Naval Ravikant

Listening to the clearest thinker alive - @DavidDeutschOxf

Kudos to @tylercowen for being willing to challenge David. https://twitter.com/petrikajander/status/1400526411836833797

If going to start with one book. Start with Anthony de Mello’s A Way to Love or his book Awareness. They’re both really good, but there’s a ton of them.

There’s a great clip from him on SoundCloud that says it’s called Life Has No Goals, No Purpose. I listen to that one a lot.

which I originally picked up from Michael Singer, by the way, he has a good book called The Untethered Soul

If going to start with one book. Start with Anthony de Mello’s A Way to Love or his book Awareness. They’re both really good, but there’s a ton of them.

I mean, there’s ancient wisdom in Schopenhauer, read Counsels and Maxims.

Yeah, Nick is a bona fide genius and a pioneer in the space, he also has a great blog called Unenumerated that I highly recommend.

Not the easiest read, but it made me smarter.

Even though I am a very good writer and I've been writing a lot since I was young, I still open up that blog post and put it in the background anytime I'm writing anything important. It's that good. I use it as my basic template for how to write well. Think about the title “The Day You Became a Better Writer.” It's such a powerful title. He teaches you in one small blog post the importance of surprise, the importance of headlines, the importance of being brief and directed, not using some adjectives and adverbs, using active not the passive voice, etc. This one blog post right there will change your writing style forever if you put your ego down and absorb it properly.

My most listened-to audiobook. The most important audiobook I've ever heard

Recommend reading

Jed McKenna is to spirituality what Rick and Morty is to children’s cartoons.

https://t.co/l30DlGVcYr

Most meditation techniques are concentration methods, and there are many, many meditation techniques. If you want to run through a bunch of them, you can pick up pick up a book called The Book of Secrets by Osho. I know he's gotten a bad rap recently, but he was he was a pretty smart guy. It's actually a translation of an old Sanskrit book with 112 different meditations. You can try each one, and see which one works for you.

The best book I've read in 2018, I highly recommend it. Lots of great ideas in there. Lots of good mental models and constructs. He has a bit of an attitude, but he has that because he's brilliant, and it's okay. So just look past the attitude and read the book, learn the concepts. It's one of the best business books I've ever read. And luckily, it doesn't masquerade as a business book.

A history of the human species. The observations, frameworks, and mental models will have you looking at history and your fellow humans differently.

Sapiens is the best book of the last decade I have read. He had decades to write Sapiens. There’s lots of great ideas in there and it’s just full of them, chock full per page.

I love this as a classic book on philosophy, a good introduction for someone starting out. I’ve given out more copies of this book than any other.

I love Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine author. His short story collection Ficciones, or Labyrinths, is amazing. Borges is probably still the most powerful author I have read who wasn’t just outright writing philosophy. There was philosophy in there with the sci-fi.

My current favorite short story, sci-fi short story: probably “Understand” by Ted Chiang. It’s in a collection called Stories of Your Life and Others. “Story of Your Life” was made into a movie called Arrival.