Naval Ravikant: The Angel Philosopher (Highlights and Notes Part 1)
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| Naval Ravikant |
What does your typical day look like? you don't need to have a typical day. You should not be bothered about in which place you are working unless you are not getting any work done. That main thing is that you need to do what you want to do and being productive and being happy. The thought of working 40 hours or 60 hours or 80 hours a week is not ideal.
You must read.. You need to read anything you get if it is good and if it is trash. It is good to read valuable books but you need to read comics and mysteries and other fiction. When you eat all the junk food and run out of junk food then you start eating healthy and you taste graduate.
You can read in any form or format of books. It is not a must to buy books or own books. You can go to the library and even if you don't have those, read magazines and newspapers. But remember if you spend your money on books it is not an expense it is an investment.
You don't have to read every book in this world. You need to read enough to find the 100 great books for you. Then you can reread them as much as you can. And it is fine to reread books you love.
You don't need to bury yourself in books. We do read a lot of articles and blogs as they sum up the main important topics in short. You need to treat the books as blogs. Because books have age-old wisdom in them. And you don't need to read everything. Just try to find out what you love and what gives you more meaning. And read that portion. That will make you read more and you will get more value from the books you are reading. Take notes of the portions you love.
You should read every day. I read for 2 hours every day and I am among the top .00001% of people who have a reading habit. Most people don’t even read 5 mins a day. Start making a reading habit. No matter what you read.. Just try and do. And remember to read whatever you are excited about.
People are a result of habits. Everything we do is habits. We eat, walk, judge people, watch tv, read, everything is a habit. Children don't come to the world being some identity. We make daily unconscious habits and we reinforce them again and again till the time when we make them our identity. It is really important to uncondition yourself and take each habit apart and see when we picked up this habit and is it helping me or making me happier. If it isn't then just tear it apart and make yourself new habits. People are a product of habit. Just try to make the one that serves you.
You need to practice various habits to find out what works for you, so you need to change a lot of habits too.
Don't be in your monkey mind. We as human children always worked on intuitions but when we hit puberty we become more based on mind and we plan long term goals and make plans for the future and create an identity and create an ego to get what we want. It is normal. But in our adulthood also we are mostly on our head and we are always thinking something or other. Most people who walk on the street are thinking something or judging things they see or playing a series of incidents that happened to them or a fantasy world of what is going to happen to them tomorrow. It is good for long-range planning and problem-solving. It is proof of the survival and mechanical machines we are, but it is not good for our happiness. I have taken the idea to break the habit of uncontrolled thinking and it is hard. All societies do this, they chase the experiences like thrills in action sports or flow states or orgasms which are basically trying to get out of your head. They are trying to get away from the voice in our head and our overdeveloped sense of self. I want my sense of self to be weaker as I get old or muted so I can live every day being present in reality and appreciate the world as a child would. Not to chase happiness from external circumstances rather change my preconceived notion.
Don’t try to suppress your monkey mind. Bcz when you try to suppress your mind it is the mind that is suppressing the mind. It's just like playing games with yourself. Try to turn it off rather.
When you make habits to survive in certain circumstances then by unconditioning the habit you may have to use the substitution effect. It is to substitute a habit with any other habit of our choice, which will help us.
When you say people about creating some good habits, they immediately will say "I don't have time". The meaning of not having time is it is not a priority. If you make something your number one priority you will get it. That’s just the way life works. If you have 10 to 15 priorities then you are going to get none of them. One habit that is a complete game-changer for me is morning workouts.
What is happiness for you? It is very difficult to answer as happiness means different everybody. It also changes with time. This question doesn't have any definite answers. But for me, happiness is what's there when you remove the sense that something is missing in your life. It is a default state. We are always trapped in the web of desires. When we remove the sense of missing, our minds stop running into the future or to the past to regret something or to plan something. when you have the internal silence then you are content and you are happy.
Every positive thought folds a negative thought in it. It is duality or polarity. The tao te ching says so. If I say I am happy it means I was sad at some point. If I say someone is attractive that means someone is unattractive. Every positive thought has a seed of negative in it. This greatness in life is only can be achieved by suffering. You have to view the negative before you can appreciate the positive.
