by Naval / Eric Jorgenson
10/10
Key Ideas:
Read what you love until you love to read.
Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.
If there’s something you want to do later, do it now. There is no “later”.
You should be too busy to “do coffee” while still keeping an uncluttered calendar.
You have two lives, and the second one begins when you realize you only have one.
Other interesting notes:
“Clear thinker” is a better compliment than “smart”.
A contrarian isn’t one who always objects—that’s a conformist of a different sort. A contrarian reasons independently from the ground up and resists pressure to conform.
Tension is who you think you should be. Relaxation is who you are.
Don’t take yourself so seriously. You’re just a monkey with a plan.
Happiness is what’s there when you remove the sense that something is missing in your life.
Anticipation for our vices pulls us into the future. Eliminating vices makes it easier to be present.
The fundamental delusion: There is something out there that will make me happy and fulfilled forever.
Happiness is being satisfied with what you have.
The problem with getting good at a game, especially one with big rewards, is you continue playing it long after you should have outgrown it. Survival and replication drive put us on the work treadmill. Hedonic adaptation keeps us there. The trick is knowing when to jump off and play instead.
Buddha or Krishnamurti are successful in the sense that they step out of the game entirely. Winning or losing does not matter to them.
If you can’t see yourself working with someone for life, don’t work with them for a day.
Happiness habits – meditation, get sunlight, smile, exercise, dropping caffeine, every time you catch yourself desiring something, say, “Is it so important to me I’ll be unhappy unless this goes my way?
A personal metric: how much of the day is spent doing things out of obligation rather than out of interest?
I’m not afraid of death any more.
To make an original contribution, you have to be irrationally obsessed with something.
Impatience with actions, patience with results.
People who live far below their means enjoy a freedom that people busy upgrading their lifestyles can’t fathom.
Making money is not a thing you do—it’s a skill you learn.
Ignore people playing status games. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
Pick business partners with high intelligence, energy, and, above all, integrity.
Learn to sell. Learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable.
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.
Forget 10x programmers. 1,000x programmers really exist.
Spend more time making the big decisions: where you live, who you’re with, and what you do.
If you want to make the maximum amount of money possible, if you want to get rich over your life in a deterministically predictable way, stay on the bleeding edge of trends and study technology, design, and art—become really good at something.
Thoughts on the book:
Multiple life changing ideas. If you prefer podcasts, just listen to Ferriss 1, 2, Rogan, How to get rich.
Longer summary/notes: KK, TS, book is free online
If you like this, you’ll probably like: How to live, A guide to the good life, The way to love, Principles, 7 habits, books
Leo :) 