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A review by espeni
The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness by Eric Jorgenson
3.0
The Almanack of Naval Ravikant
The Almanack of Naval Ravankant is a collection of Naval Ravikant (founder of Angelist and successful Angel Investor) tweets, and ideas compiled by Eric Jorgenson.
In this book Naval touches on a wide variety of topics ranging from how to build wealth to nutrition and personal fitness and how to be happy.
The Good
The ideas in The Almanack are solid, Naval gives general but good advice on building wealth and his rational buddhist ideas are pretty powerful.
The book is mostly composed of Navals tweets and interviews so it is highly digestible and easy to read.
The Bad
As this book was compiled from tweets and interviews, it doesn’t really tie together in any meaningful way. Eric Jorgenson tried to construct more of an overarching narrative but I didn’t feel it was that coherent.
Navals starts the book starting about building wealth or assets that earn money while you sleep. His strategy for building wealth is built on three concepts, specific knowledge, leverage, and compounding interest. Specific knowledge is a combination of your unique experience and knowledge, and Naval stresses that you focus on skills that you enjoy learning more than most so it is easy to put in the time to master them. Naval defines leverage as coming from three things, labor, capital, or products with little replication cost like code or digital media. By writing one line of code, a great engineer can create millions of dollars of value, and by producing one great podcast a great orator can reach millions of listeners. Finally Naval looks at compounding interest as something that doesn’t just apply to investments, and states “play long term games with long term people”.
The second big idea in The Almanack is around how to be happy. Naval stresses that you should strive to control your emotions and maintain inner peace regardless of what is happening around you. One idea that really resonated with me was taking negative things that happen to you and consciously reframing them as positive. So missing your bus becomes a chance to spend time outside at the bus stop. In this section Naval touches on a wide variety of things from nutrition, to meditation, all of which are different habits that help you become a happier person.
I gave this book 3 stars. While the ideas were good, ultimately it is a collection of tweets and not particularly coherent as a long form book. I also found it ironic that Naval would almost certainly not recommend reading this book, as he emphasizes several times that you should read the basics studying arithmetic when you want to learn math, or reading Adam Smith when you want to learn economics.
The Almanack of Naval Ravankant is a collection of Naval Ravikant (founder of Angelist and successful Angel Investor) tweets, and ideas compiled by Eric Jorgenson.
In this book Naval touches on a wide variety of topics ranging from how to build wealth to nutrition and personal fitness and how to be happy.
The Good
The ideas in The Almanack are solid, Naval gives general but good advice on building wealth and his rational buddhist ideas are pretty powerful.
The book is mostly composed of Navals tweets and interviews so it is highly digestible and easy to read.
The Bad
As this book was compiled from tweets and interviews, it doesn’t really tie together in any meaningful way. Eric Jorgenson tried to construct more of an overarching narrative but I didn’t feel it was that coherent.
Navals starts the book starting about building wealth or assets that earn money while you sleep. His strategy for building wealth is built on three concepts, specific knowledge, leverage, and compounding interest. Specific knowledge is a combination of your unique experience and knowledge, and Naval stresses that you focus on skills that you enjoy learning more than most so it is easy to put in the time to master them. Naval defines leverage as coming from three things, labor, capital, or products with little replication cost like code or digital media. By writing one line of code, a great engineer can create millions of dollars of value, and by producing one great podcast a great orator can reach millions of listeners. Finally Naval looks at compounding interest as something that doesn’t just apply to investments, and states “play long term games with long term people”.
The second big idea in The Almanack is around how to be happy. Naval stresses that you should strive to control your emotions and maintain inner peace regardless of what is happening around you. One idea that really resonated with me was taking negative things that happen to you and consciously reframing them as positive. So missing your bus becomes a chance to spend time outside at the bus stop. In this section Naval touches on a wide variety of things from nutrition, to meditation, all of which are different habits that help you become a happier person.
I gave this book 3 stars. While the ideas were good, ultimately it is a collection of tweets and not particularly coherent as a long form book. I also found it ironic that Naval would almost certainly not recommend reading this book, as he emphasizes several times that you should read the basics studying arithmetic when you want to learn math, or reading Adam Smith when you want to learn economics.