I recently read The Almanack of Naval Ravikant on a flight from Singapore to Shanghai, after a colleague recommended it with the kind of enthusiasm that usually makes me suspicious. Too many people treat business books like religious texts, underlining passages they will never act upon. But my Kindle was loaded, I needed something that wasn't about teaching or China, and by the time we landed I had filled more of the margins than I care to admit.
The Almanack isn't a conventional business book. It's a curated collection of Naval's tweets, interviews, and essays, organised around his central obsessions: wealth, happiness, and the specific knowledge that cannot be taught. Naval is a Silicon Valley investor who made his fortune early and has spent the subsequent decades trying to articulate what he actually learned. The result is fragmentary, repetitive, and occasionally brilliant.
The clarity of the writing is what struck me most. Naval writes like someone who has spent years trying to remove every unnecessary word. In my local government days, I read hundreds of strategy documents that said almost nothing in as many pages as possible. Naval does the opposite. He trusts the reader to fill in the gaps. It's a kind of intellectual respect that is rarer than it should be.
His framework of leverage — using labour, capital, code, or media to multiply your output — made me rethink how I spend my time as a teacher. Most of my work is linear. One hour of preparation produces one hour of lesson. What would it look like to build something that scales? That question has stayed with me longer than I expected.
Some critics dismiss Naval as a wealthy man repackaging Stoicism and basic economics for tech bros who haven't read Marcus Aurelius. There's some truth in this — many of his insights are not original. But that criticism misses the point. Naval isn't trying to be original. He's trying to be correct. There's a difference, and it matters. In a culture that rewards novelty over truth, someone who is content to state obvious things well is almost a relief. For all his emphasis on agency and skill, Naval is also unusually candid about the role of luck. He admits that being in Silicon Valley in the 1990s mattered as much as anything he did personally. That honesty separates him from the self-help crowd, who need you to believe that outcomes are fully within your control.
This is a collection of provocations rather than a system. Naval doesn't connect his ideas into a coherent philosophy; he drops them like stones into water and lets the ripples overlap. Some of them land. Others don't. The Almanack won't change your life. But it might change a few of your assumptions, which is almost as good.
If you're considering reading it, read it quickly, then revisit. The first pass is for the ideas that jump out. The second pass, months later, is for the ones that have proven true in your own life. Don't build your identity around it. Naval's frameworks are tools, not doctrines. The moment you start introducing yourself as "a Naval follower," you've missed the point.
One caveat: the obsession with wealth as a measure of freedom sits uncomfortably with my Buddhist practice. Money removes certain constraints, yes, but it creates others. I've met wealthy people who are no freer than the monks I sat with in Myanmar. Take what is useful and leave the rest.