Happiness: A Choice, Not a Chance PDF

PART II: II: HAPPINESS The three big ones in life are wealth, health, and happiness. We pursue them in that order, but their importance is reverse. LEARNING HAPPINESS Don’t take yourself so seriously. You’re just a monkey with a plan. HAPPINESS IS LEARNED Ten years ago, if you would have as...

PART II: II: HAPPINESS The three big ones in life are wealth, health, and happiness. We pursue them in that order, but their importance is reverse. LEARNING HAPPINESS Don’t take yourself so seriously. You’re just a monkey with a plan. HAPPINESS IS LEARNED Ten years ago, if you would have asked me how happy I was, I would have dismissed the question. I didn’t want to talk about it. On a scale of 1–10, I would have said 2/10 or 3/10. Maybe 4/10 on my best days. But I did not value being happy. Today, I am a 9/10. And yes, having money helps, but it’s actually a very small piece of it. Most of it comes from learning over the years my own happiness is the most important thing to me, and I’ve cultivated it with a lot of techniques. Maybe happiness is not something you inherit or even choose, but a highly personal skill that can be learned, like tness or nutrition. Happiness is a very evolving thing, I think, like all the great questions. When you’re a little kid, you go to your mom and ask, “What happens when we die? Is there a Santa Claus? Is there a God? Should I be happy? Who should I marry?” Those kinds of things. There are no glib answers because no answers apply to everybody. These kinds of questions ultimately do have answers, but they have personal answers. The answer that works for me is going to be nonsense to you, and vice versa. Whatever happiness means to me, it means something di erent to you. I think it’s very important to explore what these de nitions are. For some people I know, it’s a ow state. For some people, it’s satisfaction. For some people, it’s a feeling of contentment. My de nition keeps evolving. The answer I would have given you a year ago will be di erent than what I tell you now. Today, I believe happiness is really a default state. Happiness is there when you remove the sense of something missing in your life. We are highly judgmental survival-and-replication machines. We constantly walk around thinking, “I need this,” or “I need that,” trapped in the web of desires. Happiness is the state when nothing is missing. When nothing is missing, your mind shuts down and stops running into the past or future to regret something or to plan something. In that absence, for a moment, you have internal silence. When you have internal silence, then you are content, and you are happy. Feel free to disagree. Again, it’s di erent for everybody. People mistakenly believe happiness is just about positive thoughts and positive actions. The more I’ve read, the more I’ve learned, and the more I’ve experienced (because I verify this for myself), every positive thought essentially holds within it a negative thought. It is a contrast to something negative. The Tao Te Ching says this more articulately than I ever could, but it’s all duality and polarity. If I say I’m happy, that means I was sad at some point. If I say he’s attractive, then somebody else is unattractive. Every positive thought even has a seed of a negative thought within it and vice versa, which is why a lot of greatness in life comes out of su ering. You have to view the negative before you can aspire to and appreciate the positive. To me, happiness is not about positive thoughts. It’s not about negative thoughts. It’s about the absence of desire, especially the absence of desire for external things. The fewer desires I can have, the more I can accept the current state of things, the less my mind is moving, because the mind really exists in motion toward the future or the past. The more present I am, the happier and more content I will be. If I latch onto a feeling, if I say, “Oh, I’m happy now,” and I want to stay happy, then I’m going to drop out of that happiness. Now, suddenly, the mind is moving. It’s trying to attach to something. It’s trying to create a permanent situation out of a temporary situation. Happiness to me is mainly not su ering, not desiring, not thinking too much about the future or the past, really embracing the present moment and the reality of what is, and the way it is. If you ever want to have peace in your life, you have to move beyond good and evil. Nature has no concept of happiness or unhappiness. Nature follows unbroken mathematical laws and a chain of cause and e ect from the Big Bang to now. Everything is perfect exactly the way it is. It is only in our particular minds we are unhappy or not happy, and things are perfect or imperfect because of what we desire. The world just re ects your own feelings back at you. Reality is neutral. Reality has no judgments. To a tree, there is no concept of right or wrong, good or bad. You’re born, you have a whole set of sensory experiences and stimulations (lights, colors, and sounds), and then you die. How you choose to interpret them is up to you—you have that choice. This is what I mean when I say happiness is a choice. If you believe it’s a choice, you can start working on it. There are no external forces a ecting your emotions—as much as it may feel that way. I’ve also come to believe in the complete and utter insigni cance of the self, and I think that helps a lot. For example, if you thought you were the most important thing in the Universe, then you would have to bend the entire Universe to your will. If you’re the most important thing in the Universe, then how could it not conform to your desires. If it doesn’t conform to your desires, something is wrong. However, if you view yourself as a bacteria or an amoeba—or if you view all of your works as writing on water or building castles in the sand, then you have no expectation for how life should “actually” be. Life is just the way it is. When you accept that, you have no cause to be happy or unhappy. Those things almost don’t apply. Happiness is what’s there when you remove the sense that something is missing in your life. What you’re left with in that neutral state is not neutrality. I think people believe neutrality would be a very bland existence. No, this is the existence little children live. If you look at little children, on balance, they’re generally pretty happy because they are really immersed in the environment and the moment, without any thought of how it should be given their personal preferences and desires. I think the neutral state is actually a perfection state. One can be very happy as long as one isn’t too caught up in their own head. Our lives are a blink of a re y 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. We think of ourselves as xed and the world as malleable, but it’s really we who are malleable and the world is largely xed. Can practicing meditation help you accept reality? Yeah. But it’s amazing how little it helps. [laughs] You can be a long-time meditator, but if someone says the wrong thing in the wrong way, you go back to your ego-driven self. It’s almost like you’re lifting one-pound weights, but then somebody drops a huge barbell with a stack of plates on your head. It’s absolutely better than doing nothing. But when the actual moment of mental or emotional su ering arrives, it’s still never easy. Real happiness only comes as a side-e ect of peace. Most of it is going to come from acceptance, not from changing your external environment. A rational person can nd peace by cultivating indi erence to things outside of their control. I have lowered my identity. I have lowered the chattering of my mind. I don’t care about things that don’t really matter. I don’t get involved in politics. I don’t hang around unhappy people. I really value my time on this earth. I read philosophy. I meditate. I hang around with happy people. And it works. You can very slowly but steadily and methodically improve your happiness baseline, just like you can improve your tness. HAPPINESS IS A CHOICE Happiness, love, and passion…aren’t things you nd—they’re choices you make. Happiness is a choice you make and a skill you develop. The mind is just as malleable as the body. We spend so much time and e ort trying to change the external world, other people, and our own bodies—all while accepting ourselves the way we were programmed in our youths. We accept the voice in our head as the source of all truth. But all of it is malleable, and every day is new. Memory and identity are burdens from the past preventing us from living freely in the present. HAPPINESS REQUIRES PRESENCE At any given time, when you’re walking down the streets, a very small percentage of your brain is focused on the present. The rest is planning the future or regretting the past. This keeps you from having an incredible experience. It’s keeping you from seeing the beauty in everything and for being grateful for where you are. You can literally destroy your happiness if you spend all of your time living in delusions of the future. We crave experiences that will make us be present, but the cravings themselves take us from the present moment. I just don’t believe in anything from my past. Anything. No memories. No regrets. No people. No trips. Nothing. A lot of our unhappiness comes from comparing things from the past to the present. Anticipation for our vices pulls us into the future. Eliminating vices makes it easier to be present. There’s a great de nition I read: “Enlightenment is the space between your thoughts.” It means enlightenment isn’t something you achieve after thirty years sitting on a mountaintop. It’s something you can achieve moment to moment, and you can be enlightened to a certain percent every single day. What if this life is the paradise we were promised, and we’re just squandering it? HAPPINESS REQUIRES PEACE Are happiness and purpose interconnected? Happiness is such an overloaded word, I’m not even sure what it means. For me these days, happiness is more about peace than it is about joy. I don’t think peace and purpose go together. If it’s your internal purpose, the thing you most want to do, then sure, you’ll be happy doing it. But an externally in icted purpose, like “society wants me to do X,” “I am the rst son of the rst son of this, so I should do Y,” or “I have this debt or burden I took on,” I don’t think it will make you happy. I think a lot of us have this low-level pervasive feeling of anxiety. If you pay attention to your mind, sometimes you’re just running around doing your thing and you’re not feeling great, and you notice your mind is chattering and chattering about something. Maybe you can’t sit still…There’s this “nexting” thing where you’re sitting in one spot thinking about where you should be next. It’s always the next thing, then the next thing, the next thing after that, then the next thing after that creating this pervasive anxiety. It’s most obvious if you ever just sit down and try and do nothing, nothing. I mean nothing, I mean not read a book, I mean not listen to music, I mean literally just sit down and do nothing. You can’t do it, because there’s anxiety always trying to make you get up and go, get up and go, get up and go. I think it’s important just being aware the anxiety is making you unhappy. The anxiety is just a series of running thoughts. How I combat anxiety: I don’t try and ght it, I just notice I’m anxious because of all these thoughts. I try to gure out, “Would I rather be having this thought right now, or would I rather have my peace?” Because as long as I have my thoughts, I can’t have my peace. You’ll notice when I say happiness, I mean peace. When a lot of people say happiness, they mean joy or bliss, but I’ll take peace. A happy person isn’t someone who’s happy all the time. It’s someone who e ortlessly interprets events in such a way that they don’t lose their innate peace. EVERY DESIRE IS A CHOSEN UNHAPPINESS I think the most common mistake for humanity is believing you’re going to be made happy because of some external circumstance. I know that’s not original. That’s not new. It’s fundamental Buddhist wisdom—I’m not taking credit for it. I think I really just recognize it on a fundamental level, including in myself. We bought a new car. Now, I’m waiting for the new car to arrive. Of course, every night, I’m on the forums reading about the car. Why? It’s a silly object. It’s a silly car. It’s not going to change my life much or at all. I know the instant the car arrives I won’t care about it anymore. The thing is, I’m addicted to the desiring. I’m addicted to the idea of this external thing bringing me some kind of happiness and joy, and this is completely delusional. Looking outside yourself for anything is the fundamental delusion. Not to say you shouldn’t do things on the outside. You absolutely should. You’re a living creature. There are things you do. You locally reverse entropy. That’s why you’re here. You’re meant to do something. You’re not just meant to lie there in the sand and meditate all day long. You should self-actualize. You should do what you are meant to do. The idea you’re going to change something in the outside world, and that is going to bring you the peace, everlasting joy, and happiness you deserve, is a fundamental delusion we all su er from, including me. The mistake over and over and over is to say, “Oh, I’ll be happy when I get that thing,” whatever it is. That is the fundamental mistake we all make, 24/7, all day long. The fundamental delusion: There is something out there that will make me happy and ful lled forever. Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want. I don’t think most of us realize 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 recognize it as the axis of my su ering. I realize the area where I’ve chosen to be unhappy. Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want. One thing I’ve learned recently: it’s way more important to perfect your desires than to try to do something you don’t 100 percent desire. When you’re young and healthy, you can do more. By doing more, you’re actually taking on more and more desires. You don’t realize this is slowly destroying your happiness. I nd younger people are less happy but more healthy. Older people are more happy but less healthy. When you’re young, you have time. You have health, but you have no money. When you’re middle-aged, you have money and you have health, but you have no time. When you’re old, you have money and you have time, but you have no health. So the trifecta is trying to get all three at once. By the time people realize they have enough money, they’ve lost their time and their health. SUCCESS DOES NOT EARN HAPPINESS Happiness is being satis ed with what you have. Success comes from dissatisfaction. Choose. Conf ucius says you have two lives, and the second one begins when you realize you only have one. When and how did your second life begin? That’s a very deep question. Most people who are past a certain age have had this feeling or phenomenon; they’ve gone through life a certain way and then gotten to a certain stage and had to make some pretty big changes. I’m de nitely also in that boat. I struggled for a lot of my life to have certain material and social successes. When I achieved those material and social successes (or at least was beyond a point where they didn’t matter as much), I realized the people around me who had achieved similar successes and were on their way to achieving more didn’t seem all that happy. In my case, there was de nitely hedonic adaptation: I’d very quickly get used to anything. This led me to the conclusion, which seems trite, that happiness is internal. That conclusion set me on a path of working more on my internal self and realizing all real success is internal and has very little to do with external circumstances. One has to do the external thing anyway. We’re biologically hard-wired. It’s glib to say, “You can just turn it o.” Your own life experience will bring you back to the internal path. The problem with getting good at a game, especially one with big rewards, is you continue playing it long after you should have outgrown it. Survival and replication drive put us on the work treadmill. Hedonic adaptation keeps us there. The trick is knowing when to jump o and play instead. Who do you think of as successf ul? Most people think of someone as successful when they win a game, whatever game they play themselves. If you’re an athlete, you’re going to think of a top athlete. If you’re in business, you might think Elon Musk. A few years ago, I would have said Steve Jobs, because he was part of the driving force creating something that changed lives for all of humanity. I think Marc Andreessen is successful, not because of his recent incarnation as a venture capitalist, but because of the incredible work he did with Netscape. Satoshi Nakamoto is successful in that he created Bitcoin, which is this incredible technological creation that will have repercussions for decades to come. Of course, Elon Musk, because he changed everyone’s viewpoint on what is possible with modern technology and entrepreneurship. I consider those creators and commercializers successful. To me, the real winners are the ones who step out of the game entirely, who don’t even play the game, who rise above it. Those are the people who have such internal mental and self-control and self-awareness, they need nothing from anybody else. There are a couple of these characters I know in my life. Jerzy Gregorek—I would consider him successful because he doesn’t need anything from anybody. He’s at peace, he’s healthy, and whether he makes more money or less money compared to the next person has no e ect on his mental state. Historically, I would say the legendary Buddha or Krishnamurti, whose stu I like reading, they are successful in the sense that they step out of the game entirely. Winning or losing does not matter to them. There’s a line from Blaise Pascal I read. Basically, it says: “All of man’s troubles arise because he cannot sit in a room quietly by himself.” If you could just sit for thirty minutes and be happy, you are successful. That is a very powerful place to be, but very few of us get there. I think of happiness as an emergent property of peace. If you’re peaceful inside and out, that will eventually result in happiness. But peace is a very hard thing to come by. The irony is the way most of us try to nd peace is through war. When you start a business, in a way, you’re going to war. When you struggle with your roommates as to who should clean the dishes, you’re going to war. You’re struggling so you can have some sense of security and peace later. In reality, peace is not a guarantee. It’s always owing. It’s always changing. You want to learn the core skill set of owing with life and accepting it in most cases. You can get almost anything you want out of life, as long as it’s one thing and you want it far more than anything else. In my own personal experience, the place I end up the most is wanting to be at peace. Peace is happiness at rest, and happiness is peace in motion. You can convert peace into happiness anytime you want. But peace is what you want most of the time. If you’re a peaceful person, anything you do will be a happy activity. Today, the way we think you get peace is by resolving all your external problems. But there are unlimited external problems. The only way to actually get peace on the inside is by giving up this idea of problems. ENVY IS THE ENEMY OF HAPPINESS I don’t think life is that hard. I think we make it hard. One of the things I’m trying to get rid of is the word “should.” Whenever the word “should” creeps up in your mind, it’s guilt or social programming. Doing something because you “should” basically means you don’t actually want to do it. It’s just making you miserable, so I’m trying to eliminate as many “shoulds” from my life as possible. The enemy of peace of mind is expectations drilled into you by society and other people. Socially, we’re told, “Go work out. Go look good.” That’s a multi-player competitive game. Other people can see if I’m doing a good job or not. We’re told, “Go make money. Go buy a big house.” Again, external multiplayer competitive game. Training yourself to be happy is completely internal. There is no external progress, no external validation. You’re competing against yourself—it is a single-player game. We’re like bees or ants. We are such social creatures, we’re externally programmed and driven. We don’t know how to play and win these single- player games anymore. We compete purely in multiplayer games. The reality is life is a single-player game. You’re born alone. You’re going to die alone. All of your interpretations are alone. All your memories are alone. You’re gone in three generations, and nobody cares. Before you showed up, nobody cared. It’s all single player. Perhaps one reason why yoga and meditation are hard to sustain is they have no extrinsic value. Purely single-player games. Bu ett has a great example when he asks if you want to be the world’s best lover and known as the worst, or the world’s worst lover and known as the best? [paraphrased] in reference to an inner or external scorecard. Exactly right. All the real scorecards are internal. Jealousy was a very hard emotion for me to overcome. When I was young, I had a lot of jealousy. By and by, I learned to get rid of it. It still crops up every now and then. It’s such a poisonous emotion because, at the end of the day, you’re no better o with jealousy. You’re unhappier, and the person you’re jealous of is still successful or good-looking or whatever they are. One day, I realized with all these people I was jealous of, I couldn’t just choose little aspects of their life. I couldn’t say I want his body, I want her money, I want his personality. You have to be that person. Do you want to actually be that person with all of their reactions, their desires, their family, their happiness level, their outlook on life, their self-image? If you’re not willing to do a wholesale, 24/7, 100 percent swap with who that person is, then there is no point in being jealous. Once I came to that realization, jealousy faded away because I don’t want to be anybody else. I’m perfectly happy being me. By the way, even that is under my control. To be happy being me. It’s just there are no social rewards for it. HAPPINESS IS BUILT BY HABITS My most surprising discovery in the last ve years is that peace and happiness are skills. These are not things you are born with. Yes, there is a genetic range. And a lot of it is conditioning from your environment, but you can un- condition and recondition yourself. You can increase your happiness over time, and it starts with believing you can do it. It’s a skill. Just like nutrition is a skill, dieting is a skill, working out is a skill, making money is a skill, meeting girls and guys is a skill, having good relationships is a skill, even love is a skill. It starts with realizing they’re skills you can learn. When you put your intention and focus on it, the world can become a better place. When working, surround yourself with people more successful than you. When playing, surround yourself with people happier than you. What type of skill is happiness? It’s all trial and error. You just see what works. You can try sitting meditation. Did that work for you? Was it Tantra meditation or was it Vipassana meditation? Was it a ten-day retreat or was twenty minutes enough? Okay. None of those worked. But what if I tried yoga? What if I kite-surfed? What if I go car racing? What about cooking? Does that make me Zen? You literally have to try all of these things until you nd something that works for you. When it comes to medicines for the mind, the placebo e ect is 100 percent e ective. When it comes to your mind, you want to be positively inclined, not incredulous in belief. If it is fully internal, you should have a positive mindset. For example, I was reading The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, which is a fantastic introduction to being