Takeaways from The Knowledge Podcast with Naval Ravikant
Buying books is not an expense but an investment, as they can change your life in a meaningful way.
It might be better to read blogs than self-help which are centred around a central idea. Books can be treated as a blog archive and you can jump around to which section you need to know rather than read the whole thing.
Best things to read are the books, articles and threads you're excited to read. Don't read for social approval. Returns in life come from being out of the herd.
Our moods, depression levels and lifestyle are a result of our habits. They don't define us. We can ask ourselves, 'is this habit making me happy? Is taking me where I want to go?' Habits can be broken.
Puberty is the age of desire. This is when we start thinking about what we want and our ego comes into play. We start to separate ourselves from living in the moment to attaching ourselves to mental images of our identity in the world. This is part of being human but it gets out of control when we are constantly living in this loop of talking to ourselves. We are living in a fantasy world.
It is good for strategic planning but not good for our happiness.
To get out of this, we must break the habit of uncontrolled thinking. Not by thinking more about it, but by engaging in activities and mental states to get us out of our heads. Living in delusions of the future is detrimental to our happiness.
When we say we don't have time to cultivate a new habit, it means it's not our priority.
Important questions, like what is happiness, often have no good answers because they are personal to everyone. According to Naval, happiness is a state when you realise that nothing is missing.
Things seem perfect or imperfect because of our desires. If we accept our insignificance in the scheme of things, we would not try to conform the universe to our desires and have an easier time working with what we have. This is the state children live in and they are generally happy. It also helps to be more effective.
Unhappiness comes from comparing yourself to the past and having regrets.
You are more than your mind, thoughts and habits which have been programmed by the society. Once we realise this, it is easier to detach ourselves from our mind. Mind is a muscle which can be trained and conditioned differently than how society has influenced it.
Values are things we don't compromise on and will not change due to our environment. It takes time to find our foundation values.
There is a buddhist saying that goes like, 'anger is a hot coal. You hurt your hand when you throw it at somebody'
To have meaningful relationships, we should connect with those people who have the same values as we do.
When we lie to someone, we are lying to ourselves as well.
We cannot control what happens to us, but we can control how we interpret it. Meditation allows us to observe our internal state and once we become aware of it, only then can we take action towards it.
Life is a single player game. We are born alone and we die alone. This makes it important for us to learn about our values and happiness.
There are no social rewards for being happy but there are many internal rewards.
There is no point in being jealous if you don't want to be 100% like that person.
Creating identities and labels keeps you from realising the truth.
The only thing that exists is this moment. No one has ever been able to successfully predict the future and no one has gone into the past.
Problems with the education system:
1. Schools were constructed in earlier times when knowledge was scarce. Memorization was important. But with the internet, information is abundant but the desire to learn is scarce.
2. Schools are good for socialization but learning can be done through the internet with like-minded people (like we're doing here at TKS).
3. Memorization is futile in the age of the internet.
4. Everyone has a different pace to learn. More focus should be on the basics because in life we're required to apply knowledge from first principles
On decision making: Brain is a memory prediction machine.
It takes the past and uses it to predict the future, but that is dependent on situations and circumstances.
Some useful mental models to make decisions according to Naval Ravikant are: game theory, evolution and the mental models of Charlie Monger and Benjamin Franklin.
We can eliminate what would not work, instead of thinking what would.
Do what you want to do. Try to absorb and learn from others but don't try to emulate.
The most successful people have been the losers of society. They didn't fit in, so they just did what they wanted to.
How to trust someone? You can look at how they treat others. If their ways are unethical, they're not trustworthy. If someone spends a lot of time talking about their values, they are likely covering something up.
'The closer you want to get to me, the better your values have to be.'
'Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life.'
How to separate people who know what they're talking about from people who are pretending?
Knowledge comes from first principles. The smartest people can explain things to a child. True knowledge comes from connecting things.
Our preconceived notions of how life should be prevent us from seeing reality as it is. Suffering forces us to embrace reality. It is a moment of truth. Desire and ego collide with reality to prevent us from seeing the truth.
'Vision without execution is just hallucination.'
Happiness can never come from external things. This is the biggest delusion.
Everyone has to find their own purpose. It may take years. Once you do, it will be fundamental to your existence.