Work the Least for It

Happy people don’t have to work as hard

Naval:

The quality of our decisions is paramount in the modern age, because we’re all leveraged. You can be leveraged through code, community, media, capital, labor and other ways. If you’re smart, you leverage every decision you make.

If Warren Buffett makes the right decision 85% of the time and his competitors get it right 70% of the time, Buffett will win everything. That’s a source of his strength: good decision making. He makes one or two decisions a year. Most of the time he’s sitting around reading books, thinking, reading S-1s, playing bridge, traveling and golfing.

Obviously, hard work is not the solution. Good decision making and high leverage is the solution.

A peaceful mind makes better decisions

Having a peaceful mind, being a happier person, relying less on momentary pleasure and being calmer will give you the frame of mind to make better decisions. Being happy will actually increase your effectiveness. As long as the increase in effectiveness is higher than the reduction in drive, you’re well off.

Ask yourself: Would you rather be the best in the world by working the hardest for it or by working the least for it, because you worked the most intelligently?

Imagine you are the universal god. You are omniscient and omnipotent. You could change anything in the universe just by pushing a butterfly in one direction, because you know exactly how the particles will collide from there on out.

Omniscience is omnipotence. Knowledge is power. We can achieve happiness purely through knowledge, and that happiness will improve our decision making. That happiness will give us more time to read; make us more knowledgeable about how we operate and other people operate; make us more effective; and improve our judgment. It should also increase our earnings and the returns we need to be financially free.