The Almanack of Naval Ravikant
Eric Jorgenson
currently reading
Money and happiness treated as skills you can learn. The closest thing I have to a manual.
Naval Ravikant never wrote a book. He posted threads and talked on podcasts, and Eric Jorgenson collected the best of it, sorted it, and turned it into this. It has two halves, wealth and happiness, and Naval treats both as skills you can get better at.
The wealth half is the one people quote. Look for wealth, meaning things that earn while you sleep, instead of chasing a higher hourly rate or status. Build specific knowledge, the stuff you learn by following your own curiosity, which nobody can easily train someone to replace you with. And use leverage, especially the kinds that don't need anyone's permission: code and media, which you can make once and have copied a million times for free. Play long term games with long term people.
The happiness half is quieter and, I suspect, the part that matters more. He talks about happiness as the absence of wanting, about how every desire is a small contract to be unhappy until you get the thing, and about reading as the best habit anyone can have.
I'm still working through it, and I'll say more once I've finished. For now it's the book I open when I want to check whether what I'm building is actually going somewhere.
