The Almanack of Naval Ravikant by Eric Jorgenson

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The only book you need to read on building wealth and happiness in 2020. Dense, practical, and filled with wisdom, this is the best book I've read this year. If you apply every principle from this book, victory is guaranteed.

Life formulas

Happiness = Health + Wealth + Good Relationships
Health = Exercise + Diet + Sleep
Exercise = High Intensity Resistance Training + Sports + Rest
Diet = Natural Foods + Intermittent Fasting + Plants
Sleep = No alarms + 8–9 hours + Circadian rhythms
Wealth = Income + Wealth * (Return on Investment)
Income = Accountability + Leverage + Specific Knowledge
Accountability = Personal Branding + Personal Platform + Taking Risk?
Leverage = Capital + People + Intellectual Property
Specific Knowledge = Knowing how to do something society cannot yet easily train other people to do
Return on Investment = “Buy-and-Hold” + Valuation + Margin of Safety

Combining these?

Happiness = (Personal Branding + Personal Platform + Capital + People + Intellectual Property + Knowing how to do something society can't easily train people to do)^("Buy and hold" + Valuation + Margin of Safety) + High Intensity Resistance Training + Sports + Rest + Natural Foods + Intermittent Fasting + Plants + No alarms + 8-9 hours + Circadian rhythms + Good Relationships

Building Wealth

Build specific knowledge. Find the unique combination of traits that society values. Give 100% of your effort to those things. Quick hack: be authentic. You can't compete if there's no competition.

Play long term games with long term people. All returns in life, whether in wealth, relationships, or knowledge, come from compound interest. Find the 1% of your effort that isn't wasted. Go all in on that.

Take on accountability. Wealth comes from equity. Without ownership, your inputs are tied to your outputs. Optimize for independence and ownership.

Seek leverage: Wealth comes from leverage. Code, media, labor, capital. Code and media are permissionless.

Prioritize and focus. Focus on direction over speed. Value your time at an absurdly high rate. Outsource to anyone who values their time less. Do not tolerate people wasting your time.

Find work that feels like play. It's impossible to compete with someone working 16 hours a day with no effort.

Avoid lifestyle inflation. As you get rich, don't upgrade your life. Otherwise you become a slave. Avoid status games.

Focus on the fundamentals. When learning, forget the latest and greatest. Read the fundamental first principles. Understand them better than anyone else.

Learn to love to read. Reading economics, math, philosophy, history, and science. Read more than anyone else.

Choose the more difficult short-term path. When faced with two decisions, choose the one that's harder in the short term. With other decisions, if there's indecision there's no decision.

Building Happiness

Happiness is learned. Happiness is what isn't there. It's the absence of desire. It's contentment.

Desire is chosen unhappiness. Desire is a contract with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want. Instead, seek the trifecta of health, money, and time.

Success does not lead to happiness. As successful as you are, if you can't sit quietly in a room, you aren't happy. Peace is happiness at rest. Happiness is peace in motion. Seak peace.

Envy is the enemy of happiness. Be jealous of no one unless you would trade their entire life.

Happiness habits. Not drinking alcohol. Not drinking sugar. Not going on social media. Not playing video games. Not drinking caffeine. Peace of mind. Peace of body.

Happiness is singular focus. Your ability to immerse yourself in one task is correlated to your happiness.

Personal wealth metrics: How much of my day was spent doing things out of obligation versus choice?

Choose to build yourself. The greatest superpower is the ability to change yourself. Master your mind, diet, and sleep. Victory is assured.

Freedom from versus freedom to. Freedom is freedom from spending time doing things you don't want to do for people you don't like during times you don't want to do them.

Anger. Anger is a contract you make with yourself to be in physical and mental and emotional turmoil until reality changes.

Wisdom. Understanding the long-term repercussions of your actions.

Notes and Highlights

Building Wealth

And if you want to be wealthy, you want to figure out which one of those things you can provide for society that it does not yet know how to get but it will want and providing it is natural to you, within your skill set, and within your capabilities.

The specific knowledge is sort of this weird combination of unique traits from your DNA, your unique upbringing, and your response to it. It’s almost baked into your personality and your identity. Then you can hone it.

If you’re not 100 percent into it, somebody else who is 100 percent into it will outperform you. And they won’t just outperform you by a little bit—they’ll outperform you by a lot because now we’re operating the domain of ideas, compound interest really applies and leverage really applies. [78]

“Escape competition through authenticity.” Basically, when you’re competing with people, it’s because you’re copying them. It’s because you’re trying to do the same thing. But every human is different. Don’t copy.

