50 Quotes from Naval Ravikant

1. "All of the really successful people I know have a really strong action bias. They just do things."

2. "You have one life. You’re dead for tens of billions of years, and you’re going to be dead for tens of billions of years."

3. "The modern mind is overstimulated and the modern body is understimulated and overfed. Meditation, exercise, and fasting restore an ancient balance."

4. "You realize just how precious life is and how it’s important to make sure that you enjoy yourself, you sleep well at night, you’re a good moral person, you’re generally happy, you take care of other people, you help out, but you can’t take it too seriously."

5. "True happiness comes out of peace. Peace comes out of many things, but it comes from fundamentally understanding yourself."

6. "Today in society you get rewarded for creative work, for creating something brand new that society didn’t even know that it wanted that it doesn’t yet know how to get, other than through you."

7. "I want to see truth. I want to see the world the way it is. Not through my filters. Not through my desires. Not through the way that other people want me to see it. And I want to accept it the way it is."

8. "Self-awareness is the most attractive trait."

9. "Organization is the enemy of innovation."

10. "At heart I’m an entrepreneur and any day in which I solve the same problem twice in a row, I’m pretty unhappy. So by definition, I like to do something different every day. I think all humans are sort of meant to do that kind of thing."

11. "Meetings should really be phone calls, phone call should be emails, and phone calls should just be texts."

12. "Be present. Be meditative. Form real friendships. Stay away from business networking events or friendships where there is always an underlying business angle."

13. "In an older society with few resources and mechanical work, the scheduled life is the most productive. In a modern society with permissionless leverage and creative work, the unscheduled life is the most productive."

14. "I think it’s really worth – whenever you can in life, if you have the choice – optimizing for independence rather than optimizing for pay."

15. "It’s kind of a disease – social media is making celebrities of all of us and celebrities are the most miserable people in the world."

16. "Reality is neutral. Reality has no judgments. To a tree, there’s no concept of right or wrong or good or bad. You’re born, you have a whole set of sensory experiences… and then you die. How you choose to interpret that is up to you. And you do have that choice."

17. "I do everything for me. I don’t do anything for other people. None of us do. I think we all like to pretend like we’re doing everything for other people, but the reality is, we’re always just doing it for ourselves. That’s just the truth, and so whenever people ask me why did I do X or Y or Z, it’s always for me; that’s why I did it."

18. "The fundamental insecurity – most people need faith in something – religion, government, academia. Few are comfortable with decentralized systems."

19. "Judgment allows us to move through the world, but it’s also what separates us from one another. If I’m judging my friends and family, I’m separating myself from them. I’m creating a gap between us by putting them down and propping myself up."

20. "The most powerful people in the world today are the people who are writing the algorithms for Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram because they’re controlling the spread of information. They’re programming the culture."

21. "I actually think happiness is the absence of suffering. It comes from peace, and that comes from being very careful about that desire, judgment, reaction. Realizing that you don’t actually need something anymore. That something is not important to you."

22. "You have to do hard things to create your own meaning in life."

23. "The first rule of handling conflict is don’t hang around people who are constantly engaging in conflict."

24. "I learned how to make money because it was a necessity. After it stopped being a necessity, I stopped caring about it."

25. "The greatest superpower is the ability to change yourself."

26. "All real success is internal and has very little to do with external circumstances."

27. "When building habits, choose consistency over content. The best book is the one you can’t put down. The best exercise is the one you enjoy doing every day. The best health food is the one you find tasty. The best work is the work you’d do for free."

28. "The best way to prepare for the future 20 years is find something you love to do, to have a shot at being one of the best people in the world at it. Build an independent brand around it, with your name, not a company’s name or other people’s names around it. Try to make a creative work, so you’ll stay interesting, stay ahead of the game."

29. "If you look back at your life on your deathbed at all the interesting things you’ve done, they’re all going to be centered around the sacrifices you’ve made and the hard things that you did."

30. "Nothing you do is going to matter that much in the long run. Don’t take yourself so seriously."

31. "You should be too busy to do coffee while keeping an uncluttered calendar."

32. "Become the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until this is true."

33. "Most of life is a search for who and what needs you the most."

34. "A busy calendar and a busy mind will destroy your ability to create anything great."

35. "It’s only after you’re bored that you have the great ideas. It’s never going to be when you’re stressed, or busy, running around or rushed. Make the time."

36. "The best founders I’ve found are the ones who are very long-term thinkers. Even decisions that maybe they shouldn’t care that much about early on, they fix it because they are not building a house, they’re putting bricks in the foundation of the skyscraper, at least in their minds."

37. "My number one predictor of whether or not a company will find product-market fit: High shipping cadence."

38. "Keep an incredibly high bar for who you work with."

39. "Behind every successful entrepreneur is a former failed self."

40. "Leverage is critical. Leverage; Archimedes famously said, “Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand and I will move the earth”."

41. "There are three broad classes of leverage (labor, capital, and no marginal cost of replication)."

42. "The modern age is an age of leverage. We’re leveraged through machines, we’re leveraged through media, we’re leveraged through money, we’re leveraged through people working with us."

43. "A leveraged worker can out-produce a non-leveraged worker by a factor of 1000 or 10,000."

44. "As a worker you want to be as leveraged as possible so that your work has a huge impact and it won’t take as much of your time or physical effort. Like you’d rather work with a bulldozer than work with your hands, the same way you’d rather work a computer than you would with a pencil."

45. "In an age of infinite leverage, judgement is the most important skill."

46. "With a leveraged worker, the choice of how they make the decision is far more important, their judgment is far more important than how much time they put in or how hard they worked."

47. "The maximum leverage would mean that you would have people working for you. It would mean you would have a funding, you would have capital. It would mean that you’d be writing a book, it would mean that you’d be writing code and that you’d be building a media presence."

48. "The reality is you’ve been dead for the history of the universe, it’s 10 billion years or more. You will be dead for the next 70 billion years or so until the heat death of universe."

49. "My biggest fear is that I’m going to die without having really lived. I think everybody has that fear at some core level."

50. "Everyone that ends up becoming an extreme winner in society starts off as a loser."