The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness

What this book is, and who it's for

Eric Jorgenson's 2020 book is an unusual artifact: a curation of Naval Ravikant's tweets, podcast appearances, and interviews compiled into a single volume with Naval's blessing. The Almanack does not have a single narrative arc; instead it organizes the recurring themes of Naval's public thinking into chapters on wealth, judgement, happiness, and philosophy. The book's most-famous material is the 2018 tweetstorm-turned-essay on building wealth, which argues that wealth is built by acquiring specific knowledge, with accountability, applied through leverage, with patience over long timeframes — and that modern leverage (code and media, with zero marginal cost to replicate) has fundamentally changed who can play the game. The second half of the book pivots to happiness, treating it as a skill built by reducing desire rather than acquiring more, with influences from Buddhism, Stoicism, and a small set of philosophical sources Naval returns to repeatedly. Read this when you've noticed that the conventional career advice (work hard, save aggressively, retire someday) does not match how anyone you actually admire has organized their life, and you want a compressed framework for thinking about wealth and happiness as separate-but-related projects.