My review on “The Almanack of Naval Ravikanth” by Eric Jorgenson

The book is basically divided into 5 parts.

• Building Wealth
• Building Judgement
• Learning Happiness
• Saving Yourself
• Philosophy

Each has a detailed description and how to achieve them. Below are the key learnings that I have found in the book.

All the return in life, whether it is wealth, relationships, or knowledge come from compound interest.

Play long term games with long term people

Talking about Wealth,

This book has thoroughly discussed wealth and how it is different from money and being rich.

• Wealth is assets that earn while you sleep
• Money is how we transfer wealth
• Build your wealth with your specific knowledge
• Build or buy equity in a business
• The most important skill for getting richer is becoming a perpetual learner
• Owning equity means you own the upside
• The less you want something, the less you are thinking about it, the less you are obsessing over it, the more you are going to do it in a natural way
• What you want in life is to be in control of your life
• Status game is a zero-sum game
• Intentions do not matter, actions do. That's why being ethical is hard
• Solve via iterations and earn via reputation

The key learning in this module is creating wealth that can earn us while we are sleeping with the help of specific knowledge, find your specific knowledge and start working on it.

Coming to Judgment,

The book says judgment is wisdom applied to the external consequences of our actions. Wisdom is knowing the long-term consequences of our actions.

Judgment is all about “Knowing the long term consequences of our action and then making the right decision to capitalize on that”

One more important thing is “It's not about having correct judgments, it's about avoiding incorrect judgments”

Learning Happiness

• Happiness is the state when nothing is missing, when nothing is missing, our mind shuts down and stops running into the past and future to regret something or to plan something
• Happiness is about the absence of desire
• You can literally destroy happiness if we spend all our time living in delusions of the future

Exercise and meditation are two very important habits to build a healthy physique.

“To have peace of mind, you have to have peace of body first”

The book every now and then recalls the importance of reading, It is all about reading and reading anything until you find the good one to read.

Anger is a negative-sum game, “Anger is a hot coal that you hold in your hand while waiting to throw it at somebody else”

These are my learnings from “The Almanack of Naval Ravikant”. I would definitely recommend this book to everyone, It's a great read. Finally ending this with Naval say

Learn the fundamentals (math, physics, theory of computation) and then you’re future-proofed.