It’s much better to be at 9/10 or 10/10 on foundations than to try and get super deep into things.

Play long term games with long term people

“All the returns in life, whether in wealth, relationships, or knowledge, come from compound interest.”

99% of effort is wasted.

Of course, these are learning experiences. You did learn. You learned the value of hard work; you might have learned something that went deep into your psyche and became a piece of what you’re doing now. But at least when it comes to the goal-oriented life, only about 1 percent of the efforts you made paid off.

I’m not saying don’t do the 99 percent, because it’s very hard to identify what the 1 percent is. What I’m saying is: when you find the 1 percent of your discipline which will not be wasted, which you’ll be able to invest in for the rest of your life and has meaning to you—go all-in and forget about the rest.

Take on accountability

To get rich, you need leverage. Leverage comes in labor, comes in capital, or it can come through code or media.

Clear accountability is important. Without accountability, you don’t have incentives. Without accountability, you can’t build credibility. But you take risks. You risk failure. You risk humiliation. You risk failure under your own name.

If you don’t own a piece of a business, you don’t have a path towards financial freedom.

Without ownership, your inputs are very closely tied to your outputs. In almost any salaried job, even one paying a lot per hour like a lawyer or a doctor, you’re still putting in the hours, and every hour you get paid.

Build or buy equity in a business

Everybody who really makes money at some point owns a piece of a product, a business, or some IP.

The less you want something, the less you’re thinking about it, the less you’re obsessing over it, the more you’re going to do it in a natural way. The more you’re going to do it for yourself. You’re going to do it in a way you’re good at, and you’re going to stick with it. The people around you will see the quality of your work is higher. [1]

You are waiting for your moment when something emerges in the world, they need a skill set, and you’re uniquely qualified. You build your brand in the meantime on Twitter, on YouTube, and by giving away free work. You make a name for yourself, and you take some risk in the process.

One form of leverage is labor—other

Money is good as a form of leverage.

The final form of leverage is brand new—the most democratic form. It is: “products with no marginal cost of replication.” This includes books, media, movies, and code. Code is probably the most powerful form of permissionless leverage. All you need is a computer—you don’t need anyone’s permission. [1]

Coding, writing books, recording podcasts, tweeting, YouTubing—these kinds of things are permissionless. You don’t need anyone’s permission to do them, and that’s why they are very egalitarian.

Whenever you can in life, optimize for independence rather than pay. If you have independence and you’re accountable on your output, as opposed to your input—that’s the dream. [10]

Learn to sell, learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable.

Stay out of things that could cause you to lose all of your capital, all of your savings. Don’t gamble everything on one go. Instead, take rationally optimistic bets with big upsides. [78]

Judgment—especially demonstrated judgment, with high accountability and a clear track record—is critical. [78]

Prioritize and focus

It’s more about consistently creating wealth by creating businesses, creating opportunities, and creating investments. It hasn’t been a giant one-off thing. My personal wealth has not been generated by one big year. It just stacks up a little bit, a few chips at a time: more options, more businesses, more investments, more things I can do.

No one is going to value you more than you value yourself. You just have to set a very high personal hourly rate and you have to stick to it. Even when I was young, I just decided I was worth a lot more than the market thought I was worth, and I started treating myself that way.

Always factor your time into every decision. How much time does it take? It’s going to take you an hour to get across town to get something. If you value yourself at one hundred dollars an hour, that’s basically throwing one hundred dollars out of your pocket. Are you going to do that?

I would argue with my girlfriends, and even today it’s my wife, “I don’t do that. That’s not a problem that I solve.” I still argue that with my mother when she hands me little to-do’s. I just don’t do that. I would rather hire you an assistant. This was true even when I didn’t have money.

Another way of thinking about something is, if you can outsource something or not do something for less than your hourly rate, outsource it or don’t do it. If you can hire someone to do it for less than your hourly rate, hire them. That even includes things like cooking. You may want to eat your healthy home cooked meals, but if you can outsource it, do that instead. [78]

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—they make you into an angry, combative person. You’re always fighting to put other people down, to put yourself and the people you like up.

Find work that feels like play

How to retire:

Well, one way is to have so much money saved that your passive income (without you lifting a finger) covers your burn rate. A second is you just drive your burn rate down to zero—you become a monk. A third is you’re doing something you love. You enjoy it so much, it’s not about the money. So there are multiple ways to retirement.

