44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature

TLDR

Is Success Worth It?

• It depends on what you define as success. If the end goal is happiness, then why not cut to the chase and just go straight for it?

• People need to avoid becoming a suffering addict. Using suffering as a proxy for progress as opposed to the outcome of the suffering. I was in pain doing this work. I have attached well-being and satisfaction to pain, not to what the pain gets me on the other side of it.
• The emotions are optional, not necessary.
• Naval recommend someone who can do the job at least peacefully but maybe happily is going to be more effective than someone who has unnecessary emotional turmoil.
• The outcome might be the same but the entire experience of getting there is different.
• Whether you're happy or unhappy at the end, it tends not to last.
  • Life is a cycle of you wanting something. → Either you get it, → a while after you want another thing → If don't get it, you fell unhappy → A while after you want another thing → Over and over again

Ways To Shortcut Our Desires

• You could focus and decide that I don't want most things, Naval thinks we have a lot of unnecessary desires that we just pick up everywhere; we have opinions on everything, judgement on everything. Knowing that those are the source of unhappiness will make you be choosy about your desires and frankly, if you want to be successful, you have to be choosy about your desires, you have to focus. You can't be great at everything, you're just going to waste your energy and waste your time if you're trying to be great at everything.

Is Changing Our Opinions Hypocritical?

• All learning is error correction, every knowledge creation system works through correcting errors, making guesses, and correcting errors. Therefore, if you're learning, you're going to be wrong most of the time, and you'll be updating your priors.
• You would only want the respect of the very few people that you respect, trying to demand respect from the masses is a fool's errand.

Why Pride Is The Most Expensive Trait

• Pride is the enemy of learning. Pride could prevent you from admitting you're wrong. Pride can make you think you already have the answer to something, so you won't want to publicly correct yourself.
• The great artist always have this ability to start over; even the great entrepreneurs they're just always willing to start over.
• Creating anything great requires 0 to 1, which means you go back to 0, and that's really painful and hard to do.

Identifying Our Happiness

• A lot of happiness is just a choice, in the sense that you just identify yourself as actually going to be a person that's going to be happy. I'm going to figure it out. You just figure out along the way that you are not going to lose your other predilictions, ambition, other desires for success.
• A lot of people have this fear that if I'm happy, then I won't want to be successful. No, you will just do things that are more aligned with the happy version of you and be successful at those things, and believe me, you're not going to look back at the unhappy version and say, "I wish I was him" or "that guy has more success". That's the path of trying to be successful so you'll be happy, you're getting it backwards.
• Everyone's wasting their time on it. Don't do something you don't want to do. Why are you wasting time? There's so little time on this earth.
• Inspiration is perishable; act on it immediately. When you're inspired to do something, do that thing.
• All the stuff that sticks to you is you learned it when you wanted to, when you genuinely had the desire.
• Procrastination is because you don't want to do that thing right now, you want to do something else, so go do that something else.

The Key To Being Your Authentic Self

• Find what feels like play to you but looks like work to others, so it looks like work to them, but to you, it feels like play, not work. Therefore, you're going to outcompete them because you're doing it effortlessly, you are doing it for fun, they're doing it for work, some byproduct, to you it's art, beauty, joy, flow, fulfilling.
• 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.
• Summarize how to be successful in life in two words → Productive yourself.
  • figure out what it is that you naturally do that the world might want that you could scale up and turn into a project, and it'll eventually be effortless to you.
• The biggest mistake in a world with so many choices is premature commitment. You might have just completely missed and ended up in the wrong profession, wrong place, wrong people for 30 years of your life, grinding away. The best time to figure that out is before, but the second best time is now, so just change it.
• If you can't decide, the answer is NO, and most things you should just be saying no to.
• If you won't ask somebody else to do it and then you get that request yourself, you can just dismiss it, you don't have to respond; you don't even let it enter your brain. You have to be able to delete emails and text messages without flinching if you want to scale.
• Scaling your time is very important, every interruption would take you out of flow, so the only way you can remain in flow is either you get very good at ignoring these things by default or closing yourself like a hermit, or you just become emotionally capable of not registering these as something that causes turbulence inside of you.

Objectively Viewing Our Own Mind

• If you can observe your own thoughts and view them a little objectively, then you can start being a little more choosy, a little more critical, and you can realize that there're no problems in the real world other than things that pain on your body. Everything else has to become a problem in your mind first, you have to view it, interpret it and narrative that it's a problem before it becomes a problem, and then you realize that a lot of your emotional energy is spent reacting to things that your mind is automatically saying it's our problems, and you don't need those problems.
• if you want to be successful, define success very concretely and try to focus on just one overarching problem and then go solve that problem.
• You have much more mental energy to focus on the actual problems you want to solve if you don't start consciously, unconsciously reactively picking up problems everywhere, so before anything can be a problem that takes up your emotional energy you have to accept it as a problem, you can be choosy about your problems.
• A rational person should cultivate difference to things that are out of their control or a rational person could find peace by cultivating indifference to things that are out of their control.
• "Your family is broken and you try to fix the world" describe people who care about lots of issues that is out of their control but they haven't even fix their own problem yet.
• Naval's way of defining credibility: I'm not going to take you seriously if you can't fix your own life.

