Three ideas from Naval Ravikant
I’ve just finished reading the Almanack of Naval Ravikant. For those of you not in tech, Naval is a successful tech founder and investor, famous for founding Angel List and investing early in Uber, Twitter, and Notion. He credits his success with reading for 1-2 hours every day and thinks fairly deeply about what is worth doing in life.
There is a ton of wisdom in the Almanack (I found myself highlighting full pages), although interestingly, there are also some contradictions. I’ve picked three ideas to share that I thought were most relevant to raising children.
Optimism is a competitive advantage
“Be optimistic, be positive. It’s important. Optimists actually do better in the long run.” — Naval Ravikant
This idea resonated with me. Being an optimist is about being inclined to believe in good outcomes. Most people are not ‘optimists’ or ‘pessimists’; most people are optimistic about some things and pessimistic about others — each of us sits somewhere on a scale. One of the reasons optimism is so beneficial is that optimists tend to believe that they have the agency to influence their outcomes.
What we want for our children is for them to sit at the more optimistic end of the spectrum, especially about:
The future
What they can create
What they can learn
Human nature
Being positive about other people and their successes
Probably the most effective way to cultivate this in our children is to 1) model optimism and 2) create good outcomes together by figuring things out and problem-solving.
Be very intentional about desire
“Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want. I don’t think most of us realise 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 recognise it as the axis of my suffering.”
“Our lives are a blink of a firefly in the night. You’re just barely here. You have to make the most of every minute, which doesn’t mean you chase some stupid desire for your entire life. What it means is every second you have on this planet is very precious, and it’s your responsibility to make sure you’re happy and interpreting everything in the best possible way.” — Naval Ravikant
There is a thread throughout the Almanack about desire and how much our desires determine both our level of happiness and how we spend our time. The idea can be summarised as:
We are unhappy to the extent that there is a gap between what we want and our current state
We spend most of our time and energy chasing or working on the things we want
All time has an opportunity cost
We only get a very short amount of time on the planet, so we should be thoughtful about what we want
Some desires aren’t good because they don’t leave us happy or satisfied or point our energy in a useful direction. A big bucket of these are what Naval calls ‘status games’: wanting to be at a certain level of wealth, prestige, intelligence or whatever. We never reach happiness or satisfaction playing status games because there is always another level to get to. Hence, we spend our time chasing and being unhappy.
“Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.” — Naval Ravikant
Other desires can make us happy and satisfied, such as wanting to be healthy, build something useful, solve an interesting problem or develop authentic relationships with good people.
For our children, we can 1) spend time with them examining their desires and our desires and 2) cultivate desires that will direct their energy in exciting ways. For the second, that doesn’t mean deciding what they want, of course. They need to want things for themselves. It means encouraging their desires that will be satisfying for them and moving with their own current of curiosity.
“Whats important for children is understanding the opportunity cost of time. This doesn’t mean don’t play games and have fun — in fact, there should definitely be time for that. What it does mean, is being active and thoughtful about what endeavors and people to invest in. Are they truly interesting and valuable?” — Naval Ravikant
On Education
I often wonder how best to prepare my child for a future I can’t predict. Naval provides some potential guidance to navigate this: Educate a child on the foundations (maths, physics, logic, psychology, ethics) and enable them to learn anything they need to in 6-9 months. He talks about this in the context of getting rich, but it likely applies to success in almost any field today, given the speed at which innovation happens.
“The most important skill for getting rich is becoming a perpetual learner. You have to know how to learn anything you want to learn. The old model of making money is going to school for four years, getting your degree, and working as a professional for thirty years. But things change fast now. Now, you have to come up to speed on a new profession within nine months, and it’s obsolete four years later. But within those three productive years, you can get very wealthy.”
“I think learning should be about learning the basics in all the fields and learning them really well over and over. Life is mostly about applying the basics and only doing the advanced work in the things you truly love, and where you understand the basics inside out. That’s not how our system is built.”
“It’s much more important today to be able to become an expert in a brand-new field in nine to twelve months than to have studied the “right” thing a long time ago. You really care about having studied the foundations, so you’re not scared of any book. If you go to the library and there’s a book you cannot understand, you have to dig down and say, “What is the foundation required for me to learn this?” Foundations are super important.” — Naval Ravikant
Typical schools don’t achieve this. First, they don’t encourage self-directed learning, which means when individuals leave university, many stop learning independently (apart from on-the-job learning) because they haven’t built the habit and skills of self-directed learning. In addition, schools expect everyone to learn at the same pace. This means if you miss some of the building blocks of mathematics, for example, you are left behind to memorise the way to do things instead of fully understanding the foundations. I spent many years as a maths and science tutor and learned first-hand that kids could go from getting a D to an A pretty quickly if you figured out which building blocks they were missing.
At the same time, Naval recognises that individuals who go to very good schools have very different outcomes from those who don’t, which is likely partly due to the education and partly to the signalling of the credentials and the alumni network. If you do go to college, he suggests learning things you can’t learn on your own (like Chemistry and Physics) instead of subjects like English and History.
You can read an unpublished chapter of the Almanack on Education here if want to read further.. And if this piques your interest in different schooling models, this X thread has an interesting list of alternative schools / education resources, and this post has some good ways to support your child’s education at home if they are in traditional schools.