I’m always “working.” It looks like work to others, but it feels like play to me. And that’s how I know no one can compete with me on it. Because I’m just playing, for sixteen hours a day. If others want to compete with me, they’re going to work, and they’re going to lose because they’re not going to do it for sixteen hours a day, seven days a week.

You make money to solve your money and material problems. I think the best way to stay away from this constant love of money is to not upgrade your lifestyle as you make money. It’s very easy to keep upgrading your lifestyle as you make money. But if you can hold your lifestyle fixed and hopefully make your money in giant lump sums as opposed to a trickle at a time, you won’t have time to upgrade your lifestyle.

To the extent money buys freedom, it’s great. But to the extent it makes me less free, which it definitely does at some level as well, I don’t like it. [74]

How to get lucky

Trying to build business relationships well in advance of doing business is a complete waste of time. I have a much more comfortable philosophy: “Be a maker who makes something interesting people want. Show your craft, practice your craft, and the right people will eventually find you.” [14]

If someone is talking a lot about how honest they are, they’re probably dishonest. That is just a little telltale indicator I’ve learned.

Every person I met at the beginning of my career twenty years ago, where I looked at them and said, “Wow, that guy or gal is super capable—so smart and dedicated”…all of them, almost without exception, became extremely successful. You just had to give them a long enough timescale. It never happens in the timescale you want, or they want, but it does happen. [4]

The most common bad advice I hear is: “You’re too young.” Most of history was built by young people. They just got credit when they were older.

Today, with this wonderful invention called money, you can store it in a bank account. You can you work really hard, do great things for society, and society will give you money for things it wants but doesn’t know how to get. You can save money, you can live a little below your means, and you can find a certain freedom.

That will give you the time and the energy to pursue your own internal peace and happiness. I believe the solution to making everybody happy is to give them what they want.

Building judgement

if you want to get rich over your life in a deterministically predictable way, stay on the bleeding edge of trends and study technology, design, and art—become really good at something.

The advanced concepts in a field are less proven. We use them to signal insider knowledge, but we’d be better off nailing the basics. [11]

One definition of a moment of suffering is “the moment when you see things exactly the way they are.”

The problem isn’t reality. The problem is their desire is colliding with reality and preventing them from seeing the truth, no matter how much you say it.

Especially in business, if something isn’t going well, I try to acknowledge it publicly and I try to acknowledge it publicly in front of my co-founders and friends and co-workers. Then, I’m not hiding it from anybody else. If I’m not hiding it from anybody, I’m not going to delude myself from what’s actually going on. [4]

Cynicism is easy. Mimicry is easy. Optimistic contrarians are the rarest breed.

Shed your identity to see reality

I think creating identities and labels locks you in and keeps you from seeing the truth.

Learn the skills of Decision-Making

The classical virtues are all decision-making heuristics to make one optimize for the long term rather than for the short term. [11]

I never ask if “I like it” or “I don’t like it.” I think “this is what it is” or “this is what it isn’t.”—Richard Feynman

Collect mental models

don’t believe I have the ability to say what is going to work. Rather, I try to eliminate what’s not going to work. I think being successful is just about not making mistakes. It’s not about having correct judgment.

Principal-Agent Problem

The smaller the company, the more everyone feels like a principal. The less you feel like an agent, the better the job you’re going to do. The more closely you can tie someone’s compensation to the exact value they’re creating, the more you turn them into a principal, and the less you turn them into an agent. [12]
If you don’t, crack open a microeconomics textbook. It’s worth reading a microeconomics textbook from start to finish.

In the intellectual domain, compound interest rules. When you look at a business with one hundred users growing at a compound rate of 20 percent per month, it can very, very quickly stack up to having millions of users.

If you can’t decide, the answer is no. If I’m faced with a difficult choice, such as: Should I marry this person? Should I take this job? Should I buy this house? Should I move to this city? Should I go into business with this person? If you cannot decide, the answer is no.

Simple heuristic: If you’re evenly split on a difficult decision, take the path more painful in the short term.

Learn to love to read

Reading science, math, and philosophy one hour per day will likely put you at the upper echelon of human success within seven years.

I could not tell you specific passages or quotes from books. At some deep level, you absorb them, and they become threads in the tapestry of your psyche. They kind of weave in there.

Happiness

Happiness is learned

Today, I believe happiness is really a default state. Happiness is there when you remove the sense of something missing in your life.

To me, happiness is not about positive thoughts. It’s not about negative thoughts. It’s about the absence of desire, especially the absence of desire for external things.

