These are 4 different Excerpts from the

Founder of Angel List, about desires,

happiness, peace, pleasure and Aim ?
DISCLAIMER
[I built this entirely out of transcripts and talks Naval Ravikant has shared. Every attempt is
made to present Naval in his own words. However, there a The transcripts have been edited for
clarity and brevity. Concepts and interpretations change over time, medium, and context.
Interpretations will change over time. Read and interpret generously. Understand the original
intent may be different than your interpretation in a different time, medium, format, and context.]

What are Desires? Why are we unhappy and anxious? Why should
we be careful about desires? Why should we have to Tame our
mind?
Yeah. I find it a little bit more tightly, right? So let's go back to desire, right? This
is old, old Buddhist wisdom. I'm not saying anything original.
“But desire, to me, is a contract that you make with yourself to be unhappy until
you get what you want. Okay? And I keep that in front of minds. So when I'm
unhappy about something, I look for what is the underlying desire that I have
that's not being fulfilled.
It's okay to have desires. You're a biological creature, and you put on this earth,
you have to do something, you have to have desires, you have a mission.
But don't have too many. Don't pick them up unconsciously.” Don't pick them up
randomly. Don't have thousands of them.
My coffee's too cold, doesn't taste quite right. I'm not sitting perfectly. Oh, I wish
it was warmer. You know. My dog, you know, pooped in the lawn, I don't like
that. Whatever it is.

“Pick your one overwhelming desire. It's okay to suffer over that one, but on all
the others, do you want to let them go so you can be calm and peaceful and
relaxed And then you'll perform a better job”. Most people, when you're
unhappy, like a depressed person, it's not that they have very clear calm mind.
They're too busy in their mind. Their sense of self is too strong. They're sitting
indoors all the time. Their minds working, working, working. They're thinking
too much.
Well, if you want to be a high performance athlete, how good of an athlete are you
gonna be if you're always having epileptic seizures? If you're always like twitching
and running around and like jumping, and your limbs or flailing out of control?

The same way if you want to be effective in business, you need a clear, calm, cool,
collected mind. Warren Buffett plays bridge all day long and goes for walks in the
sun. He doesn't sit around like constantly loading his brain with non-stop
information and getting worked up about every little thing.
We live in an age of infinite leverage. What I mean by that is that your actions can
be multiplied a thousand fold, either by broadcasting a podcast or by investing
capital or by having people work for you or by writing code. So because of that,
the impacts of good decision making are much higher than they used to be.
Because now you can influence thousands or millions of people through your
decisions or your code.

So, a clear mind leads to better judgment, leads to a better outcome. So

a happy, calm, peaceful person will make better decisions and have
better outcomes. So if you want to operate at peak performance, you
have to learn how to tame your mind just like you've learned how to tame
your body.

Why to Focus on 1 desire at a time ?

Yeah. Well, Confucius had a great saying that, you know, "Every man has two
lives. And the second starts when he realizes he has just one." And I read that, It
was one of those book dropping lines. You know, it's like mic drop.That's a crazy
one. That was a great one. Or another one is, "Next time you get sick --" You
know, because everybody may get sick every now and then. It's like, "A happy
person wants ten thousand things, a sick person just wants one thing." Right?
So it's your unlimited desires that are clouding your peace, your happiness, have
desires. You're a biological creature, stands up and says, "I can do something. I
move. I resist. I live." But just be very careful about your desires. This is the
oldest most trite wisdom, desire is suffering. That's what it means, right? Every
desire you have is an access where you will suffer.
So, just don't focus on more than one desire at a time. The universe is
rigged in such a way that if you just want one thing and you focus on that,
you'll get it. But everything else, you got to let go.”

Why do we seek pleasures and where should our desires comes

from and why should be cautious about it ?
Yeah like very alread life is short I've died every bit at a time right, it's a you've
been dead for 13 and a half billion years, that's a lot, that's how long from the Big
Bang till now and universe will be around 70 billion years you're around for
50-70 hundred years here it's a blink of a firefly in the night.

You're just barely here so you got to make the most of every minute which
doesn't mean that you chase some stupid desire for your entire life; what it
means is that like every second that you have on this planet it's very precious
it's you're responsible to make sure you're happy and you're interpreting
everything in the best possible way.

Happiness could be I'm just going to go drink all day at the bar; that's pleasure,
so happiness is one of these bad words and I'm almost started to bring it up
because an overloaded word, it's like friendship or love it could mean anything
to anyone.

To me happiness is an internal trait that comes out of being peaceful and

accepting of whatever is going on around you it's that sense that nothing is
missing in this moment right so,

“If you have the sense that something is missing in this moment aka desire that
will pull you out of this moment and will make you unhappy ;our natural state is
to be happy, if a child is unhappy you say what's wrong? If an adult is really
happy you say why are you happy, right it's a little weird. So, I think we're born
with happiness we're intrinsically happy creatures ‘but we become unhappy
because our egos create desire, the desire pulls us out of the moment so,
something is missing right now then, we chase that and we wonder why we're
and then we try to drown that sense of loss out through pleasure and pleasure
comes through drugs, drinking, partying, sex whatever could even be extreme
sports it's all just trying to forget ourselves’ and I think there ways how we got
the and we all have it, I mean we're all looking for ways to forget ourselves
because we are often our own worst terrors, we're own worst taskmasters,
we're always arguing with ourselves disciplining ourselves, wanting things
then, not wanting to want things, fantasizing about things, regretting things
this is constant monkey mind loop, that's running in your head that's why not
meditation is in popularity, becausepeople are starting to realize, like maybe
that's not how I'm meant to live.”