present, for people who are not religious. He shows you the single-most important thing is to be present and hammers it home over and over again until you get it. He wrote about this body-energy exercise. You lie down and you feel the energy moving around your body. At that point, the old me would have put the book down and said, “Well, that’s BS.” But the new me said, “Well, if I believe it, maybe it’ll work.” I went into it with a positive mindset. I laid down and tried the meditation. You know what? It felt really good. How does someone build the skill of happiness? You can build good habits. Not drinking alcohol will keep your mood more stable. Not eating sugar will keep your mood more stable. Not going on Facebook, Snapchat, or Twitter will keep your mood more stable. Playing video games will make you happier in the short run—and I used to be an avid gamer—but in the long run, it could ruin your happiness. You’re being fed dopamine and having dopamine withdrawn from you in these little uncontrollable ways. Ca eine is another one where you trade long term for the short term. Essentially, you have to go through your life replacing your thoughtless bad habits with good ones, making a commitment to be a happier person. At the end of the day, you are a combination of your habits and the people who you spend the most time with. When we’re kids, we have very few habits. Over time, we learn the things we are not supposed to do. We become self-conscious. We start forming habits and routines. Many distinctions between people who get happier as they get older and people who don’t can be explained by what habits they have developed. Are they habits that will increase your long-term happiness rather than your short- term happiness? Are you surrounding yourself with people who are generally positive and upbeat people? Are those relationships low-maintenance? Do you admire and respect but not envy them? There’s the “ ve chimps theory” where you can predict a chimp’s behavior by the ve chimps it hangs out with the most. I think that applies to humans as well. Maybe it’s politically incorrect to say you should choose your friends very wisely. But you shouldn’t choose them haphazardly based on who you live next to or who you happen to work with. The people who are the most happy and optimistic choose the right ve chimps. The rst rule of handling con ict is: Don’t hang around people who constantly engage in con ict. I’m not interested in anything unsustainable or even hard to sustain, including di cult relationships. If you can’t see yourself working with someone for life, don’t work with them for a day. There’s a friend of mine, a Persian guy named Behzad. He just loves life, and he has no time for anybody who is not happy. If you ask Behzad what’s his secret? He’ll just look up and say, “Stop asking why and start saying wow.” The world is such an amazing place. As humans, we’re used to taking everything for granted. Like what you and I are doing right now. We’re sitting indoors, wearing clothes, well-fed, and communicating with each other through space and time. We should be two monkeys sitting in the jungle right now watching the sun going down, asking ourselves where we are going to sleep. When we get something, we assume the world owes it to us. If you’re present, you’ll realize how many gifts and how much abundance there is around us at all times. That’s all you really need to do. I’m here now, and I have all these incredible things at my disposal. The most important trick to being happy is to realize happiness is a skill you develop and a choice you make. You choose to be happy, and then you work at it. It’s just like building muscles. It’s just like losing weight. It’s just like succeeding at your job. It’s just like learning calculus. You decide it’s important to you. You prioritize it above everything else. You read everything on the topic. HAPPINESS HABITS I have a series of tricks I use to try and be happier in the moment. At rst, they were silly and di cult and required a lot of attention, but now some of them have become second nature. By doing them religiously, I’ve managed to increase my happiness level quite a bit. The obvious one is meditation—insight meditation. Working toward a speci c purpose on it, which is to try and understand how my mind works. Just being very aware in every moment. If I catch myself judging somebody, I can stop myself and say, “What’s the positive interpretation of this?” I used to get annoyed about things. Now I always look for the positive side of it. It used to take a rational e ort. It used to take a few seconds for me to come up with a positive. Now I can do it sub-second. I try to get more sunlight on my skin. I look up and smile. Every time you catch yourself desiring something, say, “Is it so important to me I’ll be unhappy unless this goes my way?” You’re going to nd with the vast majority of things it’s just not true. I think dropping ca eine made me happier. It makes me more of a stable person. I think working out every day made me happier. If you have peace of body, it’s easier to have peace of mind. The more you judge, the more you separate yourself. You’ll feel good for an instant, because you feel good about yourself, thinking you’re better than someone. Later, you’re going to feel lonely. Then, you see negativity everywhere. The world just re ects your own feelings back at you. Tell your friends you’re a happy person. Then, you’ll be forced to conform to it. You’ll have a consistency bias. You have to live up to it. Your friends will expect you to be a happy person. Recover time and happiness by minimizing your use of these three smartphone apps: phone, calendar, and alarm clock. The more secrets you have, the less happy you’re going to be. Caught in a funk? Use meditation, music, and exercise to reset your mood. Then choose a new path to commit emotional energy for rest of day. Hedonic adaptation is more powerful for man-made things (cars, houses, clothes, money) than for natural things (food, sex, exercise). No exceptions—all screen activities linked to less happiness, all non-screen activities linked to more happiness. A personal metric: how much of the day is spent doing things out of obligation rather than out of interest? It’s the news’ job to make you anxious and angry. But its underlying scienti c, economic, education, and con ict trends are positive. Stay optimistic. Politics, academia, and social status are all zero-sum games. Positive-sum games create positive people. Increase serotonin in the brain without drugs: Sunlight, exercise, positive thinking, and tryptophan. CHANGING HABITS: Pick one thing. Cultivate a desire. Visualize it. Plan a sustainable path. Identify needs, triggers, and substitutes. Tell your friends. Track meticulously. Self-discipline is a bridge to a new self-image. Bake in the new self-image. It’s who you are—now. First, you know it. Then, you understand it. Then, you can explain it. Then, you can feel it. Finally, you are it. FIND HAPPINESS IN ACCEPTANCE In any situation in life, you always have three choices: you can change it, you can accept it, or you can leave it. If you want to change it, then it is a desire. It will cause you su ering until you successfully change it. So don’t pick too many of those. Pick one big desire in your life at any given time to give yourself purpose and motivation. Why not two? You’ll be distracted. Even one is hard enough. Being peaceful comes from having your mind clear of thoughts. And a lot of clarity comes from being in the present moment. It’s very hard to be in the present moment if you’re thinking, “I need to do this. I want that. This has got to change.” You always have three options: you can change it, you can accept it, or you can leave it. What is not a good option is to sit around wishing you would change it but not changing it, wishing you could leave it but not leaving it and not accepting it. That struggle or aversion is responsible for most of our misery. The phrase I probably use the most to myself in my head is just one word: “accept.” What does acceptance look like to you? It’s to be okay whatever the outcome is. It’s to be balanced and centered. It’s to step back and to see the grander scheme of things. We don’t always get what we want, but sometimes what is happening is for the best. The sooner you can accept it as a reality, the sooner you can adapt to it. Achieving acceptance is very di cult. I have a couple of hacks I try, but I wouldn’t say they are totally successful. One hack is stepping back and looking at previous bits of su ering I’ve had in my life. I write them down. “Last time you broke up with somebody, last time you had a business failure, last time you had a health issue, what happened?” I can trace the growth and improvement that came from it years later. I have another hack I use for minor annoyances. When they happen, a part of me will instantly react negatively. But I’ve learned to mentally ask myself, “What is the positive of this situation?” “Okay, I’ll be late for a meeting. But what is the bene t to me? I get to relax and watch the birds for a moment. I’ll also spend less time in that boring meeting.” There’s almost always something positive. Even if you can’t come up with something positive, you can say, “Well, the Universe is going to teach me something now. Now I get to listen and learn.” To give you the simplest example: I was at an event and afterward, someone ooded my inbox with a whole bunch of photos they took. There was a tiny instant judgment saying, “Come on, couldn’t you have just selected a few of the best? Who sends a hundred photos?” But then immediately I asked myself, “What is the positive?” The positive is that I get to pick my ve favorite photos. I get to use my judgment. Over the last year, by practicing this hack enough, I’ve managed to go from taking a couple of seconds to think of a response, to now my brain doing it almost instantaneously. That’s a habit you can train yourself to do. How do you learn to accept things you can’t change? Fundamentally, it boils down to one big hack: embracing death. Death is the most important thing that is ever going to happen to you. When you look at your death and you acknowledge it, rather than running away from it, it’ll bring great meaning to your life. We spend so much of our life trying to avoid death. So much of what we struggle for can be classi ed as a quest for immortality. If you’re religious and believe there is an afterlife, then you’ll be taken care of. If you’re not religious, maybe you’ll have kids. If you’re an artist, a painter, or a businessman, you want to leave a legacy behind. Here’s a hot tip: There is no legacy. There’s nothing to leave. We’re all going to be gone. Our children will be gone. Our works will be dust. Our civilizations will be dust. Our planet will be dust. Our solar system will be dust. In the grand scheme of things, the Universe has been around for ten billion years. It’ll be around for another ten billion years. Your life is a re y blink in a night. You’re here for such a brief period of time. If you fully acknowledge the futility of what you’re doing, then I think it can bring great happiness and peace because you realize this is a game. But it’s a fun game. All that matters is you experience your reality as you go through life. Why not interpret it in the most positive possible way? Any moment where you’re not having a great time, when you’re not really happy, you’re not doing anyone any favors. It’s not like your unhappiness makes them better o somehow. All you’re doing is wasting this incredibly small and precious time you have on this Earth. Keeping death on the forefront and not denying it is very important. Whenever I get caught up in my ego battles, I just think of entire civilizations that have come and gone. For example, take the Sumerians. I’m sure they were important people and did great things, but go ahead and name me a single Sumerian. Tell me anything interesting or important Sumerians did that lasted. Nothing. So maybe ten thousand years