Zusammenfassung

Reich werden ist nicht nur eine Frage des Glücks; Glück ist keine angeborene Eigenschaft. Diese Ziele mögen unerreichbar erscheinen, aber Reichtum aufzubauen und glücklich zu sein sind Fähigkeiten, die wir lernen können.

Was sind diese Fähigkeiten, und wie können wir sie erlernen? Welche Grundsätze sollten unsere Bemühungen leiten? Wie sieht Fortschritt wirklich aus?

Eins der besten Bücher seit langem, obwohl es sich mehr um eine Sammlung von Zitaten, Empfehlungen etc. con Naval Ravikant handelt.

Über Naval

Naval Ravikant is an Indian-American entrepreneur and investor. He is the co-founder, chairman and former CEO of AngelList. He has invested early-stage in over 200 companies including Uber, FourSquare, Twitter, Wish.com, Poshmark, Postmates, Thumbtack, Notion, SnapLogic, Opendoor, Clubhouse, Stack Overflow, Bolt, OpenDNS, Yammer, and Clearview AI, with over 70 total exits and more than 10 Unicorn companies.

(source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Ravikant)

Zitate und Take Aways

• I take Naval seriously because he: Questions nearly everything Can think from first principles Tests things well Is good at not fooling himself Changes his mind regularly Laughs a lot Thinks holistically Thinks long-term And…doesn’t take himself too goddamn seriously.
• 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.
• Summary: Productize Yourself
• The internet enables any niche interest, as long as you’re the best person at it to scale out. And the great news is because every human is different, everyone is the best at something—being themselves.
• Intentions don’t matter. Actions do. That’s why being ethical is hard.
• 99% of effort is wasted.
• The reason I say this is not to make some glib comment about how 99 percent of your life is wasted and only 1 percent is useful. I say this because you should be very thoughtful and realize in most things (relationships, work, even in learning) what you’re trying to do is find the thing you can go all-in on to earn compound interest.
• Without ownership, your inputs are very closely tied to your outputs. In almost any salaried job, even one paying a lot per hour like a lawyer or a doctor, you’re still putting in the hours, and every hour you get paid.
• But usually, the real wealth is created by starting your own companies or even by investing. In an investment firm, they’re buying equity. These are the routes to wealth. It doesn’t come through the hours.
• FIND A POSITION OF LEVERAGE
• The less you want something, the less you’re thinking about it, the less you’re obsessing over it, the more you’re going to do it in a natural way. The more you’re going to do it for yourself. You’re going to do it in a way you’re good at, and you’re going to stick with it. The people around you will see the quality of your work is higher.
• It is: “products with no marginal cost of replication.” This includes books, media, movies, and code. Code is probably the most powerful form of permissionless leverage. All you need is a computer—you don’t need anyone’s permission.
• Coding, writing books, recording podcasts, tweeting, YouTubing—these kinds of things are permissionless. You don’t need anyone’s permission to do them, and that’s why they are very egalitarian. They’re great equalizers of leverage. Every great software developer, for example, now has an army of robots working for him at nighttime while he or she sleeps, after they’ve written the code, and it’s cranking away.
• You’re never going to get rich renting out your time.
• you want to be part of a great tech company, then you need to be able to SELL or BUILD. If you don’t do either, learn.
• Learn to sell, learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable.
• Earn with your mind, not your time.
• The one thing you have to avoid is the risk of ruin. Avoiding ruin means staying out of jail. So, don’t do anything illegal. It’s never worth it to wear an orange jumpsuit. Stay out of total catastrophic loss. Avoiding ruin could also mean you stay out of things that could be physically dangerous or hurt your body. You have to watch your health.
• Another way of thinking about something is if you can outsource something or not do something for less than your hourly rate, outsource it or don’t do it. If you can hire someone to do it for less than your hourly rate, hire them. That even includes things like cooking. You may want to eat your healthy home cooked meals, but if you can outsource it, do that instead.
• Be optimistic, be positive. It’s important. Optimists actually do better in the long run.
• Politics is an example of a status game. Even sports are an example of a status game. To be the winner, there must be a loser. I don’t fundamentally love status games. They play an important role in our society, so we can figure out who’s in charge. But fundamentally, you play them because they’re a necessary evil.
• You have to say no to everything and free up your time so you can solve the important problems. Those three are probably the three biggest ones.
• Retirement is when you stop sacrificing today for an imaginary tomorrow. When today is complete, in and of itself, you’re retired.
• 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.
• 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.
• Hard work is really overrated. How hard you work matters a lot less in the modern economy.
• “Clear thinker” is a better compliment than “smart.”
• What you feel tells you nothing about the facts—it merely tells you something about your estimate of the facts.
• Cynicism is easy. Mimicry is easy. Optimistic contrarians are the rarest breed.
• Facebook redesigns. Twitter redesigns. Personalities, careers, and teams also need redesigns. There are no permanent solutions in a dynamic system.
• I never ask if “I like it” or “I don’t like it.” I think “this is what it is” or “this is what it isn’t.” —Richard Feynman