The world just reflects your own feelings back at you. Reality is neutral. Reality has no judgments.

I have lowered my identity. I have lowered the chattering of my mind. I don’t care about things that don’t really matter. I don’t get involved in politics. I don’t hang around unhappy people. I really value my time on this earth. I read philosophy. I meditate. I hang around with happy people. And it works.

You can literally destroy your happiness if you spend all of your time living in delusions of the future. [4]

It’s most obvious if you ever just sit down and try and do nothing, nothing. I mean nothing, I mean not read a book, I mean not listen to music, I mean literally just sit down and do nothing. You can’t do it, because there’s anxiety always trying to make you get up and go, get up and go, get up and go. I think it’s important just being aware the anxiety is making you unhappy. The anxiety is just a series of running thoughts.

Desire is chosen unhappiness

When you’re young, you have time. You have health, but you have no money. When you’re middle-aged, you have money and you have health, but you have no time. When you’re old, you have money and you have time, but you have no health. So the trifecta is trying to get all three at once.

Success does not lead to happiness

To me, the real winners are the ones who step out of the game entirely, who don’t even play the game, who rise above it. Those are the people who have such internal mental and self-control and self-awareness, they need nothing from anybody else.

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.

Peace is happiness at rest, and happiness is peace in motion. You can convert peace into happiness anytime you want. But peace is what you want most of the time. If you’re a peaceful person, anything you do will be a happy activity.

Envy is the enemy of happiness

I don’t think life is that hard. I think we make it hard. One of the things I’m trying to get rid of is the word “should.” Whenever the word “should” creeps up in your mind, it’s guilt or social programming. Doing something because you “should” basically means you don’t actually want to do it. It’s just making you miserable, so I’m trying to eliminate as many “shoulds” from my life as possible. [1]

The reality is life is a single-player game. You’re born alone. You’re going to die alone. All of your interpretations are alone. All your memories are alone. You’re gone in three generations, and nobody cares. Before you showed up, nobody cared. It’s all single player.

One day, I realized with all these people I was jealous of, I couldn’t just choose little aspects of their life. I couldn’t say I want his body, I want her money, I want his personality. You have to be that person. Do you want to actually be that person with all of their reactions, their desires, their family, their happiness level, their outlook on life, their self-image? If you’re not willing to do a wholesale, 24/7, 100 percent swap with who that person is, then there is no point in being jealous.

It’s a skill. Just like nutrition is a skill, dieting is a skill, working out is a skill, making money is a skill, meeting girls and guys is a skill, having good relationships is a skill, even love is a skill. It starts with realizing they’re skills you can learn. When you put your intention and focus on it, the world can become a better place.

Happiness is built by habits

You can build good habits. Not drinking alcohol will keep your mood more stable. Not eating sugar will keep your mood more stable. Not going on Facebook, Snapchat, or Twitter will keep your mood more stable. Playing video games will make you happier in the short run—and I used to be an avid gamer—but in the long run, it could ruin your happiness. You’re being fed dopamine and having dopamine withdrawn from you in these little uncontrollable ways. Caffeine is another one where you trade long term for the short term.

The first rule of handling conflict is: Don’t hang around people who constantly engage in conflict. I’m not interested in anything unsustainable or even hard to sustain, including difficult relationships. [5]

There’s a friend of mine, a Persian guy named Behzad. He just loves life, and he has no time for anybody who is not happy.

Just being very aware in every moment. If I catch myself judging somebody, I can stop myself and say, “What’s the positive interpretation of this?” I used to get annoyed about things. Now I always look for the positive side of it. It used to take a rational effort. It used to take a few seconds for me to come up with a positive. Now I can do it sub-second. [7]

I think working out every day made me happier. If you have peace of body, it’s easier to have peace of mind. [7]

Tell your friends you’re a happy person. Then, you’ll be forced to conform to it. You’ll have a consistency bias. You have to live up to it. Your friends will expect you to be a happy person. [5]

Recover time and happiness by minimizing your use of these three smartphone apps: phone, calendar, and alarm clock. [11]

A personal metric: how much of the day is spent doing things out of obligation rather than out of interest? [11]

I have another hack I use for minor annoyances. When they happen, a part of me will instantly react negatively. But I’ve learned to mentally ask myself, “What is the positive of this situation?” “Okay, I’ll be late for a meeting. But what is the benefit to me? I get to relax and watch the birds for a moment. I’ll also spend less time in that boring meeting.” There’s almost always something positive.

