Naval Ravikant
Naval Ravikant is an Indian-American entrepreneur and investor who is widely known for his success in building wealth through investments and multiple streams of income. He is the co-founder, chairman, and former CEO of AngelList, and has invested early-stage in over 200 companies including Uber, FourSquare, Twitter, Wish.com, and many more.
635 Quotes
"Anything you do will fade. It will disappear, just like the human race will disappear and the planet will disappear. Get to Mars, even that group will disappear. No one is going to remember you past a certain number of generations, whether you’re an artist or a poet or a conqueror or a pauper or nothing. There’s no meaning."
— Naval Ravikant
"I do everything for me. I don’t do anything for other people. None of us do. I think we all like to pretend like we’re doing everything for other people, but the reality is, we’re always just doing it for ourselves. That’s just the truth, and so whenever people ask me why did I do X or Y or Z, it’s always for me; that’s why I did it."
— Naval Ravikant
"The best founders I’ve found are the ones who are very long-term thinkers. Even decisions that maybe they shouldn’t care that much about early on, they fix it because they are not building a house, they’re putting bricks in the foundation of the skyscraper, at least in their minds."
— Naval Ravikant
"The best way to prepare for the future 20 years is find something you love to do, to have a shot at being one of the best people in the world at it. Build an independent brand around it, with your name, not a company’s name or other people’s names around it. Try to make a creative work, so you’ll stay interesting, stay ahead of the game."
— Naval Ravikant
"As a worker you want to be as leveraged as possible so that your work has a huge impact and it won’t take as much of your time or physical effort. Like you’d rather work with a bulldozer than work with your hands, the same way you’d rather work a computer than you would with a pencil."
— Naval Ravikant
"I think of Twitter as the place where I go to have a great conversation when I can’t have one locally, which seems to be all the time, and the more time that I spend on Twitter, the more I sort of curate this incredible group of very intelligent people that I just get to know purely through the quality of their thoughts."
— Naval Ravikant
"Perhaps this time is different, automation will permanently destroy jobs, and humanity is incapable of relearning and doing creative work. Perhaps it’s time to drop the tyranny of low expections, and new tools will liberate individuals from a lifetime of drudgery, as they always have."
— Naval Ravikant
"On what is the purpose of life: To keep growing and learning in the short period of time that you have. To seek truth and to accept things the way they are. To see the world the way it really is. Then, just to live your life. I think that’s it. Any deeper meanings or goals just lead to ideologies, which lead to desires, and belief systems, and disappointments and conflict."
— Naval Ravikant
"We are overexposed to everything. The way to survive in modern society is to be an ascetic, it is to retreat from society. There’s too much society everywhere you go. You have society in your phone, society in your pocket, society in your ears… It’s socializing you and programming everyone. The only solution is turn it off."
— Naval Ravikant
"The modern struggle – Lone individuals summoning inhuman willpower, fasting, meditating, and exercising, up against armies of scientists and statisticians weaponizing abundant food, screens, and medicine into junk food, clickbait news, infinite porn, endless games and addictive drugs."
— Naval Ravikant
"On the meaning of life: You get to make up your own answer and that’s the beauty of it. If there was a single answer, we wouldn’t be free. We’d be trapped because we’d all have to live to that answer. We’d be robots competing with each other trying to fulfill that meaning more than the next person. (Related: What’s the Meaning of Life? | Joe Rogan and Naval Ravikant ,YouTube video)"
— Naval Ravikant
"We just play games in life. You grow up, you’re playing the school game, you’re playing the social game. Then you’re playing the money game; then you’re playing the status game. These games just have longer and longer and longer-lived horizons. At some point, at least I believe that these are all just games. There are games where the outcome really stops mattering once you see through a game."
— Naval Ravikant
"If I’m running a grade school curriculum for children, I would probably optimize happiness, nutrition, diet, exercise, How do you build good habits?, How do you break bad habits?, How do you have good relationships?, How do you find your spouse?, meditation, How do you build basic skills, not memorize lots of facts?, What kinds of books should you read?"
