving it, and not accepting it.

That struggle, or aversion, is responsible for most of our misery.

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.

We don't always get what we want, but sometimes what is happening is for the best.

The sooner you can accept it as a reality, the sooner you can adapt to it.

Achieving acceptance is very difficult.

I have a couple of hacks I try, but I wouldn't say they are totally successful.

One hack is stepping back and looking at previous bits of suffering I've had in my life.

I write them down.

Last time you broke up with somebody, last time you had a business failure, last time you had a health issue, what happened?

I can trace the growth and improvement that came from it years later.

I have another hack I use for minor annoyances.

When they happen, a part of me will instantly react negatively.

But I've learned to mentally ask myself, what is the positive of this situation?

Okay, I'll be late for a meeting.

But what is the benefit to me?

I get to relax and watch the birds for a moment.

I'll also spend less time in that boring meeting.

There's almost always something positive.

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.

To give you the simplest example, I was at an event, and afterward, someone flooded my inbox with a whole bunch of photos they took.

There was a tiny, instant judgment saying, come on, couldn't you have just selected a few of the best?

Who sends a hundred photos?

But then immediately...

What is the positive?

The positive is that I get to pick my five favorite photos.

I get to use my judgment.

Over the last year,

by practicing this hack enough,

I've managed to go from taking a couple of seconds to think of a response, to now my brain doing it almost instantaneously.

That's a habit you can train yourself to do.

How do you learn to accept things you can't change?

Fundamentally it boils down to one big hack, embracing Death is the most important thing that is ever going to happen.

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.

If you're religious and believe there is an afterlife, then you'll be taken care of.

If you're not religious, maybe you'll have kids.

If you're an artist, a painter, or a businessman, you want to leave a legacy behind.

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 10 billion years, it'll be around for another 10 billion years.

Your life is a Firefly blink in a night, you're here for such a brief period of time.

If you fully acknowledge the futility of what you're doing,

then I think it can bring great happiness and peace because you realize this is a game, but it's a fun game.

All that matters is you experience your reality as you go through life.

Why not interpret it in the most positive possible way?

Any moment where you're not having a great time, when you're not really happy, you're not doing any one any favor.

It's not like your unhappiness makes them better off somehow.

All you're doing is wasting this incredibly small and precious time you have on this earth.

Keeping death on the forefront and not denying it is very important.

Whenever I get caught up in my ego battles, I just think of entire civilizations that have come and gone.

For example, take the Sumerians.

I'm sure they were important people and did great things, but go ahead and name me a single Sumerian.

Tell me anything interesting or important Sumerians did that lasted.

Nothing.

So maybe 10,000 years from now,

or 100,000 years from now,

people will say, oh, yeah, Americans, I've heard of Americans, 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.

Laugh a little bit, appreciate the moment, and do your work.

Easy easy life, hard choices, hard life.

Saving yourself.

Doctors won't make you healthy,

nutritionists won't make you slim, teachers won't make you smart, gurus won't make you calm, mentors won't make you rich, trainers won't make you fit.

Ultimately, You have to take responsibility.

Save Choosing to be yourself.

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 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.

I never met my greatest mentor.

I wanted so much to be like him, but his message was the opposite.

Be yourself with passionate intensity.

No one in the world is going to beat you at being you.

You're never going to be as good at being me as I am.

I'm never going to be as good at being you as you are.

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

It's a fool's errand.

Instead, each person is uniquely qualified.

They have some specific knowledge, capability, and desire nobody else in the world does, purely from the combinatorics of human DNA and development.

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.

Choosing to care for yourself.

Then, it's my family's well-being.

After that, I can go out and do whatever I need to do with the rest of the world.

Nothing like a health problem to turn up the contrast dial for the rest of life.

What about the modern world steers us away from the way humans are meant to live?

There are many, many things.

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.

In terms of exercise, we're probably meant to play instead of running on a treadmill.

We're probably evolved to use all of our five senses equally as opposed to favoring the visual cortex.

In modern society, almost all of our inputs and communication are visual.

We're not meant to walk through the A lot of back and foot problems come from shoes.

We're not meant to have clothes that keep us warm all of the time.

We're meant to have some cold exposure.

It kick-starts your immune system.

We're not evolved to live in a perfectly sterile and clean environment.

It leads to allergies and an untrained immune system.

This is known as the Hygiene Hypothesis.

We're evolved to live in much smaller tribes and to have more family around us.

I partially grew up in India, and in India, everybody is in your business.

There's a cousin, an aunt, an uncle who is in your face, which makes it hard to be depressed, because you are never alone.

I'm not referring to people with chemical depression.

I'm talking more about the existential angst and malaise teenagers seem to go through.

But on the other hand, you have no privacy, so you can't be free.

There are trade-offs.

We're not meant to check our phone every five minutes.

The constant mood swings of getting alike that an angry comment makes us into anxious creatures.

We evolved for scarcity, but live in a bush.

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.

Diet Outside of math, physics and chemistry, There isn't much settled science, we're still arguing over what the optimal diet is.

Do you have an opinion on the ketogenic diet?

It seems really difficult to follow.

It makes sense for the brain and the body to have a backup mechanism.

For example, in the ice ages, humans evolved without many plants available.

At the same time, we have been eating plants for thousands of years.

I don't think plants are bad for you, but something closer to the paleo diet is probably correct.

I think the interplay between sugar and fat is really interesting.

Fat is what makes you satiated.

Fatty foods make you feel full.

