|#102 MWAVC| - "When the student is ready, the teacher will appear."
This is a re-post. Figured I need to share again for all the new subscribers we have—190 and counting!
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Naval is the founder of Angel list- a website where you can find a job at a startup, post a job as a startup or invest in a startup. He’s invested in more than 100 companies, including Uber, Twitter, Yammer, and many others. Naval is an incredibly deep thinker who challenges the status quo on so many things (mainly what we constitute as happiness and success) and each episode of his podcast, Naval, is about 10 mins long. I listened to about 10 episodes on topics like happiness, early stage investing, and enlightenment and picked these nuggets from them. Find his podcast channel here— Naval.
There’s is a contradiction that we all deal with. That we all want to be successful people, but we also want to be happy people. The two of those run in almost diametric opposites to each other.
“New wisdom” is if you walk into an airport bookstore and you open up Time Magazine, it’s all about you must be like Elon Musk or Larry Page; it’s all about success, success, success. Because we live in this mythology of “anyone can achieve the American dream” and if you’re not successful, if you’re not Tim Ferriss, then you’re a loser.
There’s always someone higher up the stack. So the success driven mentality drives you to unhappiness and if you want to be successful, surround yourself with people who are more successful than you are. But if you want to be happy, surround yourself with people who are less successful than you are. So this is the contradiction that we deal with all day long because we’re also told that the American dream will bring you happiness, and it will not. I think a lot of us learn as we get older that happiness is internal. Happiness is a choice that you make and a skill that you develop, and so how do you do that? And that’s the fundamental contradiction.
A lot of happiness is just being present. To live in the present moment is the highest calling; it’s the source of all happiness
What do you look for in founders?
Intelligence: You’ve got to be smart and know what you’re doing on some level. You talk to people and you get a sense of do they have specific knowledge? Do they have insight? Have they thought about he problem deeply? It’s not about age but how deep their understanding is of what they’re about to do.
Energy: Because being a founder is not easy. It takes a long time and the people who succeed are those who persevere.
Integrity: If you have someone who has high intelligence, high energy but low integrity, all you’ve got is a hard working, smart crook. ethics and integrity are what you do despite the money. integrity requires longitudinal relationships
if you’re signing up to invest in someone, you’re signing up to spend the next decade of your life having them around. So make sure you genuinely like these people. You don’t consider it work to have to answer a phone call or take a meeting or spend the with them. It’s exhausting and no amount of money is worth it if they’re negative
This person has to care about what they’re putting together.
Founders who have a clear vision of some type or some vision of “true north”
Re-evaluate every opportunity on its own merits and they know these things are about timing (Talking about Sequoia that invested in WebVan and Instacart)
You have to work on your internal state until you’re free of as many biases and conditioned responses as you can be and it will improve many areas of your life
Undoing your emotional state is a key skill in investing. Don’t get emotional about shit
So if I had to watch out for a mistake as early stage investors, guard your time carefully. Guard your time more carefully than you guard your money.
“All of man’s troubles arise because he cannot sit in a room quietly by himself for half an hour.” If you could literally just sit for 30 minutes and be happy, you are successful. I think that is a very powerful place to be but very few get there.
Choiceless awareness or nonjudgmental awareness: You walk around. You’re going about your daily business but hopefully there’s some nature around and you’re not talking to somebody else. And what you practice is you just learn to accept that moment that you’re in without making judgments.
I'm trying to be very, very alert and watch my thoughts. You’re not trying to judge anything, including your own thoughts.
“Enlightenment is a space between your thoughts.” Which means that enlightenment isn’t this thing you achieve after 30 years sitting in a corner on a mountaintop. It’s something you can achieve moment to moment and you can be a certain percentage enlightened every single day
Don’t worry about what other people need or want or think or expect from you.
So I think my 50-year-old self is going to say chill out, relax, don’t stress so much, live in the moment. It will all be all right. Less fear, more love. And love people more. Love is one of those weird things. Everyone wants to be loved; everyone deeply needs to be loved. It’s not something you can buy. No amount of money or power will bring you true, unconditional love.
“When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.”
In any situation in life, you only have three options. You always have three options. You can change it, you can accept it, or you can leave it.
📱📱Quote of the day
“Instead of asking yourself what you can achieve next year, ask yourself what you can change in a day... If your daily actions don’t support your long-term dreams, they will always remain latent potential.”
Remember: “Until the lion learns to write, every story will glorify the hunter.”