— Naval Ravikant
"There’s a whole set of things we don’t even bother trying to teach. We don’t teach nutrition. We don’t teach cooking. We don’t teach how to be in happy, positive relationships. We don’t teach how to keep your body healthy and fit. We just say sports. We don’t teach happiness. We don’t teach meditation."
— Naval Ravikant
"On how to deal with anxiety: I remember that I’m going to die — memento mori, as they say. It’s hard, though. Anxiety is the human condition. It’s probably the single most pervasive emotion. I don’t think people understand how deep anxiety runs. If I conquered anxiety, I’d be the Buddha; so would you if you conquered anxiety."
— Naval Ravikant
"You should realize that this is such a short and precious life that it’s really important that you don’t spend it being unhappy. There’s no excuse for spending most of your life in misery. You’ve only got 70 years out of the 50 billion or so that the universe is going to be around."
— Naval Ravikant
"We spend so much time in relationships. The average relationship probably lasts a couple years. We spend very little time deciding which relationship to get into. We spend so much time in a job, but we spend so little time deciding which job to get into. Choosing what city to live in can almost completely determine the trajectory of your life, but we spend so little time trying to figure out what city to live in."
— Naval Ravikant
"In almost any salaried job, even at one that’s paying a lot per hour like a lawyer, or a doctor, you’re still putting in the hours, and every hour you get paid. So, what that means is when you’re sleeping, you’re not earning. When you’re retired, you’re not earning. When you’re on vacation, you’re not earning. And you can’t earn non-linearly."
— Naval Ravikant
"The more worldly success you have, the more your ego gets built up. The more fearful you might be of losing it all. The more fearful my might be about what other people think. The more you have to lose. The more you get caught up in this dream of who you think you are. I think worldly success actually hurts."
— Naval Ravikant
"The world just reflects your own feelings back at you. Reality is neutral. Reality has no judgments. To a tree, there is no concept of right or wrong, good or bad. You’re born, you have a whole set of sensory experiences and stimulations (lights, colors, and sounds), and then you die. How you choose to interpret them is up to you—you have that choice."
— Naval Ravikant
HAPPINESS IS LEARNED — Almanack of Naval Ravikant"There are fundamentally two huge games in life that people play. One is the money game. Money is not going to solve all of your problems; but it’s going to solve all of your money problems. I think people know that. They realize that, so they want to make money."
— Naval Ravikant
How to Get Rich"Wealth is assets that earn while you sleep; it’s the factory of robots cranking out things. Wealth is the computer program running at night that’s serving other customers. Wealth is money in the bank that is reinvested into other assets and businesses."
— Naval Ravikant
How to Get Rich"It is competitive to some extent. It’s a positive sum game—but there are competitive elements to it, because there’s a finite amount of resources right now in society."
— Naval Ravikant
How to Get Rich"Money is how we transfer wealth. Money is social credits; it’s the ability to have credits and debits of other people’s time."
— Naval Ravikant
How to Get Rich"But they’re actually playing the other game, which is the status game. They’re trying to be high status in the eyes of others"
— Naval Ravikant
How to Get Rich"Status, on the other hand, is a zero-sum game. It’s a very old game. We’ve been playing it since monkey tribes. It’s hierarchical."
— Naval Ravikant
How to Get Rich"To be the winner, there must be a loser. Fundamentally, I don’t like status games. They play an important role in our society, so we can figure out who’s in charge."
— Naval Ravikant
How to Get Rich"Hunter-gatherers lived in entirely status-based societies. Farmers started going to wealth-based societies. The modern industrial economies are much more heavily wealth-based societies."
— Naval Ravikant
How to Get Rich"People creating wealth will always be attacked by people playing status games"
— Naval Ravikant
How to Get Rich"The problem is, to win at a status game you have to put somebody else down. That’s why you should avoid status games in your life—because they make you into an angry combative person."
— Naval Ravikant
How to Get Rich"Even in nature, there are more parasites than there are non-parasitical organisms. You have a ton of parasites in you, who are living off of you. The better ones are symbiotic, they’re giving something back. But there are a lot that are just taking. That’s the nature of how any complex system is built."