from now or a hundred thousand years from now, people will say, “Oh yeah, Americans. I’ve heard of Americans.” You’re going to die one day, and none of this is going to matter. So enjoy yourself. Do something positive. Project some love. Make someone happy. Laugh a little bit. Appreciate the moment. And do your work. SAVING YOURSELF Doctors won’t make you healthy. Nutritionists won’t make you slim. Teachers won’t make you smart. Gurus won’t make you calm. Mentors won’t make you rich. Trainers won’t make you t. Ultimately, you have to take responsibility. Save yourself. CHOOSING TO BE YOURSELF A lot of what goes on today is what many of you are doing right now— beating yourself up and scribbling notes and saying, “I need to do this, and I need to do that, and I need to do…” No, you don’t need to do anything. All you should do is what you want to do. If you stop trying to gure out how to do things the way other people want you to do them, you get to listen to the little voice inside your head that wants to do things a certain way. Then, you get to be you. I never met my greatest mentor. I wanted so much to be like him. But his message was the opposite: Be yourself, with passionate intensity. No one in the world is going to beat you at being you. You’re never going to be as good at being me as I am. I’m never going to be as good at being you as you are. Certainly, listen and absorb, but don’t try to emulate. It’s a fool’s errand. Instead, each person is uniquely quali ed at something. They have some speci c knowledge, capability, and desire nobody else in the world does, purely from the combinatorics of human DNA and development. The combinatorics of human DNA and experience are staggering. You will never meet any two humans who are substitutable for each other. Your goal in life is to nd the people, business, project, or art that needs you the most. There is something out there just for you. What you don’t want to do is build checklists and decision frameworks built on what other people are doing. You’re never going to be them. You’ll never be good at being somebody else. To make an original contribution, you have to be irrationally obsessed with something. CHOOSING TO CARE FOR YOURSELF My number one priority in life, above my happiness, above my family, above my work, is my own health. It starts with my physical health. Second, it’s my mental health. Third, it’s my spiritual health. Then, it’s my family’s health. Then, it’s my family’s wellbeing. After that, I can go out and do whatever I need to do with the rest of the world. Nothing like a health problem to turn up the contrast dial for the rest of life. What about the modern world steers us away from the way humans are meant to live? There are many, many things. There are a number on the physical side. We have diets we are not evolved to eat. A correct diet should probably look closer to a paleo diet, mostly eating vegetables with a small amount of meat and berries. In terms of exercise, we’re probably meant to play instead of running on a treadmill. We’re probably evolved to use all of our ve senses equally as opposed to favoring the visual cortex. In modern society, almost all of our inputs and communication are visual. We’re not meant to walk in shoes. A lot of back and foot problems come from shoes. We’re not meant to have clothes keep us warm all of the time. We’re meant to have some cold exposure. It kickstarts your immune system. We’re not evolved to live in a perfectly sterile and clean environment. It leads to allergies and an untrained immune system. This is known as the hygiene hypothesis. We’re evolved to live in much smaller tribes and to have more family around us. I partially grew up in India, and in India, everybody is in your business. There’s a cousin, an aunt, an uncle who is in your face, which makes it hard to be depressed, because you are never alone. (I’m not referring to people with chemical depression. I’m talking more about the existential angst and malaise teenagers seem to go through.) But on the other hand, you have no privacy, so you can’t be free. There are trade-o s. We’re not meant to check our phone every ve minutes. The constant mood swings of getting a “like” then an angry comment makes us into anxious creatures. We evolved for scarcity but live in abundance. There’s a constant struggle to say no when your genes always want to say yes. Yes to sugar. Yes to staying in this relationship. Yes to alcohol. Yes to drugs. Yes, yes, yes. Our bodies don’t know how to say no. When everyone is sick, we no longer consider it a disease. DIET Outside of math, physics, and chemistry, there isn’t much “settled science.” We’re still arguing over what the optimal diet is. Do you have an opinion on the ketogenic diet? It seems really di cult to follow. It makes sense for the brain and the body to have a backup mechanism. For example, in the Ice Ages, humans evolved without many plants available. At the same time, we have been eating plants for thousands of years…I don’t think plants are bad for you, but something closer to the paleo diet is probably correct. I think the interplay between sugar and fat is really interesting. Fat is what makes you satiated. Fatty foods make you feel full. The easiest way to feel full is to go on a ketogenic diet, where you’re eating tons of bacon all the time, and you’re going to feel almost nauseous and not want to look at fat anymore. Sugar makes you hungry. Sugar signals to your body, “There’s this incredible food resource in the environment we’re not evolved for,” so you rush out to get sugar. The problem is the sugar e ect dominates the fat e ect. If you eat a fatty meal and you throw some sugar in, the sugar is going to deliver hunger and fat is going to deliver the calories and you’re just going to binge. That’s why all desserts are large combinations of fat and carbs together. In nature, it’s very rare to nd carbs and fat together. In nature, I nd carbs and fat together in coconuts, in mangoes, maybe in bananas, but it’s basically tropical fruits. The combination of sugar and fat together is really deadly. You’ve got to watch out for that in your diet. I’m not an expert, and the problem is diet and nutrition are like politics: everybody thinks they’re an expert. Their identity is wrapped up in it because what they’ve been eating or what they think they should be eating is obviously the correct answer. Everybody has a little religion—it’s just a really di cult topic to talk about. I will just say in general, any sensible diet avoids the combination of sugar and fat together. Dietary fat drives satiety. Dietary sugar drives hunger. The sugar e ect dominates. Control your appetite accordingly. Most t and healthy people focus much more on what they eat than how much. Quality control is easier than (and leads to) quantity control. Ironically, fasting (from a low-carb/paleo base) is easier than portion control. Once the body detects food, it overrides the brain. What I wonder about Wonder Bread is how it can stay soft at room temperature for months. If bacteria won’t eat it, should you? It has been ve thousand years, and we’re still arguing over whether meat is poisonous or plants are poisonous. Ditch the extremists and any food invented in the last few hundred years. When it comes to medicine and nutrition, subtract before you add. My trainer sends me photos of his meals, and it reminds me we are all avor addicts. World’s simplest diet: The more processed the food, the less one should consume. EXERCISE The harder the workout, the easier the day. What habit would you say most positively impacts your life? The daily morning workout. That has been a complete game-changer. It’s made me feel healthier, younger. It’s made me not go out late. It came from one simple thing, which is everybody says, “I don’t have time.” Basically, whenever you throw any so-called good habit at somebody, they’ll have an excuse for themselves. Usually the most common is “I don’t have time.” “I don’t have time” is just another way of saying “It’s not a priority.” What you really have to do is say whether it is a priority or not. If something is your number one priority, then you will do it. That’s just the way life works. If you’ve got a fuzzy basket of ten or fteen di erent priorities, you’re going to end up getting none of them. What I did was decide my number one priority in life, above my happiness, above my family, above my work, is my own health. It starts with my physical health. Because my physical health became my number one priority, then I could never say I don’t have time. In the morning, I work out, and however long it takes is how long it takes. I do not start my day until I’ve worked out. I don’t care if the world is imploding and melting down, it can wait another thirty minutes until I’m done working out. It’s pretty much every day. There are a few days where I’ve had to take a break because I’m traveling, or I’m injured or sick or something. I can count on one hand the number of breaks I take every year. One month of consistent yoga and I feel 10 years younger. To stay exible is to stay young. How you make a habit doesn’t matter. Do something every day. It almost doesn’t matter what you do. The people who are obsessing over whether to do weight training, tennis, Pilates, the high-intensity interval training method, “The Happy Body,” or whatever. They’re missing the point. The important thing is to do something every day. It doesn’t matter what it is. The best workout for you is one you’re excited enough to do every day. Walking meetings: Brain works better Exercise & sunlight Shorter, less pleasantries More dialogue, less monologue No slides End easily by walking back Like everything in life, if you are willing to make the short-term sacri ce, you’ll have the long-term bene t. My physical trainer (Jerzy Gregorek) is a really wise, brilliant guy. He always says, “Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life.” Basically, if you are making the hard choices right now in what to eat, you’re not eating all the junk food you want, and making the hard choice to work out. So, your life long-term will be easy. You won’t be sick. You won’t be unhealthy. The same is true of values. The same is true of saving up for a rainy day. The same is true of how you approach your relationships. If you make the easy choices right now, your overall life will be a lot harder. [ MEDITATION + MENTAL STRENGTH An emotion is our evolved biology predicting the future impact of a current event. In modern settings, it’s usually exaggerated or wrong. Why is meditation so powerf ul? Your breath is one of the few places where your autonomic nervous system meets your voluntary nervous system. It’s involuntary, but you can also control it. I think a lot of meditation practices put an emphasis on the breath because it is a gateway into your autonomic nervous system. There are many, many cases in the medical and spiritual literature of people controlling their bodies at levels that should be autonomous. Your mind is such a powerful thing. What’s so unusual about your forebrain sending signals to your hindbrain and your hindbrain routing resources to your entire body? You can do it just by breathing. Relaxed breathing tells your body you’re safe. Then, your forebrain doesn’t need as many resources as it normally does. Now, the extra energy can be sent to your hindbrain, and it can reroute those resources to the rest of your body. I’m not saying you can beat whatever illness you have just because you activated your hindbrain. But you’re devoting most of the energy normally required to care about the external environment to the immune system. I highly recommend listening to the Tim Ferriss’s podcast with Wim Hof. He is a walking miracle. Wim’s nickname is the Ice Man. He holds the world record for the longest time spent in an ice bath and swimming in freezing cold water. I was very inspired by him, not only because he’s capable of super- human physical feats, but because he does it while being incredibly kind and happy—which is not easy to