50 Quotes from Naval Ravikant Part 2

1. "If you can’t delete an email without flinching or responding, you won’t scale."

2. "Politics is sports writ large — pick a side, rally the tribe, exchange stories confirming bias, hurl insults and threats at the other side."

3. "It is the mark of a charlatan to explain a simple concept in a complex way."

4. "On meditation: It’s self-therapy. Instead of paying a therapist to sit there and listen to you, you’re listening to yourself."

5. "We’re basically monkeys on a small rock orbiting a small backwards star in a huge galaxy, which is in an absolutely staggeringly gigantic universe, which itself may be part of a gigantic multiverse."

6. "A vacation is a very expensive way to schedule the time to read a book in peace."

7. "Given that the main function of universities these days is filtering and signaling, the best move is to get admitted to Stanford and then drop out."

8. "People who try to look smart by pointing out obvious exceptions actually signal the opposite."

9. "Develop ‘strategic incompetence’ – people won’t ask you to do things you hate to do, if you’re bad at them."

10. "Apply specific knowledge, with leverage, and eventually you will get what you deserve."

11. "If you can’t code, write books and blogs, record videos and podcasts."

12. "Arm yourself with specific knowledge, accountability, and leverage. Specific knowledge is knowledge that you cannot be trained for. If society can train you, it can train someone else, and replace you."

13. "Specific knowledge can be taught through apprenticeships or self-taught. It’s high paying because society has not yet figured out how to teach or automate it. It tends to be creative or technical."

14. "You will get rich by giving society what it wants but does not yet know how to get. At scale."

15. "The ultimate purpose of money is so that you do not have to be in a specific place at a specific time doing anything you don’t want to do."

16. "In almost any salaried job, even at one that’s paying a lot per hour like a lawyer, or a doctor, you’re still putting in the hours, and every hour you get paid. So, what that means is when you’re sleeping, you’re not earning. When you’re retired, you’re not earning. When you’re on vacation, you’re not earning. And you can’t earn non-linearly."

17. "There are no get-rich-quick schemes. That’s just somebody else trying to get rich off of you."

18. "Set and enforce an aspirational hourly rate. If fixing a problem will save less than your rate, ignore it. If outsourcing a task will cost less than your rate, outsource it. Get comfortable disappointing people whose expectations will eat your life up, one hour at a time."

19. "You can spend your life however you want, but if you want to get rich, it has to be your number one overwhelming desire."

20. "If you’re smart, you should be able to figure out how to be happy. Otherwise, you’re not that smart."

21. "Twitter is television for intellectuals."

22. "More drugs are taken to quiet the mind than to heal the body."

23. "Guilt is society’s voice speaking in your head."

24. "Self-image is the prison. Other people are the guards."

25. "On what he wants to be remembered for: I don’t care. I’ll be dead."

26. "If raising children was less rewarding than not doing it, the human race would have gone extinct."

27. "When you look at the greatest artists and creators, they have this ability to start over that nobody else does."

28. "We are biological machines programmed to survive and replicate. Happy is anti-evolution."

29. "Is it so important to me that I be unhappy unless this goes my way?"

30. "Solve via iteration. Then get paid via repetition."

31. "The fewer desires I can have, the more I can accept the current state of things, the less my mind is moving because the mind really exists in motion towards the future or the past."

32. "Everything is perfect exactly the way it is. It is only in our particular minds that we’re unhappy or not happy and things are perfect or imperfect because of what we desire."

33. "The advantage of meditation is not that you’re suddenly going to gain the superpower to control your internal state, it’s that you will recognize just how out of control your mind is."

34. "On the mind: It is like a monkey flinging feces, that’s running around the room, making trouble, shouting, breaking things. It’s completely uncontrollable. It’s an out-of-control mad person."

35. "You have to see this mad creature in operation before you feel a certain distaste towards it and you start separating yourself from it. In that separation is liberation."

36. "I think the number one thing that clouds us from being able to see reality is that we have preconceived notions of the way it should be."

37. "A busy mind accelerates the perceived passage of time. Buy more time by cultivating peace of mind."

38. "The clear thinking comes from having time to reflect and to pursue your genuine intellectual curiosity."

39. "If you want to be effective in business, you need a clear, calm, cool, and collected mind."

40. "Love is given, not received."

41. "True, unconditional love, is the province of parents and saints."

42. "Love people more. […] It turns out you can give love. It’s free to give. […] On a long enough time scale, the universe sends it back your way."

43. "Just be you and wait for the people who want that."

44. "When you have children, you learn to love something more than you love yourself, and you can talk about that all day long, but you have never had that feeling until you’ve had a child."

45. "It’s not something you can buy. No amount of money or power will bring you true, unconditional love."

46. "The best work is the work you’d do for free."

47. "Suffering is a moment of clarity, when you can no longer deny the truth of a situation and are forced into uncomfortable change. Inside suffering is the seed of change."

48. "If you don’t love yourself, who will?"

49. "We’re not really here that long, and we don’t really matter that much. Nothing that we do lasts. Eventually, you will fade. Your works will fade. Your children will fade. Your thoughts will fade. These planets will fade. This sun will fade. It will all be gone."

50. "A taste of freedom can make you unemployable."