Final Thoughts

The book closes with a meditation on what Naval calls the meta-game: the project of organizing your life so that the games you play are ones you actually want to be playing, by your own definition, not by the definition supplied by your inherited cultural context.

The argument is that most people spend their adult lives playing games chosen by their twenty-year-old selves under conditions of imperfect information and intense social pressure. The career, the relationship, the geographic location, the consumption pattern — all were chosen at a moment when the chooser had less information and less self-knowledge than they would later possess. Continuing to play those games past the point of self-knowledge that would suggest different choices is the modern condition.

The work of changing games is harder than the work of winning the current game because it involves disappointing the social environment that has organized around your participation in the current game. People who change games are usually labeled as eccentric, irresponsible, or naive — labels their younger selves applied to others who did the same thing. The cost of changing is paid in social standing; the benefit of changing is paid in the rest of your life.

The book closes with Naval's encouragement to readers to take the meta-game seriously. Spend time examining what games you are playing. Notice which ones you would not choose today if you were choosing fresh. Allow yourself to leave the games that no longer fit. The wealth-building, the happiness practice, and the philosophical work in the previous chapters are all in service of having the resources, internal and external, to make the meta-game shifts that the conditions of a developing life will eventually require. The almanack is a tool for that work, not a substitute for it.