— Naval Ravikant
How to Get Rich"the reality is everyone can be rich. We can see that by seeing, that in the First World, everyone is basically richer than almost anyone who was alive 200 years ago."
— Naval Ravikant
How to Get Rich"The engine of technology is science that is applied for the purpose of creating abundance. So, I think fundamentally everybody can be wealthy."
— Naval Ravikant
How to Get Rich"I don’t think capitalism is evil. Capitalism is actually good. It’s just that it gets hijacked. It gets hijacked by improper pricing of externalities. It gets hijacked by improper yields, where you have corruption, or you have monopolies."
— Naval Ravikant
How to Get Rich"I believe science is the engine that pulls humanity forward."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"To me, science is also the study of truth. What do we know to be true? How do we know something to be true? As I get older, I find myself incapable of having an attention span for anything that isn’t steeped in the truth."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"I was pleasantly surprised a couple of years back when I opened an old book that I’d read a decade ago called The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"Deutsch dramatically expands on that in The Beginning of Infinity."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"Karl Popper laid out the theory of what is scientific and what is not; what is a good explanation and what is not."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"At the beginning of The Fabric of Reality, David Deutsch presents this idea that you don’t need to know every single fact to fundamentally understand everything that can be understood."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"He presents this vision that there are four fundamental theories from science and outside science: quantum theory, the theory of computation, evolution by natural selection, and epistemology—which is the theory of knowledge. Together they form the worldview, or lens, through which you can understand anything that can be understood."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"You don’t have to memorize and know every fact. You don’t have to know where every particle moved. If you understand the deep underlying theories behind everything, then you know at a high level how everything works.”"
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"At some point most physicists expect that we’re going to have a unification of quantum theory and the theory of relativity."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"The Beginning of Infinity reminds me the most of Gödel, Escher, Bach in that it is very wide-ranging and stitches together ideas from many different disciplines."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"The Beginning of Infinity is similar. Everybody in my social circle has it on their bookshelf. Many claim to have read it, but very few have gotten it."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"I’m currently stuck in a loop where, at least in science, I’m only going to read The Beginning of Infinity and The Fabric of Reality over and over again until I understand them fully."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"Progress is inevitable as long as we have good explanations"
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"Deutsch’s worldview is that reality is comprehensible. Problems are solvable, or “soluble,” as he writes. It’s a deeply rationally optimistic worldview that believes in good scientific explanations and progress."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"Progress is inevitable as long as we have these good explanations. Good explanations have tremendous reach. They are acts of creativity."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"Humans are problem solvers and can solve all problems. All sins and evil are due to a lack of knowledge. One can be optimistic about constant progress."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"That’s what the title refers to: We’re at the beginning of an infinite series of progress."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"It states that we are at home in the universe and the universe is ours as a resource to learn about and exploit; that material wealth is a set of physical transformations that we can affect; that everything that is not forbidden by the laws of physics is eventually possible through knowledge and knowledge creation."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"He also writes about how humans are universal explainers, that anything that can be known and understood can be known and understood by human beings in the computation power of a human system."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"Everything is knowable by humans. We’re at the beginning of an infinity of knowledge."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"We are on our way to being able to do everything that is not forbidden by the laws of physics."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"People are the entities within the universe that create explanations. They’re able to explain what raw materials might be transformed into."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"Now, what are they transforming these raw materials into? Civilization. People creating knowledge end up becoming literally a force of nature."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"Of course, everyone wants to know how the laws of nature work. But if we want to understand how the universe is going to evolve over time, whether it’s locally on our own planet or, eventually, the galaxy, we’re going to have to talk about the knowledge that people create and the choices that they’re going to make into the future."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"It’s Impossible to Predict the Growth of Knowledge"
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"“The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies. We are so insignificant that I can’t believe the whole universe exists for our benefit.”"