Here’s a hot tip: There is no legacy. There’s nothing to leave. We’re all going to be gone. Our children will be gone. Our works will be dust. Our civilizations will be dust. Our planet will be dust. Our solar system will be dust. In the grand scheme of things, the Universe has been around for ten billion years. It’ll be around for another ten billion years.

Saving Yourself

We’re not meant to check our phone every five minutes. The constant mood swings of getting a “like” then an angry comment makes us into anxious creatures. We evolved for scarcity but live in abundance. There’s a constant struggle to say no when your genes always want to say yes. Yes to sugar. Yes to staying in this relationship. Yes to alcohol. Yes to drugs. Yes, yes, yes. Our bodies don’t know how to say no. [8]

Caring for yourself

The combination of sugar and fat together is really deadly. You’ve got to watch out for that in your diet.

Most fit and healthy people focus much more on what they eat than how much. Quality control is easier than (and leads to) quantity control. [11]

In the morning, I work out, and however long it takes is how long it takes. I do not start my day until I’ve worked out. I don’t care if the world is imploding and melting down, it can wait another thirty minutes until I’m done working out.

choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life.” Basically, if you are making the hard choices right now in what to eat, you’re not eating all the junk food you want, and making the hard choice to work out. So, your life long-term will be easy. You won’t be sick. You won’t be unhealthy. The same is true of values. The same is true of saving up for a rainy day. The same is true of how you approach your relationships. If you make the easy choices right now, your overall life will be a lot harder. [4]

Meditation + mental strength

The first few cold showers were hilarious because I’d slowly ease myself in, wincing the entire way. I started about four or five months ago. Now, I turn the shower on full-blast, and then I walk right in. I don’t give myself any time to hesitate. As soon as I hear the voice in my head telling me how cold it’s going to be, I know I have to walk in.

It pops us out of the story we’re constantly telling ourselves. If you stop talking to yourself for even ten minutes, if you stop obsessing over your own story, you’ll realize we are really far up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and life is pretty good. [6]

All of society does this to some extent. People chasing thrills in action sports or flow states or orgasms—any of these states people strive for are people trying to get out of their own heads. They’re trying to get away from the voice in their heads—the overdeveloped sense of self.

Ninety-five percent of what my brain runs off and tries to do, I don’t need to tackle in that exact moment. If the brain is like a muscle, I’ll be better off resting it, being at peace. When a particular problem arises, I’ll immerse myself in it.

The ability to singularly focus is related to the ability to lose yourself and be present, happy, and (ironically) more effective. [4]

Another thing: spirituality, religion, Buddhism, or anything you follow will teach you over time you are more than just your mind. You are more than just your habits. You are more than just your preferences. You’re a level of awareness. You’re a body. Modern humans, we don’t live enough in our bodies. We don’t live enough in our awareness. We live too much in this internal monologue in our heads. All of which is just programmed into you by society and by the environment when you were younger.

The greatest superpower is the ability to change yourself.

Choosing to build yourself

When we’re older, we’re a collection of thousands of habits constantly running subconsciously. We have a little bit of extra brainpower in our neocortex for solving new problems. You become your habits. This came to light for me when my trainer gave me a routine to do every single day. I had never worked out every single day before. It’s a light workout. It’s not tough on your body, but I did this workout every single day. I realized the incredible, astonishing transformation it had on me both physically and mentally.

When you really want to change, you just change. But most of us don’t really want to change—we don’t want to go through the pain just yet. At least recognize it, be aware of it, and give yourself a smaller change you can actually carry out. [6]

Related to the skill of reading are the skills of mathematics and persuasion. Both skills help you to navigate through the real world. Having the skill of persuasion is important because if you can influence your fellow human beings, you can get a lot done. I think persuasion is an actual skill. So you can learn it, and it’s not that hard to do so. Mathematics helps with all the complex and difficult things in life. If you want to make money, if you want to do science, if you want to understand game theory or politics or economics or investments or computers, all of these things have mathematics at the core. It’s a foundational language of nature.

Choosing to free yourself

My old definition was “freedom to.” Freedom to do anything I want. Freedom to do whatever I feel like, whenever I feel like. Now, the freedom I’m looking for is internal freedom. It’s “freedom from.” Freedom from reaction. Freedom from feeling angry. Freedom from being sad. Freedom from being forced to do things. I’m looking for “freedom from,” internally and externally, whereas before I was looking for “freedom to.” [4]

Anyone who has known me for a long time knows my defining characteristic is a combination of being very impatient and willful. I don’t like to wait. I hate wasting time. I’m very famous for being rude at parties, events, dinners, where the moment I figure out it’s a waste of my time, I leave immediately.

