51 Naval Ravikant Quotes About Entrepreneurship

If you’re seeking timeless wisdom on wealth, happiness, and decision-making, Naval Ravikant quotes offer a treasure trove of insights.

Known for his clarity of thought and concise, impactful statements, Naval Ravikant has inspired millions through interviews, tweets, and podcasts.

In this post, we explore some of the most profound Naval Ravikant quotes that can shift your mindset and guide your personal and professional growth.

Whether you’re an entrepreneur, investor, or simply someone on a path to self-discovery, these quotes are sure to resonate.

Naval Ravikant Quotes

If you don’t love yourself who will?

2. So, if you’re willing to bleed a little bit every day but in exchange, you’ll win big later, you will do better. That is, by the way, entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs bleed every day. They’re not making money, they’re losing money, they’re constantly stressed out, and all the responsibility is upon them, but when they win they win big. On average they’ll make more.

3. The most dangerous things are heroin and a monthly salary.” Right, because they are highly addictive.

4. If you’re good with computers, if you’re good at basic mathematics if you’re good at writing if you’re good at speaking, and if you like reading, you’re set for life.

5. Escape competition through authenticity.

6. You’re going to die one day and none of this is going to matter.

7. Forty hour work weeks are a relic of the Industrial Age. Knowledge workers function like athletes — train and sprint, then rest and reassess.

8. If you start with the originals as your foundations, then you have enough of a worldview and understanding that you won’t fear any book.

9. Changing your interpretation of your past is often just as good as changing your past.

10. The Internet allows you to scale any niche obsession.

11. In any situation in life, you only have three options. You always have three options. You can change it, you can accept it, or you can leave it. What is not a good option is to sit around wishing you would change it but not changing it, wishing you would leave it but not leaving it, and not accepting it. It’s that struggle, that aversion, that is responsible for most of our misery. The phrase that I probably use the most to myself in my head is just one word: accept.

12. So, you want to look for professions and careers where the inputs and outputs are highly disconnected.

13. Accountability is a double-edged thing. It allows you to take credit when things go well and to bear the brunt of the failure when things go badly.

14. The problem is to win at a status game, you have to put somebody else down. That’s why you should avoid status games. They make you into an angry, combative person. You’re always fighting to put other people down, to put yourself and the people you like up.

15. Your real resume is just a catalog of all your suffering… Anything you’re given doesn’t matter. You have to do hard things to create your own meaning in life.

16. Pointing out obvious exceptions implies either the target isn’t smart or you aren’t.

17. Courage isn’t charging into a machine-gun nest. Courage is not caring what other people think.

18. Too much sugar leads to a heavy body, and too many distractions lead to a heavy mind.

19. Wealth is assets that earn while you sleep.

20. People living below their means have freedom.

21. Status is your ranking in the social hierarchy.

22. Play stupid games, and win stupid prizes.

23. The most important skill for getting rich is becoming a perpetual learner.

24. My definition of wisdom is knowing the long-term consequences of your actions. Wisdom applied to external problems is judgment.

25. Courage isn’t charging into a machine gun nest. Courage is not caring what other people think.

26. The Lindy Effect for startups: The longer you go without shipping product, the more likely you will never ship product.

27. Knowledge is a skyscraper. You can take a shortcut with a fragile foundation of memorization, or build slowly upon a steel frame of understanding.

28. If I do my job right, if I create value for society, society says, “Oh, thank you. We owe you something in the future for the work that you did in the past. Here’s a little IOU. Let’s call that money.

29. I only really want to do things for their own sake. That is one definition of art. Whether it’s business, exercise, romance, friendship — whatever. I think the meaning of life is to do things for their own sake. Ironically, when you do things for their own sake, you create your best work.

30. The punishment for the love of money is delivered at the same time as the money. As you make money, you just want even more, and you become paranoid and fearful of losing what you do have… I think the best way to stay away from this constant love of money is to not upgrade your lifestyle as you make money.

31. What you feel tells you nothing about the facts. It merely tells you something about your estimate of the facts.

32. Desire is a contract that you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want. Every desire is a chosen unhappiness.

33. Don’t make up your mind. “Knowing” is the end of learning.

34. You must own equity to gain financial freedom.

36. The people who have the ability to fail in public under their own name actually gain a lot of power.

37. Happiness is there when you remove the sense of something missing from your life.

38. If you can outsource something or not do something for less than your hourly rate, outsource it or don’t do it.

39. Read the greats in math, science, and philosophy. Ignore your contemporaries and news. Avoid tribal identification. Put truth above social approval.

40. School, politics, sports, and games train us to compete against others. True rewards – wealth, knowledge, love, fitness, and equanimity – come from ignoring others and improving ourselves.

