Naval Ravikant’s Top 7 Reading Tips
#2 Read what you love until you love to read
Naval. Who’s Naval?
Firstly, Naval loves to read.
And his love for reading translated to success in real life. He used his learnings to start mega-successful businesses (like Epinions, AngelList) and invest in several unicorn companies like Twitter, Uber, Notion, and many more.
In 2018, he shook the Twitter world with his How to Get Rich (without getting lucky) tweetstorms, which, for me, is one of the densest resources of practical wisdom on building wealth, cultivating sharp judgment, and thriving in the modern world.
Here’s a snippet of one of his delectable tweets:
Naval is one of my heroes. He’s my role model for embodying the best bits of knowledge I learn from reading books.
What are Naval’s thoughts about reading?
Here, let’s savor some of them.
1. Read to learn.
A genuine love for reading, Naval believes, is a superpower.
“I think that [reading] alone accounts for any material success that I’ve had in my life and any intelligence that I might have,” says Naval.
If you want to educate yourself, learn to love to read.
“The foundation of learning is reading. I don’t know a smart person who doesn’t read, and reads all the time.”
2. Read what you love until you love to read.
Naval suggests to start reading easy books, books that you like reading.
“Start wherever you are,” Naval says, “and then keep building from there until reading becomes a habit.”
Start with fiction, then you may graduate to science fiction, then to nonfiction, then to science or math or philosophy.
Whatever it is that you read, take your natural path. Follow your own obsession.
3. Read several books at a time.
Unlike Bill Gates, who doesn’t read a book he doesn’t intend to finish, Naval doesn’t force himself to finish reading a book.
He says, “A really good book, I will flip through. I won’t necessarily read it exactly in order. And I won’t even finish it.”
Naval doesn’t care about reading a book to completion. What he cares about are ideas that he wants to explore more.
“When I find something interesting, I’ll reflect on it, I’ll research it.” Then when he gets bored of the book, he drops it and flips through another one.
“Thanks to electronic books I’ve got fifty to seventy books I can open anytime in my kindle or iBooks, and I’m just bouncing around between them.”
4. Get the gist, then put the book down.
Some nonfiction books are just articles expanded and loaded with related materials to fill the pages to create a book.
Naval doesn’t read those books from start to finish. He skims them. Then he puts a book down after he gets the main idea.
“Most books [nonfiction] have one point to make. They make it, and then they give you an example after example after example after example, and they apply it to explain everything in the world. Once I feel like I’ve gotten the gist, I feel very comfortable putting the book down.”
5. Take notes and toss it out there.
If Naval comes across a fundamental ‘ah-ha’ insight, he distills it into a few characters and posts it on Twitter.
“Some people love to take notes,” says Naval. “My notetaking is Twitter.”
He says that his tweets serve as his pointers, addresses, or mnemonics, and they help him recall deep-seated principles anytime he needs them.
6. Read the classics.
Naval suggests reading the originals. “Don’t read the current interpretation someone is feeding you about how things should be done,” he says.
If what you’re trying to figure out is old, read old books.
“Any book that survived for years has been filtered through many people. They stood the test of time.” They’re called classics for a reason.
7. Reread the best 100 books.
Read and skim a lot of books. And reread only the best ones.
Today we can easily access so many books that we get so much advice that all cancel to zero.
So, identify the best books that sing to you, and reread them until what you learned from them becomes part of your daily routine or behavior.
Naval says, “I would rather read the best 100 books over and over again until I absorb them, rather than read all the books.”
He said that it’s not about the number of books you’ve read. It’s about concepts and ideas you’ve understood.
Thanks for reading!
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P.S.
Eric Jorgenson compiled Naval Ravikant’s wisdom — from Naval’s Twitter, podcasts, and essays — into a book. It’s called The Almanack of Naval Ravikant. And you can download it here for free.
Enjoy!
