A Collection of Practical Wisdom About Life, Building Wealth, and Decision-Making

Last week, I downloaded a free copy of The Almanack of Naval Ravikant.

Eric Jorgenson, author of the book, compiled ideas that Naval shared on several platforms online, from podcasts to YouTube to Twitter. I’ve been following Naval since last year. I love this podcast of his. I think it’s the densest podcast - in terms of practical knowledge about life, money, business, and thinking - I’ve listened to this year.

So when I learned that the book included some transcriptions from the podcast and that the book was free, I immediately grabbed my copy.

To be honest, I haven’t finished reading the book yet. And I didn’t start reading the book from the beginning; I just jump to a chapter I want to read at the moment (as I’ve written in my previous blog post). For example, last night, when I dimmed all the lights and went to bed, I read ‘How to Think Clearly.’

For over a year now, I’ve been working on improving how I make decisions. I’ve made bad decisions in the past few years because of poor judgment. I easily believed what I heard. I didn’t question people’s motives, and I didn’t consider the idea that some people just have bad intentions.

So I end up being scammed. What’s worse is that I made decisions that affected some of my friends and relatives.

That's why I decided to work on improving my critical thinking. Back to the book, here are some of my favorite lines in How to Think Clearly:

• “The really smart thinkers are clear thinkers. They understand the basics at a very, very fundamental level. I would rather understand the basics really well than memorize all kinds of complicated concepts I can’t stitch together and can’t rederive from the basics. If you can’t rederive concepts from the basics as you need them, you’re lost. You’re just memorizing,”

I believe this mindset is helpful when we’re trying to learn a difficult skill or a complex concept. In this information age, ignorance is an option. Most of us can get access to several sources of information that are free, and we can learn any skill if we want to.

• “The number one thing clouding us from being able to see reality is we have preconceived notions of the way it should be.

“The hard thing is seeing the truth. To see the truth, you have to get your ego out of the way because your ego doesn’t want to face the truth. The smaller you can make your ego, the less conditioned you can make your reactions, the less desires you can have about the outcome you want, the easier it will be to see the reality.”

Naval refers to thinking in a more rational way. We make decisions based on emotions, and then we justify them with logic or reason.

But making decisions when we’re clinging to a certain outcome can cloud our judgment. We become biased. And biased judgment can prevent us to make the right choice.

That’s it for now.

I believe you can get useful insights from the book. As I've said, it has many great insights about life, philosophy, building wealth, and critical thinking.

So if you want to grab a free copy of the book, click this, and choose what format - epub or pdf or mobi - works for you.

Happy reading!