Self-esteem is just the reputation that you have with yourself. You’ll always know.
Naval Ravikant is the CEO and co-founder of AngelList. He previously co-founded Vast.com and Epinions.com, which went public as part of Shopping.com. He is an active angel investor and has invested in more than 100 companies, including many “unicorn” mega-successes. His deals include Twitter, Uber, Yammer, Postmates, Wish, Thumbtack, and OpenDNS. In recent years, he is the person I call most for startup-related advice.
What is the book (or books) you’ve given most as a gift, and why? Or what are one to three books that have greatly influenced your life?
Total Freedom by Jiddu Krishnamurti. A rationalist’s guide to the perils of the human mind. The “spiritual” book that I keep returning to.
Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. A history of the human species, with observations, frameworks, and mental models that will have you looking at history and your fellow humans differently.
Everything by Matt Ridley. Matt is a scientist, optimist, and forward thinker. Genome, The Red Queen, The Origins of Virtue, The Rational Optimist—they’re all great.
Debbie Millman has been called “one of the most influential designers working today” by Graphic Design USA. She is the founder and host of Design Matters, the world’s first and longest-running podcast about design, where she’s interviewed nearly 300 design luminaries and cultural commentators including Massimo Vignelli and Milton Glaser. Her artwork has been exhibited around the world. She’s designed everything from wrapping paper to beach towels, greeting cards to playing cards, notebooks to T-shirts, and Star Wars merchandise to global Burger King rebrands. Debbie is the President Emeritus of AIGA (one of only five women to hold the position in the organization’s 100-year history), the editorial and creative director of Print magazine, and the author of six books. In 2009, Debbie co-founded (with Steven Heller) the world’s first master’s program in branding at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, which has received international acclaim.
What is the book (or books) you’ve given most as a gift, and why? Or what are one to three books that have greatly influenced your life?
A book that has influenced my life and one that I keep going back to over and over is the anthology The Voice That Is Great Within Us: American Poetry of the 20th Century. Gorgeously, thoughtfully, and carefully edited by Hayden Carruth, it was required reading in a summer college class I attended back in the early 1980s. This funny-looking book introduced me to my most treasured, deeply felt poem, “Maximus to Himself,” by Charles Olson, which has since become the blueprint of my life, as well as the poetry of Denise Levertov, Adrienne Rich, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and so many more. I still have my original copy and though the cover has come off and the spine is cracked in numerous places, I will never replace it.
In order to “have” you must “do,” and in order to “do” you must “be.”
Terry Crews is an actor and former NFL player (Los Angeles Rams, San Diego Chargers, Washington Redskins, and Philadelphia Eagles). His wide-ranging credits include the original viral Old Spice commercials, television series such as The Newsroom, Arrested Development, and Everybody Hates Chris, and films including White Chicks, the Expendables franchise, Bridesmaids, and The Longest Yard. He now stars on the Golden Globe Award-winning Fox sitcom Brooklyn Nine-Nine. In 2014, Terry released his autobiography, Manhood: How to Be a Better Man—or Just Live with One.
What is the book (or books) you’ve given most as a gift, and why? Or what are one to three books that have greatly influenced your life?
The Master Key System by Charles F. Haanel. I have read hundreds of personal development books, but this is the one that clearly showed me how to visualize, contemplate, and focus on what it was I truly wanted. It revealed to me that we only get what we desire most, and to apply myself with a laserlike focus upon a goal, task, or project. That in order to “have” you must “do,” and in order to “do” you must “be”—and this process is immediate. Although it takes time for these desires to manifest in our material world, you must see the thing you desire as completed, finished, and real, now. The better you can do this, the more you can accomplish. I have bought several copies of this book and distributed it to family and friends. I also reread it probably once a month to keep my vision clear.
Two more are Viktor E. Frankl’s incredible Man’s Search for Meaning and David McRaney’s You Are Not So Smart. Both books are absolutely essential to me in order to keep my perspectives correct in a changing world.
Thinking of what makes me happy doesn’t give me the same clarity as thinking about what gives me bliss.
Kyle Maynard is a best-selling author, entrepreneur, and ESPY award-winning mixed martial arts athlete, known for becoming the first quadruple amputee to reach the summits of Mount Kilimanjaro and Mount Aconcagua without the aid of prosthetics. Oprah Winfrey called Kyle “one of the most inspiring young men you will ever hear about.” Arnold Schwarzenegger described him as “a champion human,” and even Wayne Gretzky has spoken of Kyle’s “greatness.” Kyle was born with a rare condition that resulted in arms that end at the elbows and legs that end near his knees. Despite this, and with the support of his family, Kyle learned as a child to live life independently without prosthetics. Kyle has become a champion wrestler (inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame), CrossFit Certified Instructor, owner of the No Excuses gym, world record-setting weightlifter, and skilled mountaineer.
What is the book (or books) you’ve given most as a gift, and why? Or what are one to three books that have greatly influenced your life?
Dune by Frank Herbert The Stranger by Albert Camus The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell
How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success? Do you have a “favorite failure” of yours?
It’s almost more difficult to think of a time when an apparent failure didn’t set me up for later success. Failure is inextricably connected to any major success I’ve ever had.
It all happened so suddenly and cinematically that it might defy belief—I remembered that actually I had always wanted to be a writer. So I started writing that very evening.
Susan Cain is the co-founder of Quiet Revolution and the author of the bestsellers Quiet Power: The Secret Strengths of Introverted Kids, and Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, which has been translated into 40 languages and been on the New York Times bestseller list for more than four years. Quiet was named the best book of the year by Fast Company magazine, which also named Susan one of its “Most Creative People in Business.” Susan is the co-founder of the Quiet Schools Network and the Quiet Leadership Institute, and her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, and other publications. Her TED Talk has been viewed more than 17 million times and was named by Bill Gates as one of his all-time favorite talks.
