My Favorite Nugget from Naval in 2025...

Nugget by Naval Ravikant (and Viktor Frankl)

👋 Hey friend,

I was listening to a conversation between Naval Ravikant and Eric Jorgenson, and there’s one nugget in there that keeps resonating with me—even when I’ve heard it a few times already on other interviews or tweets from Naval.

It’s the idea that it’s better to be in love, than to be loved. And I expanded it with a passage from the book Man’s Search for Meaning (by Viktor Frankl)—which I think fits this idea perfectly.

👤 Doers

💡Nugget

🟠 Naval Ravikant:

Once your health is taken care of, once your material needs are taken care of… You pursue truth, love and beauty.

Love I think is important because people want to be loved, because that helps them get over their mortality. It makes them feel a little safer (monkeys huddling in the dark around the campfire, scared of what’s out there in the woods).

But one thing I’ve realized for myself is that: it’s better to be in love than to be loved.

If somebody loves you too much—like your mom’s coming up and hugging you all the time, or some girl or some guy is obsessed with you—it can get a little clawing, right? It feels like it’s a burden. You almost don’t want that.

But when you feel in love with somebody, that’s when you’re high, that’s when you’re elated. And so, that’s counterintuitive, but… falling in love with someone or something is actually very beneficial to you. It does involve sacrifice. It involves risk. But I think that people who give up on love in their lives, you know, it’s kind of a sad life, right? You get too jaded too fast.

"What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love."
- Fyodor Dostoevsky


"Courage is a love affair with the unknown."
- Osho

And you don’t have to love people necessarily… You can love the universe, God, animals, what have you… But everybody needs to find something in their life that they love more than themselves—their mission, their family, their children, their religion... Otherwise, it’s going to be a miserable life.

👉 Source: My Conversation with Naval on Learning Happiness

🟠 Viktor Frankl:

A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth—that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart:

The salvation of man is through love and in love.

I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way—an honorable way—in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, “The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.”

👉 Book: Man’s Search for Meaning, by Viktor Frankl

All the nuggets I’ve picked for the past 5 years are saved and classified in a searchable database, which (as of October 2025) contains 4,595 timeless ideas (sourced directly from the most influential doers and entrepreneurs — captured on books, interviews/podcasts, tweets, and articles).

I call this database Doers Notebook.

🤔 Why did I build this?

Well, as the Latin motto goes, “A chief part of learning is simply knowing where you can find a thing.” And since it’s all 🔎 searchable, we only need to type a keyword to immediately get a list of insights related to it!

For instance, if I’m unsure about how to get more sales in my business, I can simply type the word “sales” and immediately get 126 insights relevant to sales! In this case from Jim Edwards, Peter Thiel, Naval Ravikant, Paul Graham, Sam Altman, Balaji Srinivasan, Nassim Taleb, and many other remarkable individuals.

It’s like having a second brain 🧠 from which we can pull wisdom on demand, to help us significantly decrease the error rate in our judgment and also get new perspectives on how to solve problems.

In an age of infinite leverage [code and media], judgment is the most important skill.

- Naval Ravikant

A change of perspective is worth 80 IQ points.

- Alan Kay

If you want to see Doers Notebook in action, I made a screen record!

You can also go directly to DoersNotebook.co

💥 Stuff I Loved

A tweet I like to revisit…

I hope you enjoyed today’s letter!

Talk you soon,

Your nuggets friend Julio :)