Happiness According To Naval Ravikant

The three big ones in life are wealth, health, and happiness. We pursue them in that order, but their importance is reverse. — Naval Ravikant, Twitter

Originally published at https://blog.happyness.design.

Naval’s a well known internet-tech founder-philosopher. He’s the co-founder, chairman and former CEO of AngelList among other things. These are some of the learnings from The Almanack of Naval Ravikant. It’s quite Twitter based as Naval himself has said that this is where he distils the learnings he gets from books and has it challenged by the wider public. This article is therefore a little bit different and highlights the main sections of the Almanack on happiness and Naval’s Tweets.

• Whatever happiness means to me, it means something different to you. I think it’s very important to explore what these definitions are… My definition keeps evolving. The answer I would have given you a year ago will be different than what I tell you now. Today, I believe happiness is really a default state. Happiness is there when you remove the sense of something missing in your life.
• Happiness is the state when nothing is missing. When nothing is missing, your mind shuts down and stops running into the past or future to regret something or to plan something… People mistakenly believe happiness is just about positive thoughts and positive actions. The more I’ve read, the more I’ve learned, and the more I’ve experienced (because I verify this for myself ), every positive thought essentially holds within it a negative thought. It is a contrast to something negative. The Tao Te Ching says this more articulately than I ever could, but it’s all duality and polarity. If I say I’m happy, that means I was sad at some point. If I say he’s attractive, then somebody else is unattractive. Every positive thought even has a seed of a negative thought within it and vice versa, which is why a lot of greatness in life comes out of suffering. You have to view the negative before you can aspire to and appreciate the positive.
• Nature has no concept of happiness or unhappiness… 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.
• People believe neutrality would be a very bland existence. No, this is the existence little children live. If you look at little children, on balance, they’re generally pretty happy because they are really immersed in the environment and the moment, without any thought of how it should be given their personal preferences and desires. I think the neutral state is actually a perfection state. One can be very happy as long as one isn’t too caught up in their own head.

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. — Naval Ravikant, Twitter

You can improve your happiness baseline like one does with fitness.

• Happiness is a choice you make and a skill you develop.
• At any given time, when you’re walking down the streets, a very small percentage of your brain is focused on the present. The rest is planning the future or regretting the past. This keeps you from having an incredible experience. It’s keeping you from seeing the beauty in everything and for being grateful for where you are. You can literally destroy your happiness if you spend all of your time living in delusions of the future.
• It’s always the next thing, then the next thing, the next thing after that, then the next thing after that creating this pervasive anxiety.
• Every desire is a chosen unhappiness
• The fundamental delusion: There is something out there that will make me happy and fulfilled forever.
• Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want. I don’t think most of us realize that’s what it is. I think we go about desiring things all day long and then wonder why we’re unhappy. I like to stay aware of it, because then I can choose my desires very carefully. I try not to have more than one big desire in my life at any given time, and I also recognize it as the axis of my suffering. I realize the area where I’ve chosen to be unhappy.
• Happiness is being satisfied with what you have. Success comes from dissatisfaction. Choose.
• Rise above the game. Don’t just play it.
• There’s a line from Blaise Pascal I read. Basically, it says: “All of man’s troubles arise because he cannot sit in a room quietly by himself.” If you could just sit for thirty minutes and be happy, you are successful. That is a very powerful place to be, but very few of us get there.
• The enemy of peace of mind is expectations drilled into you by society and other people.
• All the real scorecards are internal. We exist in single players game rather than multiplayer.
• When working, surround yourself with people more successful than you. When playing, surround yourself with people happier than you.
• You have to go through your life replacing your thoughtless bad habits with good ones, making a commitment to be a happier person. At the end of the day, you are a combi- nation of your habits and the people who you spend the most time with.
• There’s the “five chimps theory” where you can predict a chimp’s behavior by the five chimps it hangs out with the most… The people who are the most happy and optimistic choose the right five chimps.
• Your life is a firefly blink in a night. You’re here for such a brief period of time. If you fully acknowledge the futility of what you’re doing, then I think it can bring great happiness and peace because you realize this is a game. But it’s a fun game. All that matters is you experience your reality as you go through life. Why not interpret it in the most positive possible way?

I’ve taken quite a lot from Naval’s pieces on happiness and I hope this will be helpful to you too to reflect upon 🙂

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