This doesn’t mean you can’t relax. As long as you’re doing what you want, it’s not a waste of your time. But if you’re not spending your time doing what you want, and you’re not earning, and you’re not learning—what the heck are you doing?

Observe when you’re angry—anger is a loss of control over the situation. Anger is a contract you make with yourself to be in physical and mental and emotional turmoil until reality changes. [1]

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.

Live by your values

Another one is I only believe in peer relationships. I don’t believe in hierarchical relationships. I don’t want to be above anybody, and I don’t want to be below anybody. If I can’t treat someone like a peer and if they can’t treat me like peer, I just don’t want to interact with them.

Highlight(yellow) - Live by Your Values > Location 1943

“Anger is a hot coal you hold in your hand while waiting to throw it at somebody.”

How do you define wisdom? Understanding the long-term consequences of your actions.

Naval’s Recommended Reading

The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World by David Deutsch
Skin in the Game by Nassim Taleb
I’ve also been reading Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track by Feynman and rereading Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, a biography about him. [8]
The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age by James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg This is the best book I’ve read since Sapiens (far less mainstream, though).
The Book of Life by Jiddu Krishnamurti
The Book of Secrets: 112 Meditations to Discover the Mystery Within by Osho
Striking Thoughts: Bruce Lee’s Wisdom for Daily Living by Bruce Lee

Life Formulas I (2008) These are notes to myself. Your frame of reference, and therefore your calculations, may vary. These are not definitions—these are algorithms for success. Contributions are welcome. Happiness = Health + Wealth + Good Relationships Health = Exercise + Diet + Sleep Exercise = High Intensity Resistance Training + Sports + Rest Diet = Natural Foods + Intermittent Fasting + Plants Sleep = No alarms + 8–9 hours + Circadian rhythms Wealth = Income + Wealth * (Return on Investment) Income = Accountability + Leverage + Specific Knowledge Accountability = Personal Branding + Personal Platform + Taking Risk? Leverage = Capital + People + Intellectual Property Specific Knowledge = Knowing how to do something society cannot yet easily train other people to do Return on Investment = “Buy-and-Hold” + Valuation + Margin of Safety [72]

