What I’ve Learned from Naval Ravikant

Naval Ravikant is an entrepreneur and investor who co-founded AngelList. His 2018 thread “How to Get Rich (without getting lucky)” and his podcast conversations made him widely known. Eric Jorgenson gathered his ideas into The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, published in 2020 and free to read online.

His ideas are easy to say and hard to live by. That is exactly why they are worth learning.

Wealth

Assets that earn while you sleep: businesses, products, and investments

Money

The way we transfer wealth

Status

Your place in a social hierarchy, a zero-sum game

The lesson: play games everyone can win, by making things people want.

Specific knowledge is what you know that is hard to teach or train, because it grows from your curiosity, talents, and experience. To you it often feels like play. To others it looks like work.

• Notice what feels like fun to you but hard to others
• Stack two or three unusual skills
• Follow your curiosity over trends

Labor

People working for you. The oldest form, and the hardest to manage

Capital

Money working for you

Code and media

Products and content that work for you without anyone’s permission, at almost no extra cost

Naval argues that code and media are the leverage of the modern era. AI tools make them more accessible than ever.

Sign your name to your work and own the results. Accountability is risky, but it also earns you trust, credit, and rewards.

• Let compounding work in relationships, knowledge, and money
• Work with people you would work with forever
• Choose integrity, since reputation compounds too

When you have leverage, being right matters more than putting in more hours. Good judgment grows from experience, reading, and clear thinking, often done alone.

• Read what you love until you love to read
• Study the foundations: math, science, economics, and philosophy
• Reread the great books
• Drop books that lose your interest

Naval calls happiness a choice and a skill you can practice. He sees desire as a choice to be unhappy until you get what you want, so pick your desires with care.

• Fewer, deeper desires
• Meditation and solitude
• Less comparison with others
• Presence in the moment

• Exercise daily and eat simply
• Guard your sleep
• Value peace of mind over winning arguments
• Treat health as the foundation for everything else

• List what feels like play to you but work to others
• Start one piece of code or media that works while you sleep
• Sign your name to something you make
• Spend an hour reading about a topic you love
• Spend ten minutes a day simply noticing your thoughts

Go to the original How to Get Rich thread and The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, which is free online. His ideas land best in his own words, tested against your own life.