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4.2 AVERAGE
4.2 AVERAGE
challenging
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
informative
inspiring
fast-paced
I liked this book.
I read it as a part of Aniket's GRP.
It talks about Wealth, Health, and Happiness in the same order. But clarifies that importance is in reverse order. Book is compilation from Naval's tweets, speeches, blogs etc. Hence though it is published as a non-fiction book, it has conversation tone. It feels like Naval is talking loudly and explaining himself.
Some of the takeaways.
1. To build the wealth - one need equity in the business. There is no other way to build wealth.
2. One need to find one's position of leverage in the work.
3. Find work that feels like play.
4. Happiness is a skill. One can learn it. It's like a muscle and one can build it.
5.Meditation is helpful in many ways, learn it.
6.For book-lovers too, lot of inputs alongwith suggested reading list is provided.
Naval, do talk about some important and complex concepts like judgement, mental models, falsification etc. But IMHO these are complex topics and treatment in the book is very shallow. Each topic is worth a book on it's own. However Naval do give a listicle of such tough but important topics that one need to know.
Book is worth its time. A quick read.
Book at the end do give Naval's recommendations on books. It is quiet long. Some of the books that caught my eye are ...
1. The rational Optimist: How prosperity evolves. Matt Ridley
2. The Red Queen: Sex and Evolution of Human nature - Matt Ridley
3. Six easy pieces - RIchard Feynman
4. Poor Charlies ALmanack - Peter Kaufman
5. Siddartha - Hermann Hesse
6. Meditation - Marcus Aurelius.
I read it as a part of Aniket's GRP.
It talks about Wealth, Health, and Happiness in the same order. But clarifies that importance is in reverse order. Book is compilation from Naval's tweets, speeches, blogs etc. Hence though it is published as a non-fiction book, it has conversation tone. It feels like Naval is talking loudly and explaining himself.
Some of the takeaways.
1. To build the wealth - one need equity in the business. There is no other way to build wealth.
2. One need to find one's position of leverage in the work.
3. Find work that feels like play.
4. Happiness is a skill. One can learn it. It's like a muscle and one can build it.
5.Meditation is helpful in many ways, learn it.
6.For book-lovers too, lot of inputs alongwith suggested reading list is provided.
Naval, do talk about some important and complex concepts like judgement, mental models, falsification etc. But IMHO these are complex topics and treatment in the book is very shallow. Each topic is worth a book on it's own. However Naval do give a listicle of such tough but important topics that one need to know.
Book is worth its time. A quick read.
Book at the end do give Naval's recommendations on books. It is quiet long. Some of the books that caught my eye are ...
1. The rational Optimist: How prosperity evolves. Matt Ridley
2. The Red Queen: Sex and Evolution of Human nature - Matt Ridley
3. Six easy pieces - RIchard Feynman
4. Poor Charlies ALmanack - Peter Kaufman
5. Siddartha - Hermann Hesse
6. Meditation - Marcus Aurelius.
I like the way Naval thinks and Eric has done a good job of collecting his wisdom. I found some sections of the book more valuable than others, but I suspect this will really depend on the reader, where they find value.
hopeful
informative
inspiring
lighthearted
reflective
fast-paced
This was a mix of powerful, insightful passages and some pithy "one-liners". The book covers "Wealth" and "Happiness" but the biggest takeaways for me were in the Happiness section. Including some below;
-Don't partner with cynics and pessimists. Their beliefs are self-fulfilling.
-Specific knowledge is knowledge you can't be trained for. If society can train you, it can train someone else and replace you.
-Reading is faster than listening. Doing is faster than watching.
-If all your beliefs line up into neat little bundles, you should be highly suspicious.
-I don’t believe I have the ability to say what is going to work. Rather, I try to eliminate what’s not going to work.
-If you have two choices to make, and they’re relatively equal choices, take the path more difficult and more painful in the short term. What’s actually going on is one of these paths requires short-term pain. And the other path leads to pain further out in the future. And what your brain is doing through conflict-avoidance is trying to push off the short-term pain.
-...most of the gains in life come from suffering in the short term so you can get paid in the long term.
-Read the greats in math, science, and philosophy. Ignore your contemporaries and news. Avoid tribal identification. Put truth above social approval.
-Don’t read the current interpretation someone is feeding you about how things should be done and run. If you start with the originals as your foundations, then you have enough of a worldview and understanding that you won’t fear any book. Then you can just learn.
-Any book that survived for two thousand years has been filtered through many people. The general principles are more likely to be correct.
-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.
-Happiness is there when you remove the sense of something missing in your life. We are highly judgmental survival-and-replication machines. We constantly walk around thinking, “I need this,” or “I need that,” trapped in the web of desires. Happiness is the state when nothing is missing. When nothing is missing, your mind shuts down and stops running into the past or future to regret something or to plan something.