Highlights

Almost all of the people I look up to and try to steal from today, regardless of their profession, have built sharing into their routine. These people aren’t schmoozing at cocktail parties; they’re too busy for that. They’re cranking away in their studios, their laboratories, or their cubicles, but instead of maintaining absolute secrecy and hoarding their work, they’re open about what they’re working on, and they’re consistently posting bits and pieces of their work, their ideas, and what they’re learning online. (Location 24)
By generously sharing their ideas and their knowledge, they often gain an audience that they can then leverage when they need it—for fellowship, feedback, or patronage. (Location 28)
imagine something simpler and just as satisfying: spending the majority of your time, energy, and attention practicing a craft, learning a trade, or running a business, while also allowing for the possibility that your work might attract a group of people who share your interests. (Location 38)
Under this model, great ideas are often birthed by a group of creative individuals—artists, curators, thinkers, theorists, and other tastemakers—who make up an “ecology of talent.” If (Location 52)
Scenius doesn’t take away from the achievements of those great individuals; it just acknowledges that good work isn’t created in a vacuum, and that creativity is always, in some sense, a collaboration, the result of a mind connected to other minds. (Location 55)
Online, everyone—the artist and the curator, the master and the apprentice, the expert and the amateur—has the ability to contribute something. (Location 67)
today it is the amateur—the enthusiast who pursues her work in the spirit of love (in French, the word means “lover”), regardless of the potential for fame, money, or career—who often has the advantage over the professional. (Location 71)
“In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities,” said Zen monk Shunryu Suzuki. “In the expert’s mind, there are few.” (Location 74)
Amateurs might lack formal training, but they’re all lifelong learners, and they make a point of learning in the open, so that others can learn from their failures and successes. (Location 80)
The best way to get started on the path to sharing your work is to think about what you want to learn, and make a commitment to learning it in front of others. (Location 96)
It sounds a little extreme, but in this day and age, if your work isn’t online, it doesn’t exist. We all have the opportunity to use our voices, to have our say, but so many of us are wasting it. If you want people to know about what you do and the things you care about, you have to share. (Location 117)
It’s for this reason that I read the obituaries every morning. Obituaries are like near-death experiences for cowards. Reading them is a way for me to think about death while also keeping it at arm’s length. (Location 139)
But human beings are interested in other human beings and what other human beings do. “People really do want to see how the sausage gets made.” That’s how designers Dan Provost and Tom Gerhardt put it in their book on entrepreneurship, It Will Be Exhilarating. “By putting things out there, consistently, you can form a relationship with your customers. It allows them to see the person behind the products.” (Location 171)
Become a documentarian of what you do. Start a work journal: Write your thoughts down in a notebook, or speak them into an audio recorder. Keep a scrapbook. Take a lot of photographs of your work at different stages in your process. Shoot video of you working. This isn’t about making art, it’s about simply keeping track of what’s going on around you. Take advantage of all the cheap, easy tools at your disposal—these days, most of us carry a fully functional multimedia studio around in our smartphones. (Location 196)
Building a substantial body of work takes a long time—a lifetime, really—but thankfully, you don’t need that time all in one big chunk. So forget about decades, forget about years, and forget about months. Focus on days. (Location 207)
The form of what you share doesn’t matter. Your daily dispatch can be anything you want—a blog post, an email, a tweet, a YouTube video, or some other little bit of media. There’s no one-size-fits-all plan for everybody. (Location 220)
“Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that remind people you exist. Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what people discover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time.” Sloan says the magic formula is to maintain your flow while working on your stock in the background. (Location 268)
Don’t think of your website as a self-promotion machine, think of it as a self-invention machine. Online, you can become the person you really want to be. Fill your website with your work and your ideas and the stuff you care about. Over the years, you will be tempted to abandon it for the newest, shiniest social network. Don’t give in. Don’t let it fall into neglect. Think about it in the long term. Stick with it, maintain it, and let it change with you over time. (Location 295)
Where do you get your inspiration? What sorts of things do you fill your head with? What do you read? Do you subscribe to anything? What sites do you visit on the Internet? What music do you listen to? What movies do you see? Do you look at art? What do you collect? What’s inside your scrapbook? What do you pin to the corkboard above your desk? What do you stick on your refrigerator? Who’s done work that you admire? Who do you steal ideas from? Do you have any heroes? Who do you follow online? Who are the practitioners you look up to in your field? Your influences are all worth sharing because they clue people in to who you are and what you do—sometimes even more than your own work. (Location 328)
“In my opinion, the most ordinary things, the most common and familiar, if we could see them in their true light, would turn out to be the grandest miracles . . . and the most marvelous examples.” (Location 345)
When you find things you genuinely enjoy, don’t let anyone else make you feel bad about it. Don’t feel guilty about the pleasure you take in the things you enjoy. Celebrate them. (Location 352)
Art forgery is a strange phenomenon. “You might think that the pleasure you get from a painting depends on its color and its shape and its pattern,” says psychology professor Paul Bloom. “And if that’s right, it shouldn’t matter whether it’s an original or a forgery.” But our brains don’t work that way. “When shown an object, or given a food, or shown a face, people’s assessment of it—how much they like it, how valuable it is—is deeply affected by what you tell them about it.” (Location 387)
Most story structures can be traced back to myths and fairy tales. Emma Coats, a former storyboard artist at Pixar, outlined the basic structure of a fairy tale as a kind of Mad Lib that you can fill in with your own elements: “Once upon a time, there was _. Every day, _. One day, _. Because of that, _. Because of that, _. Until finally, _.” Pick your favorite story and try to fill in the blanks. It’s striking how often it works. (Location 418)