Not suffering, not desiring, not thinking about the future and past and embracing the present and reality of what it is is being in the default state of nature. Nature has no concept of happiness or unhappiness, there is no right or wrong or good or bad.
I believe in the complete and utter insignificance of self. If you think you are the most important thing in the universe, you will try to bind the universe to conform to your desires. If it doesn't conform to them then something is wrong. But if you think of yourself as a bacteria and your works and efforts as writing in the water or building sandcastles, then you have no expectation from life. Life is the way it is when you accept that there is no cause to be happy or unhappy. When you are left in that neutral state it is not neutrality. People think "oh that will be a very bland existence". No this is the existence the little children live. If you look at little children on balance, they are generally happy but they are immersed into the environment and the moment without any thought of how they should have their perfect desires. A neutral state is a perfect state. People can be happy as long as they aren't too caught up in their heads.
When you are working or doing something or talking to someone it is fine to think about stuff but when you are alone and planning about the future or fantasizing about your future dialogue than just notice the thought and ask yourself " is it really necessary right now? Do I need to think about it?" Most of the time the answer is no, when you recognise that just calm down and let the thought go from your mind and be present in the moment. The main important thing is that when you are doing anything be completely focused on the thing you are doing and when doing nothing just be present, don’t think unnecessary things.
The Buddhists talk about awareness vs the ego. What they are talking about is you can think of your brain, your consciousness as a multi-layered mechanism. There's. Kind of a core base kernel-level os that's running. Then some applications are running on top. Religion or spirituality teaches you that you are more than your mind.
Mind itself is a muscle and can be trained and it can be conditioned. It is being conditioned by society which makes us think about our jobs 24/7. But you can redo it. You can rewrite the program you want.
It is important to find your core values. There are many values in the world but you have to find what you want it to be. You can choose honesty or compassion as a value. Which you have to follow every day. When people fight with anyone that means their values are different for that reason to know the core values you need to choose them consciously.
Radical honesty means say the things you feel and feel the things you say. It makes your life a lot easier in terms of processing your thoughts.
I believe in the process of "praise specifically and criticize generally". This way people's egos and identities don't go against you.
Your values change but not drastically. You need to sort the values out by yourself and you need to choose the values that are good for you and bad for you.
In the past, I was so emotional and full of anger. If I get to do the things in the past again I would tell myself to sell emotional and be less angry. But I won't change anything that happened in the past because that led us here today.
Everybody knows that they can control how they respond to a situation but they don't do it. Osho in a lecture said that people do drugs and alcohol because they want to control their minds. But this can be done in various ways that as cognitive therapy, behavioural psychology, meditation to talking long walks in nature. You can control your mental state but you are used to doing it by hacking our external circumstances and come back around and control our mental state.
All of the men's (women’s and other’s) problems arise because he can't sit by himself in a room for 30 mins. If anybody can sit by themselves for 30 mins it is very hard for them. Bcz you look at your mind, which is the monkey mind. You don't control your mind you just look at it, how does it work. Then when you go through a situation you just know how your mind works and gonna take action which would be good not to give up on your mind.
Society teaches us that life is a multiplayer game. We do stuff and people can see them and they comment on them or you can get any return from them. So we like to do things that society taught us. But the mind is a single-player game. You are working against yourself. If you are happy nobody will know, you wouldn't gain anything. We, humans, are like bees or ants we love to socialise. We don't want to be alone. We can’t think that we are alone and gonna die after 3 generations and nobody cares.
When you believe in some ideology then you want everybody to believe in it and you think the future is going to be this ideology. I have a huge doubt about any of the ideologies going to be the only truth in future. Like religion, the world is going to end and you are going to be immortal. Like science also people talk about AI all the time. But I have a huge doubt that science made any process to the development of AI than it was 20 years ago. This makes us hope for the future and think that we are going to be saved before death. But it is not going to happen. The only truth is this moment. Just be happy. Just enjoy the present.
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