10 | NAVAL RAVIKANT - Founder of AngelList and Angel Investor in Uber & Twitter

These days, if you're in Silicon Valley, and eventually in the rest of the world, either you're telling a computer what to do or the computer's telling you what to do. Either you're programming the Uber app or the Uber app is programming you and telling you where to drive the car. You don't want to be on the wrong side of that transaction.

The history of the human race is the history of technology. If it weren't for technology, we would just be monkeys sitting around in the cold trying to figure out how to start a fire. Fire is the beginning of technology that turned us from being prey into being predators. And all human progress comes from technology.

There's no substitute for learning by doing. So, for example, if you want to start a company at some point... just go start a company. You're going to learn far more starting that company than you will apprenticing with other people on how to start a company.

You don't get rewarded in society anymore for doing things that you can be trained how to do, because if you can be trained how to do them, then the next monkey can be trained how to do them.

The mind is part of the brain, and it's attached to the body, and we're mechanical mobile creatures. There's just no way of getting away from that. If your body is not healthy, then your mind won't be sharp either, or at least not once you're past your 20s.

I really try to understand everything from first principles. First principles means that you should be able to derive it without relying on definitions. If you keep having to define things by using fancy words, then that's a problem. The fancier the words you have to use to explain something, the less you actually understand it.

At the end of the day, having a great startup boils down to picking the right team in a great market. And that's glib, that's simple, that's easy—except it's incredibly hard.

The current education system is much more about... filtering and credentialing. I think people waste a lot of time learning things that no longer have value. All the memorization-based stuff should just go away. We have Google these days, and our kids will have Google or equivalent, so they don't need to memorize so many things anymore.

What I realized, at the end of the day, is that you don't have to give reasons why. You can just say, 'You know what, that doesn't feel right to me.' And as much as it seems like a cop out, and as much as we all want to be rational beings, no one can argue with your feelings.

Study the hard things. Study the STEM topics—science, technology, engineering math—because those are foundational skills that are not going to go out of style. They're going to help you no matter what you do.

You're not going to beat anyone else at being them, and no one's going to beat you at being you. So, you may as well figure out what you're the best in the world at, and then go see if the world needs that thing.

The first principles that I would stick to is only work with really amazing people—you're better off not working with anyone than working with the wrong people—and try and do something that you think is going to be huge, because it takes no extra work compared to being small. Trying to do something small takes just as much work.

I'm a technology bull. I still think that technology is underrated relative to the impact it's going to have.

I think there's kind of this bad idea that somehow at the age of 16 to 21, you're supposed to somehow figure out what you're going to do for the next 20, 30, 40, 50 years of your life.

Being good at the basics is way more important than being good at the advanced stuff. So, even in math, being great at arithmetic and geometry is going to be much more useful... to you in life than being incredibly good at calculus—unless you happen to be in a profession that needs calculus.

Unless you can reconstruct it from the ground up through pure logic, you don't really understand it.

People, inherently, they know how to eat and how to work out, but they spend a lot of time arguing or optimizing what the workout is or what they should be eating, and that's just a way of procrastinating from the inevitable.

The emotional, mental lethargy is a little more complicated. It really just comes from being burned out from working on things you don't want to work on. When you want to work on something, you're really excited.

So, my model is instead of reading 1 book and struggling to finish it, I have 50 books open at any given time. And I would, actually, rather reread my favorite books than read a new book that's not very good.

I do spend a lot of time on Twitter, which, normally, I think would be a time suck, but the way I justify that to myself is that I'm actually trying to connect with a small number of really bright people and learn things from them in a highly compressed manner.

It takes just as much work and just as much effort to run the pizza parlor or the laundromat down the street as it does to run Google, at least for the founder. They work just as hard; they put in the hours.

When a founder comes up, and they're obviously intellectually interested in something, and they thought it through a deep level, and they can explain it, they can defend it, and it comes out of genuine interest as opposed to they read it in a book or it's the hot thing that they should get into, that's what gets me excited.

I think VCs spend too much time talking to other VCs, writing about themselves, and doing generic things like conferences and meetups and cocktail parties. When in reality, they should be becoming domain experts on something where they can add value.

I see founders spend too much time chasing VCs for money. When the reality is, if you're building a great product, fundraising is actually relatively easy.

The sad thing is I think your real education is what you get on the side from the Internet and the books when you're not busy being in school.

I think, eventually, we will start also viewing social media, at least parts of it, as a disease, like a real disease ... Over-reliance on social media is making people unhappy.

The older you get, the more you realize that life is really mainly a single-player game. You're running against yourself. You're born alone. You'll die alone. You have to choose what to do. You have to choose what gives you meaning. You have to choose what kind of people you like. And a lot of it is just about you.

I wish I had studied a lot more math, because mathematics is upstream of almost everything else. The old joke is that before I got to college, I wish they'd told me that psychology is really biology, biology is really chemistry, chemistry is really physics, physics is really mathematics.

I should not engage in any substance abuse whatsoever. I should just stop drinking completely, and I should learn to just be happy and peaceful and calm without needing any of that stuff. But the reality is I still enjoy my glass of wine.

What blockchains do is they allow us to have open protocols in almost everything—protocols where we can kind of cooperate in a way where no single entity is in charge, where we all participate in the network.

The more dispassionate you are, the more likely you are to actually call the correct outcome, because we're masters at fooling ourselves if we want the result to work out a certain way.

Generally, if you're really split on a decision and one of them is higher cost to you, either in terms of time or reputation or money, that's actually the correct decision.

The older I get, the more I want to just be open to the world the way it is and less have strong preferences and strong identity and strong likes and dislikes.