naval

What I learned from reading Decoded by Jay Z. 

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(1:39) I would practice from the time I woke in the morning until I went to sleep

(2:10) Even back then I though I was the best.

(2:57) Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography  (Founders #219)

(4:32) Belief becomes before ability.

(5:06) Michael Jordan: The Life (Founders #212)

(5:46) The public praises people for what they practice in private.

(7:28)  Lock yourself in a room doing five beats a day for three summers.

(7:50) Sam Walton: Made In America  (Founders #234)

(9:50) He was disappointed in the world, so he built one of his own — from Steven Spielberg: A Biography (Founders #209)

(12:47) The Pmarca Blog Archive Ebook by Marc Andreessen (Founders #50)

(13:35) I'm not gonna say that I thought I could get rich from rap, but I could clearly see that it was gonna get bigger before it went away. Way bigger.

(21:10) Over 20 years into his career and dude ain’t changed. He’s got his own vibe. You gotta love him for that. (Rick Rubin)

(21:41) Against The Odds: An Autobiography by James Dyson (Founders #200)

(25:27) I believe you can speak things into existence.

(27:20) Picking the right market is essential.

(29:29) All companies that go out of business do so for the same reason – they run out of money. —Don Valentine 

(29:42) There are two things in business that matter, and you can learn this in two minutes- you don’t have to go to business school for two years: high gross margins and cash flow. The other financial metrics you can forget. —Don Valentine 

(31:54) I went on the road with Big Daddy Kane for a while. I got an invaluable education watching him perform.

(33:12) Everything I do I learned from the guys who came before me. —Kobe

(34:15) I truly hate having discussions about who would win one on one or fans saying you’d beat Michael. I feel like Yo (puts his hands up like stop. Chill.) What you get from me is from him. I don’t get 5 championships without him because he guided me so much and gave me so much great advice.

(34:50) Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography (Founders #214)

(37:20) This is a classic piece of OG advice. It's amazing how few people actually stick to it.

(38:04) Nuts!: Southwest Airlines' Crazy Recipe for Business and Personal Success(Founders #56)

(39:04) The key to staying on top of things is to treat everything like it's your first project.

(41:10) The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley (Founders #233)

(44:46) We (Jay Z, Bono, Quincy Jones) ended up trading stories about the pressure we felt even at this point in our lives.

(45:22) Competition pushes you to become your best self. Jordan said the same thing about Larry Bird and Magic Johnson.

[46:43] If you got the heart and the brains you can move up quickly. There's no way to quantify all of this on a spreadsheet, but it's the dream of being the exception.

(52:26) He (Russell Simmons) changed the business style of a whole generation. The whole vibe of startup companies in Silicon Valley with 25 year old CEOs wearing shell toes is Russell's Def Jam style filtered through different industries.

(54:17) Jay Z’s approach is I'm going to find the smartest people that that know more than I do, and I'm gonna learn everything I can from them.

(54:49) He (Russell Simmons) knew that the key to success was believing in the quality of your own product enough to make people do business with you on your terms. He knew that great product was the ultimate advantage in competition.

(55:08) In the end it came down to having a great product and the hustle to move it.

(56:37) Learn how to build and sell and you will be unstoppable. The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness (Founders #191)

(58:30) We gave those brands a narrative which is one of the reasons anyone buys anything. To own not just a product, but to become part of a story.

(59:30) The best thing for me to do is to ignore and outperform.

(1:01:16) Poor Charlie's Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger. (Founders #90)

(1:06:01) Tao of Charlie Munger: A Compilation of Quotes from Berkshire Hathaway's Vice Chairman on Life, Business, and the Pursuit of Wealth With Commentary  (Founders #78)

(1:08:42) Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products(Founders #178)

(1:11:46) Long term success is the ultimate goal.

(1:12:58) Runnin' Down a Dream: How to Succeed and Thrive in a Career You Love - Bill Gurley

(1:15:11) I have always used visualization the way athletes do, to conjure reality.

(1:18:14) The thing that distinguished Jordan wasn't just his talent, but his discipline, his laser-like commitment to excellence.

(1:19:42) The gift that Jordan had wasn't just that he was willing to do the work, but he loved doing it because he could feel himself getting stronger and ready for anything. That is the kind of consistency that you can get only by adding dead serious discipline of whatever talent you have.

(1:21:37) when you step outside of school and you have to teach yourself about life, you develop a different relationship to information. I've never been a purely linear thinker. You can see it to my rhymes. My mind is always jumping around restless, making connections, mixing, and matching ideas rather than marching in a straight line,

(1:27:41) Samuel Bronfman: The Life and Times of Seagram’s Mr. Sam (Founders #116)

(1:34:15) The real bullshit is when you act like you don't have contradictions inside you. That you're so dull and unimaginative that your mind never changes or wanders into strange, unexpected places.

(1:36:25) There are extreme levels of drive and pain tolerance in the history of entrepreneurship.

(1:38:45) Hit Men: Power Brokers and Fast Money Inside the Music Business

(1:42:24)  I love sharp people. Nothing makes me like someone more than intelligence.

(1:44:17) They call it the game, but it's not. You can want success all you want but to get it you can't falter. You can't slip. You can't sleep— one eye open for real and forever.

(1:51:49) The thought that this cannot be life is one that all of us have felt at some point or another. When a bad decision and bad luck and bad situations feel like too much to bear those times. When we think this, this cannot be my story, but facing up to that kind of feeling can be a powerful motivation to change.

(1:54:18) Technology is making it easier to connect to other people, but maybe harder to keep connected to yourself.

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“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth

Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

What I learned from reading The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness by Naval Ravikant and Eric Jorgenson. Read the book online for free here. 

