I've read "The Almanack," listened to the full 3.5 hours of "How to Get Rich," absorbed his best podcasts, pondered countless tweets, and more.
Here are 20 highlights you should know (thread 👇):
Sources:
Paradoxes:
"Answers to all the great questions are paradoxes … Pursuing them is actually really useful because then it gives you certain intrinsic understanding in your life that brings a level of peace." — @naval
Meaning:
"I think the closest I can articulate ... is to keep growing and learning in the short period of time that you have. To seek truth and to accept things the way they are. To see the world the way it really is. Then, just to live your life." — @naval
Desire:
If @naval could put on thing on a billboard, it would be:
"Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want."
Most Common Mistake:
"I think the most common mistake for humanity is believing you’re going to be made happy because of some external circumstance." — @naval
Happiness:
@naval's most surprising discovery in the last five years is that peace & happiness are skills & choices:
"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."
Peace:
"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." — @naval
Social Programming:
"You have to be very careful because sometimes the voices talking in your head that you think is you is actually social programming." — @naval
Single-Player Reprogramming:
"Life is really a single-player game. It’s all going on in your head. Whatever you think and believe will very much shape your reality." — @naval
- Microeconomics, game theory, psychology, persuasion, ethics, computers
- Evolution, thermodynamics, information theory, complexity
Money:
"Money is not going to solve all of your problems; but it’s going to solve all of your money problems." — @naval
Wealth:
"My definition of wealth is oriented toward businesses and assets that can earn while you sleep." — @naval
Most Important Point:
"You’re probably not going to create wealth through work. There are many reasons for that, but the most basic is because your inputs are very closely tied to your outputs. You can’t earn non-linearly." — @naval
Entrepreneurship according to @naval is essentially an act of:
- Creating something new from scratch
- Predicting that society will want it
- Figuring out how to scale it and get it to everybody in a profitable, self-sustaining way
Your eventual outcome according to @naval will be the result of:
- You love to do it
- It’s natural and authentic to you
- You know how to do it the best
- Society wants it but doesn’t know how to get it
- Demonstrated judgment
- High accountability
- Leverage
- Long timescale
Find Founder-Product-Market Fit:
"The combination of the three should be your overwhelming goal. The most important thing for any entrepreneur is to find founder-product-market fit." — @naval
Long-Term Compounding:
"Impatience with actions, patience with results. I think that’s a good philosophy for life." — @naval
All the benefits & returns in life come from compounding:
- Wealth
- Relationships
- Love
- Health
- Habits
- Learning
- Reading
- Knowledge
- Creating
• • •
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"Thinking in Systems" by Donella Meadows is the top book on Amazon for System Theory with 1,000+ ratings.
Here are some highlights (thread ↓)
"Donella Meadows (1941–2001) was a scientist trained in chemistry and biophysics (Ph.D., Harvard University), followed by a research fellowship at MIT. There she worked with Jay Forrester, the inventor of system dynamics."
"This book is about that different way of seeing and thinking. It is intended for people who may be wary of the word 'systems' and the field of systems analysis, even though they may have been doing systems thinking all their lives."
It has 2,500+ Amazon ratings since launching a few months ago.
Here are my highlights from "The Psychology of Money" by @morganhousel
(Thread 👇)
“Financial success is not a hard science. It’s a soft skill, where how you behave is more important than what you know. I call this soft skill the psychology of money.”
— Morgan Housel
1. No One’s Crazy
“Your personal experiences with money make up maybe 0.00000001% of what’s happened in the world, but maybe 80% of how you think the world works.” — Morgan Housel
It’s been over a decade since Tim Ferriss helped popularize the concept of lifestyle design in his book "The 4-Hour Workweek."
(Thread 👇)
"Lifestyle design is a contrasting, philosophical lens to look at career and personal development that is juxtaposed with ‘slave, save, retire’—going to cash in my chips in 20-30-40 years that will then redeem this period of doing many things that I dislike doing."
— Tim Ferriss
"Effective lifestyle design is effective testing and awareness." — Tim Ferriss
"Are you designing a life you actually like living in?" — Ryan Holiday
20+ highlights from "The Way to Love" by Anthony de Mello
THREAD 👇
"Your programming is so strong and the pressure of society so intense that you are literally trapped into perceiving the world in this distorted kind of way. There is no way out, because you do not even have a suspicion that your perception is distorted."
— Anthony de Mello
"Who is responsible for the programming? Not you. It isn’t really you who decided even such basics as your wants and desires and so-called needs; your values, your tastes, your attitudes. It was your parents, your society, your culture, your religion..."
Alan Watts quotes to expand your mind and live a meaningful life.
Thread 👇
"The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves."
— Alan Watts
"This is the real secret of life — to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play."
"He was deeply philosophical, he didn’t take himself nor life too seriously. He appreciated the mysteries of life, he appreciated living life, and he had a lot of fun along the way. To me, he was like a full-stack intellectual hacker of life."
"Applied science is the engine that pulls humanity forward. It eventually becomes technology. That technology allows us to engage in all kinds of pursuits around civilization ... And so I think scientists are still the most unsung heroes of human history."