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"We are, so far as we know, the sole place in the universe that is creating knowledge, an open-ended stream of knowledge that could transform the rest of reality."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"In the same way that gravity is able to pull a galaxy into a particular shape, knowledge in the future will be able to shape the course of the planet, the solar system and, eventually, the galaxy."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"It’s impossible to predict the future growth of knowledge. That’s the nature of knowledge, because knowledge creation is genuinely an act of creation. It is bringing something into existence that wasn’t there prior."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"The value is in the knowledge, and the knowledge is inside the observer and the creator, in other words, a human."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"So a lot of the information—a lot of the value—is within a particular knowledge-bearing entity."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"Humans are unique in our capability to understand things."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"A good explanation, first and foremost, is testable or falsifiable."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"Good explanations don’t have to be obvious. They’re not derived from just looking at what happened in the past. Rather, they are testable."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"The second piece of a good explanation is that it’s hard to vary. It has to be very precise, and there has to be a good reason for the precision."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"Finally, the predictions that it makes should be narrow and precise, and they should be risky."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"If we do a test and it doesn’t agree with a particular theory that we have, that’s problematic. But that doesn’t mean that it refutes the theory."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"If you had to choose between whether or not general relativity has been refuted by your test or your test is flawed, go with the fact that your test is flawed."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"This is another aspect of the world view that we never have the final word—and that’s a good thing. That’s optimistic because it means we can keep improving, we can keep making progress, and we can keep discovering new things. There is no end of science."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"One is Nassim Taleb, who popularized the idea of the black swan, which is that no number of white swans disproves the existence of a black swan. You can never conclusively say all swans are white. You can never establish a final truth. All you can do is work with the best explanation you have today, which is still far better than ignorance."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"The other one I find fascinating is Gregory Chaitin. He is a mathematician very much in the vein of Kurt Gödel because he explores the limits and boundaries of what is possible in mathematics."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"One of the points that he makes is that Gödel’s incompleteness theorem doesn’t say that mathematics is junk; the theorem isn’t a cause for despair. Gödel’s incompleteness theorem says that no formal system—including mathematics—can be both complete and correct. Either there are statements that are true that cannot be proven true in the system, or there will be a contradiction somewhere inside the system."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"This could be a cause of despair for mathematicians who view mathematics as this abstract, perfect, fully self-contained thing. But Chaitin makes the argument that, actually, it opens up for creativity in mathematics. It means that even in mathematics you are always one step away from falsifying something and then finding a better explanation for it."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"It puts humans and their creativity and their bid to find good explanations back at the core of it."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"Comparing that to mathematics, if necessary truth is the subject matter of mathematics, mathematicians are engaged in creating knowledge about necessary truth. Because a mathematician has a brain—which is a physical object—and all physical objects are subject to making errors of degradation via the second law of thermodynamics—or simply the usual mental mistakes and errors that any human being makes—a mathematician is just as fallible as anyone else. So what they end up proving could be in error."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"So it is questioning these deepest assumptions we have—where we think there’s no possible way we could be mistaken—that leads to true progress and to a genuine, fundamental change in the sciences and everywhere else."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"in general relativity, the idea is the opposite. It says things can continuously vary, and the mathematics requires that things be continuously variable so they can be differentiated and so on. The idea is that you can keep on dividing up space and you can keep on dividing up time."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"What is the fundamental nature of reality? Is it that things can be infinitely divisible, or is that we must stop somewhere or other? If it’s infinitely divisible, then quantum theory might have to be subservient to general relativity. We just don’t know."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"But we don’t live in a world of pure mathematics; we live in a world of physics."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"And if physics says that we can transverse an infinite number of points in a finite amount of time, then that’s what we’ll do regardless of the mathematics."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"Every mathematical theory is held inside a physical substrate of a brain or a computer. You’re always bound by the laws of physics, and these pure, abstract domains may have no mappings to reality."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"Unprovable theorems vastly outnumber the provable ones"
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"The things that are not computable vastly outnumber the things that are computable, and what is computable depends entirely upon what computers we can make in this physical universe. The computers that we can make must obey our laws of physics."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"Happily, none of those theorems that we cannot prove at the moment are inherently interesting."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"Some things can be inherently boring—namely, all of these theorems which we cannot possibly prove as true or false."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"Those theorems can’t have any bearing in our physical universe. They have nothing to do with our physical universe, and this is why we say they’re inherently uninteresting. And there’s a lot of inherently uninteresting things."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"Does probability actually exist in the physical universe, or is it a function of our ignorance? If I’m rolling a die, I don’t know which way it’s going to land; so therefore I put in a probability. But does that mean there’s an actual probabilistic unknowable thing in the universe? Is the universe rolling a die somewhere, or is it always deterministic?"
