Nate's Reviews > The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness

Regurgitated bromides

Does everything in life have to have an applied utility and an end goal? Apparently so. Early on, the narrator advises to ditch courses (eg, geography, history) if you come to understand that they will have no future use for you. Good grief. I'm assuming he's talking about post-secondary education, where you have a choice as to what you want to study. And if so, he has no idea what a university education that includes history and geography is about. Certainly, it's about content. But moreover it's about fomenting and improving one's critical thinking and reasoned, original argumentation. The author fails to understand this, it seems; and it was at this point I started skimming the book.

What you get is a somewhat haphazard accounting of how to market yourself. As with most of these (useless) finance books, you are advised to anticipate consumer needs (if not create such needs yourself). Of course, doing so is quite often a matter of chance; and so the book invariably can't tell you how to gauge such need. Of course.

Don't waste your time with this compendium of insights-that-are-nothing-more-than-rah-rah-blather. Instead, read history and study geography. You'll be a much better person, and likely much happier.