The Resilient Mind - How To Stop Overthinking - Naval Ravikant

Episode Date: August 7, 2025

Naval Ravikant is an entrepreneur and investor whose journey embodies the essence of mental mastery and self-actualization. As the co-founder of AngelList and an early investor in companies like Uber and Twitter, he combines strategic thinking with a deep philosophy on wealth, happiness, and inner peace. Naval’s reflections on self-awareness, decision-making, and mindset have inspired millions to take control of their inner world.Take action and strengthen your mind with The Resilient Mind Journal. Get your free digital copy today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bit.ly/Download_JournalThis episode is brought to in partnership with Motiversity & Chris Williamson. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Resilient Mind podcast. In this episode, you will be listening to How to Stop Oversthinking with Naval Robicant. Get access to the Resilient Mind Journal by clicking the link in the show notes. Enjoy. You mentioned anxiety before. Imagine how effective you'd be if you weren't anxious all the time is one of yours. Anxiety is the emotion du jour of the 21st century and lots of driven people. Very anxious, very paranoid.

That's what's caused them to be effective. They pay so much attention, detail-oriented, not letting things go. Staying up at night, thinking about it, that's the paranoia coming in. What have you come to learn about anxiety and dealing with it? So anxiety and stress are interesting. They're very related. Stress is when, like, if you look at an iron beam, when an iron beam is under stress is because it's being bent in two different directions at the same time.

So when your mind is under stress, it's because it has two conflicting desires at once. So, for example, you know, you want to be liked, but you want to be liked, but you want to do something selfish and you can't reconcile the two and so you are under stress. You want to do something for somebody else. You want to do something for yourself, right? These are examples, you don't want to go to work but you want to make money. So you're under stress, right? So you have two conflicting desires. And I think one of the ways to get through stress is to acknowledge that, oh, I actually have two conflicting desires and either I need to resolve it. I need to pick one and then be okay losing the other. Or I will decide later, but at least just being

aware of why your stress can help alleviate a lot of stress. And then anxiety, I think, is sort of this pervasive, unidentifiable stress where you're just kind of stressed out all the time and you're not even sure why. And you can't even identify the underlying problem. And the reason for that is because you have so many unresolved problems, unresolved stress points that have piled up in your life that you can no longer identify what the problems are. And there's this mountain of garbage in your mind and it's a little bit of it poking out the top like an iceberg and that's anxiety. But underneath there's a lot of unresolved things. And so you just need to kind of go through very carefully every time you're anxious. Like, okay, why am I anxious this time? I don't know why.

Oh, well, let me sit here and just think about it. Let me write down what the possible causes could be. Let me meditate on it. Let me journal. Let me talk to a therapist. Let me talk to my friends. Let me just kind of see like when does that stress go away. If you can kind of identify and unravel and resolve these issues, then I think that helps get rid of anxiety. A lot of the anxiety is piled up because we move through life too quickly not observing our own reactions to things.

We don't resolve them. So this goes counter to what I was saying earlier about not reflecting too much on things. But you reflect on the problems to observe them and solve them. You don't reflect on them to feel better about yourself. Well, if you're doing it to just feel better about yourself, that could be strengthening your personality and your ego

and could be creating a more fragile personality. You know, one big anxiety resolve for me is just ruminating on death. I think that's a good one. You're going to die. It's all going to zero. You cannot take anything with you. And I know this is trite. And I know we don't spend enough time thinking about the big questions.

We kind of give up on them when we're very, very young. You know, a little child might ask the big questions like, why are we here? What's a meaning of life? What is it all about? You know, is there Santa Claus? Is there God? But then as adults, we're taught not to think about these things. We've given up on them.

but I think the big questions are the big questions for good reasons. And if you can keep the idea in front of you at all times that you're going to die and that everything goes literally to zero, what's sort of stress about? Yeah, for better or worse, life is very short. How should people deal with its briefness? Enjoy it. Make the best of it. It's even briefer than that.

Each moment just disappears. gone. There's only a present moment and it's gone instantly. So if you're not, if you're not there for it, if you're stressed out or you're anxious or you're thinking about something else, you missed it. So any moment, when you're not in that moment, you are dead to that moment. You might as well be dead because your mind is off doing something else or, you know, living in some imagined reality that is just a very poor substitute for the actual reality. So one of my recent realizations was what is wasted time? What is a waste of time?

So I don't like to waste time, but what is wasted time? And everything is wasted time in a sense because nothing matters in the ultimate. But in each moment the thing matters. In each moment, it's the only thing that matters, actually, what's happening in front of you is literally has all the meaning in the world.

