Author: Eric Jorgenson is a product strategist and writer. In 2011, he joined the founding team of Zaarly, a company dedicated to helping homeowners find accountable service providers. His business blog, Evergreen, has educated and entertained more than one million readers.
Book: This book is a collection of Naval Ravikant´s ideas. Naval is an entrepreneur and investor, founder of Angellist, Epinions, and Vast.com. He is an Angel investor in Twitter, Uber, Yammer, and 100+ more and he has become widely followed for his thoughts on start-ups, investing, crypto, wealth, and happiness. The book is divided into two main parts: (i) Wealth and (ii) Happiness. In Naval´s view getting rich is not about luck and happiness is a skill that can be learned, not just a trait we are born with. The book elaborates these ideas focusing on leverage, habits, mindset, etc. so that you can develop your own unique path toward a happier, wealthier life.
Opinion: I have enjoyed this book a lot. As it happens with most books, expectations will determine to some degree how much you enjoy it. Do not expect a how-to guide or any kind of practical/immediate advice, just an (elaborated) collection of random thoughts and general ideas that can make you rethink many of your basic assumptions about wealth/work/life. If you already follow Naval and TT venture capitalists on Twitter, most of his ideas will already be familiar. For outsiders, there might be many ground-breaking ideas. On the negative side, I think that some of Naval´s ideas are a bit too optimistic/naïve as they work perfectly for Venture Capitalists/Entrepreneurs, but they are much harder to follow for the bottom 99%. How is a student from a random state school going to build wealth? (i) High paying corporate job > impossible to apply most of Naval´s ideas in investment banking, consulting, private equity, etc. (ii) Entrepreneurship > Huge survivorship bias, 99.9% won´t make it. Even if Naval is completely aware of this phenomenon, in my view he doesn’t give it enough attention.
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