Naval Ravikant - The 4 BIGGEST TRAPS in Life that You NEED to GET OUT [w/ Charlie Munger]

I think people have to be very careful to not get trapped along the way with things that you can afford with your current lifestyle like the way you're living and the way you're earning but they're also imprisoning you in the fact that you are now going to have to work this 40-hour week job in order to get this thing that you can't afford but now you're saddled down to this job you've no you're not saving you're not you're not putting things in a good place and you're working for these things working for things as rewards

is a real trap that a lot of people fall into it's the biggest one you know that's even telev also says that uh you know there are two great addictions heroin and a monthly salary right and and that's why you can't get rich renting out your time because even when you start charging more and more for your time it's a slow upgrade Loop and then you upgrade your house at the same time and open your car at the same time you move in the neighborhood you really also have to get used to ignoring your peers

or upgrading or changing the definition of your peers a lot of people here who are poor here but they would be rich if they were living in Thailand and Bali and if they have the luxury of a remotely doable job they may want to be living there and saving up money but the ignoring the peers is an issue because the Keeping Up With the Jones is a real phenomenon yeah Envy makes the world go around right yeah and then there's a there's a other thing that people have to avoid even allowing their mind to think

when they're hearing what you're saying and all this logical fantastic advice there's these six dirty words that's easy for you to say yeah that is a terrible trap I mean look I grew up as a first generation immigrant uh in Jamaica Queens uh with zero money single mom two kids working day and night going to school uh you know I wash dishes uh I was K I was working catering jobs I was mowing lawns I was working since the age of 11 on and off here and there um didn't have two cents to rub together

you know I had to borrow 400 to go to college like literally a short four hundred dollars 400 I had to find 400 I didn't have it you know got rejected from a job at Dunkin Donuts so like okay it's not to say that it's easy it's not easy it's not actually really freaking in heart it is the hardest thing you will do but it's also the rewarding thing you know look at the kids who are born rich no meaning to their lives you're a terrible Place yeah your real your real resume is just a

cataloging of all your suffering right if I were to ask you to describe your real life to yourself when you look back in your deathbed you're going to go back and say what are the interesting things I've done and it's all going to be around the sacrifices that you've made and the hard things that you did anything you're given doesn't matter you know you you have your four limbs you have your brain you have your head you have your skin that's all for granted so you have to do hard things anyway to create your own

meaning in life um making money is a fine one yeah struggle it is hard I'm not going to say it's easy it's a really hard but the tools are all available it's all there there's also these these traps that people sort of establish in their own mind of giving themselves excuses or giving themselves in unsurmountable obstacles insurmountable paths to victim mentality yeah yeah it's somebody else's fault it's my skin color's fault it's the system's fault yeah those people are sinking I feel bad for them I want to shake them out of it and say actually

you can get out of it you just have to stop thinking it's everybody you have to alter the perspective yeah but it's so difficult for people to do it's one of the most difficult things for people to do is to change the way they approach approach reality itself at the end of the day I I do think even despite what I said earlier life is really a single player game it's all going on in your head you know whatever you think you believe will very much shape your reality both from what risks you take and

what actions you perform but also just your everyday experience of reality if you're walking down the street and you're judging everyone you're like I don't like that person because their skin color I don't like that oh she's she's not attractive that guy's fat this person's a loser oh who put this in my way uh you know the more you judge the more you're gonna separate yourself and you'll feel good for an instant because you'll feel good about yourself I'm better than that but then you're gonna feel lonely and then you're just gonna see negativity everywhere

the world just reflects your own feelings back at you reality is neutral the reality has no judgments to a tree there's no concept of right or wrong or good or bad right you're born you have a whole set of sensory experiences and stimulations and lights and colors and sounds and then you die yeah and how you choose to interpret that is up to you you do have that choice so this is what I meant that happiness is a choice if you believe it's the choice then you can start working on it and I can't tell

you how to find it because it's your own conditionings that are making you unhappy so you have to uncondition yourself it's just like I can't fix your eating habits for you can give you some general guidelines but you got to go through the hard habit forming of How to Eat Right but you have to believe it's possible and it is absolutely possible I was miserable I'm happy as a clam it's not just the money I got there before the money Peter Thiel talks a lot about how competition is besides the point it's counterproductive we're highly

