Live Your Truth – by Kamal Ravikant
Date read: 6/19/17. Recommendation: 6/10.
Not a book I would typically read, but there are a few hidden gems in its passages. If you're looking for inspiration, it's an easy read that you can get through in a day. Ravikant's handful of original, eye-opening insights make it worth it. Most of the book is focused on tapping into yourself and living an authentic life.
See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.
My Notes:
What are the key components of one's life? Buckets, that if you fill daily, even if just a drop, move you forward and create progress.
Example of four buckets? Health, wealth, relationships, and self-expression
We don't stumble accidentally into an amazing life. It takes decision, a commitment to consistently work on ourselves.
Our ability to love and create – that alone makes this entire experiment worthwhile.
If there's a definition of freedom, I think it's this: living life on your terms.
The truth: I live my days as if I will live forever. Putting off so much, expecting there to be more time, another chance. If I accepted my mortality to my core, never knowing when the chain snaps, then how would I live? More on my terms. A free man. I'd write more, I'd love more, I'd laugh more.
Ask yourself: what is it, that if I believed it down to my core, would change everything?
Whatever you experience in your life, choose for it to make you grow in amazing and unbelievable ways.
Now I know what success is: living your truth, sharing it. Whether through a book, raising a child, building a company, creating art, or a conversation. Whatever human endeavor we choose, as long as we live our truth, it is a success.
Hemingway, whenever he was stuck in his writing, would tell himself to write one true thing. A true sentence. Then, he would write another. And another.
Peace is letting it be. Letting life flow, letting emotions flow through you. If you don't fight them, they pass through quickly and you feel better.
There is something magical about creating.
But that's the gift of any art. When we go all in, we find the answers. They're in us.
Suffering is when we resist the moment.
I once asked one of the best entrepreneurs in the Valley how he did it. He's created game-changing companies multiple times. He sort of laughed, then said, "if I only stuck with what I was qualified for, I'd be pushing a broom somewhere."
The best people, they're afraid, they question themselves. Many, if you corner them, will admit that they wonder if they're good enough. But what separates them from the rest is that they jump off the cliff anyway. Sprout wings on the way down.
It's the knowledge – or confidence or hope or sheer stupidity; the word doesn't matter – that they will figure it out. That's it. The only qualification you need to create anything.
I am not the outcome. I am never the result. I am only the effort.
One thing about discovering a truth: first you live it, and after you experience the transformative results, it is real for you unlike anything else. Then you almost become obsessive about sharing it.
Instead, I wrote the type of book that I would want to read. Importantly, a book I wish someone had given me when I was down.
Confidence comes from crossing thresholds.
You dive deeper, you strip away the cleverness and the words becomes more important than your ego and that's when you know it's real, when it's good.
The feeling of when you step away, finished, and you look at the page and you know you tapped into something bigger than yourself, that feeling is, dare I say, spiritual.