Every client presentation, every personal essay, every cover letter, every fund-raising request—they’re all pitches. They’re stories with the endings chopped off. A good pitch is set up in three acts: The first act is the past, the second act is the present, and the third act is the future. The first act is where you’ve been—what you want, how you came to want it, and what you’ve done so far to get it. The second act is where you are now in your work and how you’ve worked hard and used up most of your resources. The third act is where you’re going, and how exactly the person you’re pitching can help you get there. Like a Choose Your Own Adventure book, this story shape effectively turns your listener into the hero who gets to decide how it ends. Whether you’re telling a finished or unfinished story, always keep your audience in mind. (Location 431)
All the same principles apply when you start writing your bio. Bios are not the place to practice your creativity. We all like to think we’re more complex than a two-sentence explanation, but a two-sentence explanation is usually what the world wants from us. Keep it short and sweet. (Location 463)
Think about what you can share from your process that would inform the people you’re trying to reach. Have you learned a craft? What are your techniques? Are you skilled at using certain tools and materials? What kind of knowledge comes along with your job? (Location 497)
The minute you learn something, turn around and teach it to others. Share your reading list. Point to helpful reference materials. Create some tutorials and post them online. Use pictures, words, and video. Take people step-by-step through part of your process. As blogger Kathy Sierra says, “Make people better at something they want to be better at.” (Location 499)
If you want fans, you have to be a fan first. If you want to be accepted by a community, you have to first be a good citizen of that community. If you’re only pointing to your own stuff online, you’re doing it wrong. You have to be a connector. (Location 534)
“Have you tried making yourself a more interesting person?” This seems like a really mean thing to say, unless you think of the word interesting the way writer Lawrence Weschler does: For him, to be “interest-ing” is to be curious and attentive, and to practice “the continual projection of interest.” To put it more simply: If you want to be interesting, you have to be interested. (Location 545)
Make stuff you love and talk about stuff you love and you’ll attract people who love that kind of stuff. It’s that simple. (Location 553)
Brancusi practiced what I call The Vampire Test. It’s a simple way to know who you should let in and out of your life. If, after hanging out with someone you feel worn out and depleted, that person is a vampire. If, after hanging out with someone you still feel full of energy, that person is not a vampire. Of course, The Vampire Test works on many things in our lives, not just people—you can apply it to jobs, hobbies, places, etc. (Location 565)
As you put yourself and your work out there, you will run into your fellow knuckleballers. These are your real peers—the people who share your obsessions, the people who share a similar mission to your own, the people with whom you share a mutual respect. There will only be a handful or so of them, but they’re so, so important. Do what you can to nurture your relationships with these people. Sing their praises to the universe. Invite them to collaborate. Show them work before you show anybody else. Call them on the phone and share your secrets. Keep them as close as you can. (Location 582)
Meeting people online is awesome, but turning them into IRL friends is even better. (Location 603)
Relax and breathe. The trouble with imaginative people is that we’re good at picturing the worst that could happen to us. Fear is often just the imagination taking a wrong turn. (Location 612)
(Consider practicing meditation—it works for me.) Strengthen (Location 615)
Strengthen your neck. The way to be able to take a punch is to practice getting hit a lot. Put out a lot of work. (Location 616)
Roll with the punches. Keep moving. Every piece of criticism is an opportunity for new work. You can’t control what sort of criticism you receive, but you can control how you react to it. (Location 618)
Protect your vulnerable areas. If you have work that is too sensitive or too close to you to be exposed to criticism, keep it hidden. (Location 621)
Keep your balance. You have to remember that your work is something you do, not who you are. (Location 624)
Do you have a troll problem? Use the block button on social media sites. Delete nasty comments. My wife is fond of saying, “If someone took a dump in your living room, you wouldn’t let it sit there, would you?” Nasty comments are the same—they should be scooped up and thrown in the trash. (Location 642)
When an audience starts gathering for the work that you’re freely putting into the world, you might eventually want to take the leap of turning them into patrons. The easiest way to do this is to simply ask for donations: Put a little virtual tip jar or a donate now button on your website. These links do well with a little bit of human copy, such as “Like this? Buy me a coffee.” (Location 667)
Don’t be afraid to charge for your work, but put a price on it that you think is fair. (Location 686)
know people who run multimillion-dollar businesses off of their mailing lists. The model is very simple: They give away great stuff on their sites, they collect emails, and then when they have something remarkable to share or sell, they send an email. You’d be amazed at how well the model works. (Location 693)
Be ambitious. Keep yourself busy. Think bigger. Expand your audience. Don’t hobble yourself in the name of “keeping it real,” or “not selling out.” Try new things. If an opportunity comes along that will allow you to do more of the kind of work you want to do, say Yes. (Location 713)
The people who get what they’re after are very often the ones who just stick around long enough. (Location 738)
Singer/songwriter Joni Mitchell says that whatever she feels is the weak link in her last project gives her inspiration for the next. Add (Location 763)
Add all this together and you get a way of working I call chain-smoking. You avoid stalling out in your career by never losing momentum. Here’s how you do it: Instead of taking a break in between projects, waiting for feedback, and worrying about what’s next, use the end of one project to light up the next one. Just do the work that’s in front of you, and when it’s finished, ask yourself what you missed, what you could’ve done better, or what you couldn’t get to, and jump right into the next project. (Location 765)
while taking a sabbatical. The (Location 773)
Thankfully, we can all take practical sabbaticals—daily, weekly, or monthly breaks where we walk away from our work completely. (Location 784)
“Anyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn’t learning enough,” writes author Alain de Botton. (Location 799)