The Angel Philosopher

I really want to break away from this idea of forty hour weeks, or 9 to 5s, or roles, or jobs, or identities. It just all feels like a straight jacket.

A really good book costs $10 or $20 and can change your life in a meaningful way

We’re playing little movies in our heads. We’re just walking down the street, but no one’s actually there. If you started voicing the thoughts you have in your head, you’d be thought of as a madman and they’d lock you up.

Saying, 'I don't have time,' is just another way of saying it's not a priority

Happiness is a default state. It’s what’s there when you remove the sense that something is missing from your life.

Every positive thought has a seed of a negative thought within it

Do I really care if I embarrass myself? I'm going to die anyway, this is all going to go to 0, and I won't remember anything. This is pointless.

All the benefits in life come from compound interest; whether in money, relationships, love, health, activities or habits

Anger is a hot coal that you hold in your hand while waiting to throw it at somebody else

Everything that I was doing, I should have still done, but with less emotion, and especially less anger

Do what you're going to do, just with less emotion and angst

Life is a single player game. You’re born alone. You’ll die alone.

You can’t just pick and choose what aspects of another’s life you want

The tools and means to learn are infinite, it’s the desire to learn that’s incredibly scarce

I think education should be about learning the basics in all the fields, and learning them really well over and over, because life is mostly just about applying the basics and only doing the advanced stuff in the things you truly love, where you know the basics inside and out

You don’t need to do anything. All you should do is what you want to do....No one in the world is going to beat you at being you.

Each person is uniquely qualified at something – they have some specific knowledge, capability, and desire, that no one else in the world has

It’s the mark of a charlatan to try and explain simple things in complicated ways, and the mark of a genius to explain complicated things in simple ways

I probably read one to two hours a day and that puts me in the top .001 percent. I think that alone accounts for any material success that I've had in my life.

Only associate with people who you don’t have to drink to be around them

Nature has no concept of happiness or unhappiness

Freedom from vs. freedom to

Only the individual transcends. Nobody reaches enlightenment or internal happiness, or does serious internal work, in group settings.

If you're not willing to do it right now, then don't commit to it

The most common mistake people make - “The idea or belief that you will be made happy because of some external circumstance”

The mind should be a tool, or servant, and I’m the master. It’s not something that should be controlling and driving me 24/7.

Happiness to me is mainly not suffering, not desiring, not thinking too much about the future or the past, and really just embracing the present moment

You should never, ever fool anybody and you are the easiest person to fool

It can literally destroy your happiness if you spend all your time living in delusions of the future

I’m both lazy and really focused on being present, so I think taking notes on a book is the same as taking photos when you’re on a trip – all it’s doing is taking you out of the moment

Decision-making is everything

The closer you want to get to me the better your values have to be

The smaller you can make your ego, the less desire you’ll have for the outcome you want, and the easier it is to see reality

The more of a desire I have that a decision work out a certain way, the less likely I am to see the truth

The idea that some external thing will bring me happiness or joy is completely delusional

There is no meaning to life. There is no purpose to life...Anything you do will fade.

So now I treat books like blogs - I'll skim through a large number of books, I'll put them down and jump around until I find a part that's interesting. I won't feel guilty about having to finish the entire book because it's like a blog archive.

It’s really important to be able to uncondition yourself from your habits - You need to be able to recognize habits that you picked up years ago, that may no longer serve you

I do not want my sense of self to continue to develop and become stronger as I get older. I want it to be weaker and more muted so that I can live much more in present everyday reality...

The reality is that 95% of what my brain runs off to do, I don’t need to tackle at that exact moment

Modern humans don’t live enough in our bodies. We don’t live enough in our awareness. We live too much in this internal monologue in our heads.

All of the real scorecards in life are internal

There is actually nothing BUT this moment. No one has ever gone back in time and no one has ever been able to predict the future successfully in any way that matters.

College and schools come from a time period when books were rare

A lot of our unhappiness comes from comparing things from the past to the present

Figure out what kinds of environments you can thrive in and then build a system to create that environment around you so that you're statistically likely to succeed

Like everything in life, if you're willing to make the short-term sacrifice, you'll have a long-term benefit

The really smart thinkers are clear thinkers and they understand the basics at a very fundamental level

Great people have great outcomes

The best workout for you is the one you’re excited about and the same goes for books – the best books to read are the ones you’re excited about reading

I try to run my brain in debugging mode as much as possible

Anyone who I can’t be honest around, I don’t want to be around

The advantage of meditation is not that you're suddenly going to gain a superpower to control your internal state. It's that you will recognize how out of control your mind actually is.

The education system is completely obsolete

If you really want to be successful and happy, you’re looking for a non-average outcome, so you can’t be reading the average things

If it doesn’t capture my attention within the first chapter in a meaningfully positive way I’ll either drop the book, or skip ahead a few chapters

Someone who makes decisions right 80% of time instead of 70% of time will be valued and compensate in the market hundreds of times more

I basically load my head with mental models, and they each apply to different situations

If someone is going around and talking about how honest they are, they’re probably dishonest

The best founders are the ones who are very long-term thinkers

Advice for founders - “Go find the thing you can commit to for 10 years, because that’s how long it’s going to take, minimum, to get a good outcome”

“The reality is that I just read a lot, that by today’s standards, would be considered mental junk food. Eventually, you just get to like reading, you run out of junk food, and you start reading the healthy food.”‘

Making reading an actual habit is the most important thing and how you make it habit doesn't matter

Naval doesn’t believe in hierarchical relationships

All of man’s problems arise because he can’t sit by himself in a room for 30 minutes

I think it's delusional to think that you're somehow going to be saved before you die by some combination of A.I. and magic science. You just have to live the life you have.

The returns in life come from being out of the herd

The smartest and most successful people I know started out as losers

To find a worthy mate, be worthy of a worthy mate

We’re full of a world where it’s so easy to pretend you have knowledge that you don’t actually have

There should be a two-factor authentication on your calendar

What Naval thinks happens after you die

Reading was my first love

Naval's Hierarchy of Priorities

To find great relationships, just find other people with whom your values line up

Jealousy is such a poisonous emotion because at the end of the day, you’re no better off – you’re unhappier, and the person you’re jealous of is still successful or good looking, or whatever.

If all of your beliefs line up into neat little bundles, you should be highly suspicious

If you read what everyone else is reading, you’re going to think what everyone else is thinking, so you need a little bit of diversity

“Most books have only one point to make

I just try and set up good systems and that way, the individual decisions don't matter as much because I think our ability to make individual decisions is actually not great

Try everything. Test it for yourself, but be skeptical. Keep what’s useful, and discard what’s not.

I don’t want to read everything, I just want to read the 100 greatest books over and over again

I read when I'm bored of everything else but the good news is I get bored very easily

We unconsciously pick up habits in the background and we keep them for decades. We may not even realize they’re bad for us.

I think the mind itself is a muscle and it can be trained and conditioned

Praise specifically, criticize generally

If an email makes you angry, wait 24 hours before responding

Change yourself, then change your family or neighbors, before you get into abstract concepts about how you’re going to change the world

Science to me is the study of truth and mathematics is the language of science and nature

Negotiations with high integrity people are usually very easy