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"All probability is actually subjective. Uncertainty and randomness are subjective. You don’t know what the outcome’s going to be, so you roll a die. That’s because you individually do not know; it’s not because there is uncertainty there deeply in the universe. What we know about quantum theory is that all physically possible things occur."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"This leads to the concept of the multiverse. Rather than refute all of the failed ways of trying to understand quantum theory, we’re going to take seriously what the equations of quantum theory say."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"This means that there is no inherent uncertainty in the universe because everything that can happen actually will happen. It’s not like some things will happen and some things won’t happen. Everything happens."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"So the number of universes still does correspond to what we calculate as the probability."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"Decision-theoretic means you assume there’s proportionality between the universes’ way of splitting things up. So if you’re rolling two different dice, then the universes proportion themselves into measures."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"The reason it’s nonsense is because the photon doesn’t know that it’s alive or dead. It doesn’t know what experiment it’s participating in."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"Experiments force us to acknowledge other universes"
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"This is why we are forced to acknowledge the existence of these other particles—and not only these other particles but other universes in which these particles exist."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"Almost everything of interest in science we do not observe."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"Even many of the things that we say we have seen, we’ve actually just seen instruments detect those things. We’re watching the effects through instruments and then theorizing that there are other universes out there where the photons are interacting with the photons that we can see."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"The history of ideas and science is a history of us broadening our vision of exactly how large physical reality is."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"It does not presume to predict the future from the past"
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"What’s wrong with induction, and where does new knowledge actually come from?"
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"Science is not about cataloging a history of events that have occurred in the past and presuming they’re going to occur again in the future."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"Now, if you’re an inductivist—or even a Bayesian reasoner—and you don’t know anything about the boiling temperature and what phenomena happen at that temperature, you can join all of those lovely lines into a perfectly diagonal straight line and extrapolate off into infinity."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"No method of recording all of these data points and extrapolating off into the future could ever have given you the correct answer."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"The correct answer can only come from creativity."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"That’s what science is, that whole complicated story about how the particles are moving faster. It’s not about trends and predictions; it’s about explanations."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"Only once we have the explanation can we make the prediction."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"The best theories come from your imagination, not extrapolation"
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"There’s a beautiful symmetry to it across all knowledge creation. It’s ultimately an act of creativity."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"It’s only the philosophers and certain mathematicians who think that science is this inductive trend-seeking way of extrapolating from past observations into the future."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"And he had a curiosity and an imagination. Imagination was key for him. He needed to imagine what could possibly explain these things."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"Einstein wasn’t looking at past phenomena in order to come up with general relativity. He was seeking to explain certain problems that existed in physics."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"Good explanations rely on creativity. They are testable and falsifiable, of course, and they’re also hard to vary and to make risky and narrow predictions."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"Some of the greatest investors of our time—people like Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger—are absolute geniuses but cannot wrap their minds around cryptocurrencies."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"The idea that there’s extra-sovereign money that’s native to the Internet and programmable is foreign to them because their money is always something that has been provided by the government and controlled by the government. They just cannot imagine it any other way."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"But it’s very rare in science to have more than one viable theory. There was the Newtonian theory of gravity and the theory of general relativity."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"What confuses people is that induction and Bayesianism work well for finite, constrained spaces that are already known. They’re not good for new explanations."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"In fact, the way we generate new explanations is through creativity. And the way we judge one explanation against another is either through experimental refutation or a straightforward criticism, when we realize that one explanation is bad."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"You never know where the best ideas are going to come from. You have to take every idea that’s made in good faith seriously."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"As Popper said, “In our infinite ignorance we are all equal.”"
