Tim Ferrisss Podcast - Naval Ravikant


Naval on Happiness

Written By: Tommy Ryan | Published: 2016-02-17

Podcast Link

Naval stuffed a lot of great info into this Q&A podcast sans Tim. Happiness is a skill that can be learned. Good habits are also a skill that can be learned. Refrain from judging people and seeking out conflict. Social media is a time sink that seems to incubate feelings of contempt, comparison, dispute, and envy. Try to only use social media as a tool to promote your brand. The future of employment will be a gig based economy.

Prepare yourself for this by building up your brand, focus on creative work that you love, and acclimating to a feast or famine lifestyle. As a consultant I remember these days fondly of project based employment. Building apps, working with clients, and solving new and different problems. My advice here would be to offload work that is busywork like bookkeeping, contract negotiation, and other office management type work to other people. If you’re a designer, design… If you’re a coder, code. Find other people that can assist you with the other stuff as it’s probably not the best use of your time.

Break one bad habit every 6 months. In doing that you’ll start to create a higher water baseline that will end up being your better normal over time. Naval also spoke of the 5 Monkeys theory. This is also called The 5 Friends / 5 Peers theory. The premise is that if someone analyzes the 5 people you spend the most amount of time with or your 5 Best Friends they’ll learn a lot about who you are as a person. Pruning friendships is tough but important. Remembering that time is your most valuable asset and commodity it makes sense that you’ll want to spend it with people that make you happy. Spend time with people that make you feel good, build you up, and make you a better person. Don’t allow people in your life that foster conflict, negativity, or drama.

Naval also spends some time speaking about living a happy life by channeling morality and peace through lenses of different religions. I like this viewpoint. I believe you can learn a lot about the teachings of different religions without the indoctrination of their rituals.

Book Recommendations Naval spoke of a lot of books. I’d like to read the first two. I have The Power of Habit on my bookshelf but I don’t remember actually reading it. Maybe I’ll spend a couple cycles and re-read skim that one and review it.

  1. The Prophet (A Borzoi Book)
  2. Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It
  3. The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business