The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness
The first half is about wealth, suitable for reading before age 35 to change one’s current situation. Much of the wisdom is also widely recognized and easy to accept around the world. The second half is about happiness, suitable for reading after 35 to accept the current situation. But that part is more subjective and differs from person to person. It belongs to greater wisdom and is more rare. Finally, Die with Zero (also a book).
It connects with many books I have read before. It really is an almanack. Much wisdom is explained clearly in just a few words. For example, Atomic Habits discusses how to build good habits, discard bad habits, and the importance of habits; The Psychology of Money discusses the definition of wealth and how to obtain wealth; and books such as evolutionary psychology and The Evolution of Desire discuss human psychology and gender psychology. Of course, those books are much more detailed and more actionable, belonging to the “technique” part. The Almanack of Naval Ravikant is a collection, a summary of the wisdom Naval, as a smart person and a person who has read many books, accumulated over decades. He explains it to everyone using the Feynman Technique, which he advocates. Different people, with different life experiences and reading histories, will feel completely different things. I truly wish I had encountered it earlier.
One definition of a painful moment is: when you see that the true appearance of a thing is not what you originally wanted it to be, you feel pain.
The longing for a beautiful reality blinds one’s perception of the real world. So-called pain is being unable to continue ignoring facts.
The most important thing in science is falsifiability.
Naval recommends reading originals and classics. But I do not quite agree. Many originals are hundreds or even thousands of years old. The barrier to reading them is high, they are not easy to understand, and some content can be outdated or limited. For example, although The Art of War has only a little over 5,000 characters, reading it directly is still hard. I chose to read Hua Shan’s explanatory version. Maybe I am just too weak.
“If I could live 1,000 times, then in 999 of them I would live a successful life.” Naval’s success does not depend on luck, but on his cognition. It is like what Zhang Guoli’s character says in Feng Xiaogang’s Back to 1942: “Give him another ten years and he can become a landlord again.” Of course, the broader environment is also very important. I certainly believe Zhang Guoli’s character knows how to start again from nothing and will succeed. But the historical process of land reform, socialist transformation, and people’s communes soon arrived. The days when poor people, like in White Deer Plain, tightened their belts, stayed flexible, stored grain in good years, bought land in bad years, and grew into landlords were gone forever. What awaited him was only a great change unseen in thousands of years.
Wisdom is the thinking ability to know the long-term consequences of personal actions.