And so what matters is just being present for the thing. So if you're doing something that you want to do and you're fully there for it, then it's not wasted time. If you don't want to do it and your mind is running away from it and you're reacting against it and you're wishing you were somewhere else and you're thinking about some other thing or you're anticipating some future thing or regretting some past thing or being fearful of something, then that's wasted time. That's time that's being wasted when you're not actually present for the reality in front

of you. So my definition of wasted time, yes, I do want some material things in life and I, you know, there are things that have more value than others within this life. but this life is very short and bounded. So the true wasted time is a time that you are not present for, when you are not there for it, when you're not doing the thing you want to do to the best of a capability such that you're immersed in it.

If you're not immersed in this moment, then you're wasting your time. People get worried about dying and no longer being here, but they don't realize that so much of their life has spent not being here in any case. That's right. And I think people crave being here for it. And when you're here for it,

you're actually not thinking about yourself. You are more immersed in the thing, the moment, the task at hand. We don't want peace of mind. We want peace for our mind. That's right. Yeah, you don't peace. The mind is what it'll eat you alive if you let it. And there's more to you than the mind.

How so? Well, I mean, I don't want to disassemble the body, some speak, right? Please go on. Yeah, at the end of the day, like, everything arises within your consciousness, right? You got nowhere else to experience it. Sorry? You've got nowhere else to experience it. And that consciousness is relatively static in a sense that it's been exactly the same for the moment you were born to the moment you die.

And everything that you experience from your body, from your mind to the world, to everything is within that consciousness. And that thing, that base layer of being, and this is what the Buddhists will tell you, is the real thing. Everything that comes and goes in the middle, including your mind, including your body is unreal. and trying to find stability in those transient things is your castle that you're building on sand that's going to crumble. Life is going to play out the way it's going to play out. There will be some good and some bad.

Most of it is actually just up to your interpretation. You're born, you have a set of sensory experiences, and then you die. How you choose to interpret those experiences is up to you and different people interpret them in different ways. Yeah, it's the old line about two people walking down the street. They're having the exact same experience. One is happy.

experience one is happy, one is sad, right? It's a narrative in their heads. It's how they choose to interpret. So I think when I said that, it was a long time ago, I was talking more about having positive interpretations and negative interpretations. But these days, I think it's better just not to have any interpretations. And to just allow things to be. You're still going to have interpretations. You can't stop it. And nor should you try. But even that having an interpretation is just a thing you can leave alone. Yeah, I really want to try and just dig in. a little more to the best way to remind people that they should value their time, just how brief it is, that the time that you spend ruminating, being distracted, fears of the past, regrets.

Well, I don't want to tell anybody how to live their life. I would just say that to the extent that you want to improve your quality of life, the easiest and best way to do that is to observe your own mind and your own thoughts and be a little, Not necessarily critical, but be observant of yourself more objectively. And then you'll kind of realize your own loops and patterns. It takes time. It's not overnight. It's not instantaneous.

So you mean letting go is not a one-time event? Yeah. Letting go is not necessarily even the right answer. Like, yes, if you're trying to be an enlightened being and, you know, you want to live like a god and everything's going to be perfect, you be a Buddha, sure you can let go. But I think it practice is actually quite hard to do. I think I would say that you're going to find a lot of fulfillment out of life by just doing what you want to do and genuinely exploring what it is that you want rather than doing what other people expect you do or society expects you to do or what you might just think it should be done by default. You know, I think most older successful people will tell you that their life was best when they lived it unapologetically on their own terms.

Be selfish. Holistic selfishness. There you go. We can clip that little close out about being selfish. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Just keep running it back. I had this insight or a question, I guess, how much do you think that we should trust the voice in our heads?

Because half of wisdom suggests to rely on your sort of bottom-up intuition, and then half of it has to be sort of top-down, rational as possible. How do you navigate the tension between head and gut in this way? I think the gut is what decides. the head is kind of what rationalizes it afterwards. The gut is the ultimate decision maker. And what is the gut? The gut is refined judgment, its taste.

Aggregated. And it could be aggregated through evolution and it's in your genes and your DNA. Or it could be aggregated through your experiences and what you've thought through. The mind is good at solving new problems and new problems in the external world that have defined edges, you know, beginnings and ends and objectives. What the mind is actually really bad at is making hard decisions. So when you have a hard decision to make, I find it's better to, yes, you ruminate on it, you think through all the pros and cons, but then you sleep on it.

