My lessons from The Almanack of Naval Ravikant
Like most of us, I grew up hearing one piece of advice again and again. Study well, work hard, get a good job, and life will be settled.
It’s good advice. But as I grew older, I noticed something it didn’t explain.
Some people I knew worked hard their whole lives. They left home early, came back late, and even on Sundays their minds were on work. Yet when they retired, they had a comfortable life, but not a rich one. And then there were others who always seemed to have time. They never missed a family function or a get-together, and they never looked like they were in a hurry. Somehow, they were the ones doing really well financially.
I remember thinking that life was being a little unfair here. If hard work is the formula, why isn’t it working for the people who work the hardest?
When I started my own career, I got some answers. I watched how people grew, who moved up quickly and who stayed in the same place for years. But those answers came in bits and pieces. What I really wanted was a simple framework, something that explained the whole picture.
I found it in a book that its author never wrote.
The book Naval didn’t write
Naval Ravikant is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor. He co-founded AngelList and invested early in companies like Twitter and Uber. Most people know him from his posts on X, where he shares short thoughts on wealth, work and life.
I had been reading his posts for some time when I came across The Almanack of Naval Ravikant. I was curious, because Naval has said more than once that he isn’t interested in writing a book. So who wrote this one?
It turns out Eric Jorgenson, a writer who followed Naval’s work closely, went through years of his tweets, podcasts and interviews and put them together in a structured way. He even made it available free online at navalmanack.com.
An almanac is a book of useful information that you keep coming back to. That’s a fair description of this one. Broadly, it’s about two things: how to build wealth, and how to be happy.
Renting out your time
The idea that finally answered my old question is this. Naval says there are two ways to earn money. You can rent out your time, or you can own something.
When you rent out your time, you get paid for the hours you put in. Most salaried jobs work this way, and so does most freelance work. The problem is that your income can only grow as far as your hours can stretch, and there are only so many hours in a day. The day you stop, the money stops.
Owning is different. If you own a business, or a piece of one, or a product, or a property, it can keep earning even when you’re not working. Naval describes wealth as assets that earn while you sleep, and he puts the other side of it very plainly: “You’re not going to get rich renting out your time.”
When I read that, I thought of those two groups of people again. The ones who worked so hard were, mostly, renting out their time. The ones who seemed free had, in some form, come to own something. It was never about who worked harder. It was about how they were earning.
Finding a position of leverage
Naval’s big word in this book is leverage.
The idea comes from physics. With a lever, you can move a heavy object with very little force. Archimedes once said that if you gave him a lever long enough and a place to stand, he could move the earth.
In work, leverage means your results are not tied to your effort one to one. A small amount of effort, applied in the right place, can produce an outcome many times bigger.
Naval explains this with an example from real estate that stayed with me. Think of a carpenter, a real estate agent and a developer, all connected to the same house.
The carpenter builds it with his hands. He is paid for that work, and when the job is over, he moves on to the next one. If anything, he works the hardest of the three.
The agent sells the house. He earns a commission, which is usually more than what the carpenter makes on the same house, but he still has to find a buyer for every single deal.
The developer bought the land, arranged the money, and hired both the carpenter and the agent. He owns the finished house, so most of the profit is his. And he can run several projects at the same time.
Same house, very different outcomes. The difference is not the effort. It’s the position each person is in. That’s what Naval means when he asks us to find a position of leverage: work where your judgment matters, where you take accountability, and where the outcome can grow far beyond the hours you put in.
Code and media
Naval talks about a few kinds of leverage. The older ones are labor, meaning people working for you, and capital, meaning money working for you. Both need someone’s permission. Someone has to agree to join you, and someone has to agree to give you money.
The newer ones are code and media, and he calls them “permissionless leverage.” You don’t need anybody’s approval to write software, record a video or start a blog.
What makes them powerful is that you do the work once, and it can be used again and again. I write a blog post once. Whether ten people read it or ten thousand, the effort on my side stays the same. A video can be watched a million times. An app can be downloaded a million times. The cost of one more copy is almost nothing.
So the advice is to look for work that you can write once and sell many, many times.
What about people in jobs?
These days I often hear people say that jobs won’t make you rich, and that only business owners get rich. Naval’s framework explains why people say that. Owners hold a piece of the business, so when the business grows, their piece grows with it. They are not just renting out their time.
But jobs have changed in the recent years.
Earlier, especially in IT services, a job mostly meant one thing: you rented out your time and got a salary. Today, many product companies also give their employees stock. So you’re renting out your time and also owning a small piece of the business. It’s a hybrid model.
That small piece can matter a lot over the long run. If the company does well, your share grows along with it, and that is how many people in jobs today are building long-term wealth. So when you compare two job offers, it’s worth looking beyond the salary and asking whether you’ll own a piece of what you’re helping to build.
Happiness is a skill
The second part of the book was a surprise for me. After all that about wealth, Naval turns to happiness, and his view is that happiness is a skill and a choice.
We are not happy by default. Our brains evolved to keep us alive, so they are always scanning for threats. That’s useful for survival, but it doesn’t make us happy. According to Naval, happiness is something we have to learn, and like any skill, it gets better with practice until it becomes a habit.
He writes a lot about this, about mental strength, about building yourself, about peace of mind. Towards the end, he gets into philosophy and the influence Buddhism had on him, and he closes with the books and ideas he recommends.
I was glad the book went there. It would have been easy to write only about getting rich. Instead, it reminds you that money is one part of a good life, not all of it.
My takeaway
For years, my thoughts about wealth were random. I had pieces of the answer but no way to connect them. This book connected them for me.
If I had to sum it up in a few lines: hard work matters, but where you put it matters more. Try not to depend only on renting out your time; own something, even if it’s small. Look for work with leverage, especially code and media, where you can build once and use it many times. And treat happiness as a skill you practise, not something that will arrive on its own.
I’d highly recommend The Almanack of Naval Ravikant. It’s a short read, and you can come back to it again and again.