Naval Ravikant - 11 Rules For Life (Genius Rules)

If you find a mountain and you start climbing, you spend your whole life climbing it, and you get, say, two-thirds of the way; and then you see the peak is like way up there. But you're two-thirds of the way up. You're still really high up, but to go the rest of the way, you're gonna have to go back down to the bottom and look for another path. Nobody wants to do that. People don't want to start over.

Yeah, and it's the nature of later in life that you just don't know the time. So it's very painful to go back down and look for a new path. But that may be the best thing to do. And that's why when you look at the greatest artists, and creators, they have this ability to start over that nobody else does. Like Elon will, you know, be called an idiot and start over doing something brand new that he supposedly is not qualified for. Or when Madonna or Paul Simon or YouTube come out with a new album, their existing fans usually hate it because they've adopted a completely new style that they've learned somewhere else. A lot of times, they'll just miss completely.

So you have to be willing to be a fool and kind of have that beginner's mind and go back to the beginning to start over. If you're not doing that, you're just getting older. Nivi just made the point to me on the side that inspiration is perishable, which is a very good point. When you have your inspiration, do it right then and there. This happens to me a lot with my tweet storms. I've actually come up with a whole bunch of additional tweets starting besides the ones that are already out there. But sometimes I just hesitate or I just pause, and then it just dies.

What I've learned is if I'm inspired to write a blog post or to publish a tweet storm, I should probably do it right away; otherwise, it's not gonna get out there. I won't come back to it. So inspiration is a beautiful and powerful thing, and when you have it, just seize it. So people talk about impatience. When do you know to be impatient? When do you know to be patient? My glib tweet on this was impatience with actions and patience with the results, and I think that's actually a good philosophy for life.

Anything you have to do, just get it done. Why wait? You're not getting any younger; your life is slipping away. You don't want to spend it waiting in line. You don't want to spend it traveling back and forth. You don't want to spend it doing things that you know ultimately aren't part of your mission. When you do them, you want to do them as quickly as you can while you do them well and with your full attention. But then you just have to give up on the results. You have to be patient with the results because you're dealing with complex systems, you're dealing with lots of people.

It takes a long time for markets to adopt products. It takes time for people to get comfortable working with each other. It takes time for great products to emerge as you polish away, polish away, polish away. So impatience with actions, patience with results. And as Nivi said, inspiration is perishable, so when you have inspiration, act on it right then and there. If you stop trying to figure out how to do things the way other people want you to do them, then you'll get to listen to that little voice inside of your head that wants to do things a certain way. Then you get to be you, and no one in the world is going to beat you at being you.

You're never going to be as good at being me as I am, and I'm never going to be as good at you being you as you are. So certainly listen, absorb, but don't try and emulate. It's a fool's errand. Instead, each person is uniquely qualified at something; they have some specific knowledge, capability, and desire that nobody else in the world does. This is purely from the combinatorics of human DNA and development.

So your goal in life is to find out the people who need you the most, to find out the business that needs you the most, to find the project and the art that needs you the most. Because there's something out there just for you, but what you don't want to do is be building checklists and decision frameworks built on what other people are doing because you're never going to be there. You'll never be good at being somebody else. The whole phrase is what feels like play to you but looks like work to others, and all those words are deliberately chosen. Like feels like, because it's your internal feeling like play. So it's fun.

But looks, because the outside person doesn’t have the feel, it's like work to them. If it looks like work to them, then you can monetize it and it can be useful. So all four of those pieces are important in that sentence. All of those criteria have to be fulfilled for you to find something that is a worthwhile endeavor, where essentially it's your hobby but it's everybody else's vocation. It's your avocation, their vocation. And that's how I know no one can compete with me on it because I'm just playing 16 hours a day, and if they want to compete with me and they're going to work, they're going to lose because they're not gonna do it 16 hours a day, seven days a week.

A happy person wants ten thousand things; a sick person just wants one thing. Right? So it's your unlimited desires that are clouding your peace, your happiness. Have desires; your biological crazy sort of stands up and says, "I can do something. I move; I resist; I live." But just be very careful of your desires. This is the oldest, most right wisdom: desire is suffering. That's what it means, right? Every desire you have is an access where you will suffer.

