Franco Prontera

Tweeting about Product 📱 | Cooking up something new 🍳 | ex-Too Good To Go 🌎

[Franco Prontera @FrancoProntera]

Naval Ravikant is a modern day philosopher and probably the most respected person in the tech world today.

I've probably revisited his blogpost on 'Happiness' more than a dozen times.

Here are 20 take away's I am regularly pondering on:

1. The big problems are the old ones.

The ones we’ve been trying to solve since the beginning: How do I stay happy? How do I become healthy? How do I become wealthy? How do I raise the family I want?

2. Health is a state of well-being.

Let’s get to a state of financial health where we’re not fearful day to day. That’s where we started, and we spent a lot of time on that. Let’s get to a state of physical health where we’re not suffering from afflictions, disease and addiction. Let’s get to a state of mental health where we’re relatively at peace and quite content with ourselves.

3. It’s easier to fulfil your material desires than to renounce them.

You can achieve happiness without financial wealth. Most of us recognize you’re not going to buy your way to happiness. But in modern times, you can buy your way out of common causes of unhappiness. Financial wealth can give you freedom and more time. It can give you peace.

4. “Every time I meet a prostitute, she wants to talk about God. And every time I meet a priest, he wants to talk about sex.”

Whatever you deny yourself will become your new prison.

5. “A sick man only wants one thing, a healthy man wants 10,000 things."

Physical health is the foundation of everything. If you don���t have your physical health, you have nothing. When you’re sick, your desires run away. Without the ability to get up and function, you can’t turn into the desiring machine that you are. When you’re sick, your desires run away.

6. Happiness is more like poetry than algorithms.

I might say, “The way to be happy is X,” and people will respond, “Well, didn’t you say happiness is a cause of misery?” This is not mathematics. You can’t link algorithms together. It's is more like poetry. If you read 50 poems by the same poet and try to map them out analytically and map words from one poem to another and see if it makes sense, you’ll miss the point. Don’t fixate on the words. Don’t even fixate on the sentences. Ponder the overall thought process and message.

7. Happiness Is a Skill You Can Develop

You’re not stuck at your current level of happiness. The first step to increasing your level of happiness is realizing you can. This is where a lot of people get tripped up. For the vast majority of people, some of their happiness—probably a lot more than they think—is in their control. This step is not easy. You might be stuck on this for a long time. Many people believe that happiness cannot be developed or changed, so they devalue it. They say, “Well, I don’t want to be happy.”

8. Desire’s a contract you make to be unhappy until you get what you want.

Happiness is returning to a state where nothing is missing. You become disturbed because you want something. Then you work really hard to get it and are miserable in the meantime. Finally, when you get it, you revert to the state you were in before you had it. It’s not like you achieve some peak level of bliss that you stay on forever.

9. Being Unhappy Is Extremely Inefficient.

Besides “I’m too smart for it,” another objection is, “I don’t want it to lower my productivity. I don’t want to have less desire or less work ethic.” Fact check on that is: True. The happier and more peaceful you are, the less likely you are to run out and change the world. At the same time, being unhappy is very inefficient. A peaceful person doesn’t have extraneous thoughts going through their head. If you’re a driven, unhappy person, your mind will be on 24/7.

10. A peaceful mind makes better decisions.

When I got happier in my own life, I became much more effective—even though I don’t work as hard as I used to. I’m able to form relationships with people who I would have kept at a distance earlier in my life, for whatever preconceived notions I held.

I make decisions much more clearly now, because I can see the long-term outcomes. I cut straight to the chase and don’t try and negotiate an extra 20% here or there—because I know that’s going to make me unhappy in the long-term, make the other person unhappy, and make the deal less stable.

I’ve become more productive even though I don’t work as hard, because I make better decisions.

11. 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?

12. Pursuing pleasure for its own sake creates addiction

Addictions let you engage in fake play and fake work. Before, you had to go socialize with friends; now, you can just get drunk with a bunch of strangers. Before, you had to go find a mate, create children and raise a family; now, you can just watch a lot of porn. Before, you had to hunt and climb trees to get fruit for a little bit of natural sweetness; now, you can buy all the gelato you want.

The modern struggle is standing up to these weaponized addictions. They give you small doses of pleasure, but they also desensitize you and expose you to the misery of their absence.

13. Addiction enables artificial relationships and activities

If you drink alcohol or take some kind of drug regularly, try the following thought experiment. What events do you most look forward to? I’ll bet they’re the ones where you get to drink or do drugs. You look forward to dinnertime, an upcoming party or bar-hopping with friends. To see how artificial it is, resolve to abstain from drinking or doing drugs the next time you go out. Now ask yourself how much you’re looking forward to that event. You’ll find: not at all.

14. Finding Peace from Mind

The mind should be a servant, not a master. Let’s talk about peace, and then we’ll talk about truth and how they relate to happiness. When I say you want to be happy, what I’m actually saying is you want to find peace. We say peace of mind, but what we really want is peace from mind.

15. The mind goes quiet during the moments of greatest pleasure

During your moments of greatest pleasure—whether you’re doing a drug, having an orgasm, finding your edge kite-surfing, laughing with a friend or looking at an incredible sunset—your mind goes quiet. It calms down, and that voice in your head goes silent. You achieve a sense of awe, which you might also call beauty, bliss or joy. We all seek this. We all chase it. Deep down, what we’re actually looking for is peace from mind.

