The Modern Struggle and Modern Devil
I’ve been on a Naval Ravikant content kick lately. I was surprised to find that I concur with many of ideas on health, as he’s most known for being an angel investor and philosopher. Yet I feel like he’d be a natural Natural Hygienist. Naval wrote in The Almanack of Naval Ravikant:
“The modern struggle:
Lone individuals summoning inhuman willpower, fasting, meditating, and exercising…
Up against armies of scientists and statisticians weaponizing abundant food, screens, and medicine into junk food, clickbait news, infinite porn, endless games, and addictive drugs.”
Having just re-joined Instagram and Youtube and feeling more up to getting back on social media, I am extremely careful to use it as a tool for good and not evil. To leverage it to help spread the message against the Modern Struggle - to paradoxically get people off their devices.
Another Naval quote:
“What I did was decide my number one priority in life, above my happiness, above my family, above my work, is my own health. It starts with my physical health. Because my physical health became my number one priority, then I could never say I don’t have time.”
This one echoes a very similar Dr. Goldhamer quote in which he says something along the lines of “If you have enough time to eat, sleep 8 hours a night, relax, have social time, etc. THEN you can think about doing work.”
And another quote because Naval’s so good:
“The modern devil is cheap dopamine. Some interesting people on Twitter pointed out to me, actually, the ancient devil is cheap dopamine…”
His good buddy Scott Adams has information on health too, like his saying at the end of this one: “Learn discipline or you don’t have a chance in today’s world.” He talks of how his stepson died of a fentanyl overdose and didn’t have the type of personality to withstand today’s onslaught of stimulation.
Some gems from this video with Scott Adams (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsZPRNY9jCw):
“Don't let reality control your imagination. Let your imagination be the user interface to steer your reality.”
'Pessimism is often a failure of imagination.'
"I appear to have willpower but I think I have better imagination. In other words, I can really, really imagine myself suffering in the future for a decision I make today." Well said!
Bonus: even more quotes by Naval, this time on making things:
“Your goal in life is to find the people, business, project, or art that needs you the most. There is something out there just for you. What you don’t want to do is build checklists and decision frameworks built on what other people are doing. You’re never going to be them. You’ll never be good at being somebody else.”
You get rewarded by society for giving it what it wants and doesn’t know how to get elsewhere.
Think about what product or service society wants but does not yet know how to get. You want to become the person who delivers it and delivers it at scale. That is really the challenge of how to make money.
Tools and leverage create this disconnection between inputs and outputs. The higher the creativity component of a profession, the more likely it is to have disconnected inputs and outputs. If you’re looking at professions where your inputs and your outputs are highly connected, it’s going to be very hard to create wealth and make wealth for yourself in that process.
If you love to do it, be authentic, and then figure out how to map that to what society actually wants. Apply some leverage and put your name on it.
Find product-market-founder fit