41. Your most important skill isn’t even what you majored in or even what you studied, it’s just knowing how to learn. If you have a good grasp of mathematics and if you like to read, there’s nothing you can’t learn on your own.

42. Competing without software is like competing without electricity.

43. Basic arithmetic and numeracy are way more important in life than doing calculus. Similarly, being able to convey yourself simply using ordinary English words is far more important than being able to write poetry, having an extensive vocabulary, or speaking 7 different languages. Knowing how to be more persuasive when speaking is far more important than being an expert digital marketer or click optimizer. Foundations are key.

44. Retirement is when you stop sacrificing today for an imaginary tomorrow. When today’s complete, in and of itself, you’re retired. . . Well, one way is to have so much money saved that your passive income, without you lifting a finger, covers your burn rate. 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.

45. You can only make progress when you’re starting with the truth. The hard thing is seeing the truth. To see the truth, you have to get your ego out the way because your ego doesn’t want to see the truth.

46. Today, the way we think you get peace is by resolving all your external problems, but there are unlimited external problems. The only way to actually get peace on the inside is giving up this idea of problems.

47. Three things in life – your health, your mission, and the people you love. That’s it.

48. Entrepreneurship is essentially an act of creating something new from scratch. Predicting that society will want it, and then figuring out how to scale it, and get it to everybody in a profitable way, in a self-sustaining way.

49. I don’t actually read a lot of books. I pick up a lot of books and only get through a few, which form the foundation of my knowledge.

50. Renting out your time means you’re essentially replaceable.

51. Too many takers and not enough makers will plunge society into ruin.

52. Apply specific knowledge with leverage and eventually, you will get what you deserve.

53. The democratization of technology allows anyone to be a creator, entrepreneur, scientist. The future is brighter.

54. Read what you love until you love to read.

55. I would rather read the best 100 books over and over again until I absorb them rather than read all the books.

56. We live in an age of infinite leverage, and the economic rewards for genuine intellectual curiosity have never been higher. Following your genuine intellectual curiosity is a better foundation for a career than following whatever is making money right now.

57. Trying to build business relationships (networking) well in advance of doing business businesses is a complete waste of time.

58. Charisma is the ability to project love and confidence at the same time.

59. The people who succeed are irrationally passionate about something.

60. Happiness is the default state. It’s what’s there when you remove the sense that something is missing.

61. Arm yourself with specific knowledge.

62. Specialization is for insects. I don’t believe in this model of trying to focus your life on one thing. You’ve got one life just do everything you want.

63. Don’t spend your life making other people happy. Other people being happy is their problem.

64. Mental models are really just compact ways for you to recall your own knowledge.

65. My 1 repeated learning in life: ‘There Are No Adults.’ Everyone’s making it up as they go along. Figure it out yourself, and do it.

66. If you’re willing to bleed a little every day, you may win big later.

67. Technology democratizes consumption but consolidates production. The best person at anything in the world gets to do it for everyone.

68. If you have specific knowledge, you have accountability, and you have leverage, they have to pay you what you’re worth. If they pay you what you’re worth, then you can get your time back. You can be hyper-efficient. You’re not doing meetings for meetings’ sake. You’re not trying to impress other people. You’re not writing things down to make it look like you did work. All you care about is the actual work itself.

69. My definition of wisdom is knowing the long-term consequences of your actions. Wisdom applied to external problems is judgment.

70. You don’t make any decisions if you don’t judge anything. You just accept everything. If I do that for ten or fifteen minutes while walking around, I end up in a very peaceful, grateful state.

71. Don’t make up your mind. “Knowing” is the end of learning.

72. Desire is a contract that you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.

73. Art is anything done for its own sake.

74. All the returns in life, whether in wealth, relationships, or knowledge, come from compound interest.

75. A personal metric: how much of the day is spent doing things out of obligation rather than out of interest?

76. If you eat, invest, and think according to what the ‘news’ advocates, you’ll end nutritionally, financially, and morally bankrupt.

77. So, if you’re willing to bleed a little bit every day but in exchange you’ll win big later, you will do better. That is, by the way, entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs bleed every day. They’re not making money, they’re losing money, they’re constantly stressed out, all the responsibility is upon them, but when they win they win big. On average they’ll make more.

78. You get rewarded by society for giving it what it wants and doesn’t know how to get it elsewhere.

79. I have this saying inside my head: the closer you want to get to me, the better your values have to be.

80. Happiness, love, and passion aren’t things you find; they’re choices you make.

81. All greatness comes from suffering.

82. A fit body, a calm mind, a house full of love. These things cannot be bought — they must be earned.

83. Wealth buys your freedom.

84. Forget rich versus poor, white-collar versus blue. It’s now leveraged versus un-leveraged.

85. Grind and sweat, toil and bleed, face the abyss. It’s all part of becoming an overnight success.

86. It’s better to read a great book slowly than to fly through a hundred books quickly.

87. Specific knowledge is found much more by pursuing your innate talents, your genuine curiosity, and your passion. It’s not by going to school for whatever is the hottest job. It’s not by going into whatever field investors say is the hottest.