16. Our environment rewards pessimism and paranoia

Modern society’s a lot safer and more peaceful. It still makes sense to be careful, maintain some paranoia and occasionally to get angry—but not as much as we’re hardwired to do. It’s okay to dial it down. The threat level is not as high as our genes think. If you were walking through the woods 1,000 years ago and heard something rustling in the bushes, you’d be right to be paranoid. Let’s say nine out of 10 times it’s a rabbit in the bushes, and one out of 10 times it’s a tiger. The optimist would catch a rabbit nine out of 10 times and get eaten by a tiger the 10th. The pessimist survives every time. Our evolved nature rewards pessimism. But we live in much safer times, so we must find ways past that and work towards peace.

17. “Peace is happiness at rest; happiness is peace in motion.”

18. Wise people are quiet

“The closer you are to the truth, the more silent you become inside.” We intuitively know this. When someone is blabbing too much or being the court jester, you know they’re not at peace. You know Robin Williams was not peaceful inside. We expect a wise person like a Lao Tzu or Socrates to be quiet—not because they’re trying to look wise, but because they’re internally quiet. We understand that peace and wisdom go together. Kapil Gupta, who’s written far more on this topic than I have, said, “Wisdom begets stoicism. Stoicism does not beget wisdom.” As you become wise, you naturally become stoic. You don’t become wise by being stoic. That’s reversing the cart and horse.

19. What society wants for you isn’t what’s good for you

What’s considered to be true is fought over. Individuals search for truth but groups search for consensus—and society is the largest group. So the biggest problem we run into is this: What society wants for you is not always what’s good for you. Even smart people go along with society’s lies. Here’s a simple example: “Money won’t make you happy” is a social truth, but it’s not an individual truth. Look at all the individuals trying to make money. They know money can remove a lot of sources of unhappiness and get them to a point where happiness is under their control. It becomes their choice, as opposed to being inflicted upon them by external forces.

20. The Path to Peace Is Truth

When self-improvement fails, work on discovering the truth. The search for peace is really the search for truth. Try to see the advantage of understanding things by discovering the truth rather than by practice. When you discover the truth, bad habits can disappear. Let’s say I’m trying to quit smoking. There are techniques I can try, but they’re always painful and difficult. Often, a moment will come when I see myself in a new way that allows the habit to disappear by itself. I get a diagnosis of lung cancer and understand I’m going to die, or I see a friend get in trouble with similar bad habits. When I see something clearly enough and understand it, the bad habit can dissolve by itself.

If we want peace, we have to give up on self-conflict. We even have to give up on self-improvement, because self-improvement is just a dressed up form of self-conflict. Instead, we need to use our natural curiosity to understand things better. Through understanding, we will naturally improve ourselves.

Once we truly understand the effects of unhealthy food on our bodies—when we see the extra weight we’re carrying, or we track the glucose spike and crash after eating too much sugar, or we see how caffeine hops us up and then crashes us—we automatically change for the better.

Find the full version at https://t.co/c9t6MpvuD1

Follow @naval for all his insights on modern day philosophy.

Follow, like, retweet if you like the above @FrancoProntera

[Franco Prontera @FrancoProntera]

@george__mack Please cite @rcbregman if you use his orginal content 😊

[Franco Prontera @FrancoProntera]

@iamkylebalmer Builder

[Franco Prontera @FrancoProntera]

@tferriss Excited to read this one @tferriss and gift to the team!

[Franco Prontera @FrancoProntera]

@Evecoins Done

[Franco Prontera @FrancoProntera]

Look what I learned on Duolingo in 2024! #Duolingo365

[Franco Prontera @FrancoProntera]

@nurijanian This may be your best post so far! Thanks! 🫶

[Bishal Nandi @LearnWithBishal]

This is hilarious.

Engineers are competing who creates the worst Ul on Reddit.

I think the winners are (thread)🧵

1/ Enter your phone number

[Franco Prontera @FrancoProntera]

@zach_yadegari @blakeandersonw Kudos Zach! Keep on building!

[Zach Yadegari @zach_yadegari]

0 to $1 million monthly revenue in 6 months.

Many people on this platform share “app growth secrets” but have never done it themselves.

I’ll be releasing the full viral playbook pdf with @blakeandersonw in the next month…

Retweet for early access.

[Franco Prontera @FrancoProntera]

@buccocapital Into the Wild - Jon Krakauer 🔥

[Franco Prontera @FrancoProntera]

@austinkleon Simon and Cartfunkel

[Franco Prontera @FrancoProntera]

How you do anything, is how you do everything.

[Franco Prontera @FrancoProntera]

Be the most optimistic person you know.

[George from 🕹prodmgmt.world @nurijanian]

great structured approach to thinking about and communicating different aspects of a product and where to highlight them @apierriPMM @heyrobk

[Franco Prontera @FrancoProntera]

When building a product, find out the difference between when your users are ‘very excited to use your product’ versus ‘very disappointed when they won’t be able to anymore’.

[Franco Prontera @FrancoProntera]

🔥🔥🔥

[Franco Prontera @FrancoProntera]

Spaced repetition forgetting curves for marketing/branding.

Did you just launch? You need to get in front of people again at 2, 7, 30 and 60 days later if you don't want to be forgotten.

This is the stuff brands are built on.

[Franco Prontera @FrancoProntera]

Order vs Chaos

[Franco Prontera @FrancoProntera]

Make something people want.