Highlights from “44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature”
Great interview with Naval Ravikant. Some excerpts:
“So there are two paths to happiness: one path is success, where you get what you want and satisfy your material needs. The other is like Diogenes, where you just don’t want it in the first place. I’m not sure which one is more valid, and it also depends what you define as success. If the end goal is happiness, then why not cut to the chase and just go straight for it?”
“I went to a retreat in LA a couple of years ago, and there was a guy that I used to follow, a big business and productivity advice content creator, really successful, and he just totally stepped back from everything, went monk mode and focused on his business. I asked him why, and he said, “I started feeling like I had to live up to in private the things that I was saying in public.”
“You only want the respect of the very, very few people that you respect. Trying to demand respect from the masses is a fool’s errand.”
“It’s hard enough to face the outside world, and no one’s going to like you more than you like yourself, so if you’re struggling with yourself then the outside world becomes an insurmountable challenge.”
“One interesting thought is that to some extent self-esteem is a reputation you have with yourself. You’re watching yourself at all times, you know what you’re doing and you have your own moral code. Everyone has a different moral code, but if you don’t live up to your own moral code, the same code that you hold others to, it will damage your self-esteem.”
“Don’t do something you don’t want to do. Why are you wasting your time? There’s so little time on this earth. Life goes fast, what is it, four thousand weeks that’s your lifespan? And yes, we hear that, but we don’t remember it, but I guess I’m keenly aware of how little time I have, so I’m just not going to waste it.
I’ve gotten utterly more and more ruthless on it, mainly it’s that I see or hear people’s freedom, and then that liberates me further. So I read a blog post by Marc Andreessen, where he said don’t keep a schedule, and I took that to heart, so I deleted my calendar and I don’t keep a schedule, I try to remember it all in my head, if I can’t remember it, I’m not going to add it.
My wife knows not to ever book or schedule me for anything, I’m not expected to go to couples dinners, I’m not expected to go to birthdays, I’m not expected to go to weddings. If somebody tries to rope her into having me show up, she says he makes his own decisions, you gotta ask him directly. I’m freeing up all my time, so my entire life is serendipity. I get to interact with whoever I want, whenever I want, wherever I want, but I hear the invite, then make the decision.
I don’t commit to anything in the future, so I’ll say, okay, if that thing is interesting, I’ll see if I can get in that day when I’m in the mood, but there’s nothing worse than something coming up that your past self committed you to, that your present self doesn’t want to do.
It destroys your entire calendar. It destroys your day because there’s like, oh, this one hour slot which is sitting like a turd on my calendar that I have to schedule my whole day around. I can’t do anything twenty minutes before, twenty minutes afterwards.
I had a friend who said to me once, “You know, I never want to have to be at a specific place at a specific time” and I was like, oh my god, that’s freedom. When I heard that, that changed my life right there.
To the extent you can bring freedom into your life, optimize for that, you’ll actually be more productive. You won’t just be happier, more free, you will be more productive, because then you can focus on what is in front of you, whatever the biggest problem of that day.
I’m definitely not free, but also another thing that I really believe is that inspiration is perishable. Act on it immediately. So when you’re inspired todo something, do that thing. If I’m inspired to write a blog post, I want to do it at that moment. If I’m inspired to send a tweet, I want to do it that moment. If I’m inspired to solve a problem, I want it that moment. If I’m inspired to read a book, I want to read it right then. If I want to learn something, do it at the moment of curiosity, the moment the curiosity arrives, I go learn that thing immediately. I download the book, I get on Google, I get on ChatGPT, whatever, I will figure that thing out on the spot, and that’s when the learning happens. It doesn’t happen because I’ve scheduled time, because I’ve set an hour aside, because when that time arrives I might be in a different mood, I might just want to do something different.
“If I had to summarize how to be successful in life in two words, I would just say productize yourself. That’s it. Just figure out what it is that you naturally do that the world might want that you can scale up and turn into a product, and it’ll eventually be effortless for you. Yes, there’s always work required, but it won’t even feel like work to you, it’ll feel like play to you, and modern society gives us that opportunity.”
“And also presumably kill things that aren’t working very quickly. By default, you should kill everything, you know, if you can’t decide, the answer is no, and most things you just be saying no to. Part of my keeping my calendar free is just by default saying no to everything. Do I want to create a calendar just to add your event, right, or to add your need or your desire?
Selfish is fine. I’ll take selfish. I’m selfish. I’m a very selfish person. Don’t contact me.”
“So, you know, another one of my little quips was, you know, a rational person can sort of find peace by cultivating indifference to things that are out of their control, and I’m as guilty as anybody of doomsurfing on X or social media and getting worked up about things that I can’t do anything about, right? Like do I want to be fighting those battles in my mind when I literally cannot do anything about it?
