Hello and Welcome. This page is a collection of 99 quotes from The Almanack of Naval Ravikant book by Eric Jorgenson that I liked and saved while reading this book. I hope you will like these quotes too.
By the way, I am Deepak Kundu, an avid book reader, quotes collector and blogger.
Quotes on Happiness
- The three big ones in life are wealth, health, and happiness. We pursue them in that order, but their importance is reverse.
- Happiness is the state when nothing is missing. When nothing is missing, your mind shuts down and stops running into the past or future to regret something or to plan something. In that absence, for a moment, you have internal silence. When you have internal silence, then you are content, and you are happy.
- 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.
- 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.
- Peace is happiness at rest, and happiness is peace in motion. You can convert peace into happiness anytime 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.
- The most important trick to being happy is to realize happiness is a skill you develop and a choice you make. You choose to be happy, and then you work at it. It’s just like building muscles. It’s just like losing weight. It’s just like succeeding at your job. It’s just like learning calculus. You decide it’s important to you. You prioritize it above everything else. You read everything on the topic.
Quotes on Reading
- Reading science, math, and philosophy one hour per day will likely put you at the upper echelon of human success within seven years.
- 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.
- Read what you love until you love to read.
- I don’t want to read everything. I just want to read the 100 great books over and over again.
- Reading a book isn’t a race – the better the book, the more slowly it should be absorbed.
- Read everything you can. And not just the stuff that society tells you is good or even books that I tell you to read. Just read for its own sake. Develop a love for it. Even if you have to read romance novels or paperbacks or comic books. There’s no such thing as junk. Just read it all. Eventually, you’ll guide yourself to the things that you should and want to be reading.
Quotes on How To Get Rich
- 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.
- 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 is 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.
- The most important skill for getting rich is becoming a perpetual learner.
- 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.
Quotes on Meditation
- Meditation is intermittent fasting for the mind.
- Time spent undistracted and alone, in self-examination, journaling, meditation, resolves the unresolved and takes us from mentally fat to fit.
- When in bed, meditate. Either you will have a deep meditation or fall asleep. Victory either way.
- Meditation is turning off society and listening to yourself. It only “works” when done for its own sake. Hiking is walking meditation. Journaling is writing meditation. Praying is gratitude meditation. Showering is accidental meditation. Sitting quietly is direct meditation.
Quotes on Money
- To the extent money buys freedom, it’s great. But to the extent it makes me less free, which it definitely does at some level as well, I don’t like it.
- 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.
Quotes on Personal Finance
- There are no get-rich-quick schemes. Those are just someone else getting rich off you.
- You don’t get rich by spending your time to save money. You get rich by saving your time to make money.
Other Quotes
- Books make for great friends, because the best thinkers of the last few thousand years tell you their nuggets of wisdom.
- 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.
- Seek wealth, not money or status. Wealth is having assets that earn while you sleep. Money is how we transfer time and wealth. Status is your place in the social hierarchy.
- Play iterated games. All the returns in life, whether in wealth, relationships, or knowledge, come from compound interest.
- Learn to sell. Learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable.
- An army of robots is freely available – it’s just packed in data centers for heat and space efficiency. Use it.
- Become the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until this is true.
- 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.
- Technology democratizes consumption but consolidates production. The best person in the world at anything gets to do it for everyone.
- No one can compete with you on being you.
- Most of life is a search for who and what needs you the most.
- Society, business, & money are downstream of technology, which is itself downstream of science. Science applied is the engine of humanity.
- Escape competition through authenticity.
- If you are fundamentally building and marketing something that is an extension of who you are, no one can compete with you on that.
- The best jobs are neither decreed nor degreed. They are creative expressions of continuous learners in free markets.
- The old model of making money is going to school for four years, getting your degree, and working as a professional for thirty years. But things change fast now. Now, you have to come up to speed on a new profession within nine months, and it’s obsolete four years later. But within those three productive years, you can get very wealthy.
- 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.
- If you don’t own a piece of a business, you don’t have a path towards financial freedom.
- Follow your 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.
- If they can train you to do it, then eventually they will train a computer to do it.
- Forget rich versus poor, white-collar versus blue. 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 the printing press. It accelerated with broadcast media, and now it’s really blown up with the internet and with coding.
- 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.
- Forty hour work weeks are a relic of the Industrial Age. Knowledge workers function like athletes – train and sprint, then rest and reassess.
- Earn with your mind, not your time.
- 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.
- 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 byproduct. I just can’t handle them all.
- There are almost 7 billion people on this planet. Someday, I hope, there will be almost 7 billion companies.
- We just play games in life. When you grow up, you’re playing the school game, or you’re playing the social game. Then you’re playing the money game, and then you’re playing the status game. These games just have longer and longer and longer-lived horizons. At some point, at least I believe, these are all just games. These are games where the outcome really stops mattering once you see through the game. Then you just get tired of games. I would say I’m at the stage where I’m just tired of games.