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"But if you believe that knowledge comes through creativity, then any child born tomorrow could be the next Einstein or Feynman. They could discover something that will change the world forever with creativity that has nonlinear outputs and effects."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"At the moment we’re very concerned about the pollution and the loss of certain species, and these are legitimate concerns for some people. But it should never be at the expense of the long-term vision that we can solve all of those problems—and far more—if we could progress at a faster rate by using the resources that we have available to us."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"There are probably multiple reasons for that. It’s easier to be a pessimist than an optimist. It’s hard to guess how life is going to improve; it’s easier to extrapolate how it’s going to get worse."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"You could also argue that the risk of ruin is so large—you can’t come back from it—that we’re hardwired to be pessimists."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"In fact, collaboration, cooperation and resource exploitation are the things that will drive this knowledge economy forward so that we can solve these problems."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"I’m guilty of having recorded one of these doomsayer podcasts about enders blowing up the Earth. That was the one podcast I regretted the most. We had a great conversation, but I don’t fundamentally agree with conclusions that we should slow down because the world is going to end."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"Pessimism is an easy trap to fall into, but it implies that humans are not creative."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"Pessimism doesn’t acknowledge all the ways that we have innovated our way out of previous traps."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"If you’re a pessimist, you get your feedback from other people. It’s a social act. You’re convincing other people of your pessimism."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"But entrepreneurs get feedback from nature and free markets, which I believe are much more realistic feedback mechanisms."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"Professions in which you get your feedback from other members of that profession tend to get corrupted."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"When you see a journalist writing articles to impress other journalists or a restaurant owner trying to impress other foodies and restaurant owners, it’s usually not practical or high-quality."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"A scientist or an experimentalist gets feedback from Mother Nature, and an entrepreneur gets feedback from a free market in which people vote with their money and time. Those are much better predictors."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"To be an entrepreneur, you need to be optimistic about the fact that you’re creating something that other people are going to find value in."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"people who are creating are trying to bring something new into existence."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"Here we take the stance that all evils are due to lack of knowledge."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"Rational optimism is the way out. The data supports it, and history supports it."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"Through creativity, we can always come up with good explanations to improve our lives and everybody else’s lives."
— Naval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity, Part 1"you said that you should “learn to sell, learn to build, if you can do both, you will be unstoppable.”"
— Naval Ravikant
Learn to Sell, Learn to Build"So, generally, the Silicon Valley startup model tends to work best. It’s not the only way, but it is probably the most common way, when you have two founders, one of whom is world class at selling, and one of whom is world class at building."
— Naval Ravikant
Learn to Sell, Learn to Build"That’s when you get people who can create entire industries."
— Naval Ravikant
Learn to Sell, Learn to Build"The living example is Elon Musk. He may not necessarily be building the rockets himself, but he understands enough that he actually makes technical contributions."
— Naval Ravikant
Learn to Sell, Learn to Build"I think the real giants in any field are the people who can both build and sell."
— Naval Ravikant
Learn to Sell, Learn to Build"I’d rather teach an engineer marketing than a marketer engineering"
— Naval Ravikant
Learn to Sell, Learn to Build"And usually the building is a thing that a sales person can’t pick up later in life."
— Naval Ravikant
Learn to Sell, Learn to Build"you may not be good at hand-to-hand sales, but you may be a really good writer."
— Naval Ravikant
Learn to Sell, Learn to Build"writing is a skill that can be learned much more easily than, say, in-person selling, and so you may just cultivate writing skills until you become a good online communicator and then use that for your sales."
— Naval Ravikant
Learn to Sell, Learn to Build"Long term, people who understand the underlying product and how to build it and can sell it, these are catnip to investors, these people can break down walls if they have enough energy, and they can get almost anything done."
— Naval Ravikant
Learn to Sell, Learn to Build"When you’re trying to stand out from the noise building is actually better because there’re so many hustlers and sales people who have nothing to back them up."
— Naval Ravikant
Learn to Sell, Learn to Build"I think if you only had to pick up one, you can start with building and then transition to selling. This is a cop-out answer, but I think that is actually the right answer."
— Naval Ravikant
Learn to Sell, Learn to Build"Making something social destroys the truth of it because social groups need consensus to survive—otherwise they fight and can’t get along—and consensus is all about compromise, not truth-seeking."