88. To summarize the fourth type [of luck], build your character in a certain way, then your character becomes your destiny.

89. The fewer desires I can have, the more I can accept the current state of things, the less my mind is moving— because the mind really exists in motion toward the future or the past — the more present I am, the happier and more content I will be.

90. Just focus on the one or two really important things, and everything else, just surrender to it.

91. A rational person can find peace by cultivating indifference to things outside their control.

92. You have two lives, and the second one begins when you realize you only have one.

93. Most of the gains in life come from suffering in the short term so you can get paid in the long term.

94. When building a portfolio of investments that can have non-linear outcomes, never sell early. You may be right most of the time, but the one time you’re wrong will cost you most of the returns.

95. If you care about ethics in wealth creation, it is better to create your wealth using code and media as leverage because then those products are equally available to everybody as opposed to trying to create your wealth through labor or capital.

96. Humans evolved in societies where there was no leverage… If I was chopping wood or carrying water for you, you knew that 8 hours put in would equal 8 hours of output… With a leveraged worker, judgment is far more important than how much time they put in or how hard they work.

97. If all your beliefs line up into neat little bundles, you should be highly suspicious.

98. The people who succeed are irrationally passionate about something.

99. The measure of how much you love something is what you sacrifice for it.

100. You should be able to pick up any book in the library and read it.

101. Reading a book isn’t a race — the better the book, the more slowly it should be absorbed.

102. Play long-term games with long-term people.

103. The group of scientists who made real breakthroughs and contributions probably added more to human society, I think, than any other single class of human beings. Not to take away anything from art or politics or engineering or business, but without science, we’d still be scrambling in the dirt, fighting with sticks, and trying to start fires.

104. Your only failures are written within your psyche and they are obvious to you. If you have too many of these moral shortcomings, you will not respect yourself. The worst outcome in this world is not having self-esteem. If you don’t love yourself, who will? I think you just have to be very careful about doing things you are fundamentally not going to be proud of, because they will damage you.

105. Inspiration is perishable. Act on it immediately.

106. You can’t be normal and expect abnormal returns.” I’ve always enjoyed that one too.

107. The only true test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life.

108. Retirement is when you stop sacrificing today for an imaginary tomorrow. When today is complete, in and of itself, you’re retired.

109. Don’t partner with cynics and pessimists; their beliefs are self-fulfilling.

110. Escape competition through authenticity. Basically, when you’re competing with people, it’s because you’re copying them. It’s because you’re trying to do the same thing. But every human is different. Don’t copy.

101. It’s only after you’re bored, you have the great ideas.

102. Learn to sell. Learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable.

103. If it entertains you now but will bore you someday, it’s a distraction. Keep looking.

104. Embrace accountability and take business risks under your own name. Society will reward you with responsibility, equity, and leverage.

105. The really smart thinkers are clear thinkers. They understand the basics at a very, very fundamental level. I would rather understand the basics really well than memorize all kinds of complicated concepts I can’t stitch together and can’t rederive from the basics.

106. No one can compete with you on being you. Most of life is a search for who and what needs you the most.

107. Most of the time, the person you have to become to make money is a high-anxiety, high-stress, hard-working, competitive person. When you have done that for 20, 30, 40, 50 years and you suddenly make money, you can’t turn it off. You’ve trained yourself to be a high-anxiety person. Then you have to learn how to be happy.

108. Sing the song that only you can sing, write the book that only you can write, build the product that only you can build… live the life that only you can live.

109. Don’t take yourself so seriously. You’re just a monkey with a plan.

110. I would rather be a failed entrepreneur than someone who never tried. Because even a failed entrepreneur has the skill set to make it on their own.

111. Getting rich is about knowing what to do, who to do it with, and when to do it. It is much more about understanding than purely hard work. Yes, hard work matters, and you can’t skimp on it. But it has to be directed in the right way. If you don’t know yet what you should work on, the most important thing is to figure it out. You should not grind at a lot of hard work until you figure out what you should be working on.

112. No one is going to value you more than you value yourself.

113. Hiking is walking meditation. Journaling is writing meditation. Praying is gratitude meditation. Showering is accidental meditation. Sitting quietly is direct meditation.

114. You make your own luck if you stay.

115. The less you want something, the less you’re thinking about it, the less you’re obsessing over it, the more you’re going to do it in a natural way.