You wait a couple of days. You wait until the gut answer appears with conviction and it feels right. And when you're younger, it takes longer because you just don't have as much experience. And when you're older, it can happen much faster, which is why, you know. And you have less time to. Yeah. I know people are more set in their way as a consequence, right? They know what they want. They know what they don't want. So it takes time to develop your gut instinct and judgment. But once you've developed them, don't trust anything else because you can't go against your gut. It'll bite you in the end. Usually in relationships that failed, you can look back and say, oh, actually, I knew it was going to fail because of this reason. But I kind of went ahead anyway because I wanted it to be this way, right? I wanted this person to be a different way than they are. I wanted to get a different thing out of it than I thought I was going to, then I knew I was going to. to get, but I just wanted it. So sometimes desire will override your judgment and then

wishful thinking. Yeah, wishful thinking. It traps you into a pathway that choose up time. Don't settle from mediocrity. And I think the only, like people debate intelligence, for example, right? We talk about IQ tests and all that. But I think the only true test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life. And there are two parts to that. One is getting what you want, so you know how to get it. And the second is wanting the right things. knowing what to want in the first place. I could want to be a, you know, six-foot-eight basketball player and I'm not going to get that. So it's wanting the wrong thing. That's wanting something that you can't get. That's wanting something you can't get. There's also wanting something that's a

booby prize. There are plenty of booby prizes out there too, right? I haven't heard that word in about 20 years. Yeah, prizes that are just not worth having or that create their own problems. But if you're not careful, you can end up in a place in life not only that you don't want to be, but one that you didn't even mean to get to. That's if you're kind of proceeding. unconsciously. And usually I think people end up there because they are going on autopilot with sort of societal expectations or other people's expectations. So, you know, or out of guilt or out of like mimetic desire. You know, Peter Thiel has this whole thing from Renee Gerard about how mimetic desires, our desires are picked up from other people. And some of those are automatically

baked into society like, you know, go to law school, go to med school, go to whatever, go to business school. Or they might be from watching what your friends are doing and, you know, the other monkeys are doing. Or it might just be, you know, what your parents' expectations are. I might be a guilt. You know, guilt is just society's voice speaking in your head, socially programmed, so you'll be a good little monkey and do things that are good for the tribe. But I think the the best outcomes come when you think it through for yourself and decide for yourself. And I don't think people spend enough time deciding. For example, we run on these four-year cycles, you know, In Silicon Valley, you go join a startup, you vest your stock over four years.

That's the standard. In college, you know, you go for four years. High school, you go for four years. Some things take longer. You know, you have children. They hit puberty nine years later. That's like a nine-year cycle until that relationship changes. But we're used to these fairly long cycles, multi-year cycles, in which we are committed to things.

You go to law school, you know, four or five-year cycle. You go be a lawyer. 40-year cycle. These are very long cycles. The amount of time we spent deciding what to do and who to do it with, very short, very, very short, right? We spend, you know, three months deciding, one month deciding on a job where we're going to be for 10 years or five years. And because a lot of discovery is path dependent where the next thing you find on the path is dependent on where you were on the previous path, you sort of start going down this vector that is a very long distance. people decide frivolously which city to live in, and that's going to decide who their friends are,

what their jobs are, their opportunity, their weather, their food supply, their air supply, quality of life. It's such an important decision, but people spend so little time thinking it through. I would argue that if you're making a four-year decision, spend a year thinking it through, like really thinking it through. 25% of the time. Yeah, exactly. There's the secretary theorem.

I don't know if you know that one. Is that after you've done this many people, pick the best one of the next, however, man. That's right. Yeah. Yeah, the secretary theorem is this computer science professor is trying to figure out how much time he should spend interviewing secretaries and then how long to keep the secretary. So let's say he's going to have a secretary for 10 years. Does he keep searching for, you know,

one year, two years, three years, one month, two months. What is the optimal time? And it turns out that the optimal time is somewhere around a third, about a third of the way through, you take the best person you've worked with and try to find someone that good or better. So by the time you've gone about a third of the way through, you have, excuse me, seen enough that you've done, you've you now have a sense of what the bar is. And then anybody who meets or exceeds that bar is good enough. And this applies to dating. This applies to jobs and careers.

This applies generally. But the interesting thing about the secretary theorem is that it's actually not time-based. It's not based on one-third of the time. It's iteration-based. The number of candidates. The number of shots you took on goal. That's right. So you want to have lots and lots of iterations.

So in that sense... You need to bail out quickly and you need to be decisive quickly. That's right. You need to take opportunities quickly and bail out quickly. Correct. Like if you go back and you look through failed relationships, probably the biggest regret will be staying in the relationship after you was over. Exactly.

You should have left sooner. The moment you knew it wasn't going to work out, you should have moved on. So in that sense, I think Malcolm Gladwell popularize this idea of 10,000 hours to mastery. I would say it's actually 10,000 iterations to mastery. It's not actually 10,000. It's some unknown number. But it's about the number of iterations that drives a learning curve. And iteration is not repetition. Repetition is a different thing. Repeating is doing the same thing over and over.