accomplish. He advocates cold exposure, because he believes people are too separate from their natural environment. We’re constantly clothed, fed, and warm. Our bodies have lost touch with the cold. The cold is important because it can activate the immune system. So, he advocates taking long ice baths. Being from the Indian subcontinent, I’m strongly against the idea of ice baths. But Wim inspired me to give cold showers a try. And I did so by using the Wim Hof breathing method. It involves hyperventilating to get more oxygen into your blood, which raises your core temperature. Then, you can go into the shower. The rst few cold showers were hilarious because I’d slowly ease myself in, wincing the entire way. I started about four or ve months ago. Now, I turn the shower on full-blast, and then I walk right in. I don’t give myself any time to hesitate. As soon as I hear the voice in my head telling me how cold it’s going to be, I know I have to walk in. I learned a very important lesson from this: most of our su ering comes from avoidance. Most of the su ering from a cold shower is the tip-toeing your way in. Once you’re in, you’re in. It’s not su ering. It’s just cold. Your body saying it’s cold is di erent than your mind saying it’s cold. Acknowledge your body saying it’s cold. Look at it. Deal with it. Accept it, but don’t mentally su er over it. Taking a cold shower for two minutes isn’t going to kill you. Having a cold shower helps you re-learn that lesson every morning. Now hot showers are just one less thing I need out of life. Meditation is intermittent fasting for the mind. Too much sugar leads to a heavy body, and too many distractions lead to a heavy mind. Time spent undistracted and alone, in self-examination, journaling, meditation, resolves the unresolved and takes us from mentally fat to t. Do you have a current meditation practice? I think meditation is like dieting, where everyone is supposedly following a regimen. Everyone says they do it, but nobody actually does it. The real set of people who meditate on a regular basis, I’ve found, are pretty rare. I’ve identi ed and tried at least four di erent forms of meditation. The one I found works best for me is called Choiceless Awareness, or Nonjudgmental Awareness. As you’re going about your daily business (hopefully, there’s some nature) and you’re not talking to anybody else, you practice learning to accept the moment you’re in without making judgments. You don’t think, “Oh, there’s a homeless guy over there, better cross the street” or look at someone running by and say, “He’s out of shape, and I’m in better shape than him.” If I saw a guy with a bad hair day, I would at rst think “Haha, he has a bad hair day.” Well, why am I laughing at him to make me feel better about myself? And why am I trying to make me feel better about my own hair? Because I’m losing my hair, and I’m afraid it’s going to go away. What I nd is 90 percent of thoughts I have are fear-based. The other 10 percent may be desire-based. You don’t make any decisions. You don’t judge anything. You just accept everything. If I do that for ten or fteen minutes while walking around, I end up in a very peaceful, grateful state. Choiceless Awareness works well for me. You could also do transcendental meditation, which is where you’re using repetitive chanting to create a white noise in your head to bury your thoughts. Or, you can just very keenly and very alertly be aware of your thoughts as they happen. As you watch your thoughts, you realize how many of them are fear- based. The moment you recognize a fear, without even trying it goes away. After a while, your mind quiets. When your mind quiets, you stop taking everything around you for granted. You start to notice the details. You think, “Wow, I live in such a beautiful place. It’s so great that I have clothes, and I can go to Starbucks and get a co ee anytime. Look at these people—each one has a perfectly valid and complete life going on in their own heads.” It pops us out of the story we’re constantly telling ourselves. If you stop talking to yourself for even ten minutes, if you stop obsessing over your own story, you’ll realize we are really far up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and life is pretty good. Life-hack: When in bed, meditate. Either you will have a deep meditation or fall asleep. Victory either way. Another method I’ve learned is to just sit there and you close your eyes for at least one hour a day. You surrender to whatever happens—don’t make any e ort whatsoever. You make no e ort for something, and you make no e ort against anything. If there are thoughts running through your mind, you let the thoughts run. For your entire life, things have been happening to you. Some good, some bad, most of which you have processed and dissolved, but a few stuck with you. Over time, more and more stuck with you, and they almost became like these barnacles stuck to you. You lost your childhood sense of wonder and of being present and happy. You lost your inner happiness because you built up this personality of unresolved pain, errors, fears, and desires that glommed onto you like a bunch of barnacles. How do you get those barnacles o you? What happens in meditation is you’re sitting there and not resisting your mind. These things will start bubbling up. It’s like a giant inbox of unanswered emails, going back to your childhood. They will come out one by one, and you will be forced to deal with them. You will be forced to resolve them. Resolving them doesn’t take any work— you just observe them. Now you’re an adult with some distance, time, and space from previous events, and you can just resolve them. You can be much more objective about how you view them. Over time, you will resolve a lot of these deep-seated unresolved things you have in your mind. Once they’re resolved, there will come a day when you sit down to meditate, and you’ll hit a mental “inbox zero.” When you open your mental “email” and there are none, that is a pretty amazing feeling. It’s a state of joy and bliss and peace. Once you have it, you don’t want to give it up. If you can get a free hour of bliss every morning just by sitting and closing your eyes, that is worth its weight in gold. It will change your life. I recommend meditating one hour each morning because anything less is not enough time to really get deep into it. I would recommend if you really want to try meditation, try sixty days of one hour a day, rst thing in the morning. After about sixty days, you will be tired of listening to your own mind. You will have resolved a lot of issues, or you have heard them enough to see through those fears and issues. Meditation isn’t hard. All you have to do is sit there and do nothing. Just sit down. Close your eyes and say, “I’m just going to give myself a break for an hour. This is my hour o from life. This is the hour I’m not going to do anything. “If thoughts come, thoughts come. I’m not going to ght them. I’m not going to embrace them. I’m not going to think harder about them. I’m not going to reject them. I’m just going to sit here for an hour with my eyes closed, and I’m going to do nothing.” How hard is that? Why can you not do anything for an hour? What’s so hard about giving yourself an hour-long break? Was there a moment you realized you could control how you interpreted things? I think one problem people have is not recognizing they can control how they interpret and respond to a situation. I think everyone knows it’s possible. There’s a great Osho lecture, titled “The Attraction for Drugs Is Spiritual.” He talks about why do people do drugs (everything from alcohol to psychedelics to cannabis). They’re doing it to control their mental state. They’re doing it to control how they react. Some people drink because it helps them not care as much, or they’re potheads because they can zone out, or they do psychedelics to feel very present or connected to nature. The attraction of drugs is spiritual. All of society does this to some extent. People chasing thrills in action sports or ow states or orgasms—any of these states people strive for are people trying to get out of their own heads. They’re trying to get away from the voice in their heads—the overdeveloped sense of self. At the very least, I do not want my sense of self to continue to develop and strengthen as I get older. I want it to be weaker and more muted so I can be more in present everyday reality, accept nature and the world for what it is, and appreciate it very much as a child would. The rst thing to realize is you can observe your mental state. Meditation doesn’t mean you’re suddenly going to gain the superpower to control your internal state. The advantage of meditation is recognizing just how out of control your mind is. It is like a monkey inging feces, running around the room, making trouble, shouting, and breaking things. It’s completely uncontrollable. It’s an out-of-control madperson. You have to see this mad creature in operation before you feel a certain distaste toward it and start separating yourself from it. In that separation is liberation. You realize, “Oh, I don’t want to be that person. Why am I so out of control?” Awareness alone calms you down. Insight meditation lets you run your brain in debug mode until you realize you’re just a subroutine in a larger program. I try to keep an eye on my internal monologue. It doesn’t always work. In the computer programming sense, I try to run my brain in “debugging mode” as much as possible. When I’m talking to someone, or when I’m engaged in a group activity, it’s almost impossible because your brain has too many things to handle. If I’m by myself, like just this morning, I’m brushing my teeth and I start thinking forward to a podcast. I started going through this little fantasy where I imagined Shane asking me a bunch of questions and I was fantasy- answering them. Then, I caught myself. I put my brain in debug mode and just watched every little instruction go by. I said, “Why am I fantasy-future planning? Why can’t I just stand here and brush my teeth?” It’s the awareness my brain was running o in the future and planning some fantasy scenario out of ego. I was like, “Well, do I really care if I embarrass myself? Who cares? I’m going to die anyway. This is all going to go to zero, and I won’t remember anything, so this is pointless.” Then, I shut down, and I went back to brushing my teeth. I was noticing how good the toothbrush was and how good it felt. Then the next moment, I’m o to thinking something else. I have to look at my brain again and say, “Do I really need to solve this problem right now?” Ninety- ve percent of what my brain runs o and tries to do, I don’t need to tackle in that exact moment. If the brain is like a muscle, I’ll be better o resting it, being at peace. When a particular problem arises, I’ll immerse myself in it. Right now as we’re talking, I’d rather dedicate myself to being completely lost in the conversation and to being 100 percent focused on this as opposed to thinking about “Oh, when I brushed my teeth, did I do it the right way?” The ability to singularly focus is related to the ability to lose yourself and be present, happy, and (ironically) more e ective. It’s almost like you’re taking yourself out of a certain frame and you’re watching things from a di erent perspective even though you’re in your own mind. Buddhists talk about awareness versus the ego. They’re really talking about how you can think of your brain, your consciousness, as a multilayered mechanism. There’s a core-base, kernel-level OS running. Then, there are applications running on top. (I like to think of it as computer and geek speak.) I’m actually going back to my awareness level of OS, which is always calm, always peaceful, and generally happy and content. I’m trying to stay in awareness mode and not activate the monkey mind, which is always worried, frightened, and anxious. It serves incredible purpose, but I try not to activate the monkey mind until I need it. When I need it, I want to just focus on