So if you find yourself looping on a problem like you’re watching the news too much and you’re getting caught up in a problem you can’t do anything about, you have to step away from that, and modern media is a delivery mechanism for mimetic viruses, and what’s happened now is you know, one hundred years ago, five hundred years ago, if something wasn’t happening in your immediate vicinity, you wouldn’t hear about it. It wouldn’t be a problem for you, but now every single one of the world’s problems has turned into a mimetic virus, which is going into the battlefield of the news and is trying to infect your mind in real time. Hyper speed.
So that, yeah, so that you become obsessed with the war in Ukraine, is really far away, or you get obsessed with climate change or you get obsessed with AI doom or you get obsessed with whatever, and there’s nothing as riveting as the old religion, the world is ending, the world is ending, pay attention, the world is ending.
Cassandra Complex at global scale and I would argue that large percentages of population are essentially just infected with these mimetic viruses that have taken over their brain and are causing them to do incredible gyration about things that probably aren’t even true or are greatly exaggerated, but even to the extent they are true, are things that that person can do nothing about and they should put their own house in order first.
So you know another little line I have for myself is your family is broken but you’re going to fix the world, right? I think it defies credibility if you can’t fix your own life first. I’m not going to take you seriously if you can’t fix your own life, like all these philosophers who you know seem like people you emulate and so smart or like these brilliant celebrities and they go off and commit suicide, well you just kind of invalidated your whole way of life.
“I think overthinking about yourself is probably the—it may not be the cause of depression, but it certainly doesn’t help.”
“Anxiety and stress are interesting – they’re very related. Stress is when your mind is being pulled in two different directions at the same time. If you look at an iron beam, when it’s under stress, it’s because it’s being bent in two different directions. When your mind is under stress, it’s because it has two conflicting desires at once.”
“Anxiety, I think, is sort of this pervasive unidentifiable stress where you’re just stressed out all the time and you’re not even sure why. You can’t even identify the underlying problem. The reason for that is because you have so many unresolved problems, unresolved stress points that have piled up in your life that you can no longer identify what the problems are. There’s this mountain of garbage in your mind with a little bit of it poking out the top like an iceberg – that’s anxiety. But underneath there’s a lot of unresolved things.”
“The true waste of time is time that you are not present for, when you are not there for it, when you are not doing the thing you want to do to the best of your capability such that you’re immersed in it.”
“I think you’re going to find a lot of fulfillment out of life by just doing what you want to do and genuinely exploring what it is that you want rather than doing what other people expect you to do or society expects you to do or what you might just think should be done by default. I think most older successful people will tell you that their life was best when they lived it unapologetically on their own terms.”
“If you can’t decide, the answer is no. If you’re offered an opportunity, if you have a new thing that you’re saying yes or no to that is a change from where you’re starting, the answer is by default always no.”
“The more seriously you take yourself, the unhappier you’re going to be.”
“All the philosophy that’s out there, for example, it’s almost trite, like most people they look at philosophy like until they discover it for themselves, because wisdom is the set of things that cannot be transmitted. If they could be transmitted, you know, we’d read the same five philosophy books, it would all be done, we’d all be wise. You have to learn it for yourself, it has to be rediscovered for yourself in your own context, you have to have specific experiences that then allow you to generalize and see the truth in those things in such a way that you’re not going to unsee them, but each person is going to see them in a different way. I can tell you that Socrates story, and it’s not going to resonate until there’s something that other people desire that you realize you yourself don’t want, and the moment that happens, then you’ll see the truth in the general statement.”
“No matter how arduous or costly or effortful it is going to be for us to find out ourselves, we prefer to disregard the mountains of warnings from our elders, songs, literature, historical catastrophes, public scandals, and instead think some version of, “yeah, that might be true for them, but not for me.” We decide to learn the hard lessons the hard way over and over again.
These are all basic bitch, obvious insights that everybody has heard before. But if they’re so basic, why does everyone so reliably fall prey to them throughout our lives? And if they’re so obvious, why do people who have recently become famous or wealthy or lost a parent orgone through a breakup start to proclaim these facts with the renewed grandiose ceremony of someone who’s just gone through religious revelation?
“There was a Nobel Prize winner who said something to the effect of “everything worth saying may have been said before, but given that nobody was listening, it must be said again.”
“Desire is a contract to be unhappy until you get what you want.”
“At some point, you just have to cut your past. If your past is bothering you, you will eventually get tired of trying to untangle that knot and you will just drop it because you will realize life is short. The more you have, the more you want to accomplish in this life, actually the less time you have to unravel that thing.”