-To me, happiness is not about positive thoughts. It’s not about negative thoughts. It’s about the absence of desire, especially the absence of desire for external things. The fewer desires I can have, the more I can accept the current state of things, the less my mind is moving, because the mind really exists in motion toward the future or the past. The more present I am, the happier and more content I will be. If I latch onto a feeling, if I say, “Oh, I’m happy now,” and I want to stay happy, then I’m going to drop out of that happiness. Now, suddenly, the mind is moving. It’s trying to attach to something. It’s trying to create a permanent situation out of a temporary situation.
-Everything is perfect exactly the way it is. It is only in our particular minds we are unhappy or not happy, and things are perfect or imperfect because of what we desire. The world just reflects your own feelings back at you. Reality is neutral. Reality has no judgments. To a tree, there is no concept of right or wrong, good or bad. You’re born, you have a whole set of sensory experiences and stimulations (lights, colors, and sounds), and then you die. How you choose to interpret them is up to you—you have that choice.
-The mind is just as malleable as the body. We spend so much time and effort trying to change the external world, other people, and our own bodies—all while accepting ourselves the way we were programmed in our youths.
-Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.
-When you’re young, you have time. You have health, but you have no money. When you’re middle-aged, you have money and you have health, but you have no time. When you’re old, you have money and you have time, but you have no health. So the trifecta is trying to get all three at once.
-Peace is happiness at rest, and happiness is peace in motion.
-The reality is life is a single-player game. You’re born alone. You’re going to die alone. All of your interpretations are alone. All your memories are alone. You’re gone in three generations, and nobody cares. Before you showed up, nobody cared. It’s all single player.
on jealousy;
-It’s such a poisonous emotion because, at the end of the day, you’re no better off with jealousy. You’re unhappier, and the person you’re jealous of is still successful or good-looking or whatever they are. One day, I realized with all these people I was jealous of, I couldn’t just choose little aspects of their life. I couldn’t say I want his body, I want her money, I want his personality. You have to be that person. Do you want to actually be that person with all of their reactions, their desires, their family, their happiness level, their outlook on life, their self-image? If you’re not willing to do a wholesale, 24/7, 100 percent swap with who that person is, then there is no point in being jealous.
-Politics, academia, and social status are all zero-sum games. Positive-sum games create positive people.
-Death is the most important thing that is ever going to happen to you. When you look at your death and you acknowledge it, rather than running away from it, it’ll bring great meaning to your life. We spend so much of our life trying to avoid death. So much of what we struggle for can be classified as a quest for immortality.
-Doctors won’t make you healthy. Nutritionists won’t make you slim. Teachers won’t make you smart. Gurus won’t make you calm. Mentors won’t make you rich. Trainers won’t make you fit. Ultimately, you have to take responsibility. Save yourself.
-When it comes to medicine and nutrition, subtract before you add.
-The mind itself is a muscle—it can be trained and conditioned. It has been haphazardly conditioned by society to be out of our control.
-Read everything you can. And not just the stuff that society tells you is good or even books that I tell you to read. Just read for its own sake. Develop a love for it. Even if you have to read romance novels or paperbacks or comic books. There’s no such thing as junk. Just read it all. Eventually, you’ll guide yourself to the things that you should and want to be reading.
-My old definition was “freedom to.” Freedom to do anything I want. Freedom to do whatever I feel like, whenever I feel like. Now, the freedom I’m looking for is internal freedom. It’s “freedom from.” Freedom from reaction. Freedom from feeling angry. Freedom from being sad. Freedom from being forced to do things. I’m looking for “freedom from,” internally and externally, whereas before I was looking for “freedom to.”
-Don’t spend your time making other people happy. Other people being happy is their problem. It’s not your problem. If you are happy, it makes other people happy. If you’re happy, other people will ask you how you became happy and they might learn from it, but you are not responsible for making other people happy.
-All benefits in life come from compound interest, whether in money, relationships, love, health, activities, or habits.
-There is actually nothing but this moment. No one has ever gone back in time, and no one has ever been able to successfully predict the future in any way that matters. Literally, the only thing that exists is this exact point where you are in space at the exact time you happen to be here.
-Don't partner with cynics and pessimists. Their beliefs are self-fulfilling.
-Specific knowledge is knowledge you can't be trained for. If society can train you, it can train someone else and replace you.
-Reading is faster than listening. Doing is faster than watching.
-If all your beliefs line up into neat little bundles, you should be highly suspicious.
-I don’t believe I have the ability to say what is going to work. Rather, I try to eliminate what’s not going to work.
-If you have two choices to make, and they’re relatively equal choices, take the path more difficult and more painful in the short term. What’s actually going on is one of these paths requires short-term pain. And the other path leads to pain further out in the future. And what your brain is doing through conflict-avoidance is trying to push off the short-term pain.
-...most of the gains in life come from suffering in the short term so you can get paid in the long term.
-Read the greats in math, science, and philosophy. Ignore your contemporaries and news. Avoid tribal identification. Put truth above social approval.
-Don’t read the current interpretation someone is feeding you about how things should be done and run. If you start with the originals as your foundations, then you have enough of a worldview and understanding that you won’t fear any book. Then you can just learn.
-Any book that survived for two thousand years has been filtered through many people. The general principles are more likely to be correct.
-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.