that. If I run it 24/7, I waste energy and the monkey mind becomes me. I am more than my monkey mind. Another thing: spirituality, religion, Buddhism, or anything you follow will teach you over time you are more than just your mind. You are more than just your habits. You are more than just your preferences. You’re a level of awareness. You’re a body. Modern humans, we don’t live enough in our bodies. We don’t live enough in our awareness. We live too much in this internal monologue in our heads. All of which is just programmed into you by society and by the environment when you were younger. You are basically a bunch of DNA that reacted to environmental e ects when you were younger. You recorded the good and bad experiences, and you use them to prejudge everything thrown against you. Then you’re using those experiences, constantly trying and predict and change the future. As you get older, the sum of preferences you’ve accumulated is very, very large. These habitual reactions end up as runaway freight trains controlling your mood. We should control our own moods. Why don’t we study how to control our moods? What a masterful thing it would be if you could say, “Right now I would like to be in the curious state,” and then you can genuinely get yourself into the curious state. Or say, “I want to be in a mourning state. I’m mourning a loved one, and I want to grieve for them. I really want to feel that. I don’t want to be distracted by a computer programming problem due tomorrow.” The mind itself is a muscle—it can be trained and conditioned. It has been haphazardly conditioned by society to be out of our control. If you look at your mind with awareness and intent (a 24/7 job you’re working at every moment) I think you can unpack your own mind, your emotions, thoughts, and reactions. Then you can start recon guring. You can start rewriting this program to what you want. Meditation is turning o society and listening to yourself. It only “works” when done for its own sake. Hiking is walking meditation. Journaling is writing meditation. Praying is gratitude meditation. Showering is accidental meditation. Sitting quietly is direct meditation. CHOOSING TO BUILD YOURSELF The greatest superpower is the ability to change yourself. What’s the biggest mistake you’ve made in your life and how did you recover? I’ve made a class of mistakes I would summarize the same way. The mistakes were obvious only in hindsight through one exercise, which is asking yourself: when you’re thirty, what advice would you give your twenty-year-old self? And when you’re forty, what advice would you give your thirty-year-old self? (Maybe if you’re younger, you can do it by every ve years.) Sit down and say, “Okay, 2007, what was I doing? How was I feeling? 2008, what was I doing? How was I feeling? 2009, what was I doing? How was I feeling?” Life is going to play out the way it’s going to play out. There will be some good and some bad. Most of it is actually just up to your interpretation. You’re born, you have a set of sensory experiences, and then you die. How you choose to interpret those experiences is up to you, and di erent people interpret them in di erent ways. Really, I wish I had done all of the same things, but with less emotion and less anger. The most celebrated example would be when I was younger, I started a company. This company did well, but I didn’t do well, so I sued some of the people involved. It was a good outcome for me in the end, and everything worked out okay, but there was a lot of angst and a lot of anger. Today, I wouldn’t have the angst and the anger. I would have just walked up to the people and said, “Look, this is what happened. This is what I’m going to do. This is how I’m going to do it. This is what’s fair. This is what’s not.” I would have realized the anger and emotions are a huge, completely unnecessary consequence. Now, I’m trying to learn from that and do the same things I think are the right things to do but without anger and with a very long-term point of view. If you take a very long-term point of view and take the emotion out of it, I wouldn’t consider those things mistakes anymore. Again, habits are everything—everything we are. We are trained in habits from when we are children, including potty training, when to cry and when not to, how to smile and when not to. These things become habits— behaviors we learn and integrate into ourselves. When we’re older, we’re a collection of thousands of habits constantly running subconsciously. We have a little bit of extra brainpower in our neocortex for solving new problems. You become your habits. This came to light for me when my trainer gave me a routine to do every single day. I had never worked out every single day before. It’s a light workout. It’s not tough on your body, but I did this workout every single day. I realized the incredible, astonishing transformation it had on me both physically and mentally. To have peace of mind, you have to have peace of body rst. This taught me the power of habits. I started realizing it’s all about habits. At any given time, I’m either trying to pick up a good habit or discard a previous bad habit. It takes time. If someone says, “I want to be t, I want to be healthy. Right now, I’m out of shape and I’m fat.” Well, nothing sustainable is going to work for you in three months. It’s going to be at least a ten-year journey. Every six months (depending on how fast you can do it), you’re going to break bad habits and pick up good habits. One of the things Krishnamurti talks about is being in an internal state of revolution. You should always be internally ready for a complete change. Whenever we say we’re going to try to do something or try to form a habit, we’re wimping out. We’re just saying to ourselves, “I’m going to buy myself some more time.” The reality is when our emotions want us to do something, we just do it. If you want to go approach a pretty girl, if you want to have a drink, if you really desire something, you just go do it. When you say, “I’m going to do this,” and “I’m going to be that,” you’re really putting it o. You’re giving yourself an out. At least if you’re self-aware, you can think, “‘I say I want to do this, but I don’t really because if I really wanted to do it, I would just do it.” Commit externally to enough people. For example, if you want to quit smoking, all you have to do is go to everybody you know and say, “I quit smoking. I did it. I give you my word.” That’s all you need to do. Go ahead, right? But most of us say we’re not quite ready. We know we don’t want to commit ourselves externally. It’s important to be honest with yourself and say, “Okay, I’m not ready to give up smoking. I like it too much, it is going to be too hard for me to give up.” Say instead, “I’ll set a more reasonable goal for myself; I’ll cut down to the following amount. I can commit to that externally. I’m going to work on that for three or six months. When I get there, I’ll take the next step, as opposed to beating myself up over it.” When you really want to change, you just change. But most of us don’t really want to change—we don’t want to go through the pain just yet. At least recognize it, be aware of it, and give yourself a smaller change you can actually carry out. Impatience with actions, patience with results. Anything you have to do, just get it done. Why wait? You’re not getting any younger. Your life is slipping away. You don’t want to spend it waiting in line. You don’t want to spend it traveling back and forth. You don’t want to spend it doing things you know ultimately aren’t part of your mission. When you do them, you want to do them as quickly as you can while doing them well with your full attention. But then, you just have to be patient with the results because you’re dealing with complex systems and many people. It takes a long time for markets to adopt products. It takes time for people to get comfortable working with each other. It takes time for great products to emerge as you polish away, polish away, polish away. Impatience with actions, patience with results. As Nivi said, inspiration is perishable. When you have inspiration, act on it right then and there. CHOOSING TO GROW YOURSELF I don’t believe in speci c goals. Scott Adams famously said, “Set up systems, not goals.” Use your judgment to gure out what kinds of environments you can thrive in, and then create an environment around you so you’re statistically likely to succeed. The current environment programs the brain, but the clever brain can choose its upcoming environment. I’m not going to be the most successful person on the planet, nor do I want to be. I just want to be the most successful version of myself while working the least hard possible. I want to live in a way that if my life played out 1,000 times, Naval is successful 999 times. He’s not a billionaire, but he does pretty well each time. He may not have nailed life in every regard, but he sets up systems so he’s failed in very few places. Remember I started as a poor kid in India, right? If I can make it, anybody can, in that sense. Obviously, I had all my limbs, my mental faculties, and I did have an education. There are some prerequisites you can’t get past. But if you’re reading this book, you probably have the requisite means at your disposal, which is a functioning body and a functioning mind. If there’s something you want to do later, do it now. There is no “later.” How do you personally learn about new subjects? Mostly, I just stay on the basics. Even when I learn physics or science, I stick to the basics. I read concepts for fun. I’m more likely to do something that has arithmetic in it than calculus. I won’t be a great physicist at this point. Maybe in the next lifetime or my kid will do it, but it’s too late for me. I have to stick to what I enjoy. Science is, to me, the study of truth. It is the only true discipline because it makes falsi able predictions. It actually changes the world. Applied science becomes technology, and technology is what separates us from the animals and allows us to have things like cell phones, houses, cars, heat, and electricity. Science, to me, is the study of truth and mathematics is the language of science and nature. I’m not religious, but I’m spiritual. To me, that is the most devotional thing that I could do, to study the laws of the Universe. The same kick that someone might get out of being in Mecca or Medina and bowing to the prophet, I get the same feeling of awe and small sense of self when I study science. For me, it’s unparalleled and I’d rather stay at the basics. This is the beauty of reading. Do you agree with the idea “If you read what everybody else is reading, you’re going to think what everyone else is thinking”? I think almost everything that people read these days is designed for social approval. I know people who have read one hundred regurgitated books on evolution and they’ve never read Darwin. Think of the number of macroeconomists out there. I think most of them have read tons of treatises in economics but haven’t read any Adam Smith. At some level, you’re doing it for social approval. You’re doing it to t in with the other monkeys. You’re tting in to get along with the herd. That’s not where the returns are in life. The returns in life are being out of the herd. Social approval is inside the herd. If you want social approval, de nitely go read what the herd is reading. It takes a level of contrarianism to say, “Nope. I’m just going to do my own thing. Regardless of the social outcome, I will learn anything I think is interesting.” Do you think there’s some loss aversion there? Because once you diverge, you’re not sure if you’re diverging toward a positive outcome or a negative outcome? Absolutely. I think that’s why the smartest and the most successful people I know started out as losers. If you view yourself as a loser, as someone who was cast out by society and has no role in normal society, then you will do your own thing and you’re much more likely to nd a winning path. It helps to start out by