The Almanack of Naval Ravikant

I loved this book! I had only heard of Naval Ravikant in passing before reading this book, I hadn't followed him in any manner via twitter, blog, podcast or otherwise. I found many useful tidbits in here both for life and for business. This is one of those books that gets you motivated to create (a business) and to live your life better.

It was a quick read, and I probably highlighted 30% of it to refer to later. Great job by the author to both (1) gather the information from all the sources and (2) pare it down into a manageable and coherent format! Definitely a book I will be revisiting in the future.

First I want to clarify that the book is not written by Naval himself. It's a collection of his public writings and sayings assembled by Eric Jorgenson.

Overall opinion - The book is kinda chaotic and has some contradicting statements. I find this pretty annoying combined with a lack of explanation in many other places. Despite some views that I don't share I find his work pretty engaging and easy to read.

Before reading, I had never listened to Naval's podcast or read anything about his philosophy. I was greatly surprised as it introduced some new mental models. I find the philosophy chapters more valuable than the wealth part. Within these chapters, he describes Buddhist concepts and his personal beliefs on the topics of existence, happiness, and the meaning of life (the usual suspects).

Not bad, but not great either. It's just a lot of opinions. I admire them, and i bought it simply because i wanted to learn about his perspective.
For me, my biggest win for myself was to better understand my relationship with money and wealth. I never really understood wealth creation. I always associated more money with evil and a negative emotion. Mostly because of how my family and bollywood movies viewed it. But my view has swung to the other side now, and it hopefully will only grow in that direction. If we can use our skills to solve problems for people, there is nothing wrong in letting society reward you with the agreed currency of the world. Ofcourse, it needs to be ethical and non exploitative.
More to learn in this journey though. To any of you reading this, if you can understand what I'm trying to explore, please do suggest more reading material.

This isn't an especially well -wrotten book (the author basically directly quotes Naval for 100% of it's length, sorting the quotes thematically). The content is pretty good though. Going in, I had no idea who this Naval was, but it's pretty clear that he knows some things about business and happiness (even if I don't agree with absolutely everything, I find his perspective fascinating).