So just don't focus on more than one desire at a time. The universe is rigged in such a way that if you just want one thing and you focus on that, you'll get it. But everything else, you've got to let go. The reality is I don't actually read that much compared to what people think. I probably read one to two hours a day, which puts me in the top 0.0001. I think that alone accounts for any material success that I've had in my life and the intelligence that I might have because real people don't read an hour a day. Real people, I think, read a minute a day or less.

So making it an actual habit is the most important thing, and how you make it a habit doesn’t matter. It's very much like exercise or working out. Do something every day; it almost doesn't matter what you do. So the people who are obsessing over, like, should I be weight training or should I be doing tennis or should I be doing Pilates or should I be doing the high-intensity training method versus the happy body versus whatever, they're missing the point.

The important thing is to do something every day; it doesn't matter what it is. So in the same way, I would argue the important thing is to read every day, and it doesn't matter. It almost doesn't matter what you read because eventually, you'll read enough things and your interest will lead you there that it will dramatically improve your life. So just like the best workout for you is the one that you're excited enough to do every day, the same way I would say the best books to read are the ones that you’re excited about reading all the time.

I'm actually an anti-social introvert, and I was just lost in the world of words and ideas from an early age. I think some of it comes from the happy circumstance that when I was young, nobody forced me on what to read. I think there's a tendency among parents and teachers to say, "Oh, you should read this, but don't read that." The reality is I just read a lot that by today's standards would be considered mental junk food, but eventually, you just get to like reading. You run out of the junk food, and then you start eating the healthy food, right? Or your tastes kind of graduate.

So I think to some extent, that's what happened with me. Because I started from comic books and then ran from that into mysteries and went from that into fantasy. You get into sci-fi and then into science, and then mathematics, and then philosophy. So it just kind of kept climbing up the stack. But I'm lucky that there was no one around when I was seven years old or 16 years old saying, "Oh, you shouldn't read that; you should read this instead."

Now what I realized is that the biggest mistake was memorization, right? Because when you're actually trying to live your life in congruence with reality, you want to have a deep understanding of what you do and why you do it. It's much more important to know the basics really well than it is to know the advanced. Knowing calculus wouldn't help you today; it doesn't help you in business; it doesn't help you in most things. But knowing arithmetic really will help you; really, whether it's at the corner grocery store counting change or figuring out the value of your podcast business or figuring out how to do the probability math on, you know, some action that you want to take.

So understanding basic mathematics cold is way more important than memorizing calculus concepts. And the problem is, and this is true of I think all reasoning: it's much better to know the basics from the ground up—a solid foundation of understanding, a steel frame of understanding—that is, to just have a scaffolding which is memorizing advanced concepts. This is why there are a lot of people, I'm sure, that you listen to who are really smart; they use a lot of jargon and you can't quite follow their reasoning. You don't know how they're putting things together, and you have this deep-down suspicion they don't even really understand.

Right? So if you look at the most powerful thinkers, especially the ones where money or life is on the line, they have to understand the basics really, really well. Richard Feynman, the physicist, was able to, he had this piece in one of his lectures where he takes you from counting numbers on your hand all the way to calculus in four pages of text—an orally, but written down—four pages of text, and it's a complete unbroken logical chain that takes you through geometry, trigonometry, precalculus, analytic geometry, graphs, everything, all the way to calculus. He understood numbers at a core level; he didn't have to memorize anything.

When you're memorizing, it's an indication that you don't understand. You should be able to re-derive anything on the spot. And if you can't, you don't know it. So do you apply that to things other than mathematics? You apply that to everything. And the first thing, if you're going to make money, is that you're not going to get rich renting out your time. There are many reasons for that, but the most basic is just that your inputs are very closely tied to your output.

In almost any salary job, even one that's paying a lot per hour, like a lawyer or a doctor, you're still putting in the hours, and every hour you get paid. So what that means is when you're sleeping, you're not earning. When you're retired, you're not earning. When you're on vacation, you're not earning. And you can't earn non-linearly. If you look at even doctors who get rich—like, really rich—it’s because they open a business.

They open like a private practice, and that private practice builds a brand, and that brand attracts people. Or they build some kind of a medical device or a procedure or a process where they have intellectual property. So essentially, you're working for somebody else, and that person is taking on the risk and has the accountability and the intellectual property and the brand. So they're just not going to pay you enough. They're going to pay you the bare minimum that they have to to get you to do the job.

And that can be a high bare minimum, but it's still not going to be true wealth where you're retired. And finally, you're not creating new things for society; you're just doing things over and over, and you're essentially replaceable because you're now doing a set role. Most set roles can be taught. If they can be taught like in a school, then eventually you'll be competing with someone who's got more recent knowledge, who's been taught and is coming in to replace you.

