Picking Nuggets

Imagine your best friend spending tens of hours every week in learning from remarkable entrepreneurs and thinkers (such as Jeff Bezos, Nassim Taleb and Naval Ravikant…) and calling you every Friday night (after dinner) to tell you his favorite nugget.

While it's hard to have a friend like that, it's super easy to subscribe to The Little Almanack—my free weekly newsletter in which (some Fridays) I send you my top insight (selected from tens of hours of listening and reading from these world-class individuals).

Sign up here and let me be your “nuggets friend” :) - www.littlealmanack.com/

1 week ago | [YT] | 151

Picking Nuggets

🟠 Naval Ravikant on the Power of Thinking Big:

"You’ve got one life on this planet. Why not try to build something big? This is the beauty of Elon Musk, and why I think he inspires so many people, it’s just because he takes on really, really big audacious tasks. And he provides an example for people to think big.

And it takes a lot of work to build even small things. I don’t think the corner grocery store owner is working any less hard than Elon Musk, or pouring any less sweat and toil into it. Maybe even more.

But for whatever reason, education, circumstance, they didn’t get the chance to think as big, so the outcome is not as big. So, it’s just better to think big. Obviously, rationally, within your means, stay optimistic."


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If you enjoyed this nugget, you can find many more on my weekly newsletter The Little Almanack - www.littlealmanack.com/

2 weeks ago | [YT] | 426

Picking Nuggets

"Having spent time with some of the richest, most powerful, most admired people in the world, as well as some of the poorest, most disadvantaged people in the most obscure corners of the globe, I can assure you that, beyond a basic level, there is no correlation between happiness levels and conventional markers of success. A carpenter who derives his deepest satisfaction from working with wood can easily have a life as good or better than the president of the United States."

- Ray Dalio

3 weeks ago | [YT] | 339

Picking Nuggets

🟠 From the book How To Stop Worrying And Start Living:

“I ended up in an Army dispensary. An Army doctor gave me some advice which has completely changed my life. After giving me a thorough physical examination, he informed me that my troubles were mental.

‘Ted’, he said, ‘I want you to think of your life as an hourglass. You know there are thousands of grains of sand in the top of the hourglass; and they all pass slowly and evenly through the narrow neck in the middle. Nothing you or I could do would make more than one grain of sand pass through this narrow neck without impairing the hourglass. You and I and everyone else are like this hourglass. When we start in the morning, there are hundreds of tasks which we feel that we must accomplish that day, but if we do not take them one at a time and let them pass through the day slowly and evenly, as do the grains of sand passing through the narrow neck of the hourglass, then we are bound to break our own physical or mental structure.

“I have practised that philosophy ever since that memorable day that an Army doctor gave it to me. ‘One grain of sand at a time. … One task at a time.’

1 month ago | [YT] | 193

Picking Nuggets

"Every day is a new life to a wise man." - Dale Carnegie

"Begin at once to live, and count each separate day as a separate life" - Seneca

1 month ago | [YT] | 301

Picking Nuggets

New is overvalued relative to great. For example, when choosing which movie to watch or what book to read, are you drawn to proven classics or the newest big thing? In my opinion, it is smarter to choose the great over the new.

- Ray Dalio

1 month ago | [YT] | 169

Picking Nuggets

Health, love, and your mission, in that order. Nothing else matters.

- ‪@NavalR‬

1 month ago | [YT] | 257

Picking Nuggets

The only real revolution

2 months ago | [YT] | 251

Picking Nuggets

Escape Competition Through Authenticity...

🟠 Naval Ravikant:

The more you do things that are natural to you, the less competition you have.

You escape competition through authenticity — by being your own self.

If I had to summarize how to be successful in life in two words, I would just say Productize Yourself.

That's it.

Just figure out what it is that you naturally do that the world might want, that you can scale up and turn into a product.

And it will eventually be effortless for you… Yes, there's always work required, but it won't even feel like work to you. It'll feel like play to you. And modern society gives us that opportunity! If you were born on a farm 2000 years ago, your choices are very limited, right? You're gonna do stuff on that farm. Now, you can literally wake up and you can move to a different city, you can switch careers, you can switch jobs, you can change the people that you're with. You can change so many things about who you are, and who you're with, and what you're doing… That there is infinite opportunity out there for you, literally infinite. And so, it's much better to treat this like a search function:

- To find the people who need you the most,

- To find the work that needs you the most,

- To find the place you're best suited to be at.

And it's worthwhile to spend time in that exploration before diving into exploitation.

The biggest mistake in a world with so many choices is premature commitment. If you prematurely commit to being a lawyer or a doctor and now you've got like, you know, five years invested into that, you might have just completely missed… You might just end up in the wrong profession, the wrong place with wrong people for 30 years of your life grinding away.

And yes, the best time to figure that out was before, but the second best time is now. So just change it.

(Source: Naval Ravikant podcast episode with Chris Williamson)

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🌠 This nugget was sent on my newsletter The Little Almanack. If you want to get more nuggets like this in your inbox every Friday, sign up here - www.littlealmanack.com/

2 months ago | [YT] | 219

Picking Nuggets

The search for truth and the search for love are actually the same search.

It is the search for, as Jacob Bronowski said, “unity within variety.”

- ‪@NavalR‬

2 months ago | [YT] | 133