The Almanack of Naval Ravikant

This is my first book in the journey of trying nonfiction genre. Nothing wrong with fiction (I still love them), but I thought reading nonfiction, especially books that teach you peace and good things can bring a lot of positive difference in life.

Thanks to my friend Yash for suggesting this book!

This book is available free of cost digitally at https://www.navalmanack.com/. Thanks a lot!

I did not know who is Naval Ravikant before reading this book. To be frank, I read Naval as Navel (the belly button) and thought it is just a crazy title or has some hidden meaning.

This book covers a lot of interesting subjects that all of us crave for either directly or indirectly like wealth and happiness. It is not written by Naval himself, but by Eric Jorgenson, who collected it from Naval’s tweets, podcasts and articles. So we have works of two people here. Eric the author and Naval the source. Most of my review here is about the source Naval than Eric, unless otherwise noted.

The book itself was easy to read. Paragraphs were concise. There was not much beating around the bush, but since the book touches on parts of philosophy, it is quite difficult to avoid.

However I wish the book used less images. The images did not make any sense. They were there like a placeholder without any hint on how they convey the idea. May be it is a high-level philosophical thought that I’m yet to learn.

The ideas presented in the book may or may not suit to everyone. It really has some I’m rich and now I can say whatever I want and call that as my secret to success vibes. Or in other words, there is a strong survivorship bias.

The author was lucky enough to be born in a family with literate (or educated may be?) members, financially well enough to move to USA (he was poor as per USA’s perspective and he did suffer a lot in his childhood). Most of us are not given that luck in our life. He also belonged to an extremely lucky period of technology boom where knowing computer science can be a huge kick-starter. So it was a mixture of a skilled person in a growing environment. And to nobody’s surprise, the author also agrees that hard work does not pay-off on its own. I always think of it like anything multiplied by zero is zero. So just hard working is not enough, it should be aimed at a proper target.

The chapter about making money and becoming rich did not go that well with me. The author says to get a skill that nobody else can achieve and then sell it. This way you are irreplaceable. This is remotely impossible and also I do not think we have any business in this world which can not be replaced. Even the monopolies we see are not technically irreplaceable.

He says we have to give our best and then society will take care of repaying with profits. This is an ideal society where your action is valued purely based on merit and good work is always appreciated. But this is not the reality. Society does not reward good work. Society is filled with competition where if you are too good, you get kicked down (may be legally or illegally). One way or the another you need to find a way in, trick people into thinking you are the best, bend ways around. So this advice is also far from reality.

There are other such advice scattered throughout the text which does not match the practical world. But thankfully, they are concentrated in the first chapter about wealth. Getting rich is a controversial discussion anyway.

Now coming to good parts, the book has a lot of excellent advice on living in general. For example he says that if you can not work with someone for five minutes, then you should not expect to work with them for your lifetime. There are a lot of leave it if it does not look good thoughts and I agree with them. Life is too short to fight and change people, we should live for ourselves first.

He also has good points on reading books. He says to read anything until you can narrow down to what to read. He says he uses a fast reading technique where he skips chapters and contents till he finds something to grab his mind. I would extend this reading to learning. Learn everything you can and then narrow it to what you like. Here learning can be from books or videos. Ultimately, you read or watch something and get some knowledge from it.

Day before yesterday, I was thinking that people should not target goals, but instead target to the intended effect of the goal. Like, instead of saying my goal is to earn a million dollars, I should rephrase it to mean why I want that money in the first place. May be it is to buy a house, or to go on tour. This way we have a better measurable pathway (how close am I to buy this house) than an obfuscated mission.

Then, yesterday I read the book and the author also had a similar thought. He said we should define the target environment we wants ourselves to be and not the goals. I think it is similar to my idea but more polished and concrete.

There are other similar thoughts and ideas throughout the book that agreed with my notion of things.

Anyway, at the end of the day, we all know there is no secret rule to success. It first of all depends on what you define success to be. Next it depends on how much achievable it is. There are successful people who share what made them succeed. Will it make us successful? Who knows.

As a conclusion, I can say this is really a nice book with a lot of good knowledge. It is also quite short and has examples then and there to relate to real life. So even if you do not agree with all his thoughts, you can at least know that there are such thoughts. So go ahead, give it a try!