You're much more likely to be doing a job that can be eventually replaced by a robot or by an AI, and it doesn't have to be wholesale replaced overnight. It can be replaced a little bit at a time, and that eats into your wealth creation and therefore your earning capability. So fundamentally, your inputs are matched to your outputs. You are replaceable, and you're not being creative. I just don't think that that is a way that you can truly make money.

So the first thing you have to do is you have to own a piece of a business. You need to have equity, either as an owner, an investor, a shareholder, or a brand that you're building that accrues to you to gain your financial freedom. So this newest form of leverage is where all the new fortunes are made. So all the new billionaires—the last generation fortunes were made by capital. That was the Warren Buffetts of the world. But the new generation fortunes are all made through code or media.

Joe Rogan making 50 to 100 million bucks a year from his podcasts. PewDiePie, I don't know how much money he's rolling in, but he's bigger than the news, right? The Fortnite players, of course. Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg, and Larry Page, and Sergey Brin, and Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs—that is all code-based leverage. Probably the most interesting thing to keep in mind about the new forms of leverage is they are permissionless. They don't require somebody else's permission for you to use them or succeed.

For labor leverage, somebody has to decide to follow you. For capital leverage, somebody has to give you money to invest or to turn into a product. But coding, writing books, recording podcasts, tweeting, youtubing—these kinds of things—these are permissionless. You don't need anyone's permission to do them, and that's why they're very egalitarian. They're great equalizers of leverage. And it's really, it's actually really important to have empty space.

If you don't have a day or two days a week in your calendar where you're not always in meetings and you're not always busy, then you're not going to be able to think. You're not going to have good ideas for your business; you're not going to have good judgments. So I also encourage taking at least one day a week, preferably two, because if you budget two, you'll end up with one—a day a week where you have nothing on your calendar, and you just have time to think.

It's only after you're bored that you're gonna have the great ideas. It's never going to be when you're stressed or busy or running around or rushed. So make the time to—me, the real winners are the ones who step out of the game entirely, who don't even play the game, who rise above it. And those are the people who have such internal mental and self-control and self-awareness that they need nothing from anybody else. So there are a couple of these characters that I know in my life, some older gentlemen that I like to kind of learn from, and we mentioned our Polish friend earlier.

I would consider him successful because he doesn't need anything from anybody. Yeah, he is at peace; he is at health. And whether he makes more money or less money, or whether the next person over from him does better or worse than him has no effect on his mental state and bearing. Historically, I would say that the legendary Buddha or Krishna Morty—who stuff that I like reading—they are successful, quote unquote, in the sense that they step out of the game entirely. Winning or losing does not matter to them. There's some line that I read somewhere that all of man's troubles arise because he cannot sit in a room quietly by himself for a half an hour.

Right? And if you could literally just sit, if you could just sit for 30 minutes and be happy, you were successful. And I think that that is a very powerful place to be. But very few of us get there. Now let me leave you with some words from Steve Jobs, Warren Buffett, and Charlie Munger on some of these rules.

Be ready to start over. Steve Jobs said, "I didn't see it then but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life."

Do what feels like play but looks like work. Similar to this, Steve Jobs said, "Don't be a career. The enemy of most dreams and intuitions, and one of the most dangerous and stifling concepts ever invented by humans is the career. A career is a concept for how one is supposed to progress through stages during the training for, and practicing, of your working life."

There are some big problems here. First and foremost is a notion that your work is different and separate from the rest of your life. If you're passionate about your life and your work, this can't be so; they will become more or less one. This is a much better way to live one's life. Overcome the need for external validation. Warren Buffett said, "Would you rather be the world's greatest lover but have everyone think you're the world's worst lover? Or would you rather be the world's worst lover but have everyone think you're the world's greatest lover? Your answer to this question will tell you whether you're doing things for the sake of external valuation or for the sake of your own driven passion."

Fall in love with reading. Charlie Munger reads around 500 non-fiction books every year. He said the following: "In my whole life, I have known no wise people who didn't read all the time. None. Zero. You would be amazed at how much Warren reads and at how much I read. My children laugh at me; they think I'm a book with a couple of legs sticking out." Navarro Vacant has also said that it's not about educated versus uneducated; it's about likes to read and doesn't like to read.

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