Naval Ravikant: “To operate at peak performance, you have to learn how to tame your mind.”

Desire to me is a contract that you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want, okay? And I keep that in front of mind. So when I'm unhappy about something, I look for what is the underlying desire that I have that's not being fulfilled. It's okay to have desires. You're a biological creature. You're put on this earth. You have to do something. You have to have desires. You have a mission, but don't have too many. Don't pick them up unconsciously, don't pick them up randomly, don't have thousands of them. My coffee is too cold, doesn't taste quite right. I'm not sitting perfectly. Oh, I wish it were warmer. You. Oh, my dog pooped in the lawn. I didn't like that. Whatever it is, pick your one overwhelming desire. It's okay to suffer over that one. But on all the others, you want to let them go so you can be calm and peaceful and relaxed, and then you'll perform a better job. Most people, when you're unhappy, like a depressed person, it's not that they have a very clear, calm mind. They're too busy in their mind. Their sense of self is too strong. They're sitting indoors all the time, their mind's working, working, working. They're thinking too much. Well, if you want to be a high performance athlete, how good of an athlete are you going if you're always having epileptic seizures, if you're always, like, twitching and running around and like, jumping and your limbs are flailing out of control? The same way if you want to be effective in business, you need a clear, calm, cool, collected mind. Warren Buffett plays bridge all day long and goes for walks in the sun. He doesn't sit around, like, constantly loading his brain with nonstop information and getting worked up about every little thing. We live in an age of infinite leverage. What I mean by that is that your actions can be multiplied a thousand fold, either by broadcasting at a podcast or by investing capital or by having people work for you or by writing code. So because of that, the impacts of good decision making are much higher than they used to be. Because now you can influence thousands or millions of people through your decisions or your code. So a clear mind leads to better judgment, leads to better outcome. So a happy, calm, peaceful person will make better decisions and have better outcomes. So if you want to operate at peak performance, you have to learn how to tame your mind, just like you have to learn how to tame your body.