Iteration is modifying it with a learning and then doing another version of it. So that's error correction. So if you get 10,000 error corrections in anything, you will be an expert at it. Don't partner with cynics and pessimists. You mentioned there about the people who've got a nightmare going on at home and are trying to fix the world. But a lot of the time that cynicism and pessimism we find in ourselves, we see the world, whether we want to, whether it's because, because we've imbibed what the news or the negative people around us have said, or it's a bit more kind of endogenous than that. It's just sort of in us. It's the way that we see the world. How can people avoid cynicism and pessimism within themselves? Yeah, cynicism and pessimism is a tough one.

We're naturally hardwired for it. Again, I go back to evolution. I'm sorry to keep harping on evolution, but within biology, there's very few good explanatory theories and theory of evolution by natural selection is probably the best one. So if you can't explain something about life or psychology or human nature through evolution, then you probably don't have a good theory for it. And I would say that pessimism is another one that comes out of this, which is in the natural

environment, you're hardwired to be pessimistic because let's say that I see something rustling in the woods. And if I move towards it and it turns out to be food and prey, then good, I get to eat one meal. But if it turns to be a predator, I get eaten. And that's the end of that. So we are hardwired to avoid ruin. and just dying.

So we are naturally hardwired to be pessimists. But modern society is very different. Despite whatever problems you may have with modern society, it is far, far safer than living in the jungle and just trying to survive. And the opportunities and the upside are nonlinear. For example, when you're investing, if you short a stock, the most money you can make is 2x. You just lose, you know, if the stock goes to zero, you double your money.

But if the stock is an next to Nvidia and it goes 100x or 1,000 X, you make a lot of money. So upside because of leverage is nearly unlimited. Also in modern society, because there are so many different people you can interact with, if you go on a date and it fails, there are infinite more people to go on a date with. In a tribal system, there might have been 20 people and you can't even get through all of them. So modern society is far more forgiving of failure. And you just have to sort of neocortically realize and override that. You have to realize that you're much more running a search function to find the thing that'll work. And then that one thing, will pay off in massive compounding.

Once you find your mate for the rest of your life, you find your wife or your husband, then you can compound in that relationship. It's okay if you had 50 failed dates in between. The same way, once you find the one business you're meant to plow into and it'll compound returns, it's okay if you had 50 small failed ventures or 50 small failed job interviews.

The number of failures doesn't matter. And so there's no point in being a pessimist. You want to be an optimist, but I would say you want to be skeptical about specific things. Every specific opportunity is probably a fail, but you want to be optimistic in the general. In the general, you want to be like something in here is going to work out. How do you navigate that tension? I mean, exactly, as I said, I'm optimistic in the general that if something fails right now, then this is a little woo-woo, but it wasn't meant to be. It was a learning

experience. It was an iteration. As long as I learned something from it, then it's a win. If I didn't learn from it, then it's a loss. But as long as you're learning and you keep iterating fast and cutting your losses quickly, then when you find the right thing, you have to be optimistic and compound into it. So you don't want to jump into the first thing. You don't want to marry the first person you date necessarily, unless you got very lucky. But you want to investigate and explore very, very quickly until you find the match. And then you have to be willing to go all in.

You have to willing to move your chips at the center of the table. So both those approaches are required. So it's a Bob L strategy. it's sort of black or it's white and most people are sort of stuck in this gray bit and like half in but I'm kind of don't really know if I am and I also think like labels like pessimists, optimists, cynic, introvert,

extrovert, these are very self-limiting. Humans are very dynamic. There are times when you feel like being introverted. There are times when you feel like being extroverted. There are contexts in which you'll be pessimistic. There are contexts in which you'll be optimistic. Leave all the labels alone. It's better just to look at the problem at hand

look at reality the way it is, try to take yourself out of the equation in a sense. Like, obviously, you're involved, but motivated reasoning is the worst kind of reasoning. You're not going to find truth through highly motivated reasoning. You have to be objective. And objective means trying to take yourself out of it as much as possible, or at least your personality out of it as much as possible. And so to the extent you run with this thick identity and personality, it's going to cloud your judgment. It's going to try and lock you into the past. If you say I'm a depressed and unhappy person, yeah, I'm going to be unhappy. That's a way of locking yourself into your past.

Even saying, I have trauma, I have PTSD. Yeah, you feel something. There are memories. There are flashes. They're occasional bad feelings. But don't define yourself by it because then you lock it into your identity and you're just going to loop on it. It's better to stay flexible because reality is always changing. And you have to be able to adapt to it.

Adaptation is also intelligence. Adaptation is survival. Adaptation is kind of how you're here. You're here because you're an adapter and your answer. sisters or adapters. So to adapt, you'll see things clearly. And if you're seeing them through your own identity, it's going to cloud your judgment. Thank you for tuning in. Continue strengthening your mind by listening to our other episodes.