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Naval has changed my life for the better, and if you approach the following pages like a friendly but highly competent sparring partner, he might just change yours.

Books make for great friends, because the best thinkers of the last few thousand years tell you their nuggets of wisdom.

If you don't know yet what you should work on, the most important thing is to figure it out.

Seek wealth, not money or status. Wealth is having assets that earn while you sleep. Money is how we transfer time and wealth. Status is your place in the social hierarchy.

Ignore people playing status games, They gain status by attacking people playing wealth creation games.

You will get rich by giving society what it wants but does not yet know how to get. At scale.

The internet has massively broadened the possible space of careers, Most people haven't figured this out yet.

Learn to sell. Learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable.

Arm yourself with specific knowledge, accountability, and leverage.

Specific knowledge is found by pursuing your genuine curiosity and passion rather than whatever is hot right now. Building specific knowledge will feel like play to you but will look like work to others.

Specific knowledge is often highly technical or creative. It cannot be outsourced or automated.

Fortunes require leverage.

Code and media are permissionless leverage. They're the leverage behind the newly rich. You can create software and media that works for you while you sleep.

An army of robots is freely available-it's just packed in data centers for heat and space efficiency. Use it.

If you can't code, write books and blogs, record videos and podcasts.

Leverage is a force multiplier for your judgment.

Set and enforce an aspirational personal hourly rate. If fixing a problem will save less than your hourly rate, ignore it. If outsourcing a task will cost less than your hourly rate, outsource it.

Work as hard as you can. Even though who you work with and what you work on are more important than how hard you work.

Become the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until this is true.

Apply specific knowledge, with leverage, and eventually you will get what you deserve.

When you're finally wealthy, you'll realize it wasn't what you were seeking in the first place. But that is for another day.

Your summary says "Productize yourself"-what does that mean? “Productize" has leverage. “Yourself" has accountability.

Technology democratizes consumption but consolidates production. The best person in the world at anything gets to do it for everyone.

When I talk about specific knowledge, I mean figure out what you were doing as a kid or teenager almost effortlessly. Something you didn't even consider a skill, but people around you noticed. Your mother or your best friend growing up would know.

No one can compete with you on being you. Most of life is a search for who and what needs you the most.

If you're not 100 percent into it, somebody else who is 100 percent into it will outperform you. And they won't just outperform you by a little bit-they'll outperform you by a lot because now we’re operating the domain of ideas, compound interest really applies and leverage really applies.

Escape competition through authenticity.

If you are fundamentally building and marketing something that is an extension of who you are, no one can compete with you on that.

The best jobs are neither decreed nor degreed. They are creative expressions of continuous learners in free markets.

The most important skill for getting rich is becoming a perpetual learner.

If you don't own a piece of a business, you don't have a path towards financial freedom.

Find a position of leverage. We live in an age of infinite leverage.

Forget rich versus poor, white-collar versus blue. It's now leveraged versus un-leveraged.

The most interesting and the most important form of leverage is the idea of products that have no marginal cost of replication.

This newest form of leverage is where all the new fortunes are made. The new generation's fortunes are all made through code or media.

Whenever you can in life, optimize for independence rather than pay.

What you want in life is to be in control of your time.

Demonstrated judgment-credibility around the judgmentis so critical. Warren Buffett wins here because he has massive credibility. He's been highly accountable. He's been right over and over in the public domain. He's built a reputation for very high integrity, so you can trust him. People will throw infinite behind him because of his judgment. Nobody asks leverage him how hard he works. Nobody asks him when he wakes up your or when he goes to sleep. They're like, "Warren, just do thing."

Being at the extreme in your art is very important in the age of leverage.

Spend more time making the big decisions. There are basically three really big decisions you make in your early life: where you live, who you're with, and what you do.

Your real résumé is just a catalog of all your suffering. If I ask you to describe your real life to yourself, and you look back from your deathbed at the interesting things you've done, it's all going to be around the sacrifices you made, the hard things you did.

My definition of wisdom is knowing the long-term consequences of your actions.

The really smart thinkers are clear thinkers. They understand the basics at a very, very fundamental level. 

Very smart people tend to be weird since they insist on thinking everything through for themselves.

The more you know, the less you diversify.

Inversion. 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. I think being successful is just about not making mistakes. It's not about having correct judgment. It's about avoiding incorrect judgments.
 

In the intellectual domain, compound interest rules.

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.

The genuine love for reading itself, when cultivated, is a superpower. We live in the age of Alexandria, when every book and every piece of knowledge ever written down is a fingertip away. The means of learning are abundant-it's the desire to learn that is scarce.

I probably read one to two hours a day. That puts me in the top .00001 percent. I think that alone accounts for any material success I've had in my life and any intelligence I might have.

There is ancient wisdom in books. If you're talking about an old problem like how to keep your body healthy, how to stay calm and peaceful, what kinds of value systems are good, how you raise a family, and those kinds of things, the older solutions are probably better. Any book that survived for two thousand years has been filtered through many people. The general principles are more likely to be correct. I wanted to get back into reading these sorts of books.

A 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.

All the real scorecards are internal.

You decide it's important to you. You prioritize it above everything else. You read everything on the topic.

No exceptions—all screen activities linked to less happiness, all non-screen activities linked to more happiness.

Self-discipline is a bridge to a new self-image.

Enjoy yourself. Do something positive. Project some love. Make someone happy. Laugh a little bit. Appreciate the moment. And do your work.

To make an original contribution, you have to be irrationally obsessed with something.

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

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Get access to the World’s Most Valuable Notebook for Founders by investing in a subscription to Founders Notes

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“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested, so my poor wallet suffers.” — Gareth

Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast