Naval Ravikant - One Simple Mental Hack To Completely Change Your Life!

Nugget from Naval Ravikant

Hey Friend!

I was re-listening an interview of Tim Ferriss with Naval Ravikant, and I picked a gem that I wanna share with you!

I have been applying it for quite some time now (as I first heard it long ago) and it has definitely shifted my view of the world…

I hope you find it valuable too!

👤 Doer

💡Nugget

Source → Naval Ravikant on the Tim Ferriss Show

[Naval Ravikant]:

I recently read a book which I think a lot of people have read as a child called Illusions by Richard Bach.

It’s a beautiful book.

[Just as the book] Siddhartha is about a character becoming Buddha-ish and his journey to do that… Illusions is about a character becoming Jesus and his journey to do that.

And it’s very messianic.

It’s kind of got a Midwestern twist to it.

But it has a lot of really great little mental hacks for living your life.

One of them, was to treat your life as a movie.

So if you pick up a film reel, that’s a finished movie. That’s kind of your life. It’s a finished life. Because so much of it is out of your control that for all practical purposes, it’s finished. And then you sort of have to watch it one frame at a time to experience it.

So the purpose of your life is to live it.

But now, if you start living your life as if it’s a movie and you’re the star of your own movie… [Why the star?] → Because everyone's trapped in their own heads. The things you care about are so different than the things I care about that for all practical purposes, we’re living in two different worlds that intersect only briefly. So we’re each living the movie of our lives.

Now, if you start treating real life as that, you’re walking around and you’re like:

“Well, this is the movie of my life.”

[Then] You take a very positive view towards everything. Because you’re like:

“Well, I'm sitting here on a train and I'm acting all bored… When really in the movie of my life something interesting would be going on! In the movie of my life, I'd be talking to the person next to me. So why don’t I just talk to the person next to me?”

[Tim Ferriss]:

I like that.

[Naval Ravikant]:

Yeah, so it sort of helps you just keep your life moving along in a positive way.

Because it’s your movie.

You want it to turn out well.

And even when you get pissed off at people, you say:

“Oh yeah, that’s the villain. Awesome! The villain has entered the scene. This is the foil who now I am going to counterbalance against and I'm going to learn something in the process. Let’s see if this is the chapter where I win or I lose—and then maybe I'll win later on down the road.”

Another way to think about it is that it also gets you to be more moral or more ethical because if it’s a movie, that means there are hundreds of thousands or millions of people watching your movie…

So what would the hero of the movie do?

Would the hero behave badly or would the hero behave well?

Well, hopefully the hero would behave well.

There’s no such thing as a part of the movie where the hero does something terrible and the audience kind of overlooks it.

So, if you treat the world as a movie of your life, and you treat yourself as the hero of that movie, it makes the world look like a much more pleasant place to deal with.

"Enthusiastically build an extraordinary reality day after day."

- Brunello Cucinelli

💥 Stuff I Loved

This newsletter is brought to you by VEED!

VEED: The Simplest Path to Professional Videos!

In today’s digital age, visuals often trump text, with an average person devouring 17 hours of video content weekly. Yet, for many brands, video remains a daunting frontier, especially without AI to streamline production.

Enter VEED, the comprehensive video editing tool designed for ease and efficiency. VEED transforms video creation with:

• Simplicity: Auto subtitles and background noise removal turn hours of work into mere clicks.

• Speed: AI-enhanced features enable rapid production, saving valuable time without sacrificing quality.

• Accessibility: With VEED’s intuitive design, creating standout videos isn’t limited to professionals.

👉 Elevate your video content at VEED.io and captivate your audience like never before.

Just got the YouTube plaque 🎉

I hope you enjoyed today’s edition!

Happy Friday ;)

Julio xx

P.S. If you liked this article, you'll definitely enjoy my free 80-page ebook. It’s packed with 23 big ideas (from top influential doers and entrepreneurs) to become better, richer and wiser. Download your copy here!