memetic creatures we copy what everybody else is doing around us we copy our desires from them everyone around me is a great artist I want to be an artist if everyone around me is a great business person I want to be a business person everybody around me is a social activist I want to be a social activist that's where my self-esteem will come from you have to be a little careful when you get caught up in these status games that you end up competing over things that aren't worth competing over so Peter Thiel talks about

how he was going to be a law clerk because he was in law school and everybody around him wanted to be a law clerk for a Supreme Court Justice or some famous judge and he got rejected and that's what made him go into business so it helped him break out of a lesser game into a greater game so sometimes you just get trapped in the wrong game because you're competing and the best way to escape competition to get away from the Specter of competition which is not just stressful and nerve-wracking but will often drive you

to just the wrong answer the way to Escape competition is to just be authentic to yourself if you are fundamentally building and marketing something that is just an extension of who you are no one can compete with you on that but when people look at particularly social media let's bring back to that when you see someone who you know you see them posed in front of their mansion with their beautiful car and they're leaning against it with their designer clothes on their expensive watch you go ah I want that right that's what I want what

you really want is freedom you want freedom from your money problems right and I think that's okay so people once someone can solve their money problems either by lowering their lifestyle or by making enough money and you know essentially what you want to get everybody to is retirement but not retirement in the I'm 65 years old sitting in a nursing home collecting a check retirement different definition retirement is when you stop sacrificing today for some imaginary tomorrow okay yes when today is complete in and of itself you're retired yeah and so how do you get

there well one is you can have so much money saved up that just your passive income off of that without your having to lift a finger covers your burn rate keep your burn rate low right a second is you just drive your burn rate down to zero you become a monk a third is you're doing something you love you enjoy it so much it's not about the money right so there are multiple ways to that path but the most common is people just say I need to make more money and the kind of wealth creation

that I talk about is about creating Timeless principles and adapting yourselves that making money won't be an issue anybody who's read your life you're a testament to the idea that to not be a victim but to be a Survivor and it's an attitude that has helped me in my short life so far could you perhaps expand on that idea how it's helped you and how that is perhaps one of the greatest ways to live your life out regardless of what happens of course feeling like it's really interesting to make change some people are victimized by

other people and if it weren't for the ending nation that that causes we wouldn't have reforms that we need but that truth is mixed with another very counterproductive or an individual to feel like a victim even if he is best attitude is just to be careful about everything and keep plugging along and therefore I don't like politicians that get ahead by trying to make everybody else feel like a victim yeah they make my flesh crawl and I just don't believe in it of course who wants to be a victim instead of a survivor of course

we want and but feeling like a victim you can recognize your position as bad and try and improve it that's okay but to have a deep feeling of the wooden that's all somebody else's fault is a very counterproductive Way To Think people aren't even like being around it it's really stupid and yet our politicians build on it and make their careers work by doing something that's very bad for all what people are talking to and they think they're doing the world's work you know it's crazy it's absolutely crazy reflections working for things as rewards the

things you own end up owning you Chuck palahnuk the goal isn't passive income the goal is active income doing what you like sahil Lavinia I recommend watching the video that by Kapil Gupta which Naval recently shared on Twitter you can check the link at the top right corner of the screen the victim mentality my formula for greatness is amorphati that one wants nothing to be different not forward not backwards not in all eternity not merely bear what is necessary still less conceal it but love it. Nietzsche. A great man is hard on himself a small

man is hard on others Confucius the competition trap if you have a guaranteed Market of one I.E yourself you are ahead of 99 of all entrepreneurs out there team in fairies ideas don't come out fully formed they only become clearer as you work on them you just have to get started Mark Zuckerberg something that has been useful to me is this idea of building something that I myself would love to consume even if I see other entrepreneurs already executing on that same concept I just do something similar or shamelessly copycat them if they have better

ideas this might look like I'm getting into competition instead of escaping from it but the thing is that as I execute the project I naturally give it my own spin over time so when I just start the project my idea it's also just starting it is far from being a complete business idea but as I work on the project the idea gets more and more formed and as it gets formed you're slowly getting away from competition until the ideal scenario in which there is demand for your product and the market cannot find it anywhere where

else other than through you that's the point where you become a personal Monopoly as one of my favorite writers David Pearl would put it thanks for watching