IT'S ALL A CHOICE - Naval Ravikant Powerful Motivational Speech

Chris Williamson (0:00)

We sacrifice the thing we want for the thing that's supposed to get it.

Naval Ravikant (0:03)

A lot of happiness is just a choice. First, you just identify yourself as, actually, I'm gonna be a person that's gonna be happy, I'm gonna figure it out. And you just figure it out along the way. You're not gonna lose your other predilections, you're not gonna lose your ambition or desire for success. I think a lot of people have this fear that, oh, if I'm happy, then I won't want to be successful. No, you'll just wanna do things that are more aligned with the happy version of you, and you'll be successful at those things. You're actually trying to be successful, so you'll be happy.

Chris Williamson (0:28)

We sacrifice happiness in order to be successful, so that when we're finally sufficiently successful, we can actually be happy.

Naval Ravikant (0:33)

At least in my own life, I have not found there to be a trade-off. If anything, I have found that the happier I get, the more I am going to do the things that I'm good at and aligned with, and that will make me even happier. And so I actually end up more successful, not less. Don't do something you don't wanna do. Why are you wasting your time? There's so little time on this earth. Life goes fast. What is it, 4,000 weeks? That's your lifespan.

And yes, we hear that, but we don't remember it. But I guess I'm keenly aware of how little time I have, so I'm just not gonna waste it.

Chris Williamson (1:05)

How have you got more comfortable at being the unapologetic self-prioritizer?

Naval Ravikant (1:10)

I've gotten utterly more and more ruthless on it. Mainly it's that I see or hear people's freedom, and then that liberates me further. I read a blog post by Mark Andreessen, where he said, don't keep a schedule. And I took that to heart. So I deleted my calendar and I don't keep a schedule. Some of these habits I adopted long before, actually. There's nothing worse than something coming up that your past self committed you to. And then it destroys your entire calendar. It destroys your day because there's like this one hour slot, which is sitting like a turd on my calendar, that I have to like schedule my whole day around. I can't do anything at 20 minutes before or 20 minutes afterwards.

Even for phone calls, if someone wants to do a phone call, say, okay, just text me when you're free. I'll text you when I'm free and we'll just do it on the fly. It's a much better way of living than this overly scheduled.

Chris Williamson (1:52)

The over scheduled life is not worth living.

Naval Ravikant (1:54)

It's not. I think it's a terrible way to live life. That's not how we evolved. It's not how we grew up.

It's not how we were as children, hopefully. Your natural order is freedom. I had a friend who said to me once, I never want to have to be at a specific place at a specific time. And I was like, oh my God, that's freedom. When I heard that, that changed my life.

SPEAKER_3 (2:16)

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Chris Williamson (2:27)

Sink a little bit more into that, like kind of like that F**k You Energy, that self-prioritizing energy, because I think people rationally love the idea of this. I'm going to do what only I want to do, even if they've got the level of freedom.

Naval Ravikant (2:40)

It's not F**k You Energy in the sense that I think everyone should live their life that way to the greatest extent possible. Obviously, we have our requirements around work and our obligations that are genuinely important to us, but don't fitter away your life on randomly schedule things and on things that aren't important, don't matter, and events and weddings and, you know, tedious dinners with tedious people that you don't want to go to. To the extent you can bring freedom into your life, optimize for that, you'll actually be more productive. You won't just be happier, more free. You will be more productive, because then you can focus on what is in front of you, whatever the biggest problem of that day. When I wake up in the morning, the first four hours are when I have the most energy, and that's when I want to solve all the hard problems. And the next four hours are when I kind of want to, you know, do some more outdoorsy activities, or I want to work out, or maybe I can, you know, have some meetings, but I'll try to do those last second based on whatever the day's priorities demand. The last four hours, I kind of want to wind down. I want to hang out with the kids, and I want to play games, or read a book, or something like that. So having that flexibility and freedom is really important. So you can just put whatever is most needed into the slot at that moment.