How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success? Do you have a “favorite failure” of yours?
Many, many moons ago, I used to be a corporate lawyer. I was an ambivalent corporate lawyer at best, and anyone could have told you that I was in the wrong profession, but still: I’d dedicated tons of time (three years of law school, one year of clerking for a federal judge, and six and a half years at a Wall Street firm, to be exact) and had lots of deep and treasured relationships with fellow attorneys. But the day came, when I was well along on partnership track, that the senior partner in my firm came to my office and told me that I wouldn’t be put up for partner on schedule. To this day, I don’t know whether he meant that I would never be put up for partner or just delayed for a good long while. All I know is that I embarrassingly burst into tears right in front of him—and then asked for a leave of absence. I left work that very afternoon and bicycled round and round Central Park in NYC, having no idea what to do next. I thought I’d travel. I thought I’d stare at the walls for a while.
The disease of our times is that we live on the surface. We’re like the Platte River, a mile wide and an inch deep.
Steven Pressfield has made a professional life in five different writing arenas—advertising, screenwriting, fiction, narrative nonfiction, and self-help. He is the best-selling author of The Legend of Bagger Vance, Gates of Fire, The Afghan Campaign, and The Lion’s Gate, as well as the cult classics on creativity, The War of Art, Turning Pro, and Do the Work. His Wednesday column on stevenpressfield.com is one of the most popular series about writing on the web.
What is an unusual habit or an absurd thing that you love?
This’ll sound crazy, but I have certain places that I go to, usually alone, that summon up for me earlier eras in my life. Time is a weird thing. Sometimes you can appreciate a moment that’s gone more in the present than you did when it was actually happening. The places that I go to are different all the time and they’re usually mundane, ridiculously mundane. A gas station. A bench on a street. Sometimes I’ll fly across the country just to go to one of these spots. Sometimes it’s on a vacation or a business trip when I’m with family or other people. I might not ever tell them. Or I might. Sometimes I’ll take somebody along, though it usually doesn’t work (how could it?).
What advice would you give to a smart, driven college student about to enter the “real world”? What advice should they ignore?
I’m probably hopelessly out of date but my advice is get real-world experience: Be a cowboy. Drive a truck. Join the Marine Corps. Get out of the hypercompetitive “life hack” frame of mind. I’m 74. Believe me, you’ve got all the time in the world. You’ve got ten lifetimes ahead of you. Don’t worry about your friends “beating” you or “getting somewhere” ahead of you. Get out into the real dirt world and start failing. Why do I say that? Because the goal is to connect with your own self, your own soul. Adversity. Everybody spends their life trying to avoid it. Me too. But the best things that ever happened to me came during the times when the shit hit the fan and I had nothing and nobody to help me. Who are you really? What do you really want? Get out there and fail and find out.
Endings don’t have to be failures, especially when you choose to end a project or shut down a business…. Even the best gigs don’t last forever. Nor should they.
Samin Nosrat is a writer, teacher, and chef. Called “a go-to resource for matching the correct techniques with the best ingredients” by The New York Times, and “the next Julia Child” by NPR’s All Things Considered, she’s been cooking professionally since 2000, when she first stumbled into the kitchen at Chez Panisse. Samin is one of five food columnists for The New York Times Magazine. She lives, cooks, surfs, and gardens in Berkeley, California. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking.
What purchase of $100 or less has most positively impacted your life in the last six months (or in recent memory)?
Paul Stamets’ Host Defense MyCommunity mushroom complex is the most incredible immunity supplement I have ever taken (and I have taken a lot of them!). No matter how much I travel, how many hands I shake, or how exhausted I am, I don’t get sick as long as I take the supplement diligently.
How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success? Do you have a “favorite failure” of yours?
I have had so many spectacular failures, but looking back, I can see how each of them led me a little closer to doing what I actually wanted to do. Years before I was ready to write a book of my own, I bungled two opportunities to co-write cookbooks with other people. These mistakes haunted me, and I was sure I’d never get to write another book. But I waited, and I persisted, and after 17 years I wrote the book I’d always dreamt of.
Principles are fundamental truths that serve as the foundations for behavior that gets you what you want out of life. They can be applied again and again in similar situations to help you achieve your goals.
Reading this book will prompt you and others to discover your own principles from wherever you think is best and ideally write them down. Doing that will allow you and others to be clear about what your principles are and understand each other better. It will allow you to refine them as you encounter more experiences and to reflect on them, which will help you maek better decisions and be better understood.
Introduction
Life Principles
The overarching principles that drive my approach to everything are laid out in Life Principles. In this section, I explain my principles in greater depth and show how they apply in the natural world, in our private lives and relationships, in business and policymaking, and of course at Bridgewater. I’ll share the 5-Step Process I’ve developed for achieving one’s goals and making effective choices; I’ll also share some of the insights I’ve gained into psychology and neuroscience and explain how I’ve applied them in my private life and in my business. This is the real heart of the book because it shows these principles can be applied to most anything by most anyone.
Work Principles
In Work Principles, you’ll get a close-up view of the unusual way we operate at Bridgewater. I will explain how we’ve coalesced our principles into an idea meritocracy that strives to deliver meaningful work and meaningful relationships through radical truth and radical transparency. I’ll show you how this works at a granular level and how it can be applied to nearly any organization to make it more effective. As you will see, we are simply a group of people who are striving to be excellent at what we do and who recognize that we don’t know much relative to what we need to know. We believe that thoughtful, unemotional disagreement by independent thinkers can be converted into believability-weighted decision making that is smarter and more effective than the sum of its parts. Because the power of a group is so much greater than the power of an indivicual, I believe these work principles are even more important than the life principles on which they’re based.