- Retirement is when you stop sacrificing today for an imaginary tomorrow. When today is complete, in and of itself, you’re retired.
- 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 name on it.
- Whether in commerce, science, or politics – history remembers the artists.
- 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 sixteen 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 sixteen hours a day, seven days a week.
- I value freedom above everything else. All kinds of freedom: freedom to do what I want, freedom from things I don’t want to do, freedom from my own emotions or things that may disturb my peace. For me, freedom is my number one value.
- The winners of any game are the people who are so addicted they continue playing even as the marginal utility from winning declines.
- Become the best at what you do. Refine what you do until this is true. Opportunity will seek you out. Luck becomes your destiny.
- Be a maker who makes something interesting people want. Show your craft, practice your craft, and the right people will eventually find you.
- 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.
- Cynicism is easy. Mimicry is easy. Optimistic contrarians are the rarest breed.
- 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.
- 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.
- If you’re evenly split on a difficult decision, take the path more painful in the short term.
- A calm mind, a fit body, and a house full of love. These things cannot be bought. They must be earned.
- Our lives are a blink of a firefly in the night. You’re just barely here. You have to make the most of every minute.
- 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.
- The idea you’re going to change something in the outside world, and that is going to bring you the peace, everlasting joy, and happiness you deserve, is a fundamental delusion we all suffer from, including me.
- 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.
- When you’re young, you have time. You have health, but you have no money. When you’re middle-aged, you have money and you have health, but you have no time. When you’re old, you have money and you have time, but you have no health. So the trifecta is trying to get all three at once.
- 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.
- 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.
- The reality is life is a single-player game. You’re born alone. You’re going to die alone. All of your interpretations are alone. All your memories are alone. You’re gone in three generations, and nobody cares. Before you showed up, nobody cared. It’s all single player.
- When working, surround yourself with people more successful than you. When playing, surround yourself with people happier than you.
- If you can’t see yourself working with someone for life, don’t work with them for a day.
- First, you know it. Then, you understand it. Then, you can explain it. Then, you can feel it. Finally, you are it.
- 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.
- We’re all going to be gone. Our children will be gone. Our works will be dust. Our civilizations will be dust. Our planet will be dust. Our solar system will be dust. In the grand scheme of things, the Universe has been around for ten billion years. It’ll be around for another ten billion years. 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.
- You’re going to die one day, and none of this is going to matter. So enjoy yourself. Do something positive. Project some love. Make someone happy. Laugh a little bit. Appreciate the moment. And do your work.
- 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 yourself.
- My number one priority in life, above my happiness, above my family, above my work, is my own health. It starts with my physical health. Second, it’s my mental health. Third, it’s my spiritual health. Then, it’s my family’s health. Then, it’s my family’s wellbeing. After that, I can go out and do whatever I need to do with the rest of the world.
- Too much sugar leads to a heavy body, and too many distractions lead to a heavy mind.
- When you really want to change, you just change. But most of us don’t really want to change – we don’t want to go through the pain just yet. At least recognize it, be aware of it, and give yourself a smaller change you can actually carry out.
- Science is, to me, the study of truth. It is the only true discipline because it makes falsifiable predictions. It actually changes the world. Applied science becomes technology, and technology is what separates us from the animals and allows us to have things like cell phones, houses, cars, heat, and electricity.
- Grind and sweat, toil and bleed, face the abyss. It’s all part of becoming an overnight success.
- Mathematics helps with all the complex and difficult things in life. If you want to make money, if you want to do science, if you want to understand game theory or politics or economics or investments or computers, all of these things have mathematics at the core. It’s a foundational language of nature. Nature speaks in mathematics. Mathematics is us reverse engineering the language of nature, and we have only scratched the surface.
- Anger is its own punishment. An angry person trying to push your head below water is drowning at the same time.
- People who live far below their means enjoy a freedom that people busy upgrading their lifestyles can’t fathom.
- A taste of freedom can make you unemployable.
- The modern struggle: Lone individuals summoning inhuman willpower, fasting, meditating, and exercising … Up against armies of scientists and statisticians weaponizing abundant food, screens, and medicine into junk food, clickbait news, infinite porn, endless games, and addictive drugs.
- The real truths are heresies. They cannot be spoken. Only discovered, whispered, and perhaps read.
- All benefits in life come from compound interest, whether in money, relationships, love, health, activities, or habits. I only want to be around people I know I’m going to be around for the rest of my life. I only want to work on things I know have long-term payout. .
- Try everything, test it for yourself, be skeptical, keep what’s useful, and discard what’s not.
- There is actually nothing but this moment. No one has ever gone back in time, and no one has ever been able to successfully predict the future in any way that matters. Literally, the only thing that exists is this exact point where you are in space at the exact time you happen to be here.
- Inspiration is perishable – act on it immediately.