The Almanack Of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth And Happiness 📚

I stumbled on this book through a LinkedIn post. One of those carousels, where people say ‘read these 10 books to change your life’. Well, I am not sure why, but this time I took notes, and went and bought almost all of those books. One of them happened to be this one: The Almanack of NR. Never heard of Naval before, but it seems I must have been living under some rock or something, since he was pretty well known figure in the Tech industry.

Here is a 1-sentence summary from ‘4 minute books’: “The Almanack of Naval Ravikant compiles the valuable lessons of Naval Ravikant, who teaches people how to build wealth and achieve long-term happiness by working on a few essential skills, all while discovering the secrets of living a good life.“

I’d say that is pretty accurate. The book struck a cord with me right away, as the first chapter is about wealth, and the first sentence int eh first chapter is: “Seek wealth, not money or status. Wealth is having assets which earn money while you sleep. Money is how we transfer time to wealth. Status is your place in the social hierarchy.“

This mapped so much with my goals around financial independence, and the way I have been looking at my earnings and savings over the past 5 years, that I knew this book would resonate with me. It keeps reiterating that if your goal is to be wealthy, you need to completely ignore status games, since they are not going to make you wealthy.

Growing up in Austria, I found myself surrounded by these types of status games a lot. While they are a possible way to accelerate your career and income potential, they are not based on a fair hierarchy of competence, and thus not something I like to engage with. The book made a deeply personal statement to me: you are correct in moving away from environments which put an emphasis on status hierarchies, and you are wise to move closer to a fair hierarchy based on competence. Which is what I had always done looking back, but against a considerable amount of (internal) resistance.

The books goes on to talk about topics which are critical to every Product Manager, personally and professionally. Here are some examples:

• What it means to ‘productionize’ something (including yourself) and why this is relevant
• The power of ‘iterating’ toward a goal, and the necessity of patience along the way
• A principled line between intentions (they don’t matter) and actions (they are the only thing that matter)
• The 3 (current) forms of leverage: labour, money, and scale through technology. The last form is new, and not a lot of people know how to leverage it (yet)
• Learning (‘earning with your mind’) is a great way to spend time, regardless of immediate success metrics (money, sales)
• Judgement is underrated: making just slightly better decisions over a long period of time has disproportionate impact (similar to the mantra of Charlie Munger, the famous investor)
• Collect ‘mental models’: Steve Jobs said that, too – to develop the ability to ‘think in a certain way’, i.e. like a scientist, or a lawyer, or a mathematician, or a designer; the ability to apply multiple ‘models’ – or ways of thinking – can be an important edge in making a better decision
• Happiness is about presence, and managing expectations: I LOVE this. A while ago I started actively reducing my expectations, in everyday settings. When I need to wait in line, I recalibrate my mind to think: what if this takes another 30 minutes. When it ends up taking 10, I am super happy.

Naval has compiled a lit of very principled, first-principle guidelines for making life better, providing context for many things which happen in our life, and how to deal with them. It can be intimidating at times, to read the ‘take responsibility’ undertone of the book and not feel overwhelmed. But overall I found it very much aligned with my view on how good Product Managers lead their teams, and take accountability for the business they are in.

Take Action 🎬

📅 Book a private coaching session with me to grow your PM career. I will share my 15+ years of experience as a Product Manager, all my learning and pitfalls, with actionable tips and concrete lessons to model after.

📙 Since reading the book I started following the IG handle ‘navalravikantsays’.

📚 I also recommend reading The Almanack of Naval Ravikant in full. This is a book you will pick up time and time again, and you will always find a new way how the content relates toy our life and situations.