• I use my tweets and other people’s tweets as maxims that help compress my own learnings and recall them. The brain space is finite—you have finite neurons—so you can almost think of these as pointers, addresses, or mnemonics to help you remember deep-seated principles where you have the underlying experience to back it up.
• Rather, I try to eliminate what’s not going to work. I think being successful is just about not making mistakes. It’s not about having correct judgment. It’s about avoiding incorrect judgments.
• It’s a very simple concept. Julius Caesar famously said, “If you want it done, then go. And if not, then send.” What he meant was, if you want it done right, then you have to go yourself and do it. When you are the principal, then you are the owner—you care, and you will do a great job. When you are the agent and you are doing it on somebody else’s behalf, you can do a bad job. You just don’t care. You optimize for yourself rather than for the principal’s assets.
• IF YOU CAN’T DECIDE, THE ANSWER IS NO.
• RUN UPHILL
• Simple heuristic: If you’re evenly split on a difficult decision, take the path more painful in the short term.
• What are the most efficient ways to build new mental models? Read a lot—just read. Reading science, math, and philosophy one hour per day will likely put you at the upper echelon of human success within seven years.
• The means of learning are abundant—it’s the desire to learn that is scarce.
• tweet from @illacertus said, “I don’t want to read everything. I just want to read the 100 great books over and over again.” I think there’s a lot to that idea. It’s really more about identifying the great books for you because different books speak to different people. Then, you can really absorb those. Reading a book isn’t a race—the better the book, the more slowly it should be absorbed.
• If they wrote it to make money, don’t read it.
• It’s better to be really great at arithmetic and geometry than to be deep into advanced mathematics. I would read microeconomics all day long—Microeconomics 101.
• If you want to learn macroeconomics, first read Adam Smith, read von Mises, or read Hayek. Start with the original philosophers of the economy. If you’re into communist or socialist ideas (which I’m personally not), start by reading Karl Marx. Don’t read the current interpretation someone is feeding you about how things should be done and run.
• calm mind, a fit body, and a house full of love. These things cannot be bought. They must be earned.
• The three big ones in life are wealth, health, and happiness. We pursue them in that order, but their importance is reverse.
• Don’t take yourself so seriously. You’re just a monkey with a plan.
• I just don’t believe in anything from my past. Anything. No memories. No regrets. No people. No trips. Nothing. A lot of our unhappiness comes from comparing things from the past to the present.
• There’s a line from Blaise Pascal I read. Basically, it says: “All of man’s troubles arise because he cannot sit in a room quietly by himself.” If you could just sit for thirty minutes and be happy, you are successful. That is a very powerful place to be, but very few of us get there.
• There’s the “five chimps theory” where you can predict a chimp’s behavior by the five chimps it hangs out with the most. I think that applies to humans as well. Maybe it’s politically incorrect to say you should choose your friends very wisely. But you shouldn’t choose them haphazardly based on who you live next to or who you happen to work with. The people who are the most happy and optimistic choose the right five chimps.
• No exceptions—all screen activities linked to less happiness, all non-screen activities linked to more happiness.
• “Okay, I’ll be late for a meeting. But what is the benefit to me? I get to relax and watch the birds for a moment. I’ll also spend less time in that boring meeting.” There’s almost always something positive.
• 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.
• Your goal in life is to find the people, business, project, or art that needs you the most. There is something out there just for you. What you don’t want to do is build checklists and decision frameworks built on what other people are doing. You’re never going to be them. You’ll never be good at being somebody else.
• World’s simplest diet: The more processed the food, the less one should consume.
• Usually the most common is “I don’t have time.” “I don’t have time” is just another way of saying “It’s not a priority.” What you really have to do is say whether it is a priority or not. If something is your number one priority, then you will do it.
• If you make the easy choices right now, your overall life will be a lot harder.
• So, he advocates taking long ice baths. Being from the Indian subcontinent, I’m strongly against the idea of ice baths. But Wim inspired me to give cold showers a try. And I did so by using the Wim Hof breathing method. It involves hyperventilating to get more oxygen into your blood, which raises your core temperature. Then, you can go into the shower.
• I learned a very important lesson from this: most of our suffering comes from avoidance. Most of the suffering from a cold shower is the tip-toeing your way in. Once you’re in, you’re in. It’s not suffering. It’s just cold. Your body says it’s cold is different than your mind saying it’s cold. Acknowledge your body saying it’s cold. Look at it. Deal with it. Accept it, but don’t mentally suffer over it. Taking a cold shower for two minutes isn’t going to kill you.
• 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.
• If there’s something you want to do later, do it now. There is no “later.” 

Health, love, and your mission, in that order. Nothing else matters.

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