saying, “I’m never going to be popular. I’m never going to be accepted. I’m already a loser. I’m not going to get what all the other kids have. I’ve just got to be happy being me.” For self-improvement without self-discipline, update your self-image. Everyone’s motivated at something. It just depends on the thing. Even the people that we say are unmotivated are suddenly really motivated when they’re playing video games. I think motivation is relative, so you just have to nd the thing you’re into. Grind and sweat, toil and bleed, face the abyss. It’s all part of becoming an overnight success. If you had to pass down to your kids one or two principles, what would they be? Number one: read. Read everything you can. And not just the stu that society tells you is good or even books that I tell you to read. Just read for its own sake. Develop a love for it. Even if you have to read romance novels or paperbacks or comic books. There’s no such thing as junk. Just read it all. Eventually, you’ll guide yourself to the things that you should and want to be reading. Related to the skill of reading are the skills of mathematics and persuasion. Both skills help you to navigate through the real world. Having the skill of persuasion is important because if you can in uence your fellow human beings, you can get a lot done. I think persuasion is an actual skill. So you can learn it, and it’s not that hard to do so. Mathematics helps with all the complex and di cult things in life. If you want to make money, if you want to do science, if you want to understand game theory or politics or economics or investments or computers, all of these things have mathematics at the core. It’s a foundational language of nature. Nature speaks in mathematics. Mathematics is us reverse engineering the language of nature, and we have only scratched the surface. The good news is you don’t have to know a lot of math. You just have to know basic statistics, arithmetic, etc. You should know statistics and probability forwards and backwards and inside out. CHOOSING TO FREE YOURSELF The hardest thing is not doing what you want—it’s knowing what you want. Be aware there are no “adults.” Everyone makes it up as they go along. You have to nd your own path, picking, choosing, and discarding as you see t. Figure it out yourself, and do it. How have your values changed? When I was younger, I really, really valued freedom. Freedom was one of my core values. Ironically, it still is. It’s probably one of my top three values, but it’s now a di erent de nition of freedom. My old de nition was “freedom to.” Freedom to do anything I want. Freedom to do whatever I feel like, whenever I feel like. Now, the freedom I’m looking for is internal freedom. It’s “freedom from.” Freedom from reaction. Freedom from feeling angry. Freedom from being sad. Freedom from being forced to do things. I’m looking for “freedom from,” internally and externally, whereas before I was looking for “freedom to.” Advice to my younger self: “Be exactly who you are.” Holding back means staying in bad relationships and bad jobs for years instead of minutes. FREEDOM FROM EXPECTATIONS I don’t measure my e ectiveness at all. I don’t believe in self-measurement. I feel like this is a form of self-discipline, self-punishment, and self-con ict. If you hurt other people because they have expectations of you, that’s their problem. If they have an agreement with you, it’s your problem. But, if they have an expectation of you, that’s completely their problem. It has nothing to do with you. They’re going to have lots of expectations out of life. The sooner you can dash their expectations, the better. Courage isn’t charging into a machine gun nest. Courage is not caring what other people think. Anyone who has known me for a long time knows my de ning characteristic is a combination of being very impatient and willful. I don’t like to wait. I hate wasting time. I’m very famous for being rude at parties, events, dinners, where the moment I gure out it’s a waste of my time, I leave immediately. Value your time. It is all you have. It’s more important than your money. It’s more important than your friends. It is more important than anything. Your time is all you have. Do not waste your time. This doesn’t mean you can’t relax. As long as you’re doing what you want, it’s not a waste of your time. But if you’re not spending your time doing what you want, and you’re not earning, and you’re not learning—what the heck are you doing? Don’t spend your time making other people happy. Other people being happy is their problem. It’s not your problem. If you are happy, it makes other people happy. If you’re happy, other people will ask you how you became happy and they might learn from it, but you are not responsible for making other people happy. FREEDOM FROM ANGER What is anger? Anger is a way to signal as strongly as you can to the other party you’re capable of violence. Anger is a precursor to violence. Observe when you’re angry—anger is a loss of control over the situation. Anger is a contract you make with yourself to be in physical and mental and emotional turmoil until reality changes. Anger is its own punishment. An angry person trying to push your head below water is drowning at the same time. FREEDOM FROM EMPLOYMENT People who live far below their means enjoy a freedom that people busy upgrading their lifestyles can’t fathom. Once you’ve truly controlled your own fate, for better or for worse, you’ll never let anyone else tell you what to do. A taste of freedom can make you unemployable. FREEDOM FROM UNCONTROLLED THINKING A big habit I’m working on is trying to turn o my “monkey mind.” When we’re children, we’re pretty blank slates. We live very much in the moment. We essentially just react to our environment through our instincts. We live in what I would call the “real world.” Puberty is the onset of desire—the rst time you really, really want something and you start long-range planning. You start thinking a lot, building an identity and an ego to get what you want. If you walk down the street and there are a thousand people in the street, all thousand are talking to themselves in their head at any given point. They’re constantly judging everything they see. They’re playing back movies of things that happened to them yesterday. They’re living in fantasy worlds of what’s going to happen tomorrow. They’re just pulled out of base reality. That can be good when you do long-range planning. It can be good when you solve problems. It’s good for us as survival-and-replication machines. I think it’s actually very bad for your happiness. To me, the mind should be a servant and a tool, not a master. My monkey mind should not control and drive me 24/7. I want to break the habit of uncontrolled thinking, which is hard. A busy mind accelerates the passage of subjective time. There is no endpoint to self-awareness and self-discovery. It’s a lifelong process you hopefully keep getting better and better at. There is no one meaningful answer, and no one is going to fully solve it unless you’re one of these enlightened characters. Maybe some of us will get there, but I’m not likely to, given how involved I am in the rat race. The best case is I’m a rat who might be able to look up at the clouds once in a while. I think just being aware you’re a rat in a race is about as far as most of us are going to get. The modern struggle: Lone individuals summoning inhuman willpower, fasting, meditating, and exercising… Up against armies of scientists and statisticians weaponizing abundant food, screens, and medicine into junk food, clickbait news, in nite porn, endless games, and addictive drugs. PHILOSOPHY The real truths are heresies. They cannot be spoken. Only discovered, whispered, and perhaps read. THE MEANINGS OF LIFE A really unbounded, big question: what is the meaning and purpose of life? That’s a big question. Because it’s a big question, I’ll give you three answers. Answer 1:1 It’s personal. You have to nd your own meaning. Any piece of wisdom anybody else gives you, whether it’s Buddha or me, is going to sound like nonsense. Fundamentally, you have to nd it for yourself, so the important part is not the answer, it’s the question. You just have to sit there and dig with the question. It might take you years or decades. When you nd an answer you’re happy with, it will be fundamental to your life. Answer 2: 2 There is no meaning to life. There is no purpose to life. Osho said, “It’s like writing on water or building houses of sand.” The reality is you’ve been dead for the history of the Universe, 10 billion years or more. You will be dead for the next 70 billion years or so, until the heat death of the Universe. Anything you do will fade. It will disappear, just like the human race will disappear and the planet will disappear. Even the group who colonizes Mars will disappear. No one is going to remember you past a certain number of generations, whether you’re an artist, a poet, a conqueror, a pauper, or anyone else. There’s no meaning. You have to create your own meaning, which is what it boils down to. You have to decide: “Is this a play I’m just watching?” “Is there a self-actualization dance I’m doing?” “Is there a speci c thing I desire just for the heck of it?” These are all meanings you make up. There is no fundamental, intrinsic purposeful meaning to the Universe. If there was, then you would just ask the next question. You’d say, “Why is that the meaning?” It would be, as physicist Richard Feynman said, it would be “turtles all the way down.” The “why’s” would keep accumulating. There is no answer you could give that wouldn’t have another “why.” I don’t buy the everlasting afterlife answers because it’s insane to me, with absolutely no evidence, to believe because of how you live seventy years here on this planet, you’re going to spend eternity, which is a very long time, in some afterlife. What kind of silly God judges you for eternity based on some small period of time here? I think after this life, it’s very much like before you were born. Remember that? It’s going to be just like that. Before you were born, you didn’t care about anything or anyone, including your loved ones, including yourself, including humans, including whether we go to Mars or whether we stay on planet Earth, whether there’s an AI or not. After death, you just don’t care either. Answer 3: 3 The last answer I’ll give you is a little more complicated. From what I’ve read in science (friends of mine have written books on this), I’ve stitched together some theories. Maybe there is a meaning to life, but it’s not a very satisfying purpose. Basically, in physics, the arrow of time comes from entropy. The second law of thermodynamics states entropy only goes up, which means disorder in the Universe only goes up, which means concentrated free energy only goes down. If you look at living things (humans, plants, civilizations, what have you) these systems are locally reversing entropy. Humans locally reverse entropy because we have action. In the process, we globally accelerate entropy until the heat death of the Universe. You could come up with some fanciful theory, which I like, that we’re headed towards the heat death of the Universe. In that death, there’s no concentrated energy, and everything is at the same energy level. Therefore, we’re all one thing. We’re essentially indistinguishable. What we do as living systems accelerates getting to that state. The more complex system you create, whether it’s through computers, civilization, art, mathematics, or creating a family—you actually accelerate the heat death of the Universe. You’re pushing us towards this point where we end up as one thing. LIVE BY YOUR VALUES What are your core values? I’ve never fully enumerated them, but a few examples: Honesty is a core, core, core value. By honesty, I mean I want to be able to just be me. I never want to be in an environment or around people where I have to watch what I say. If I disconnect what I’m thinking from what I’m saying, it creates multiple threads