The easiest way to feel full is to go on a ketogenic diet

where you're eating tons of bacon all the time and you're going to feel almost nauseous and not want to look at fat anymore.

Sugar makes you hungry.

Sugar signals to your body, there's this incredible food resource in the environment we're not evolved for, so you rush out to get sugar.

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.

That's why all desserts are large combinations of fat and carbs together.

In nature, it's very rare to find carbs and fat together.

In nature, I find carbs and fat together in coconuts, in mangoes, maybe in bananas, but it's basically tropical.

The combination of sugar and fat together is really deadly.

You've got to watch out for that in your diet.

I'm not an expert, and the problem is diet and nutrition are like politics.

Everybody thinks they're an expert.

Their identity is wrapped up in it because what they've been eating or what they think they should be eating is obviously the correct answer.

Everybody a little religion.

It's just a really difficult topic to talk about.

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 Quality control is easier than and leads to quantity control.

Ironically, fasting from a low-carb paleobase is easier than portion control.

Once the body detects food, it overrides the brain.

What I wonder about Wonder Bread is how it can stay soft at room temperature for months.

If bacteria won't eat it, should you?

It has been 5,000 years, and we're still arguing over whether meat is poisonous or plants are poisonous.

Dix the extremists and any food invented in the last few hundred years.

When it comes to medicine and nutrition, subtract before you add.

My trainer sends me photos of his meals, and it reminds me we are all flavor addicts.

World's simplest diet.

The processed the food, the less one should consume.

Exercise, the harder the workout, the easier the day.

What habit would you say most positively impacts your life?

The daily morning workout, that has been a complete game changer.

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, 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 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 10 or 15 different priorities, You're going to end up getting none of them.

What I did was decide 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.

Because my physical health became my number one priority, then I could never say I don't have time.

In the morning, I work out, and however long it takes is how long it takes.

I do not start my day until I've worked out.

I don't care if the world is imploding and melting down, it can wait another 30 minutes until I'm done working out.

It's pretty much There are a few days where I've had to take a break because I'm traveling, or I'm injured or sick or something.

I can count on one hand the number of breaks I take every year.

One month of consistent yoga, and I feel ten years younger.

To stay is to stay young.

How you make a habit doesn't matter.

Do every day.

It almost doesn't matter what you do.

The people who are obsessing over whether to do weight training, tennis, pilates, the high intensity interval training method, the happy body or whatever.

they're missing the point.

The important thing is to do something every day.

It doesn't matter what it is.

The best workout for you is one you're excited enough to do every day.

Walking Brainworks exercise and sunlight, shorter, less pleasantries, more dialogue, less monologue, no slides, and easily by walking back.

Like in life, if you are willing to make the short-term sacrifice.

You'll have the long-term benefit.

My physical trainer, Jersey Gregory, is a really wise, brilliant guy.

He always says, easy choices, hard life, hard journey.

easy life.

Basically, if you are making the hard choices right now and what to eat, you're not eating all the junk food you want and making the hard choice to work out.

So, your lifelong term will be easy.

You won't be sick.

You won't be unhealthy.

The same is true of values.

The same is true of saving up for a rainy day.

The same is true of how you approach your relationships.

If you make the easy choices right now, your overall life will be a lot harder.

Meditation intermittent fasting for the mind.

Meditation plus mental strength An emotion is our evolved biology predicting the future impact of a current event.

In modern settings, it's usually exaggerated or wrong.

Why is meditation so powerful?

Your breath is one of the few places where your autonomic nervous system meets your voluntary nervous system It's involuntary,

but you can also control it.

I Think a lot of meditation practices put an emphasis on the breath because it is a gateway into your autonomic nervous system

There are many, many cases in the medical and spiritual literature of people controlling their bodies at levels that should be autonomous.

Your mind is such a powerful thing.

What's so unusual about your forebrain sending signals to your hindbrain and your hindbrain routing resources to your entire body?

You can do it just by breathing.

Relaxed breathing tells your body you're safe.

Then, your forebrain doesn't need as many resources as it normally does.

Now, the extra energy can be sent to your hind brain and it can reroute those resources to the rest of your body.

I'm not saying you can beat whatever illness you have just because you activated your hindbrain,

but you're devoting most of the energy normally required to care about the external environment to the immune system.

I highly recommend listening to Tim Ferriss' podcast with Wim Hof.

He is a walking miracle.

Wim's nickname is the ice.

He holds the world record for the longest time spent in an ice bath and swimming in freezing cold water.

I was very inspired by him,

not only because he's capable of superhuman physical feats, but because he does it while being incredibly kind and happy.

which is not easy to accomplish.

He advocates cold exposure because he believes people are too separate from their natural environment.

We're constantly clothed, fed, and warm.

Our bodies have lost touch with the cold.

The cold is important because it can activate the immune system.

So he advocates taking long ice baths.

Being from the Indian subcontinent, I'm strongly against the idea of ice baths, but Wim inspired me to give cold showers a try.

And I did so by using the Wim Hof breathing method.

It involves hyperventilating to get more oxygen into your blood, which raises your core temperature.

Then, you can go into the shower.

The first few cold showers were hilarious, because I'd slowly ease myself in, wincing the entire way.

I started about four or five months ago.

Now, I turn the shower on full blast, and then I walk right in.

I don't give myself any time to hesitate.

As soon as I hear the voice in my head telling me how cold it's going to be, I know I have to walk in.

I learned a very important lesson from this.

Most of our suffering comes from avoidance.

Most of the suffering from a cold shower is the tiptoeing.

Once you're in, you're in.

It's not suffering.