#922 - Naval Ravikant - 44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature

Don't do something you don't want to do. Why are you wasting your time? There's so little time on this Earth. Life goes fast. What are there, four thousand weeks? That's your lifespan ... I'm keenly aware of how little time I have. So I'm just not going to waste it.

There are no problems in the real world other than maybe things that inflict pain on your body. Everything else has to become a problem in your mind first. You have to view it and interpret it and create a narrative that it is a problem before it becomes a problem. And then you realize that a lot of your emotional energy is spent on reacting to things that your mind is automatically saying are problems.

The people who are really extraordinarily successful didn't sit around watching success porn. They just went and did it. They had such an overwhelming desire to be successful at the thing that they were doing that they just went and did that thing; they didn't have time to study and learn and listen. They just did it. It's the overwhelming desire that's the most important—and the focus that comes from that.

I think most older successful people will tell you that their life was best when they lived it unapologetically on their own terms. Be selfish.

You escaped competition through authenticity—by being your own self. If I had to summarize how to be successful in life in two words, I would just say 'productize yourself.'

If you wouldn't ask somebody else to do it and then you get that request yourself, you can just dismiss it. You don't have to respond. You don't even let it enter your brain. You have to be able to delete emails, and text messages without flinching if you want to scale. And scaling is very important. Scaling your time is really important. Every interruption will take you out of flow.

I think I would say that you're going to find a lot of fulfillment out of life by just doing what you want to do and genuinely exploring what it is that you want, rather than doing what other people expect you do or society expects you to do or what you might just think it should be done by default.

What the mind is actually really bad at is making hard decisions. So when you have a hard decision to make, I find it's better to— Yes, you ruminate on it. You think through all the pros and cons. But then you sleep on it, you wait a couple of days, you wait until the gut answer appears with conviction and it feels right. And when you're younger it takes longer, because you just don't have as much experience. And when you're older, it can happen much faster.

Your natural order is freedom. I had a friend who said me once, 'I never want to have to be at a specific place at a specific time.' And I was like, oh my God, that's freedom. When I heard that, that change my life, right there.

I reject this frame that efficiency and productivity and success are counter to happiness and freedom. They actually go together.

What is happiness? I think it's just basically being okay with where you are.

I think the big questions are the big questions for good reasons. If you can keep the idea in front of you at all times that you're going to die and that everything goes literally to zero, what is there to stress about?

Don't fritter away your life on randomly scheduled things and on things that aren't important, don't matter, and events and weddings, and tedious dinners with tedious people that you don't want to go to.

The only true test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life.

If you look at an iron beam. When an iron beam is under stress, it's because it's being bent in two different directions at the same time. So when your mind is under stress, it's because it has two conflicting desires at once.

Ultimately, you will end up wherever is acceptable to you. You will get out of life whatever it is acceptable to you.

My wife knows not to ever book or scheduled me for anything. I'm not expected to go to couples dinners. I'm not expected to go to birthdays. I'm not expected to go to weddings...

I don't commit to anything in the future ... There's nothing worse than something coming up that your past self committed you to.

No one is going to beat you at being you ... Find what feels like play to you but looks like work to others.

If you can't decide, the answer is no. And most things, you should just be saying no to. Part of my keeping my calendar free is just by default saying no to everything.

I would argue that if you're making a 4-year decision, spend a year thinking it through.

Any moment, when you're not in that moment, you are dead to that moment. You might as well be dead.

I think over-thinking about yourself is probably— It may not be the cause of depression, but it certainly doesn't help.

If you don't lie awake at night thinking about it, you don't want it badly enough.

Spontaneity is really important. You're going to learn best when you're having fun, when you're genuinely are enjoying the process, not when you're forced to sit there and do it.

I think it's really good to be able to view your own mind and your own thoughts objectively. And that is the big benefit of meditation. It creates a small gap between your conscious observation (self) and your mind.

The best outcomes come when you think it through for yourself and decide for yourself.

Everybody craves thinking about something more than themselves. If you want to be happy to some extent, you have to forget about your personal problems. And one way to do that is take on other problems, bigger problems.