My Thoughts & Highlights on ‘The Almanack of Naval’ by Eric Jorgenson

The Almanack of Naval by Eric Jorgenson

Rating: 10/10

On Cultivating Knowledge & Learning

Specific knowledge is found by pursuing your genuine curiosity and passion rather than whatever is hot right now.
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Building specific knowledge will feel like play to you but will look like work to others.
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By cultivating our own unique specific knowledge, we can all bring unique value to the world. It’s that amalgamation of our unique skillsets that creates opportunity, and presents solutions for the world. For example, I am a sales professional and a musician. Because of this, I see scripts in a sales pitch, similarly to how I see guitar licks in a piece of music. By combining those to specific uses of knowledge, I can provide a view point that others may not have seen.

Read for Intelligence

Books make for great friends, because the best thinkers of the last few thousand years tell you their nuggets of wisdom.
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Study microeconomics, game theory, psychology, persuasion, ethics, mathematics, and computers.
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Reading science, math, and philosophy one hour per day will likely put you at the upper echelon of human success within seven years.
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Read the greats in math, science, and philosophy. Ignore your contemporaries and news. Avoid tribal identification. Put truth above social approval.
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We waste too much time in this day and age reading low quality articles and message board comments. Start reading for intelligence, not just as a time filler when we have nothing else to do. Read books again. Books cultivate all the best bits of wisdom, so you don’t have to.

Just read because you enjoy it.
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I probably read one to two hours a day.
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On Money & Wealth

Getting rich is about knowing what to do, who to do it with, and when to do it.
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Seek wealth, not money or status. Wealth is having assets that earn while you sleep. Money is how we transfer time and wealth. Status is your place in the social hierarchy.
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You will get rich by giving society what it wants but does not yet know how to get. At scale.
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Wealth is the thing you want. Wealth is assets that earn while you sleep. Wealth is the factory, the robots, cranking out things.
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By focusing on building wealth rather than working a for a salary on some else time, we can maximise our leverage, build value and produce 24/7. When most people want to say they want to be rich, what they really want is wealth. Wealth provides freedom and options. For more thoughts on wealth, check out my post on ‘The Psychology of Money’ by Morgan Housel.

What’s Your Aspirational Hourly Rate?

Set and enforce an aspirational personal hourly rate. If fixing a problem will save less than your hourly rate, ignore it. If outsourcing a task will cost less than your hourly rate, outsource it.
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You just have to set a very high personal hourly rate and you have to stick to it. Even when I was young, I just decided I was worth a lot more than the market thought I was worth, and I started treating myself that way.
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Treat your time with more value than you currently do, and you’ll quickly prioritise the things that are most important. Would you waste time mowing lawns, if your hourly rate was $5,000/hr? Of course not, you’d pay someone to do it. Work out your aspirational hourly rate and start acting as if you are getting paid that. What activities should you be doing to achieve that rate within 5 years?

It’s going to take you an hour to get across town to get something. If you value yourself at one hundred dollars an hour, that’s basically throwing one hundred dollars out of your pocket. Are you going to do that?
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My hourly rate, I used to say to myself over and over, is $5,000 an hour.
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Real Wealth Is Created From Building Businesses, Gaining Equity and Investing

You’re not going to get rich renting out your time. You must own equity—a piece of a business—to gain your financial freedom.
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But usually, the real wealth is created by starting your own companies or even by investing.
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Stop consuming, start building. Something. Anything. Just start.

On Compounding

Play iterated games. All the returns in life, whether in wealth, relationships, or knowledge, come from compound interest.
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To achieve any real success, we need to start playing longer term games. And with our attention being pulled in more directions that ever, it’s going to be those that have the ability to focus that will inevitably succeed. This not only applies in the long term, but also the short term. Can you focus on one thing for a half hour? Can you work on a project for ninety minutes without getting distracted? If not, consider digital minimalism. Can you work on a project for three months, without getting bored changing to the next shiny new idea? Can you do it for a year? Stick with something, and see what happens.

On Leverage

Code and media are permissionless leverage. They’re the leverage behind the newly rich. You can create software and media that works for you while you sleep.
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If you can’t code, write books and blogs, record videos and podcasts.
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Code is probably the most powerful form of permissionless leverage.
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Coding, writing books, recording podcasts, tweeting, YouTubing—these kinds of things are permissionless.
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Learn code and media. Build a simple product you can sell on an app store. Blog about the process of learning any of the topics in your specified fields of knowledge. Send content out to the world in the form of, twitter posts, blog posts, short form videos on youTube and Tiktok, podcasts and newsletter. Learn the fundamentals of code. Always be thinking, how can I turn what I am consuming, into content?

Leverage Is The New Currency For The Wealthy

Forget rich versus poor, white-collar versus blue. It’s now leveraged versus un-leveraged.
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But the new generation’s fortunes are all made through code or media.
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Now, you can multiply your efforts without involving other humans and without needing money from other humans.
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Multiply your efforts through leverage.

On Time Management

You should be too busy to “do coffee” while still keeping an uncluttered calendar.
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Whenever you can in life, optimize for independence rather than pay. If you have independence and you’re accountable on your output, as opposed to your input—that’s the dream.
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Knowledge workers function like athletes—train and sprint, then rest and reassess.
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Find a job that allows you to work remotely, work in sprints, and use your time wisely.

Free Up Time By Focusing On The Foundational

“What is the foundation required for me to learn this?”
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Foundations are key. It’s much better to be at 9/10 or 10/10 on foundations than to try and get super deep into things.
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You can only achieve mastery in one or two things.
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Condense and simplify everything to the foundational. So much of what we read and consume on the internet these days is the same content repackaged in a different way. Course, steps to achieve a result and books are intentionally overcomplicated, to give the impression of providing more value.

A good example of can be related to my recent foray into the world of fitness. I have recently been looking into starting a new weight lifting program, and with all the information available, went down a multi-hour rabbit hole trying to find the ‘perfect’ program to start. After experiencing some debilitating analysis paralysis I remembered the above quotes. Foundations are key.

After this realisation I quickly started to notice that the majority of the programs were simply slight variations of each other. I then asked myself, what would be the foundations to achieving the result I set out to attain? My answer came in the form of ‘The Golden Six’ workout program that Arnold Schwarzenegger did in the 70’s and some Reg Park workouts. Simple, effective and known to work for decades.

Free up time by focusing on the foundational.

On Authenticity

long-term goal of getting wealthy, you should ask yourself, “Is this authentic to me? Is it myself that I am projecting?” And then, “Am I productizing it? Am I scaling it?
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No one can compete with you on being you.
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If you’re not 100 percent into it, somebody else who is 100 percent into it will outperform you.
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The internet enables any niche interest, as long as you’re the best person at it to scale out.
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“Escape competition through authenticity.”
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Don’t follow trends, take the time to find out your authentic interests and skills and capitalise on them.

You can buy The Almanack of Naval on Amazon, here.