You know 300 years ago or even forget five years ago pre smartphone seven
years ago you weren't constantly being pulled out of your present reality into your
phone be like this constant little addiction, we're like pigeons now and Skinner's
experiments you know pressing little tap to get dopamine hits, so we've been
reduced to that and;

“It's really important to be cognizant of first, you get to a peaceful state where
you feel like nothing is missing and I'm okay with this moment then, you can
add your desires very carefully one by one, that's a hard state for most,
that's a challenge, it is a challenge because we have unconsciously been led
there through desires that we copy from other people most of our desires are
picked up through society, what other people are doing, what my friends are
doing, what my brother is doing, what my classmates are doing, what my wife
wants etc., so we copy those desires and then we make them part of ourselves.”
Be careful about it.

We create these constructs of desire that we copy from each other on top. It's
really important to sit down sometime close the door, turn off the lights, and just
sit there by yourself, and watch your mind not even judge it, don't even argue
with it, don't even fight it, just watch the thing run out of control, your mind is
like a monkey that's running around flinging feces and throwing bananas
everywhere, it's impossible to control, and ask yourself how did I become like
that? because when you were a child, you want to like that look at any
two-year-old they're not like that they live very much moment they don't have
constant uncontrollable thoughts about the past or the future that's what keeps
them happy so, how can you unconditional some of these things that you don't
want anymore running through your head it's possible but it's different for
everybody.

BONUS
What is Your Quality of Life ?

And if you want to see what the quality of your life actually is, put down the drink,
put down the computer, put down the smartphone, put down the book, put down
the headphones, just sit by yourself, doing nothing. And then you will know what
the quality of your life actually is because that’s what you’re always running away
from.

About Anxiety and Unexamined Life.

But if let’s just say like you have a family, so let’s just say one of your kids comes
to you is like, “Dad, I’m suffering from a lot of anxiety. What should I do?”

Or you observe it and you want to help your kid out. What types of
recommendations would you make? Or might you make?

Yeah. It’s really hard to separate all the pieces out. I mean, it comes from a
combination of a philosophy, yoga meditation, and getting older, having kids.
Like you, I’ve had some psychedelic experiences, but those are very far back in
the past, just a distant memory at this point. But I would say the number one
thing that has been very, very important for me is meditation.

And it’s a stupid thing to say, because so trite, everybody just says it now. But
when I say meditation, I don’t mean sitting there and watching your breath or
chanting a mantra. I mean, self-examination and meditation is a great way to do
that self-therapy. It’s sitting there with your thoughts. So anxiety, this pervasive
nonspecific anxiety where we’re just constantly on edge about everything, that
comes from an unexamined life. I think it was Socrates who said, “An
unexamined life is not worth living.” I forget who said that quote—
One of those smart philosopher types, but it’s correct. It’s your unexamined life
that is causing the problems. And you can examine it in multiple ways. You can
examine it through you can have some crazy mushroom trip where it all comes
out one night. You could do a lot of meditation sitting there with yourself and
letting your mind run crazy.

And then seeing what’s actually in your mind that your mind wants to tell you,
and have you listened to, and have you resolved that is unresolved. It could be
through therapy. It could be through reading lots of philosophy and reflection
and long walks. So there’s many, many ways to tackle it, but it’s that spending the
time with yourself to examine why are you having these thoughts?

Think about it this way. We spend so much time in our relationships. Our
relationships with our wives, our relationship with our colleagues, our
relationships to our business partners, our relationship with our friends, the most
important relationship you have is with yourself. It’s with this voice in your head
that is constantly rattling every waking hour, it’s this crazy roommate living
inside your mind who’s always chattering, always chattering, never shuts up and
you can’t control these thoughts.

They just come up out of you don’t even know where, and those quality of your
thoughts, those conversations you’re having in your head all the time. That is
your world. That is the world you live in. That’s the worldview you have. That’s a
lens you see through, and that’s going to determine the quality of your life more
than anything else.

And if you want to see what the quality of your life actually is, put down the drink,
put down the computer, put down the smartphone, put down the book, put down
the headphones, just sit by yourself, doing nothing. And then you will know what
the quality of your life actually is because that’s what you’re always running away
from.

That’s why people, when they try to meditate they sit down, “I hate it. I can’t sit
still.” Why? Because your mind is eating you alive. Your life is unexamined. Your
mind is running in loops over things that it has not resolved. And because they’re
not resolved when you run around your normal life. It’s not that those problems
have gone away. It’s that they’re just there, they’re there, but they’re provoking
anxiety.
And what you think of as the anxiety that’s kind of consuming you and you can’t
identify the source. That’s just the tip of an iceberg poking out from underneath
the water and underneath this giant pile of garbage of decisions that were made
without too much thought of situations that you’re in, that you haven’t resolved,
that you need to resolve, of problems that you have, or desires that you have that
have gone unmet or unmanifested, or are being, or contradictions that you’re
living in a ways that you, which you feel trapped.

So proper meditation, proper examination should ruin the life that you’re
currently living. It should cause you to leave relationships. It should cause you to
reestablish boundaries with family members and with colleagues. It should cause
you to quit your job. It should cause you to change your eating patterns. It should
cause you to spend more time with yourself.

It should cause it to change the books you read. It should cause us to change what
your friends are. If it doesn’t do that, it’s not real examination. If it doesn’t come
attached with destruction of your current life, then you can’t create the new life in
which you will not have the anxiety.

The more anxiety in your life the more you need to change. Anxiety can be
conditional for a temporary time due to a particular reason but most of the time
either it is in habit or lifestyle or it starts to become a part of life.