#5 A conversation with Naval Ravikant

Throw out the idea of work. If you get too attached to the idea that you have to work to make yourself happier, you'll end up beating yourself up. It's very easy for self-improvement to degenerate into self-conflict and self-conflict into self-misery.

Build your own garden; tend your own lawn; clean your own mind. Attend to your own household and make sure it's a paragon before you go out and try to fix the world.

I challenge this notion of 'work.' It's not work. You're not going to get anywhere on these kinds of matters unless you genuinely want it, enjoy it, and you do it because it's your passion. If it's your passion, it's not work—it's not going to feel like work for an instant to you.

The truth is that no one is going to remember me on any time scale that matters, and I don't much care for their opinions now, and I won't care at all after I'm gone. The only opinion of me that I care for is my own, and the only time frame is now.

In a romantic relationship. I know it's popular to say you have to work on your relationship. I disagree. I say find the relationship where you naturally being you make the other person happy and the other person that should be your person makes you happy

The moment I don't enjoy it, I won't do it. There's no podcast you could put me on, there's no TV show you could offer me, there's no book you could say I'd be on the cover of... If I don't feel like doing it, and I don't enjoy the process, I won't do it.

Work is industrial, work is miserable, and work is no way to live a life, especially if you're a first-world citizen with options.

You have to be very careful because sometimes the voice talking in your head that you think is you is actually social programming. Guilt is society's voice speaking in your head.

Even the average middle-class person today. Let's better than a king might have just a few hundred years ago with all the machines in the technology and the and the medicines

At some level, for something to hurt or affect you, you have to let it, and if you're letting it, that means there's a part of you that believes it.

To me, wisdom is understanding the long-term consequences of your actions.

Your only power in life is to inspire other people, and the only way you can inspire them is by living the most genuine and authentic life to yourself possible.

Is it effective to be critical of yourself all the time to the point where you feel miserable? That's not effective. It's effective to the point where it gets you to eat right, work out, and work on your business; it's not effective to the point where it's keeping you unhappy, anxious, and in terror all the time.

The only thing you can do is to do your best work, and the way you do your best work is not by doing it for anybody else; you do it for yourself.

Wisdom means thinking about the long-term consequences of your actions. So, if you're always thinking on a 30-year time horizon, you'll usually end up with the right answer.

Most of us are carrying very obsolete self-images that no longer correspond to the actual environment we're in.

The surest way to not leave a legacy is to care about it—just like the surest way to not create art is to try to create art.

Give love, but never expect it.

If you're not enjoying it, you're not going to do it that much, and you're not going to be the best in the world. These days, the world rewards people for being the best at something—no matter what it is.