in my mind. I’m no longer in the moment—now I have to be future-planning or past-regretting every time I talk to somebody. Anyone around whom I can’t be fully honest, I don’t want to be around. Before you can lie to another, you must rst lie to yourself. Another example of a foundational value: I don’t believe in any short-term thinking or dealing. If I’m doing business with somebody and they think in a short-term manner with somebody else, then I don’t want to do business with them anymore. All bene ts in life come from compound interest, whether in money, relationships, love, health, activities, or habits. I only want to be around people I know I’m going to be around for the rest of my life. I only want to work on things I know have long-term payout. Another one is I only believe in peer relationships. I don’t believe in hierarchical relationships. I don’t want to be above anybody, and I don’t want to be below anybody. If I can’t treat someone like a peer and if they can’t treat me like peer, I just don’t want to interact with them. Another: I don’t believe in anger anymore. Anger was good when I was young and full of testosterone, but now I like the Buddhist saying, “Anger is a hot coal you hold in your hand while waiting to throw it at somebody.” I don’t want to be angry, and I don’t want to be around angry people. I just cut them out of my life. I’m not judging them. I went through a lot of anger too. They have to work through it on their own. Go be angry at someone else, somewhere else. I don’t know if these necessarily fall into the classical de nition of values, but it’s a set of things I won’t compromise on and I live my entire life by. I think everybody has values. Much of nding great relationships, great coworkers, great lovers, wives, husbands, is nding other people where your values line up. If your values line up, the little things don’t matter. Generally, I nd if people are ghting or quarreling about something, it’s because their values don’t line up. If their values lined up, the little things wouldn’t matter. Meeting my wife was a great test because I really wanted to be with her, and she wasn’t so sure at the beginning. In the end, we ended up together because she saw my values. I am lucky I had developed them by that point. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have gotten her. I wouldn’t have deserved her. As investor Charlie Munger says, “To nd a worthy mate, be worthy of a worthy mate.” My wife is an incredibly lovely, family-oriented person, and so am I. That was one of the foundational values that brought us together. The moment you have a child, it’s this really weird thing, but it answers the meaning-of-life, purpose-of-life, question. All of a sudden, the most important thing in the Universe moves from being in your body into the child’s body. That changes you. Your values inherently become a lot less sel sh. RATIONAL BUDDHISM The older the question, the older the answers. You’ve called your philosophy Rational Buddhism. How does it di er from traditional Buddhism? What type of exploration did you go through? The rational part means I have to reconcile with science and evolution. I have to reject all the pieces I can’t verify for myself. For example, is meditation good for you? Yes. Is clearing your mind a good thing? Yes. Is there a base layer of awareness below your monkey mind? Yes. All these things I’ve veri ed for myself. Some beliefs from Buddhism I believe and follow because, again, I’ve veri ed or reasoned with thought experiments myself. What I will not accept is things like, “There’s a past life you’re paying o the karma for.” I haven’t seen it. I don’t remember any past lives. I don’t have any memory. I just have to not believe that. When people say your third chakra is opening, etc.—I don’t know—that’s just fancy nomenclature. I have not been able to verify or con rm any of that on my own. If I can’t verify it on my own or if I cannot get there through science, then it may be true, it may be false, but it’s not falsi able, so I cannot view it as a fundamental truth. On the other side, I do know evolution is true. I do know we are evolved as survival and replication machines. I do know we have an ego, so we get up o the ground and worms don’t eat us and we actually take action. Rational Buddhism, to me, means understanding the internal work Buddhism espouses to make yourself happier, better o , more present and in control of your emotions—being a better human being. I don’t subscribe to anything fanciful because it was written down in a book. I don’t think I can levitate. I don’t think meditation will give me superpowers and those kinds of things. Try everything, test it for yourself, be skeptical, keep what’s useful, and discard what’s not. I would say my philosophy falls down to this—on one pole is evolution as a binding principle because it explains so much about humans, on the other is Buddhism, which is the oldest, most time-tested spiritual philosophy regarding the internal state of each of us. I think those are absolutely reconcilable. I actually want to write a blog post at some point about how you can map the tenets of Buddhism, especially the non-fanciful ones, directly into a virtual reality simulation. Everyone starts out innocent. Everyone is corrupted. Wisdom is the discarding of vices and the return to virtue, by way of knowledge. How do you de ne wisdom? Understanding the long-term consequences of your actions. If wisdom could be imparted through words alone, we’d all be done here. THE PRESENT IS ALL WE HAVE There is actually nothing but this moment. No one has ever gone back in time, and no one has ever been able to successfully predict the future in any way that matters. Literally, the only thing that exists is this exact point where you are in space at the exact time you happen to be here. Like all great profound truths, it’s all paradoxes. Any two points are in nitely di erent. Any moment is perfectly unique. Each moment itself slips by so quickly you can’t grab it. You’re dying and being reborn at every moment. It’s up to you whether to forget or remember that. “Everything is more beautiful because we’re doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now, and we will never be here again.” —Homer, The Iliad I don’t even remember what I said two minutes ago. At best, the past is some ctional little memory tape in my head. As far as I’m concerned, my past is dead. It’s gone. All death really means is that there are no more future moments. Inspiration is perishable—act on it immediately. BONUS The democratization of technology allows anyone to be a creator, entrepreneur, scientist. The future is brighter. It’s statistically likely there are more advanced alien civilizations out there. Hopefully, they’re good environmentalists and nd us cute. NAVAL’S RECOMMENDED READING The truth is, I don’t read for self-improvement. I read out of curiosity and interest. The best book is the one you’ll devour. BOOKS (Since there are so many links in this section, you may prefer a digital copy. Go to Navalmanack.com to get a digital version of this chapter for your convenience.) Read enough, and you become a connoisseur. Then you naturally gravitate more toward theory, concepts, non ction. NONFICTION The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World by David Deutsch Not the easiest read, but it made me smarter. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari A history of the human species. The observations, frameworks, and mental models will have you looking at history and your fellow humans di erently. Sapiens is the best book of the last decade I have read. He had decades to write Sapiens. There are lots of great ideas in there and it’s just full of them, chock- full per page. The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley The most brilliant and enlightening book I’ve read in years. He has written four of my top twenty books. Everything else written by Matt Ridley. Matt is a scientist, optimist, and forward thinker. One of my favorite authors. I’ve read everything of his, and reread everything of his. Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge Skin in the Game by Nassim Taleb The best book I read in 2018, I highly recommend it. Lots of great ideas in there. Lots of good mental models and constructs. He has a bit of an attitude, but he has that because he’s brilliant, and it’s okay. So just look past the attitude and read the book, learn the concepts. It’s one of the best business books I’ve ever read. And luckily, it doesn’t masquerade as a business book. The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms by Nassim Taleb This is his collection of ancient wisdom. He is also famous for The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, and Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets, all of which are worth reading. Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher by Richard Feynman I would give my kids a copy of Richard Feynman’s Six Easy Pieces and Six Not-So-Easy Pieces: Einstein’s Relativity, Symmetry, and Space-Time. Richard Feynman is a famous physicist. I love both his demeanor as well as his understanding of physics. I’ve also been reading Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track by Feynman and rereading Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, a biography about him. Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words by Randall Munroe A great book by Randall Munroe (creator of xkcd, a very science-oriented webcomic). In this book, he explains very complicated concepts, all the way from climate change to physical systems to submarines while only using the thousand most common words in the English language. He called the Saturn Five rocket “Up Goer Five.” You can’t de ne a rocket as a spaceship or a rocket. It’s self-referential. He says “up goer.” It’s this thing that goes up. Kids get it right away. Thinking Physics: Understandable Practical Reality by Lewis Carroll Epstein There’s another great book called Thinking Physics. I open this one all the time. I love on the back cover how it has this great little pitch that says, “The only book used in both grade school and graduate school.” It’s true. It’s all simple physics puzzles that can be explained to a twelve-year-old child and can be explained to a twenty- ve-year-old grad student in physics. They all have fundamental insights in physics. They’re all kind of tricky, but anyone can get to the answer through purely logical reasoning. The Lessons of History by Will and Ariel Durant This is a great book I really like that summarizes some of the larger themes of history; it’s very incisive. And unlike most history books, it’s actually really small, and it covers a lot of ground. The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age by James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg This is the best book I’ve read since Sapiens (far less mainstream, though). Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger by Charlie Munger (edited by Peter Kaufman) This masquerades as a business book, but it’s really just Charlie Munger (of Berkshire Hathaway)’s advice on overcoming oneself to live a successful and virtuous life. Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity by Carlo Rovelli This is the best book I’ve read in the last year. Physics, poetry, philosophy, and history packaged in a very accessible form. Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli I’ve read this one at least twice. For game theory, in addition to playing strategy games, you may want to try The Compleat Strategyst: Being a Primer on the Theory of Games of Strategy by J.D. Williams and The Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod. PHILOSOPHY AND SPIRITUALITY Everything by Jed McKenna Jed spits raw truth. His style may be o -putting, but the dedication to truth is unparalleled. Theory of Everything (The Enlightened Perspective) - Dreamstate Trilogy Jed McKenna’s Notebook Jed Talks #1 and #2 Everything by Kapil Gupta, MD Kapil recently became a personal advi