— Naval Ravikant
Making Something Social Destroys the Truth of It"The more groupthink you see involved, the farther from the truth you actually are."
— Naval Ravikant
Making Something Social Destroys the Truth of It"You can have an harmonious society while still allowing truth seekers within the society to find truth and to find the means to alter and improve reality for the entire group."
— Naval Ravikant
Making Something Social Destroys the Truth of It"Peter Thiel talks a lot about how competition is besides the point. It’s counterproductive."
— Naval Ravikant
Escape Competition Through Authenticity"You have to be careful when you get caught up in status games. You end up competing over things that aren’t worth competing over."
— Naval Ravikant
Escape Competition Through Authenticity"The best way to escape competition—to get away from the specter of competition, which is not just stressful and nerve-wracking but also will drive you to the wrong answer—is to be authentic to yourself."
— Naval Ravikant
Escape Competition Through Authenticity"Artist are, by definition, authentic. Entrepreneurs are authentic, too."
— Naval Ravikant
Escape Competition Through Authenticity"Authenticity naturally gets you away from competition."
— Naval Ravikant
Escape Competition Through Authenticity"you have to adjust until you find product-market fit."
— Naval Ravikant
Escape Competition Through Authenticity"In entrepreneurship, the masses are never right"
— Naval Ravikant
Escape Competition Through Authenticity"if the whole market is empty, that can be a warning indicator. It can indicate you’ve gone too authentic and should focus more on the product-market part of founder-product-market fit."
— Naval Ravikant
Escape Competition Through Authenticity"If you are successful, in the long-term you’ll find you’re almost doing all of your hobbies for a living, no matter what they are."
— Naval Ravikant
Escape Competition Through Authenticity"As Robert Frost said, “my goal in life is to unite my avocation with my vocation.” That’s really where life is going to lead you anyway."
— Naval Ravikant
Escape Competition Through Authenticity"As you go through your career, you’ll find you gravitate towards the things you’re good at, which by definition are the things you enjoy doing."
— Naval Ravikant
Escape Competition Through Authenticity"Other people will push you towards the things you’re good at, too. Because your smart bosses, co-workers and investors will realize you’re world-class in this one thing."
— Naval Ravikant
Escape Competition Through Authenticity"Ideally, you want to end up specializing in being you."
— Naval Ravikant
Escape Competition Through Authenticity"It’s always being guessed. It’s our best understanding at any given time."
— Naval Ravikant
All Knowledge Is Conjectural"You are absolutely sure that you’re not wrong. This feeling is something we should always be skeptical of."
— Naval Ravikant
All Knowledge Is Conjectural"Karl Popper has this wonderful saying, “It is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood.”"
— Naval Ravikant
All Knowledge Is Conjectural"A group will never admit, “We made a mistake,” because a group that tries to change its mind falls apart."
— Naval Ravikant
Groups Never Admit Failure"A group would rather keep living in the mythology of “we were repressed” than ever admit failure."
— Naval Ravikant
Groups Never Admit Failure"Ironically, for-profit entities are more sustainable than non-profit entities. They’re self-sustainable."
— Naval Ravikant
Groups Never Admit Failure"But I would argue that the best businesses are the ones that are for-profit, sustainable and ethical so you can attract the best people."
— Naval Ravikant
Groups Never Admit Failure"There’s a diminishing marginal utility to the money in your life."
— Naval Ravikant
Groups Never Admit Failure"Knowledge is the thing that makes the existence of resources infinite. The creation of knowledge is unbounded. We’re going to keep on creating more knowledge and, thereby, learning about more and different resources."
— Naval Ravikant
Knowledge Makes the Existence of Resources Infinite"Unfortunately, there’s a pessimistic assumption here that people make that human creativity is bounded, and I think it’s the people who have not built things, who have not created new things from scratch, who seem to feel this the most."
— Naval Ravikant
Knowledge Makes the Existence of Resources Infinite"Even so-called empty space has a lot of matter and a lot of things that could be converted into energy. There is no limit to the number of resources out there. There’s purely a limit to knowledge."
— Naval Ravikant
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