📚 A&B #134

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👋 Hey everyone,

Here are a few popular posts you may have missed:

• 10+ Life formulas from Naval.

• 15+ Rules for a better life from Naval.

• 20+ Reading tips from Naval Ravikant.

🤓 Course Update:

I finished the slides for 4 lessons this week:

• Welcome To The Art of Reading

• How To Find Amazing Books

• How To Use Books You Loved To Find Even More Awesome Books

• Why You Should Judge A Book By It's Cover (& How To Do So)

We're up to 250+ people on the waitlist, reply "A" to this email and I'll personally email you once the course is available for preorder!

📚 Book Summary:

This week's book is The Almanack of Naval Ravikant by Eric Jorgenson (PS: You can read/download the book for free here).

Naval is a brilliant entrepreneur and philosopher and this book shares all of his best wisdom in one place. Read it to become happier, healthier, and wealthier. 

Here are 3 key lessons from the book:

📖

1) 3 Tips For Happiness

Be Present: The easiest way to be happy is to be fully present. Most of us are unhappy because our brains are worried about the future or regretting the past. 

But thinking about the past or future prevents us from seeing the beauty in everyday life and being grateful for what we already have. Happiness isn't found by sitting on a mountaintop for 30 years, it's found in the space between our thoughts.

Remove Desire: There's a great quote from Naval where he says, "Desire is a contract that you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want."

To be happy now, all you need to do is remove your desire for more and you'll be happy. If you tell yourself you won't be happy until you get a new car or house, that means you're actively choosing to be unhappy until you get that thing–which is foolish because it may not even make you happy after you get it.

Build Long-Term Happiness Habits: If you want to be happier, Naval recommends building habits that focus on long-term happiness instead of short-term happiness.

For example, Naval quit alcohol because alcohol only brought him short-term happiness. He says the same about sugar and social media. Naval even quit video games, even though he loved gaming, because he noticed it made him happy in the short term but unhappy over the long run.

After quitting those short-term happiness habits, he started focusing on long-term happiness habits such as meditation, spending more time outdoors, and exercising daily. So take a moment to reflect on your habits and ask yourself if those habits are bringing your short-term happiness or long-term happiness.

📖

2) Focus On Saving Time, Not Money

There's a great quote from Naval where he says, "You don't get rich by spending your time to save money. You get rich by saving your time to make money."

Too many people (my past self included) were raised in families that focused more on saving money than making money. I was taught to look for coupons, stand in line for clearance deals, and drive to a further gas station to save a few bucks.

But like Naval, I soon realized that time was our most valuable resource because it is finite whereas money is not. Naval's advice to better value your time is to set a high personal hourly rate for yourself and avoid selling your time for anything below it. 

For instance, if you set a personal hourly rate of $100 and it takes an hour for you to drive to the store and back to return a sweater worth $50, you'd be better off just donating it or giving it to a friend.

Another way to think about this is to outsource any task below your personal rate. If you don't, you're actually losing money.

If your hourly rate is $100 and it takes you 1 hour to clean your house, you're -$100. But if you hire a cleaning lady for $40 an hour, you'll be up $60 ($100-40).

By outsourcing tasks below your rate, you'll be able to focus on higher-earning tasks which will make you more money and save you more time. 

📖

3) Master The Skill of Reading

I used to think I was a skilled reader, but then I discovered how Naval read books and he completely changed the way I read.

Here are a few of my favorite reading tips from him:

Spend more time rereading books: The best books are worth rereading because they're packed with so much wisdom that you can't absorb all the key lessons the first time around.

Reading isn't a race: Every new reader thinks that the answer to their problems is to learn how to speed read so that they can get through books 2-3x faster. But the problem is that the best books have to be read slowly. An amazing book will force you to put it down and stare at the wall because you'll need time to reflect on it and put your brain back together after it blows you away.

Read what you love until you love to read: Too many people focus on reading books that are bestsellers or classics because they believe those are the books they should read. But the truth is that you should read the books that interest you. Find a book about a topic you're fascinated with and you'll love reading a lot more than if you'd pick a random book on the NYT bestseller list.

Quit more books: From a young age, school taught us that if you're given a book you have to finish it. But sooner or later we come across a book we don't like and stop reading altogether. A better option is to treat books like blog posts and feel no obligation to finish them. It's much better to quit a book than to quit reading altogether.

PS: I'll be sharing many more mindset shifts and reading tips in my course. Reply "A" to this email to get notified when it's available for preorder.

✅ Actionable Advice:

Last week I asked you guys if you preferred the Actionable Advice recap or Book Quotes, and the result was...

Both! 

The results were basically split 50/50 so I think I'll keep the AA recap but also throw in some of my favorite quotes at the end like such:

---------

1) Do this to become happier:

• Spend more time focusing on the present.

• Remove your desire for more.

• Build habits that will bring you long-term happiness.

2) Think about how you can outsource more tasks in your life:

• Hire someone to clean your home.

• Hire a virtual assistant to help you manage your inbox.

• Hire an editor to edit your content instead of doing it yourself.

3) Book quotes worth reflecting on: 

• "Books make for great friends because the best thinkers of the last few thousand years tell you their nuggets of wisdom."

• "Understand ethical wealth creation is possible. If you secretly despise wealth, it will elude you."

• "Don't partner with cynics and pessimists. Their beliefs are self-fulfilling."

• "Earn with your mind, not your time."

• "There are basically three really big decisions you make in your early life: where you live, who you're with, and what you do."

• "Very smart people tend to be weird since they insist on thinking everything through for themselves."

• "Happiness is what's there when you remove the sense that something is missing in your life."

• "We think of ourselves as fixed and the world as malleable, but it's really we who are malleable and the world is largely fixed."

📖  Reading Lesson:

Why you should read naked (no not that type of naked).

⭐️  Weekly Quote:

"The most important skill for getting rich is becoming a perpetual learner."

–Naval Ravikant

Thank you for your support everyone, I'll see you next Sunday!

Read on,

Alex W.