# The Almanack of Naval Ravikant ###### tags: `thread` The Almanack of Naval Ravikant is a collection and summary of Naval's Twitter and Blog messages from the past few years, and I'll excerpt some of the best ones. ### Wealth ≠ money Seek wealth, not money or status. Wealth is having assets that generate income after sleep. Money is how we mobilize our time and wealth. Identity is where you are in the social system. You cannot become wealthy by renting your time; you need to own assets, a part of a business, to gain financial freedom. To gain wealth, you can provide something of value to society that they don't know how to get. And it has to be supplied on a large scale. ### Leverage and compound interest Play the compound interest game. Whether it's wealth, relationships or knowledge, all the great rewards you get in life come from compound interest. The main business levers are capital, manpower, and products with very low replication costs (code and media). Code and media are the levers that work without permission. It is the leverage behind the new rich. You can create software and media that will still work for you while you sleep. ### Learn Special Knowledge Special knowledge is such a strange combination that comes from your DNA, your unique upbringing, and your response to that knowledge. It's almost like these are integrated into your personality and identity. You can keep training it. Special knowledge is only truly discovered by pursuing your talents, curiosity, and passions. Not by going to school for the hottest job; not by getting into what investors' call a hot field. The most important skill for creating wealth is to become a lifelong learner. You must know how to learn anything you want to learn. The old model of making money was to go to college for four years, get your degree, and then work at your job for thirty years. But in this day and age, you have to master a new major in nine months that will be obsolete in four years. But in those three valuable years, you can gain a great deal of wealth. ### Find work that feels like play Starting a business for me is like playing a game. I started a business just because the product and the thing itself was fun. I'm always "working". People think I'm working, but I'm actually playing. So no one can compete with me because I'm playing, 16 hours a day. If someone wants to compete with me, for them they have to work and then they lose because their job is not to play, they have to spend 16 hours a day, 7 days a week, on their job. ### Love to read Reading is not a competition The better the book, the more slowly you have to understand and absorb it. As long as I have a book in my hand, I don't feel like wasting time. --Charlie. Munger Learn logic and math (and English), you can easily read any book once you have mastered them. Read the original books (textbooks). If you're interested in evolution, read Charles Robert Munger. Robert Darwin. Darwin's book. Instead, start with Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene. Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, for starters. Read Darwin first, then read Dawkins. Everyone's brain works differently. Some people like to go take notes. In fact, I take notes on Twitter. I keep reading until I get some new "ah-ha" understanding, and Twitter forces me to condense that into a few short sentences (because of the 140 character maximum limit). I try to write it down into short statements. Then, my point would be challenged by random people who would cite various counter-examples and slam me. Then I'd think, "Why am I doing this :)? I'll start reading a book from the first page, but I flip through it very quickly. If I'm not interested, I'll skim quickly. If I'm not hooked on the book in the first chapter, I'll stop reading or skip the first few chapters.