-Happiness is there when you remove the sense of something missing in your life. We are highly judgmental survival-and-replication machines. We constantly walk around thinking, “I need this,” or “I need that,” trapped in the web of desires. Happiness is the state when nothing is missing. When nothing is missing, your mind shuts down and stops running into the past or future to regret something or to plan something.
-To me, happiness is not about positive thoughts. It’s not about negative thoughts. It’s about the absence of desire, especially the absence of desire for external things. The fewer desires I can have, the more I can accept the current state of things, the less my mind is moving, because the mind really exists in motion toward the future or the past. The more present I am, the happier and more content I will be. If I latch onto a feeling, if I say, “Oh, I’m happy now,” and I want to stay happy, then I’m going to drop out of that happiness. Now, suddenly, the mind is moving. It’s trying to attach to something. It’s trying to create a permanent situation out of a temporary situation.
-Everything is perfect exactly the way it is. It is only in our particular minds we are unhappy or not happy, and things are perfect or imperfect because of what we desire. The world just reflects your own feelings back at you. Reality is neutral. Reality has no judgments. To a tree, there is no concept of right or wrong, good or bad. You’re born, you have a whole set of sensory experiences and stimulations (lights, colors, and sounds), and then you die. How you choose to interpret them is up to you—you have that choice.
-The mind is just as malleable as the body. We spend so much time and effort trying to change the external world, other people, and our own bodies—all while accepting ourselves the way we were programmed in our youths.
-Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.
-When you’re young, you have time. You have health, but you have no money. When you’re middle-aged, you have money and you have health, but you have no time. When you’re old, you have money and you have time, but you have no health. So the trifecta is trying to get all three at once.
-Peace is happiness at rest, and happiness is peace in motion.
-The reality is life is a single-player game. You’re born alone. You’re going to die alone. All of your interpretations are alone. All your memories are alone. You’re gone in three generations, and nobody cares. Before you showed up, nobody cared. It’s all single player.
on jealousy;
-It’s such a poisonous emotion because, at the end of the day, you’re no better off with jealousy. You’re unhappier, and the person you’re jealous of is still successful or good-looking or whatever they are. One day, I realized with all these people I was jealous of, I couldn’t just choose little aspects of their life. I couldn’t say I want his body, I want her money, I want his personality. You have to be that person. Do you want to actually be that person with all of their reactions, their desires, their family, their happiness level, their outlook on life, their self-image? If you’re not willing to do a wholesale, 24/7, 100 percent swap with who that person is, then there is no point in being jealous.
-Politics, academia, and social status are all zero-sum games. Positive-sum games create positive people.
-Death is the most important thing that is ever going to happen to you. When you look at your death and you acknowledge it, rather than running away from it, it’ll bring great meaning to your life. We spend so much of our life trying to avoid death. So much of what we struggle for can be classified as a quest for immortality.
-Doctors won’t make you healthy. Nutritionists won’t make you slim. Teachers won’t make you smart. Gurus won’t make you calm. Mentors won’t make you rich. Trainers won’t make you fit. Ultimately, you have to take responsibility. Save yourself.
-When it comes to medicine and nutrition, subtract before you add.
-The mind itself is a muscle—it can be trained and conditioned. It has been haphazardly conditioned by society to be out of our control.
-Read everything you can. And not just the stuff that society tells you is good or even books that I tell you to read. Just read for its own sake. Develop a love for it. Even if you have to read romance novels or paperbacks or comic books. There’s no such thing as junk. Just read it all. Eventually, you’ll guide yourself to the things that you should and want to be reading.
-My old definition was “freedom to.” Freedom to do anything I want. Freedom to do whatever I feel like, whenever I feel like. Now, the freedom I’m looking for is internal freedom. It’s “freedom from.” Freedom from reaction. Freedom from feeling angry. Freedom from being sad. Freedom from being forced to do things. I’m looking for “freedom from,” internally and externally, whereas before I was looking for “freedom to.”
-Don’t spend your time making other people happy. Other people being happy is their problem. It’s not your problem. If you are happy, it makes other people happy. If you’re happy, other people will ask you how you became happy and they might learn from it, but you are not responsible for making other people happy.
-All benefits in life come from compound interest, whether in money, relationships, love, health, activities, or habits.
-There is actually nothing but this moment. No one has ever gone back in time, and no one has ever been able to successfully predict the future in any way that matters. Literally, the only thing that exists is this exact point where you are in space at the exact time you happen to be here.
A really good tome (based on twitterisms) for studying the mind of one of todays's greatest angel investors / bloggers.
informative
reflective
medium-paced
easily digestible and informative. some of my favourite quotes below!
- every desire is a chosen unhappiness - its a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you achieve it
- more important to perfect your desires
- stop asking why and start saying wow
- what’s the positive interpretation of this
- you can change it, accept it, or leave it
- “well, the universe is going to teach me something now”
- be yourself with passionate intensity
- to make an original contribution, you have to be irrationally obsessed with something
- freedom to vs freedom from
(freedom from desire, from employment etc) - inspiration is perishable. act on it immediately
