The Almanack of Naval Ravikant

Jorgenson compiled this from Naval Ravikant's tweets, podcast appearances, blog posts and interviews, organised into two parts: wealth and happiness. Ravikant co-founded AngelList and invested early in Uber, Twitter, Postmates and others. He did not write the book, though he approved it, and it is free online.

The wealth section makes several specific arguments. Wealth means assets that earn while you sleep, which Ravikant distinguishes from money and from status. Status games are zero-sum and wealth creation is positive-sum, and he argues that people playing status games attack wealth creation. He argues for specific knowledge, meaning capability that cannot be trained for and that a person is uniquely suited to develop, combined with accountability, meaning taking public risk under your own name, and with leverage, which he divides into labour, capital and permissionless leverage from code and media.

His position on permissionless leverage is the most practically useful. Code and media replicate at zero marginal cost and require no one's permission to deploy, which he argues makes them the defining source of new fortunes. He also argues for hourly rate discipline, meaning setting a personal rate and refusing work below it, and against renting out time in any form because it does not compound.

The happiness section covers desire as a contract to be unhappy until you get what you want, the treatment of happiness as a skill and a choice rather than a circumstance, and meditation. It is less distinctive and repeats standard positions. The book is a compilation of aphorisms without argument or evidence, so a reader cannot test any of it. Ravikant's own outcome makes the advice hard to separate from survivorship. The leverage framework is the part that transfers.