116. I think learning how to break habits is a very important meta-skill that can serve you better in life than almost anything else.

117. Wealth creation is an evolutionarily recent positive-sum game. Status is an old zero-sum game. Those attacking wealth creation are often just seeking status. . . They’re playing a different game, and it’s a worst game. It’s a zero-sum game instead of a positive-sum game.

118. The enemy of peace of mind is expectations drilled into you by society and other people.

119. The means of learning are abundant, and the desire to learn is scarce.

120. Life hack: when in bed, meditate. Either you will have a deep meditation or fall asleep. Victory either way.

121. Taleb’s Skin In The Game is required reading.

122. It’s not about educated versus uneducated. It’s about “likes to read” and “doesn’t like to read.”

123. To the experts, what looks like hard work from the outside, is a play from the inside.

124. Meditation is intermittent fasting for the mind.

125. Intentions don’t matter, actions do. That’s why being ethical is hard.

126. Reality is neutral. Our reactions reflect back and create our world. Judge, and feel separate and lonely. Anger, and lose peace of mind. Cling, and live in anxiety. Fantasize, and miss the present. Desire, and suffer until you have it.

127. Every second you have on this planet is very precious, and it’s your responsibility to make sure you’re happy and interpreting everything in the best possible way.

128. The most important trick to be happy is to realize that happiness is a choice that you make and a skill set that you develop. You choose to be happy, and then you work at it. It’s just like building muscles.

129. Sharks eat well, but live a life surrounded by sharks.

130. People creating wealth will always be attacked by people playing status games.

131. Caught in a funk? Use meditation, music, and exercise to reset your mood. Then choose a new path to commit emotional energy for rest of day.

132. There are three broad classes of leverage. One form of leverage is labor — other humans working for you. It is the oldest form of leverage and actually not a great one in the modern world. I would argue this is the worst form of leverage that you could possibly use. Managing other people is incredibly messy. It requires tremendous leadership skills. You’re one short hop from a mutiny or getting eaten or torn apart by the mob.

133. We’re not really here that long, and we don’t really matter that much. Nothing that we do lasts. Eventually, you will fade. Your works will fade. Your children will fade. Your thoughts will fade. These planets will fade. This sun will fade. It will all be gone.

134. Earn with your mind, not your time.

135. The final form of leverage is brand new, the most democratic form. It is products with no marginal cost of replication. This includes books, media, movies, and code… Now you can multiply your efforts without involving other humans and without needing money from other humans… This newest form of leverage is where all the new fortunes are made.

136. As long as you are doing what you want, it’s not a waste of time.

137. Reading is more efficient when at rest. Audio is more efficient when in motion.

138. If you can’t decide, the answer is no.

139. About Luck Making money isn’t about luck. It’s about becoming the kind of person who makes money. Making money isn’t about luck.

140. The most common bad advice I hear is “You’re too young.” Most of history was built by young people, they just got credit when they were older. The only way to truly learn something is by doing it. Yes, listen to guidance, but don’t wait.

141. Don’t partner with pessimists.

142. The internet enables any niche interest, as long as you’re the best person at it, to scale out.

143. The smarter you get, the slower you read.

144. Art is creativity. Art is anything done for its own sake. What are the things that are done for their own sake and there’s nothing behind them? Loving somebody, creating something, playing. To me, creating businesses is play. I create busineses because it’s fun, because I’m into the product… It makes money almost a side-effect… My motivation has shifted from being goal-oriented to being artistic. Ironically, I think I’m much better at it now.

145. If you want to make the wrong decision, ask everyone.

146. As you get older, you just realize that there’s no happiness in material possessions.

147. Any meeting with eight people sitting around at a conference table, nothing is getting done in that meeting. You are literally just dying one hour at a time.

148. We evolved for scarcity but live in abundance.

149. Impatience with actions, patience with results.

150. At the end of the day, you are a combination of your habits and the people you spend the most time with.

151. Tension is who you think you should be. Relaxation is who you are.

152. Happiness is what there is when you remove the sense that something is missing in your life.

153. Be present above all else.

154. Reading is the ultimate meta-skill that can be traded for anything else.

155. Inspiration is perishable — act on it immediately.

156. The fundamental delusion — there is something out there that will make me happy and fulfilled forever.

157. I’ve learned that tit-for-tat iterated prisoner’s dilemma is the piece of game theory that is worth knowing the most. You can almost put down the game theory book after that.

158. The most important trick to happiness is to realize happiness is a skill you develop and a choice you make.

159. A taste of freedom can make you unemployable.

160. We don’t always get what we want, but sometimes what is happening is for the best.

161. If you want to be a philosopher king first become a king then become a philosopher. Not first become a philosopher and then become a king.