Intelligence

• The only true test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life, and there are two parts to that:
  1. getting what you want: you know how to get it.
  2. wanting the right things: knowing what to want in the first place, and not wanting the wrong things.
     1. Wrong things:
        1. wanting something you can't get.
        2. wanting something you don't want.

How Can We Avoid Cynicism And Pessimism Within Ourselves?

• You want to be an optimist, you want to be skeptical about specific things, every specific opportunity is probably a fail but you want to be optimistic in the general, in general like something in here is going to work.

What is happiness?

• Naval's definition of happiness is being ok with where you are. no wanting things that are different than the way they are, not having the sense that anything is missing in this moment.
• being aware of what it is that you actually want at this point in time, and when you want something then you will act on it with maximal capability and that's the time to act on it.
• If you are doing it because other people tell you you should do it, or society tells you you should do it, or you feel slightly guilty about it, these are half-hearted efforts, and half-hearted efforts don't get you there.

Learning How To Deal With Anxiety

• A lot of anxiety is piled up because we move through life too quickly, not observing our own reactions to things. We don't resolve them, so this goes counter to not reflecting too much on things.
• In each moment, the thing it's the only things that matters. What's happening in front of you is literally has all the meaning in the world so what matters is just being present for the thing. If you're doing something you want to do and you're fully there for it, there's not waste of time. if you don't want to do it and your mind is running away from it and you're reacting against it and you are wishing you were somewhere else and thinking out some other thing then that's time being wasted.
• The true waste of time is a time that you're not present for, when you're not there for it, not doing the thing you want to do to the best of your capability such that you're immersed in it. If you're not immersed in it, then you're wasting your time.

Optimising Our Quality Of Life

• The best and easiest way to improve your quality of life is to observe your own mind and thoughts and be observant of yourself more objectively, then, you'll realize your own loops and patterns.
• You're going to find a lot of fulfillment out of life by just doing what you want to do and genuinely exploring what it is that you want rather than doing what other people expect you to do, or what society wants you to do, or what you might just think should be done by default.

Relationship

• True answer of love / why you want to be with a person: I just love being with this person, I just trust them, I enjoy being around them, I love how capable he is, I love how kind she is, I love her spirit, etc.
• The more materially and concretely definable the reasons are you're together the worse they are.

Why We Can't Change Other People

• When somebody does something praiseworthy don't forget to praise them, and it has to be genuine, it can't be a fake thing because eventually people will see through that, they want authenticity.
• Don't forget to praise people when they do something praiseworthy, and you'll get more of that behavior.

The 3 things/decision-making really matter in the early life

1. Who you're with?
2. What you're doing?
3. Where you live?

• The secret to a happy relationship is two happy people. If you want to be happy, be with a happy person. Don't think you're going to be with someone who's unhappy and then make them happy down the road. Or, if you're okay with them being unhappy but there're other things you like about them that's fine.

• If you take yourself too seriously, then you're going to get trapped and circumscribe yourself again into a limited set of behaviors and outcomes that keep you from being free, spontaneous, and happy.
• Realizing that the advice you need to hear right now is something you almost always learned a long time ago.
• People ask questions like what advice do you wish that you would give yourself 10 years ago, and almost invariably the advice that you would give yourself 10 years ago is still the advice that you need to hear today.
• Do the same things, but do them without all the emotional turbulence.
• On physical things, discipline is important. On mental things, understanding is more important cause once you see the truth of something, you cannot unsee it.

The Best And Worst Places To Spend Wealth

• A good use of money is to take risks and build things and do things that other people can't do, align it with your own unique talents so you can keep delivering to the world.
• Work is just a set of things you have to do that you don't want to do, so if you want to do it, it's not work.

Philosophical Beliefs

• If you have to memorize something, it's because you don't understand it. And if you understand something, you don't have to memorize it.

What Does The Future Of The Culture Wars Look Like?

• The modern flavor is that the individual is getting more powerful because they're becoming more leverage. Someone like Elon Musk can have the leverage of tens of thousands of brilliant engineers and producers working for him, he have factories of robots manufacturing things, he can have hundreds of billions of dollars of capital behind him and he can project himself through media to hundreds of millions of people, and those are more power than any individual could have had historically. In the status game, there are essentially more losers, there are more invisible people who are getting nothing out of life and have no leverage, relatively speaking. Objectively speaking, they might be better off since they have phones, TVs, etc. However, we are relative creatures.
• You're probably better off only caring about things that are local or things that you can affect. If you really care about something that's in the news, then by all means care about it but make a difference go do something about it, and make sure it's your overwhelming desire and you don't have five other desires at the same time, also just realize the consequences of it, you're going to be unhappy until that thing gets fixed and that thing will often be out of your control.
• Desire is a contract to be unhappy until you get what you want, but for the most part, that's something that is in your life.

Is There An Advantage To Starting As A Loser?

Time

• Time itself doesn't even mean that much because a lot of time could be wasted. After all, you are not present for it. You're not paying attention, so the real currency of life is attention; it's what you choose to pay attention to and what you do about it.

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• The more resources you have, the more you can take care of, and the more of the tribe you can take care of. When you have no resources, you're struggling to take care of yourself, and at that point, it's good to be selfish cuz you can't save somebody else if you can't even save yourself, and you become the best version of yourself. </content>